Exegesis and Theology

The Blog of Brian Collins

Christian Political Involvement

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This last year I had the privlege of contributing a section on the Christian’s involement in politics in BJU Press’s new textbook, Biblical Worldview: Creation, Fall, Redemption. We looked at the Christian’s political responsibility under these headings:

Praying for All People

Pressing for God’s Will to Be Done

Preserve the Good, Reform the Evil

Develop Christian Political Virtues: Prudence, Boldness, Humility, and Respect

In the first draft of this chapter I wrote what follows about prayer (the published text was cut due to space constraints and improved by fellow authors and editors; I present the initial draft here because it is fuller and blogs don’t have space constraints):

When God sent the Israelites into exile, they were a conquered, politically powerless people. They were scattered form their homeland for the purpose of breaking their political power. And yet they are told to pray for the city to which they would be sent. (Jer. 29:7). Prayer was still possible. Likewise, the Christians in first century Rome did not have any political power. Many Christians were slaves. But Paul makes prayer for those in authority a duty for all Christians (1 Tim. 2:1-4).

The content of these two prayers is significant. In Jeremiah the people are to pray for the welfare of the foreign city to which they were exiled. Israel may have been tempted to view the Babylonians simply as the enemy. They may have been tempted pray curses down on these enemies. But God says his people’s welfare will be found in the welfare of the people they live among. Though Christians are not exiles under God’s judgment, they are still exiles and sojourners in this present evil age awaiting the return of their King (1 Peter 1:1). They may face persecution, if only the credulous mocking that comes when Christians resist the debauchery around them (1 Peter 2:11-12; 4:4). Nonetheless, Christians should view the unbelievers around them not as enemies, but as neighbors. They should pray for their welfare.

Paul urges that Christians pray for all people, but he calls out kings and other authorities for special attention. In particular, Paul says that Christians should pray that rulers would rule in such a way that Christians can lead “peaceful and quiet” lives. This may be a way of praying that governments would live up to their obligations as laid out in Romans 13:1-7 and 1 Peter 2:13-17. Rulers who are a terror to bad conduct but a blessing to good conduct will lead to peaceful and quiet lives for all, including Christians. But this prayer goes beyond praying just that government would fulfill its responsibilities. Paul is praying that the government will permit Christian’s to fulfill theirs. He prays that Christians might live lives of eusebia, which means a life lived in the fear of God, a life that seeks to please God in every aspect of life. He also prays that Christians would be able to live “dignified” lives. A dignified person is not flippant about life; he knows that every moment is lived before God. Life may be enjoyed but it should be enjoyed with due recognition of the duty to live always before God and a watching world. Finally, Paul indicates that Christians pray for everyone because God desires everyone to be saved. This means that Christians should pray for the salvation of those in government.

Paul’s example here of praying the government would fulfill its God-given duties reveals that Christians can pray that their leaders would be enabled by God to promote justice in all that they do. Christians should pray that governments will defend those who are deprived of justice from their oppressors (Ps. 72). Christians should also pray that their leaders would be just, righteous, morally self-controlled, and aware that they will give an account before God for their actions (Acts 24:25).

Jesus’s model prayer instructs us to pray that the Father’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” This would include God’s will about the matters of state (Matt. 6:10).

Finally, Christians should pray for the soon return of Jesus from heaven to establish his righteous rule on earth forevermore (Matt. 6:10).

Review of Sanders’s The Deep Things of God

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Sanders, Fred. The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything. Crossway, 2010.

This book has two notable strengths. First, it is an excellent introduction to the Trinity and its implications for the Christian life. If anyone thinks that the Trinity is an arcane doctrine that cannot have the central importance for the Christian life that Christians have historically given to, this would be a book to read. Personally. I especially appreciated the chapters on the Trinity and Scripture and the Trinity and prayer. Second, Sanders demonstrates that evangelicalism has strong Trinitarian foundations, even if sometimes only implicitly. Evangelicals have a tendency toward self-critique that can sometimes become problematic, so it was nice to read an author who, though not uncritical toward the evangelical tradition, was determined to draw on its strengths.

Reading Lewis and Edwards

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Lewis, C. S. The Horse and His Boy.

Lewis works on many different levels. On the one hand, this is simply a fun adventure story. On another it thoughtfully examines topics such as pride, providence, and even liberal approaches to Christianity.

Edwards, Jonathan. “An Account of the Revival of Religion in Northampton in 1740-1742, as Communicated in a Letter to a Minister of Boston.” In Jonathan Edwards on Revival. Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1965.

In this letter Jonathan Edwards recounts the revival in Northampton. He is careful to distinguish what he believes to be the true work of the Spirit of God with lasting Spiritual effects and what he takes to be less pure manifestations that are primarily “visible commotion” rather than a true work of God.

Review of Mark Rogers Article on Luther, Mullins, and the Priesthood of the Beleiver

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Rogers, Mark. “A Dangerous Idea? Martin Luther, E. Y. Mullins, and the Priesthood of All Believers,” Westminster Theological Journal 72, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 119-134.

The title of this article is a play off the title of Alistair McGrath’s book, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution. McGrath argues that Luther’s teaching of the priesthood of the believer “had a ‘democratizing agenda'” that fostered democracy among Protestants. Rogers notes that “McGrath’s argument draws entirely on Luther’s pre-1522 writings” and that a fuller view of Luther’s view of the priesthood of all believers requires attention to his later writings as well.

In the first part of the article Rogers looks at Luther’s writings about the priesthood of the believer. He notes that Luther always held to this doctrine, “but after 1524, as he began to see the danger of uneducated and spiritually immature Christians making up their own theology, he emphasized accountability among official teachers, both to the orthodox fathers of the church and to spiritually nature lay people.” Also interesting in this section of the article was Rogers observation that Luther saw the priesthood of the believer as a communal ministry to one another rather than   in an entirely individualized sense.

In the latter part of the article Rogers compares Luther’s teaching with that of E. Y. Mullins, an early twentieth-century theologian whose view of the priesthood of the believer is probably the most widely held today. Rogers notes that with Luther Mullins rejected the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church, maintained that the “Christian could have direct access to God without any human mediator,” and a affirmed a role for the Christian ministry.  Rogers points out three differences as well, “Mullins emphasized competent individualism whereas Luther focused on the interdependent priesthood of all Christians,” Mullins held to “the right private judgment” where Luther did not, and they differed in their view of church government.

Roger’s conclusion: “The Enlightenment, American democracy, modern subjectivism: these factors, rather than Luther’s doctrine of the universal priesthood, moved much of American evangelical theology in a radically democratic, egalitarian, and individualistic direction. The result is that the priesthood of all believers, a doctrine that should build Christ-centered, Bible-saturated, interdependent community in the church, has, in many pockets of evangelicalism, morphed into a teaching that encourages radical individualism and undermines the significance of the church’s life together. Luther’s doctrine was not perfect. Few evangelicals will want to return to a reliance on a state church system or limitations on religious liberty. But a proper understanding of Luther’s teaching and this doctrine’s development in history could help churches recover a more biblical, Christ-centered view of the priesthood of all believers, and thereby a more biblical community life within the church.”

Thinking about Democracy

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For most Americans that democracy is good is a given. This was not always so. Mark Noll observes:

Republican themes have been so widely embraced by both religious and nonreligious Americans that it is now difficult to understand why defenders of traditional religion once looked with such suspicion on civic humanist, commonwealth, Real Whig, and country convictions. Yet such suspicion was in fact the norm until the unusual convergence of republicanism and Christianity in the American founding.

Traditional Christian complaints were recited for several centuries as a common litany: Republican instincts prized human self-sufficiency more highly than dependence on God. They demeaned the life to come by focusing without reservation on this-worldly existence. They defined the human good in terms of public usefulness instead of divine approval. Both Protestants and Catholics, in addition, regularly noted the persistent correlation of republican political convictions and heterodox theological opinions. This discourse of virtue, vice, liberty, and tyranny seemed always to be associated with the rejection of innate human sinfulness, with views on human salvation that dispensed with the substitutionary work of Christ, with opinions about Jesus treating him as no more than an unusual human being, and, in the most extreme cases, with arguments denying the existence of God altogether.

Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 57-58.

Through friendlier to democracy that Christians in earlier generations David Koyzis warns against democracy as an ideology. When Koyzis issues this warning, he is not claiming that democratic elements in a government are a problem. To the contrary, democracy as an element of a governmental system seems appropriate given that God has given all humans the responsibility of ruling over the earth (Gen. 1:26-28).

But sometimes political figures speak as if the spread of democracy would bring salvation, or at least stability and freedom, to the world. This kind of thinking, Koyzis says, is idolatrous. In addition it neglects the reality that unchecked democracy has significant flaws: “Democracy, in short, can endanger politics by attempting to impose a single majoritarian interest on a diverse and pluriform political community” (Kindle loc 1592). It is true that modern democracies often have checks and balances built in, but Koyzis notes that “democratic checks on political power are insufficient to prevent a totalitarian expansion of that power, especially if there are no countervailing checks on democracy itself” (Kindle loc 1711). The American founders instituted a number of these checks on democracy, from the election of senators by legislatures and of the president by the electoral college to the appointment of Supreme Court justices for life. Yet these checks have been eroded or are now regularly challenged on the grounds that they are undemocratic.

Koyzis notes a “second way in which democracy can become totalitarian: by attempting to extend the democratic principle throughout the entire political system and even into the whole of life, including an array of spheres where for various reasons it is simply not appropriate. Here democracy becomes not simply a form of government, but a way of life with definite idolatrous religious roots” (Kindle loc 1718). Examples of this noted by Koyzis include running families, churches, and schools as if they were democracies. Sometimes people presume that all of society and culture should be democratic in nature.

C. S. Lewis also identified this extension of democracy as a problem: “When equality is treated . . . as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies” (“Equality,” in Present Concerns, Kindle loc 147).

The privilege to participate in the governing process should be valued by all Americans, but we must be alert to the dangers of democracy as well as to its blessings.

Review of Van Reken on Christians as Pilgrims or Settlers

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Van Reken, Calvin P. “Christians in This World: Pilgrims or Settlers,” Calvin Theological Journal 43 (2008): 234-56.

Van Reken traces and “Old Vision” and a “New Vision” in the CRC regarding the Christian’s place in the world. Interestingly he approaches this topic by looking at revisions to the denomination’s hymnals. For instance, he notes that a hymn that once read “Spirit of God, who dwells within my heart, wean it from earth” was altered in the 1987 hymnal to read “Spirit of God, who dwells within my heart, wean it from sin.” He then documents a shift from seeking the world “as so vile as to be dangerous to Christians” to seeking the world as a place that Christians should seek to redeem. In the new vision sees “the world as our home in need of our attention.” Van Reken believes that the new vision is correct in some areas. But he has two concerns: worldliness and lack of evangelism.

He notes that 1928 CRC “did not warn the church about cultural engagements in general; it warned specifically about worldly amusements.” It did not call these amusements “intrinsically sinful.” But it did recognize a danger in them that differed from other kinds of cultural engagement: “the less hazardous forms of cultural engagement, such as working in a factory or running for Congress, are not things so pleasant as to make us forget God. They have much less power to lure us away from our interest in heaven. Worldly amusements, on the other hand, are enjoyable.” Van Reken thinks that danger from worldly amusements is greater now than in 1928 but that concern about this matter has greatly diminished—making the danger even greater.

Van Reken’s other concern is an increasingly lack of attention given to evangelism. He praises the increased social outreach that the new view has generated, but he is distressed that this social work seems to have replaced an emphasis on evangelism. And what shall it profit if Christians repaired a home destroyed by a hurricane but failed to share the gospel of salvation with the homeowner?

Fundamentally, however, Van Reken believes that the new vision has forgotten that the old vision was rooted in the Bible’s teaching about the pilgrim life of the believer. Van Reken does not think that the pilgrim vision should detract from engagement with the world. But he does think that it reminds us to consider what is temporary and what is eternal. It reminds us that the life to come is eternal and that this life is transitory. In other words, Van Reken concludes, “If we completely lose the old vision, we are in danger of forgetting what is really most important.”

Koyzis on Liberalism and the Christian Worldview

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Koyzis observes that liberalism exists in many different forms today. Indeed, many of the debates between the right and left in American life are debates between differing kinds of liberals. In elucidating this, Koyzis notes that there are several stages to liberalism. The first stage might be labeled “proto-liberal.” In this stage the ideas of a state of nature in which the individual is sovereign is proposed. From this it follows that sovereign individual precedes the community or the body politic. In this period the form of government might still be an absolute monarchy, but the rationale is laid for oppressed individuals to unite to overthrow a tyrant.

The second stage Koyzis labels “the night watchman state.” In this stage of liberalism, government’s role is to ensure the protection of private property. Government should not intrude upon the marketplace as that limits a person’s economic freedom. By the late nineteenth century many people were concerned about large monopolies. They thought that these businesses, and not government only, had the power to threaten people’s freedom. So in the third stage of liberalism the “regulatory state” is born. Koyzis said that “‘reform’ liberals” thought they could use government power to protect people’s freedom from powerful nongovernmental entities.

In the fourth stage of liberalism government adds another role to come “the equal opportunity state.” According to Koyzis, FDR’s “four freedoms” are an example of this stage of liberalism. The second stage liberals, often called “classical liberals,” thought that government should be limited so that individuals had the “space to pursue their own interests as they see fit.” But equal opportunity liberals note that poor children do not have the same opportunities that children of well-to-do parents have.

Koyzis thinks that this progression reveals a weakness in liberalism:

[Liberal individualism] is not only unable to account for the ontological status of community; it also ignores the connectedness of individuals to previous and succeeding generations. It pretends that the individual is an isolated runner in the race, whose success or failure depends wholly on herself. When it becomes apparent that this is not the case—that is, when liberals bump up against reality—they are often driven to pursue policies quite at variance with classical liberalism’s initial antistatist orientation. This late liberals came to embrace the welfare state.

A fifth stage of liberalism, according to Koyzis, is “the choice enhancement state.” There is a long background to this stage. Prior to liberalism, philosophers and theologians believed that “there is a substantive good which human beings or their political leaders are obliged by their nature to follow.” But Thomas Hobbes declared, “There is no such, finis ultimus, utmost aim, nor summum bonum, greatest good, as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers.” Every individual can decide for himself what he thinks the good life should be for him. Koyzis notes, “The task of liberalism, therefore, is to try to accommodate these desires as much as possible. . . . But in no case should the liberal state attempt to prejudge the choices lying before individuals, since that would be an undue limitation on freedom of choice.” In previous eras, non-liberal elements in society  (such as widely held religious beliefs) placed a check on this aspect of liberalism. But now the liberal idea that government should not legislate morality has become a commonplace. These ideas have consequences:

Government may decline to ‘stigmatize’ divorcees or to place legal obstacles in their way, but it cannot proclaim that divorce will have no deleterious effects on the parties involved and on the larger society. It may similarly abstain from adversely judging nonmarital intercourse, but it cannot decree that unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases will not proliferate. Government may legally affirm that single-parent families are ‘just as valid’ as two-parent families, but it cannot declare that there will be no negative fallout from the choice to end a marriage or that fatherlessness will not leave its impact on the lives of the offspring.

When these undesirable consequences do occur, rather than acknowledge that the quest to validate all lifestyle choices equally is a utopian one doomed to failure, fifth-stage liberals increasingly call on government to ameliorate, if not altogether eliminate, such consequences so they can continue to engage in this fruitless quest. This inevitably leads to an expansion of the scope of government that is difficult to contain within any borders whatever. . . . This final stage of liberalism demands that government effectively subsidize irresponsible behavior for fear that doing otherwise risks making government into a potentially oppressive legislator of the good life.

From a Christian perspective, certain forms of liberalism are better than others. However, Koyzis has identified two major flaws. First, liberty is viewed as the ultimate value, and every individual is allowed to choose his own definition of the good life. On a practical level this does not bode well for social cohesion, but from a Christian perspective it denies the grand truth that God’s glory should be the end of every individual and society because God’s glory is the end for which God created the world. Second, later stages of liberalism try to cushion people from the consequences of violating the structures that God built into his creation. But a society cannot continuously press against the norms God has built into his world without suffering the consequences of living contrary to creation.

Source: David T. Koyzis, Political Visions & Illusions: A Survey & Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2003), 53-64.

Poythress on Genesis 1, the Ancient Near East, and Myths

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Poythress, Vern S. “Three Modern Myths in Interpreting Genesis 1. ” WTJ 76 (2014): 321-50.

Poythress makes the case that many interpreters of Genesis 1 have fallen prey to the following three “modern myths”: (1) “The Myth of Scientistic Metaphysics,” (2) “The Myth of Progress,” and (3) “The Myth of Understanding Cultures from Facts.”

The first myth asserts that modern scientific metaphysics describes reality while phenomenological language does not. “The ‘unreality’ of appearances follows only if we have a metaphysical principle of reductionism, which says that science gets to the “bottom,” the “real” foundation of being, and that everything above the bottom is unreal in relation to the bottom. This metaphysics has no real warrant based on details of scientific investigation, but is a groundless assumption that is imposed on the investigation” (328). The example Poythress uses is biblical language about the sun rising. Those who fall prey to this myth may argue “the ancient people carried along a raft of assumptions about the cosmos, and that we now know that those assumptions were wrong. For instance, they thought that the earth was at the center in an absolute sense” (326). To which Poythress responds, “Well, perhaps they did. And perhaps they did not. Might it just be the case that the average Israelite did not worry about complicated physical and mathematical systems for describing motions of the heavenly bodies?” (326).

The second myth is the belief that modern science and technology make modern cultures superior in their understanding to ancient cultures. Poythress uses the existence of demons as a counter-example. Many modern people would dismiss their existence as unscientific. But in this case the ancient cultures would have the better understanding of reality (329-30). When interpreters in thrall to this myth interpret Genesis 1, they think they must find “some core religious message” and discard its “cultural trappings.” Poythress says, “This attitude undermines empathy, and lack of empathy hinders genuine understanding” (330).

The third myth assumes “we can study and understand a culture effectively with a dose of armchair learning about the facts” (330). Poythress finds the confidence expressed in this myth misplaced. “With the ancient Near East, these difficulties go together with the absence of direct contact. We cannot function like a well-trained field worker in social anthropology, actually immersing ourselves within an ancient culture and learning it seriously and empathetically ‘from inside.’ In addition, the ancient Near East consists of many interacting subcultures that changed over a period of millennia. The extant documentary and archaeological evidence is fragmentary. People who are richly informed by evidence, who have skills in cross-cultural thinking and adaptation, and who have innate empathy, may often make good inferences up to a point. But knowledge of such a culture as an interlocking whole remains partial and tentative” (330-31). As an example, Poythress examines the oft-made claim that the ancients believed the sky to be a solid dome. But Poythress doubts the assumption that since ancient people didn’t have our scientific understanding of the atmosphere that they must have had an incorrect scientific understanding. Perhaps they were not thinking in those terms at all. For instance he notes the Egyptians are said to believe in a solid sky held up by the gods, yet the same texts that speak in this way speak of the gods as forming the sky and air. Poythress notes, “Inasmuch as both pictures involve gods, one may doubt whether a materialistic interpretation captures the point in either case. Both pictures may perhaps be artistic representations, not quasi-scientific models of physical structure” (332, n. 24). Poythress  not deny that the Bible speaks of windows in the heaven and such, but he questions the value of these images in giving insight into the Israelites conception of the physical makeup of the world. He says, “We talk about a person with a big “ego” without committing ourselves to Sigmund Freud’s theory of the ego. Likewise, might ancient discussion of the observable world creatively use the imagery of a house, with pillars, windows, doors, or upper chambers, or the image of a tent, or an // expanse?31 Could such imagery appear, without teaching a detailed physicalistic theory? Modern physicalistic readings run the danger of not recognizing analogy and metaphor in ancient texts” (335-36).

A method of interpretation that Poythress believes falls for these myths he labels the vehicle-cargo approach. In this approach ancient cosmological ideas, or ideas otherwise shown by science to be false, are merely the vehicle that carries the cargo of theological truth. The goal is to uphold inerrancy: “Consequently [upon the adoption of the vehicle-cargo approach], Gen 1 contains no errors in its teaching. In fact, its teaching harmonizes well with modern science, because when rightly understood it is not teaching anything directly about science or anything that could contradict science” (322). But Poythress is doubtful that inerrancy is actually protected: “Suppose that a modern interpreter says that Gen 1 is about theology and not specific events in time and space. This dichotomy is problematic. Theology is expressed precisely through God’s actions in events in time and space. If we make a false dichotomy in Gen 1, this same dichotomy can spread to other parts of the Bible. A principle of this kind easily becomes a wedge by which people pull away from the reality that God acts in history and speaks about history” (346). So, on Poythress’s, analysis the vehicle-cargo approach suffers fails to protect inerrancy while also, ironically, falling prey to myths similar to the ones it set out to avoid: “The vehicle-cargo approach criticizes naïve modern readings of Gen 1 for artificially projecting into Genesis ideas from modern science. It also criticizes the philosophers and theologians who resisted Copernicus, because they projected Aristotelian and Ptolemaic theories of ultimate structure—metaphysics—into Gen 1. But is it doing something analogous? The vehicle-cargo approach also projects its own brand of “metaphysics” into Gen 1, namely, the metaphysics that it has found from reading ancient Near Eastern myths” (345).

This really is a must-read article.

Government and the Fall

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The Fall has affected government in a myriad of ways. Tyranny and corruption are two common ways that sin has corrupted governments. David Koyzis points out that the Fall has affected our approach to governing in ways that we may not think about at first: political ideologies.

According to Koyzis (Political Visions and Illusions):

Every ideology is based on taking something out of creation’s totality, raising it above that creation, and making the latter revolve around and serve it. It is further based on the assumption that this idol has the capacity to save us from some real or perceived evil in the world (kindle loc 156).

For instance, liberal ideologies make liberty the ultimate good, socialist ideologies do the same with equality, democratic ideologies make the voice of the people the ultimate good.

When ideologies do this they become idolatrous:

If ideologies deify something within God’s creation, they inevitably view this humanly made god as a source of salvation. Thus each of the ideologies is based on a specific soteriology, that is, on a worked-out theory promising deliverance to human beings from some fundamental evil that is viewed as the source of a broad range of human ills (kindle loc 338).

Koyzis does not deny that every ideology has grasped a part of the truth. They have each grasped something good in the creational structure. The problem is in elevating that good part of the creation out of its rightful place.

Ideologies also make the equal and opposite error: “ideologies tend to locate the source of this fundamental evil somewhere within the creation” (kinde loc 347).

The Christian worldview, by contrast identifies sin, not some aspect of the creational order, as the fundamental problem in the world, and it looks to Christ for salvation, recognizing that salvation cannot be achieved through the political process.

Traditional conservative Russell Kirk makes much the same point in his critique of ideologies:

Ideology, in short, is a political formula that promises mankind an earthly paradise; but in cruel fact what ideology has created is a series of terrestrial hells. I set down below some of the vices of ideology. 1) Ideology is inverted religion, denying the Christian doctrine of salvation through grace in death, and substituting collective salvation here on earth. . . .

Russell Kirk, The Politics of Prudence, 5.

Kirk’s point was that there is a certain kind of prudential approach to politics that has the more limited goal of seeking to retain what is good in a society and seeking to reform what is evil as we are able. Some of these reforms have a life-and-death importance to them (literally, in the case of abortion), and deserve a great deal of political effort. But achieving such reforms must be seen as a means of glorifying the heavenly Father though good works (Matt. 5:16) and not as a step on the way toward saving the nation.

Mansfield and Winthrop on Philosophy of Translation

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Because I’m interested in philosophies of Bible translation, I pay close attention to translator’s notes for other books. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop have produced a highly recommended translation of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I think their comments on translation contain wisdom for translators of Scripture.

Our intent has been to make our translation of Tocqueville’s text as literal and consistent as we can, while still readable. By ‘readable’ we mean what can easily be read now, not what we might normally say. Of the two extremes in translating, staying as close as possible to the original and bringing it as close as possible to us, we are closer to the former. A book as great as Tocqueville’s should inspire a certain reverence in translators, not only because it is so intelligent or because its style is so perfect but also because the intelligence and the style go together and need as much as possible to be conveyed together in English. Precisely to bring Tocqueville to us requires an effort, both in translating and in reading, to get close to him, and to become familiar with his terms, his rhetorical flights, his favorite expressions.

Recognizing that translation is always imperfect, we have sought all the more to be modest, cautious, and faithful. Every translator must make many choices, but in making ours we have been guided by the principle, admittedly an ideal, that our business is to convey Tocqueville’s thought as he held it rather than to restate it in comparable terms of today. By refraining as much as possible from interpretation, we try to make it possible for readers to do their own thinking and figure out for themselves what Tocqueville means. As translators we respect the diversity of interpretation best when we do not offer one ourselves. Tocqueville wrote the following reproach to Henry Reeve, his friend and author of the first English translation of Democracy in America: ‘Without wishing to do so and by following the instinct of your opinions, you have quite vividly colored what was contrary to Democracy and almost erased what could do harm to Aristocracy.’ We are not likely to receive such an authoritative message, but we hope very much that we do not deserve one. . . . We do provide notes meant to be helpful, identifying events and allusions no longer familiar in our day. We also specify Tocqueville’s references to other places in his own text. . . . We have kept Tocqueville’s long sentences and short paragraphs.

Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, “A Note on Translation,” in Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 2000), xci-xciii.