The series continues (see bottom for posts thus far). What might a Wesleyan philosophy look like?
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The best way to govern society
1. As we said in the previous post, few people in history actually get a say in what the governance of society might look like. We might go further. Among those very few who do participate in the shaping of the state, even fewer are probably people of pure faith. As Lord Acton put it in the 1800s: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Few can influence the form of government. Fewer are Christians. And the Christianity of those very few is susceptible to the corruption of power.
I was not always so pessimistic. I grew up with a dreamy view of most leaders, past and present. I had a sense that only the most virtuous get promoted to high offices, including the general officials of my church denomination. John Wesley was obviously a saint, and so were the general superintendents of my church.
I actually think very highly of John Wesley and my general superintendent, although I would not consider Wesley to be flawless or inerrant, by any stretch. Those in authority in the church over me right now are obviously flawless. :-)
But there is a certain hardness that can become important, perhaps even necessary to succeed in positions of power. In his famous advice, The Prince, Machiavelli around 1500 suggested that because the ruler was surrounded by forces that would love to dethrone him, the prince could not survive unless he acted in kind. A truly virtuous ruler, Machiavelli thought, would be quickly eaten alive. A colleague of mine once wondered if it was more and more difficult to be holy the higher you ascended in leadership.
2. There is a significant segment of Christianity that thinks everything went wrong when Constantine made Christianity cool in the year AD313. They idealize that dreamy persecution age before him, when being a Christian could get you killed. They demonize the period when Christianity took power, which they think ruined it.
I have mixed feelings about this perspective. I don't think it is entirely right or wrong. Rodney Stark's 1997 book suggests a mixture of reasons why Christianity came to dominate the Roman Empire. [1] Some were the fact that it did not abort female children and had a philosophy of helping others. It thus had higher reproduction rates and survived epidemics better. In the end, Stark notes that a 40% growth rate (which Christianity had) is not actually unusual for a religion. Perhaps what was more significant is the fact that Christianity weathered challenges better than other groups.
Did persecution help Christianity grow? Perhaps the occasional persecution did contribute to a social cohesiveness that is often attractive after the persecution is over. But I have heard Bud Bence strongly question whether Christianity grew during persecution. I once asked David Riggs his opinion of why early Christianity grew. I believe his answer was reproduction. On the other hand, persecution more or less did stop Christianity in medieval China and later in the Muslim world.
There are some very good things that came from the Constantinian era. While I am unsure about Constantine's own soul ("power corrupts"), making Christianity legal doesn't seem a bad thing. Even if the number of "fake Christians" then multiplied, surely the number of true Christians grew as well.
By the way, Constantine was not the one that made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. That's erroneous, although you hear it often. That didn't happen until later in 381 under Theodosius, when Nicene Christianity became the only permissible religion. Perhaps then such voices should be blaming Theodosius rather than Constantine.
We also tend to have dreamy eyes about what Christians prior to Constantine believed. Yet it was under Constantine that the Trinity become solidified as orthodox belief. Even in the mid-300s, there was a time when more Christians were Arians--who believed Jesus was the first of God's creations, not eternally begotten--than Athanasians who believed in the Trinity of the Nicene Creed. It is not entirely clear that, without Constantine and Theodosius, the Trinity would have become official orthodoxy. One of the things Constantine did was prompt an official position, which Theodosius put in stone.
The New Testament canon was not agreed on when Constantine became emperor (or even in his lifetime). The canon was not decided at Nicaea in 325, although you hear that a lot as well. You could argue that the standardization of both the biblical text and its boundaries was a consequence of the standardization of worship in the period after Christianity became legal. In that sense, the pre-Constantine church was a church where you did not have to believe in the Trinity and where there were differences of opinion on which books belonged in the Bible.
3. In the end, I have come to agree with Jesus. "Narrow is the road that leads to life, and there are few who find it" (Matt. 7:14). The true church, the true people of God, cannot be identified by sight. True, it is a physical church as well as a spiritual church. The people of God gather. The people of God can be seen with our eyes in that respect.
But they are also invisible in the sense that we can never know by sight who is truly in. At any one period of time, not everyone in the church is in the Church. There are always both wheat and weeds (Matt. 13:24-30). I believe this was also true of ancient Israel as well. Not everyone who was in Israel was in Israel. Paul says as much in Romans 9:6.
So in a sense, there has never been and will never be an earthly kingdom where everyone is in the kingdom of God. While the medieval kings of Europe were Christians, I wonder if hardly any were truly Christians. 1 and 2 Kings would indicate that a minority of the kings of Israel and Judah were actually children of God. There is always a separation between church and state, even when the state thinks it is Christian.
Of Rights and Freedoms
Wesleyans broadly speaking have lived under a number of forms of governance since the movement started in the 1700s. Wesley lived under a monarchy with significantly reduced power. American Christians live in a representational democracy. Christians have lived in Africa under dictatorships. Christians in China have lived under communism.
Biblical instruction suggests that Christians under all these circumstances should submit to the governance of the state except where it directly conflicts with the commands of God. Romans 13:1 says, "Let every soul submit themselves to governing authorities." 1 Peter 2:13-14 say, "Be subject to every human institution because of the Lord, whether to the king as ruler or to governors as being sent through him." These instructions should be balanced with Acts 4:19, where Peter explicitly defies the instructions of the Sanhedrin.
Indeed, John Wesley did not think American Methodists were biblically right to rebel against the king of England, and I also find it difficult to justify in relation to these passages. "Taxation without representation" was not on the lips of Peter in front of the Sanhedrin. When I think of the injustices of slavery, the injustices of taxing tea seem rather feeble.
Mind you, I'm glad the revolution happened and that the US won. Once the war had begun, perhaps we could have justified fighting for the revolution in self-defense. Wars are complicated, and Christians sometimes end up fighting in defense of their own people when they would not have initiated the conflict or perhaps do not even consider the overall reasons for the fight to be justified. In such cases, the moral blame rests more with the instigators of war.
Secular freedom is not a biblical principle. Freedom from slavery to sin is a biblical principle. Fighting for my individual rights is not a biblical principle. Giving up one's freedom for the benefit of others is a biblical principle. Fighting for the value of others might perhaps be justified. [2]
The impulse to insist on meeting to worship during the height of COVID was in part based on faulty understanding. A segment of Christianity was misled into believing that the virus was a hoax and an instrument to oppress the church. Anyone who got seriously sick or had a close one die can tell you it was no hoax. I knew more than one person who died after not taking it seriously. Shame on those who misled people to their deaths.
However, the notion of freedom and rights would have been insufficient biblical grounds to meet during COVID. The biblical principle is the surrender of one's rights for the betterment of others. On an accurate understanding of the situation, meeting as a church virtually rather than in person was the loving thing to do toward one's neighbor and family, no matter how much one personally might have wanted to meet.
The idolization of freedom among American Christians is a synthesis of non-Christian values with Christianity. It is a me-centered freedom rather than an other-centered surrender. It is what we call "syncretism," a mixture into our faith of elements that are actually antithetical to true faith, which is about surrender to God and others rather than the indulgence of personal freedom.
Monarchies and Oligarchies
1. Clearly a person can be a Christian and live under a king/queen, whether the ruler is just or unjust. Plato in the 300s BC thought that the ideal situation was a state ruled by a philosopher king. [3] I suspect a state run by a competent, benevolent, Christian king or queen could be a very good state indeed. The problem is whether that will be true of the next ruler.
In fact, God is the perfect King/Ruler. He is all-knowing and all-understanding. He is omni-competent. He is so omni-benevolent that the Bible can say, "God is love," where love is the disposition to act for the good of the other. It would thus be foolish not to submit to the Kingship of God and the Lordship of Jesus the Anointed One, the Messiah. No earthly king could ever come close.
However, over the long term, on earth with human kings and queens, you cannot guarantee that the succeeding kings or queens will be either benevolent or competent, even if they consider themselves Christian. I suspect that the citizens of a state would have a better life, even as Christians, under a competent atheist who is benevolent than a well-intentioned Christian who is a buffoon--let alone a person who calls him or herself Christian but is not truly benevolent at all.
It is simply false to think that a spiritual leader will thereby be a good leader or that if a person is a good leader, they must obviously be spiritual. Patently false. There have always been unethical leaders who accomplish good things and ethical leaders who screw everything up.
The choice of a king in 1 Samuel 8 was apparently not God's first choice for Israel, although he allowed it and then used it. This is an illustration both of God dispensing choice to his people and of God working through whatever forms of culture might exist at a particular place and time. Perhaps God would have eventually given Israel a king anyway, in preparation for Christ.
But we should not conclude, as some monarchists argued in the 1600s, that monarchies are God's will for the earth. [4] A king or queen does not have a "divine right" to rule, let alone to rule in whatever way they wish. God gave Israel a king because their surrounding peoples all had kings. It was another example of the incarnational principle, where God meets people where they are in their situation and understanding. Then he works from there.
For all these reasons, I do not believe that a benevolent monarchy is the ideal form of governance. Aristotle, like Plato, believed that a benevolent monarchy was the best form of governance, but a tyranny (rule by an evil dictator) would be the worst. [5] Secondarily, he argued that the rule of a few good men would be second best, an aristocracy. So rule of a few evil people, an oligarchy, would be second worst to a tyrrany.
2. As a side note, Aristotle viewed women as incomplete humans and as incubators. They did not contribute to the "form" of a person, in his view, the part that constituted the essence of who we are. [6] In his view, women would not typically be appropriate to rule, "except when there is a departure from nature." [7] Aristotle's Politics presents a view of the household where the husband is the head of the household like the leader of a city. The wife was then like a citizen in that city. He also gives his ideals with regard to children and slaves.
His instruction is quite similar to the household codes in Colossians and 1 Peter. This comes to a key point that I think is quite consistent with Wesleyan thinking. There is nothing distinctively Christian in Paul's world about saying the husband is the head of the household or that the wife should submit to her husband. There is nothing distinctive in Paul's world about saying a slave should obey his or her master, assuming the institution of slavery. These statements conform to Paul's secular culture, and Aristotle would wholeheartedly agree.
It is thus when Paul pushes for the empowerment of the wife that he is being distinctively Christian. It is when he urges Philemon to consider Onesimus a brother that he is being distinctively Christian. The principle of "in Christ neither slave nor free" is the eternal identity principle. The other is an accommodation to a fallen world. This is what the early Wesleyan Methodists believed, and that Luther Lee preached. In that sense, egalitarianism is more in sync with the trajectory of Wesleyanism than complementarianism, which I would argue is less than the kingdom ideal and a corruption of Wesleyanism.
3. An aristarchy as Aristotle understood it was not a matter of vote or appointment. It was rule by powerful leaders who did not really need the approval of the people they governed. The Roman senate before the Empire was an oligarchy of sorts, ruled as it were by wealthy, important people like Cicero. Each year, two consuls were elected from the Senate to run the administration of the Republic. The House of Lords in England was an aristocracy, before the House of Commons was added. The addition of representational elements was a move forward, in my opinion.
Aristotle thought that an aristocracy was the second best way for a society to be ruled. However, if those few men were evil, it would become an oligarchy, the second worst form of rule. Although Russia under Putin has moved more and more back toward a dictatorship, it has largely been run by a few incredibly wealthy individuals these last two decades. As we will argue in a later post, this is what happened when the dissolved Soviet Union shifted to unbridled capitalism largely without the checks of representational democracy or a Constitution with checks and balances like most modern Western states.
Communism
Communism, technically speaking, was meant to be a point when society did not really need money because resources would come "from each according to his ability" and would then redistribute "to each according to his need." [8] Although it sounds very Christ-like, it just doesn't work on any large scale or for any sustained period of time. We will return to it in a later post on economic philosophy.
As a means of governing society, twentieth-century communism was a wholesale failure. It inevitably devolved into dictatorships and oligarchies which did not in any way lead to societal thriving. Those with ability had little motivation to excel because the fruits of their labor were siphoned away to those with less ability. In the end, the drive to excel is part of human nature in its unfallen state, and society thrives when this drive is leveraged in balance with the needs and welfare of others.
There have been some brief, smaller experiments with communal living--the Shakers in Kentucky, the Oneida community in New York. These experiments generally have a short life because they are contrary to human nature, both in its essence and in its fallenness. There are almost always stronger personalities that unofficially dominate. Conflicts eventually come that have no real mechanism for effective resolution.
In the end, I only mention communism here because it was a form of governance in the twentieth century. It lingers on in some sense in certain parts of the world, but even China and Cuba have made capitalist adjustments in order to move forward. Communism has largely turned out to be a form of monarchy or oligarchy, not the dreamy, classless society Marx thought it would become.
Democracy
As a teenager, the word Democrat was sufficiently shunned in my background that we did not want to call the US a democracy. Instead, it was important to say it was a "republic," which of course fit much better with being Republican. What is the difference? Perhaps we could say that a pure democracy is a place where individuals vote on almost everything, such as in certain towns in New England. A republic in the American sense is a representational democracy, where individuals are elected by the people to make key decisions and laws for the whole.
In our context, however, it is a distinction without a difference.
Obviously, a pure democracy, where every individual votes on virtually everything, would be unsustainable on a large scale. Aristotle considered a democracy the third best form of government, and mob rule the third worst. A danger with a pure democracy, I suppose, would be when there are no checks and balances on the majority. The majority, then, can obliterate the minority, if they so desire.
Similarly, the whims of small groups can get out of hand quickly on smaller scales. When you look at the way blacks were treated in the Jim Crow South in the late 1800s and early 1900s, you have an example of local power oppressing a particular people group virtually without check. An example is the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. His obvious murderers went unconvicted because the social forces of the region undermined the system. It took the intervention of a larger authority, the federal government, to begin to address a system that was supposed to work fairly and equally that had gone awry on a local and regional level.
As you may have picked up, I believe the concept of state's rights has largely served historically to try to undermine the American ideal. This was certainly true in the conflict of the Civil War, and the same dynamic resurfaced in the South in the 50s and 60s over civil rights. A particular region didn't like being forced to do the right thing by the broader country. Note that I am expressing the historically Republican view, the view of Lincoln, in saying this. State's rights was a Democratic perspective until the 1960s. The two parties have switched perspectives.
Even in regard to the issue of abortion, the argument of states' rights is not really the true position of the anti-abortionist. Clearly, the proper goal of the anti-abortion movement is not for the issue to be a matter of individual states but for there to be a federal law prohibiting abortion nationwide. We are seeing the anti-abortion argument shift in this direction now that Roe v. Wade has been repealed. At best, a state's rights position in relation to abortion was transitional.
Representational Democracy
1. The form of government of the United States and other modern Western countries seems to me the best possible of forms, given human nature. On the one hand, there is a Constitution that is rather difficult to change. The first ten amendments are a Bill of Rights, on condition of which the Constitution would not have been ratified in 1788. These are very important because they protect the minority against the whims of the majority.
The central principles of the system are checks and balances alongside an assumption of self-interest. In an approach that fits very well with Christian and Wesleyan theology, there is a fundamental assumption that human beings are fundamentally selfish and self-interested. If we are allowed, we will run over our neighbor when it is to our own advantage.
The system thus works to cancel out our fallen tendencies. The people elect those who represent them, and they can vote them out. A president focuses executive action but is checked in power by the Constitution as upheld by the judicial system. Congress is meant to channel the will of the people, as it is allowed by the Constitution. The system, in effect, is meant to encapsulate the love of our neighbor as ourselves.
As mentioned, there is an executive, the administrative head of the republic. This role channels the benefits of a monarchy. But the executive must follow the Constitution and the laws of the land. The executive is re-elected every four years and can only serve twice--an improvement to the Constitution made after FDR.
The laws of the land are the purview of Congress, which consists of two houses. The House of Representatives is the more representational of the two houses, where representatives are chosen every two years from a smaller geographical unit based on population. The Senate has two representatives from every state for six years and thus follows again the principle that the majority cannot simply overrun the minority. Rhode Island gets as much a say in the Senate as Texas or California.
However, the Constitution and laws of the land are only as good as the people are willing to enforce them. If a president were to ignore the Constitution and stay in office, if the powers that be could not dislodge him or her, then the letters on pages become irrelevant. It is essential for the people only to elect individuals committed to the system as it stands. It is also essential that the voting system remain intact, unlike Russia where it would seem elections are rigged.
The 2020 election was a very dangerous moment in our history. On the one hand, the key points of its certification were all individuals who had supported the incumbent. Every examination of the election in the justice system upheld it, often by judges appointed by the incumbent. The former Attorney General under the previous president has repeatedly affirmed its validity. No one has been able to demonstrate sizable error in voting machines. Yet the former president has been able to convince many Christians that its results were invalid. This is a very dangerous situation, and it is unfortunate that many believers have contributed to it.
2. The Supreme Court and justice system then provide line calls. For the last fifty years, we have had a debate not unlike debates over how to appropriate Scripture. The side that has dominated until recently has appropriated the words of the Constitution in the light of historical developments. The focus is on the principles of the Constitution. The other side, which has recently become dominant, applies the words of the Constitution in terms of the specifics in the heads of its eighteenth-century originators. In a sense, the impact of the Civil War is reversed. The realities of a significantly broadened context are not taken into account.
Let me give a biblical parallel. The Bible says to love your neighbor. The justices of the last fifty years have, in effect, asked what would be loving given our current sensibilities. The new court, now dominated by "originalist" appointees, asks instead what would have been considered loving in 1789. If beating a child or wife was considered to be within the parameters of love in 1789, then the law must allow it today.
By contrast, the side that was previously accused of "legislating from the bench" and being "activist judges" would rather have said that, given our current sense of things, it is not loving to beat your wife or child senseless. The originalist side would have us make explicit in law any extension of Constitutional principles beyond the unwritten specifics in the bubbles above the heads of the founding fathers. In both cases, the same words are followed, but the originalist would not allow us to leave the time-bound understandings of the 1700s unless we explicitly pass laws to say so, even though those specific understandings were never specifically stated in the Constitution itself.
The spirit of originalism has never contributed to freedom or the underlying principles of the Constitution. It has never expanded rights. It has always served to constrain and withhold. We saw it in the Dred Scot decision that forced runaway slaves back to their masters. We saw it in Plessy v. Ferguson's "separate but equal" debacle, which led to the re-oppression of blacks for over fifty years. It has virtually always served an unloving and repressive purpose that works against the spirit of the Constitution.
As a side note, the underlying dynamic of re-contextualization has always been in play in our appropriation of Scripture without our realizing it, and I believe God is in it. No doubt if we did not "spare the rod" in the manner of an ancient Israelite, we would consider it highly abusive today. When James Dobson set out parameters for the corporal punishment of children, he did so in a very careful way that no doubt is quite different from what would have been in the bubble above the head of an ancient Israelite.
In short, Christians and the church have always read the words of Scripture informed by a spiritual common sense in dialog with our current context. This is how the Spirit speaks through Scripture and how Scripture remains a living word.
Universal Ethical Egoism
The ethical approach that underlies the modern constitutional system might be called universal ethical egoism. As an "egoistic" approach, it aims to provide maximal freedom universally. However, this is not without limits. At a certain point, the exercise of my freedom begins to impinge upon yours. There is thus no such thing as absolute freedom in the system.
Freedom of religion ends when my religion calls me to kill you or steal your stuff. Freedom of the press ends if my press threatens to undo the whole system. The right to bear arms ends when I start shooting people.
So we create a system that allows the majority to prevail except when its will would impinge on the rights of individuals or subgroups. And we allow individuals to have freedom except when it impinges on the rights of other individuals or groups. There is a system and a structure that facilitates these principles.
Church and State
The non-establishment clause of the Constitution was meant to prevent a state church. It was meant to provide government neutrality toward organized religion. The principle is very Wesleyan and seems to be what God has practiced throughout history. God did not allow Israel to worship other gods, but he allowed the nations of the world to do so. In Romans 1, God "gives them up" to worship idols and be sexually immoral. A nation that allows its people freedom of religion beyond Christianity is thus analogous to the way God runs the world.
It is true that the spectrum of religions in 1789 was much less extensive than it is today. Here is an example where the originalist runs the risk of undermining the spirit of the Constitution by focusing on unwritten specifics that may or may not have been in the heads of some founding fathers. The more timeless principle is that the United States should be a religious neutral zone. Congress should not pass any laws that are rooted in the specific religious understandings of a particular religion.
I have already mentioned the fictitious quote attributed to Charles Spurgeon. "Why didn't the Baptists burn anyone at the stake?" The response: "Because we were never in charge." The very reasons why some individuals came to America--pursuing freedom from religious persecution--militates against a government that turns around and establishes a specific religious framework.
We might point out that the rules not to murder, not to steal can be justified in a non-religious way. From the standpoint of the Constitution, these sorts of rules fit hand-in-glove with a social contract we have made with each other. The Preamble to the Constitution is a social contract, with the philosophies of John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and others standing in the background. "We the People... do ordain and establish this Constitution."
I agree not to kill you if you agree not to kill me. I agree not to steal your stuff if you agree not to steal mine. In terms of the Constitution, these are not religious statements. In terms of the Constitution, these are not the legislation of morality. In terms of the Constitution, these are the terms of a social contract aiming at universal ethical egoism. These are concrete, commonly understood principles for a maximally free society. They cohere well with Christian values, but they are not specifically Christian.
However, I would also agree with those who argue that some judges in the past have misinterpreted the independence of the state from religion as almost a hostility against religion in the public sphere. The clause does not say, "The state shall prohibit all religious expression in anything run by the state." Rather, the goal is for the government to provide a neutral ground where a pluralism of religions might exist without any of them harming each other.
[1] Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997).
[2] 1 Corinthians 9 is very helpful on this subject. It is in the context of chapters 8-10 on the question of eating food sacrificed to pagan gods. As an example, Paul did not insist that the Corinthians give him his rights. Rather, he surrendered his rights for the edification and true benefit of others. Romans 14 presents similar principles.
[3] Plato's Republic.
[4] E.g., Thomas Hobbes' Leviathon. Louis XIV is the consummate example of a seventh century king who thought his absolute monarchy was a matter of divine right.
[5] Aristotle's Politics.
[6] By contrast, because Plato saw the mind and soul of a person as something quite distinct from their bodies, he was more open to women leading. In their minds, they could also contemplate the eternal ideals.
[7] Politics, 1259-1260.
[8] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
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Introduction
Logic
Philosophy of Religion
Philosophical Psychology
Ethics
Social and Political Philosophy (How should we then live together?)
