1

Jack Kilcrease, Ph.D.

jackkilcrease@hotmail.com

943 Aberdeen St. NE,

Grand Rapids, MI 49505

Phone: 503-810-2116

Should We Rejoice in the End of Christendom? A Biblical and

Confessional Evaluation

By Jack Kilcrease Ph.D.

Introduction: Recent Theological Evaluations of the End of Christendom

With the accelerating decline of Christendom over the previous four decades, there

have been a number of responses among those professing Christianity. One approach,

common both in conservative American Evangelical and Roman Catholic circles, is the

attempt to retake waning cultural influence by political force. Those taking such an course

have created a number of Christian lobbying groups (Moral Majority, Christian Coalition, the

Catholic League) aimed at recapturing Christian cultural dominance through legislation and

activism.1 Many of these strategies are rooted in either the Reformed model of Christian

cultural engagement (“Christ the transformer of culture”2 of Niebuhr’s typology), or a Roman

Catholic one (Niebuhr’s “Christ above culture”3). These groups see the Christian Church as a

unique legal order and civilizational program that is only meaningful if it is implemented by

the blunt force of the political process.

1 Jon Butler, Grant Wacker, and Randall Balmer, Religion in American Life: A Short History (New

York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 391-7; Sarah Diamond, Not by Politics Alone: The Enduring Influence of

the Christian Right (New York: The Guilford Press, 2000); idem, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the

Christian Right (Boston: South End Publishers, 1989); William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the

Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996); Clyde Wilcox and Carin Robinson Onward

Christian Soldiers?: The Religious Right in American Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2010); Daniel K.

Williams, God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

2 H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: HaperOne, 2001), 190-229.

3 Ibid., 116-148.

2

On the other end of the spectrum there has been something of a clamoring for a

revival of the old Anabaptist model of “Christ against culture.”4 Among these groups, the

prospect of the rejection by the wider culture means the greater possibility for Christian

authenticity that was lost with the coming of the Constantinian Church. The desire to see the

Church as a community in opposition to the wider culture is nothing new. This seems largely

to have been the mentality of the Ante-Nicene Fathers. Similarly, going back to the 12th

century there have occasionally arisen in the Western Church various quasi-Millennialist

sectarian groups which have wished Christians live a life of radical peace and poverty in

opposition to the institutional Church and the Constantinian order.5 These separatist and

utopian tendencies found expression again at the time of the Reformation through the

Anabaptist movement (in both its violent and non-violent forms), which sought to find

Christian identity in opposing and separating itself from the larger culture.6

Among many Anabaptist groups, believer’s baptism played a significant role in

establishing their opposition to what they viewed as the inauthenticity of the Constantinian

order. Within the legal order of the Corpus Christianum all children were baptized as a

matter of course, not only to ward off original sin, but to establish them as members of an

explicitly Christian political order. In light of this, believer’s baptism logically meant that

one was in opposition to that order. Believers self-identified and therefore were baptized as a

public pledge of belonging to an alternative Res Publica Christiana.7 It is for this reason

4 Ibid., 45-82.

5 See good discussion in Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian

Reform to the Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002) and also, Gordon Leff, Heresy in the Later

Middle Ages: The Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent C.1250-C.1450 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,

1999).

6 See seminal studies by Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1970), 223-80. And also George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth

Century Journal Publishers, 1992).

7 Williams, 432-46. This does of course not exhaust the Anabaptist theology of baptism. Nevertheless,

Williams shows that being called out into an alternative community did play a significant role, particularly in

the theology of the prophets of Münster.

3

unsurprising that many of the Anabaptists accepted a quasi- Millenarian eschatology.8

Implicit in the theology of the Millenialist is the notion that all earthly kingdoms (even those

that are nominally Christian) are illegitimate because they will finally be swept away by

Christ’s coming temporal (not just atemporal and eternal!) kingdom of which the alternative

Anabaptist religio-political order is an anticipation.9

In more recent times, this Anabaptist opposition to Christendom has become popular

as a means to dealing with the trauma of Christendom’s collapse. This can be found in the

highly influential works of the now deceased Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder. As

a student of Karl Barth,10 Yoder seemingly absorbed early Dialectical Theology’s attempt to

utilize the New Testament theme of the apocalyptic opposition of God’s revelation to the

expectations of the fallen world. As a Reformed theologian, Barth (beginning with first

edition of Der Römerbrief and but also continuing on into his Kirkliche Dogmatiks)

understood this opposition as taking the form of the juxtaposition of all temporality and

human autonomy to the revelation of God’s atemporal sovereignty in his electing grace in

Christ.11 By contrast, as an heir of the peaceful wing of the 16th century Anabaptists, Yoder

thinks of this apocalyptic opposition of God’s revelation to the normal functioning of the

temporal world in terms of cultural practices of peace and hospitality. Whereas the city of

man is one of violence, the city of God is one of peace. An ethic of radical pacifism (and not

the knowledge of divine sovereignty as in the Reformed Barth) now becomes the totally

disruptive content of revelation

8 Ibid., 521-3. We say “quasi” because the Radical Reformers (such as Hofmann) did not take the

1,000 year reign of Christ literally, though he certainly believed that he would have an earthly kingdom much

like the Joachimist Spiritual Franciscans did.

9 This was particularly true of Thomas Müntzer’s program and the Münster utopia. See Cohn, 223-80.

10 Mark Nation, John Howard Yoder: Mennonite Patience, Evangelical Witness, Catholic Convictions

(Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006),18.

11 The continuity of Barth’s position in this regard was famously documented in Bruce McCormack,

Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909-1936 (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1997) in opposition in Hans Urs von Balthasar’s interpretation which suggested a radical shift

from a dialectical concept of revelation to an analogical one. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl

Barth, trans. Edward Oakes (San Francisco: Communio, 1992).

4

In his seminal work, The Politics of Jesus, Yoder implicitly takes the “Christian

Realism”12 of Reinhold Niebuhr (so popular in the mid-20th century mainline Protestant

establishment!) to task as a false compromise with modern secular concepts of order achieved

through coercive justice.13 For Yoder, Jesus enacted the Jubilee year (long promised by

Isaiah), which does not so much mean God’s promise of the forgiveness of sins as those from

the tradition of the Magisterial Reformation would have it, but rather as a series of practices

such as forgiveness between the brethren, hospitality, and peace-making.14

Peace-making and a radical ethic of pacifism is particularly defining for Yoder,

because they define the Church as a community wholly opposed to the glue of coercion that

normally holds civil society together.15 Against all conventional understandings of the need

for coercive justice, Yoder insists that Christians should oppose all violence, even when it is

exercised by what would normally be understood to be legitimate authorities. He attempts to

argue that every text of the New Testament that allows for the legitimate use of violence

(Romans 13, etc.) merely refers to God’s use of evil powers (i.e., the coercive State) for a

greater good in his overall plan. St. Paul’s admonition to obedience to the State does not in

fact mean that it is a good in and of itself, but rather that Christians should follow a radical

ethic of non-resistance in relation to it as an extension of the pacifist ethic.16

For this reason in his later works, Yoder follows the typical Anabaptist narrative of

the fall of the Church arriving with Constantine and the establishment of Christendom. He

classifies figures with such diverse political theologies as Augustine and Eusebius of

12 Particularly in Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics

(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013). See Yoder’s first response to Niebuhr in John Howard

Yoder, “Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Pacifism,” The Mennonite Quarterly Review 29 (1955): 101-17.

13 John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1972), 11-26. See

Yoder’s more explicit attack on Niebuhr in John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and

Revolution (Grand RapidsL Brazos Press, 2009), 285-98.

14 Ibid., 64-77.

15 Ibid., 78-93.

16 Ibid., 163-214.

5

Ceasarea as blandly “Constantinian.”17 By accepting a Christian political order and the

legitimacy of the coercive state, these men tainted the very nature of the Church as a peaceful

alternative community.

One finds very nearly an identical line of reasoning in the works of Stanley Hauerwas.

Hauerwas in recent years has been given the prestigious title of America’s most “influential

theologian.”18 While a professor of Christian ethics at Notre Dame, Hauerwas (though a

Methodist) regularly met with Yoder who was teaching at the Mennonite seminary in Elkhart,

Indiana.19 In his book, Resident Aliens, Hauerwas argues that the Church has proven

impotent to deal with modernist and post-modernist ideologies.20 This is largely because it

understands itself within the framework of Christendom, wherein the Church domesticates

Jesus’ message of peace, forgiveness, and hospitality to the strictures of the surrounding

secular political environment, whatever form that may take (Paul Tillich21 and Reinhold

Niebuhr22 come under special criticism for this). For this reason, the end of Christendom is a

good thing, because it frees the Church to be the alternative, edgy counter-culture that it was

meant to be:

The demise of the Constantinian worldview, the gradual decline of the notion that the

church needs some sort of surrounding “Christian” culture to prop it up and mold its

young, is not a death to lament. It is an opportunity to celebrate. The decline of the

old Constantinian synthesis between the church and the world means that we

American Christians are at last free to be faithful in a way that makes being a

Christian today an exciting adventure . . . And we believe that recognition signals a

seismic shift in the world view of our church, which makes all the difference in the

world for how we go about the business of being the church. Now our churches are

17 See Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution, 62-65; idem, "The Constantinian

Sources of Western Social Ethics," in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame, Ind.:

University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 135-47.

18 J. Daryl Charles, Retrieving the Natural Law: A Return to Moral First Things (Grand Rapids: Wm.

B. Eerdmans, 2008), 141.

19 Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans,

2012), 116-118.

20 Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in a Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989),

15-30.

21 Ibid., 20-8.

22 Ibid., 31-2.

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free to embrace our roots, to resemble more closely the synagogue—a faith

community that does not ask the world to do what it can only do for itself.23

The confessional Lutheran will notice the irony of Yoder and Hauerwas’ opposition to

Christendom and what they refer to as Constantinianism. For Yoder and Hauerwas, the

Church is fundamentally a legal order, rather than one created through the proclamation of

the sacramental word of grace. No less than their Roman Catholic and Reformed opponents,

they assume that for the Church to have a meaningful reality its unique law must be enforced.

The main difference between them and their opponents is that whereas Reformed and

Catholic revivers of Christendom seek to produce this enforcement of the Church’s unique

law by dominating the State, Yoder and Hauerwas seek to renounce any claims to control the

world order by violence in order to focus on enforcing the law within the boundaries of

alternative Christian communities. Ultimately, such small scale enforcement of the law in the

alternative community will spill over into the kingdom of the world.

The Benefits of Christendom from the Perspective of the Law

The question we seek to answer in this essay is whether or not confessional Lutherans

can share Hauerwas and his followers’ enthusiasm for the end of Christendom. In examining

the benefits and drawbacks of our current situation, we will make our case by highlighting the

relationship between the end of Christian culture in the West and the mission of the Church in

proclaiming the law and the gospel. Contrary to the thinkers we have examined so far,

confessional Lutheran theology does not hold the Church to be primarily a legal order, that is,

an order that subsists in conforming to a particular pattern of existence presented to it by a

legal or institutional code. Rather, the Church is called into existence by God's gracious

action by the power of the Spirit, and not coercive institutional structures. The Church

23Ibid., 18. Emphasis added.

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subsists in its reception of God’s gracious address to it in Word and sacrament.24 This makes

it an utterly unique community within a fallen world held together largely by institutional

coercion of various sorts.

God’s address to his Church is defined by both law and gospel, because God’s actions

via the Word and the sacraments necessarily take the form of these two words. Although law

and gospel do not exhaustively describe the content of revelation,25 they are necessary

components in the encounter that the sinner has with God through the ministry of the Church.

This is because the narrative of God’s actions presented in the Scriptures and proclaimed by

the Church either highlights the fallenness and judgment of the hearer of the Word, or their

redemption in Christ. By examining the law-gospel implication of the end of Christian

cultural dominance, we can better bring into focus what is at stake for Christians living in a

larger society of increasing unbelief. We can also better bring into focus the role of the State

as comprehended within the framework of the overall narrative of creation and redemption

infallibly presented to us in Sacred Scripture.

When discussing the drawbacks and benefits of Christendom, we must also define

precisely what we mean by “Christendom.” This will make our answer to the question

somewhat more precise than it was in the authors we looked at earlier. Christendom may be

broadly or more narrowly defined. A narrow definition might be the State establishment of

Christianity as the exclusive or simply official state religion. This form of Christendom was

an almost uniform reality in the West from the time of the Theodosian Decrees of the late 4th

century,26 until the granting of various forms of religious liberty in the West between the 17th

24 CA 7, 8; Concordia Triglotta, ed. and trans. F. Bente and W. H. T. Dau (St. Louis: Concordia

Publishing House, 1921), 46-7. Hereafter, Concordia Triglotta will be abbreviated as “CT.”

25 A mistake often made in 20th century Lutheran theology. See criticism in David Scaer, "The Law-

Gospel Debate in the Missouri Synod Continued." Springfielder 40 (September 1976), 107-18.

26 Jaroslav Pelikan Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith of the

Christian Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 225-6; Frank R. Trombley, Hellenic Religion

and Christianization: C. 370-529 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 1-2.

8

and 18th centuries.27 Conversely, Christendom can also be understood in a broader sense as

merely a time (perhaps extending to as recently as the 1950s in Middle America) when most

people in the West believed in the Christian metanarrative and its consequent moral claims.

It should also be noted that in describing Christendom according to either definition, we are

primarily defining Christendom and describing its merits and demerits from the perspective

of the law, rather than the gospel.

When viewed as a whole, the net benefits of narrower version of Christendom are

mixed, and at times negligible. Although the State establishment of Christianity superficially

bestowed many blessings (particularly on the enforcement of Christian moral standards in the

kingdom of the left), its drawbacks outweighed the gains. Most importantly, State-sanctioned

Christianity tends to distort the law-gospel mission of the Church. Historically the State-

sanctioning of Christianity has meant the Christian Church becoming a legal institution,

whose primary focus is the first use of the law, rather than the second. In defining itself

primarily (rather than derivatively and pragmatically) as an institution, the Church became

effectively defined (as is the case with all institutions) by the rules of its institutional

structure. Such a move distorts the Church’s identity, which is centered on the proclamation

of the gospel, rather than the institutional, political, and cultural enforcement of the law.

Beyond this, the establishment of the Church as a law-centered institution means that it must

compete with other legal entities in the world in order to secure its position of power. The

institutional structure therefore tends to seek to dominate sinners, rather than proclaim the

good news of forgiveness to them.

27 See John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689 (London:

Routledge, 2000); R. Po-Chia Hsia and Henk F. K. van, eds., Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch

Golden Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith:

Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2010);

Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500-1700 (New York:

Manchester University Press, 2006); Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

9

Historically, this has taken a variety of forms. On one end of the spectrum, we may

think of the post-Gregorian Roman Catholic Church with its endless attempts at dominating

the kingdom of the left.28 This model can take on more blatant the forms, as in the theory of

the two-swords.29 It can also take on a less brazen and more covert form as in Vatican II30

and in the various incarnations of Catholic Modernism,31 at present, revived yet again by

Pope Francis. Regarding the latter form, this tendency finds its expression in the modern

Roman Catholic propensity of selectively taking on some of the values of the surrounding

culture in order to lure persons within it into the thrall of Papal domination. Though it may

seem at odds with the more authoritarian tendencies of traditional Catholicism (Trent,

Vatican I, etc.) the goal is in actuality the same. Not only is the goal the same, but the

distortion of the Church and its mission are the same. As a society existing above the rest of

society (Niebuhr’s aptly named “Christ above Culture”32), it becomes the chief goal of the

Church to coerce secular culture to conform to its better and higher law.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Protestant Erastianism33 and of course, the

situation of the Eastern Church since the time of Eusebius.34 In both cases, the Church may

on the surface appear to have given up its power scheming, but this is merely a façade. One

28 See discussion of the Gregorian Revolution in Christopher Bellitto, Renewing Christianity: A History

of Church Reform from Day One to Vatican II (New York: Paulist Press, 2001), 51-61.

29 See Otto Von Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. F.W. Maitland (Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press, 1958), 7-21; Ewart Lewis, Medieval Political Ideas, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1954), 2:506-38.

30 See Austin Flannery, O.P., ed., Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents: Constitutions,

Decrees, Declarations (New York: Costello, 1996).

31 See description in Alec Vidler, A Variety of Catholic Modernists (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press, 1970). Catholic Modernism has also taken on other forms such as Liberation theology. See

Gustavo Gutirrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (New York: Orbis Books, 1988).

32 H. Richard Niebuhr, 116-47.

33 See Charles Gunnoe, Thomas Erastus and the Palatinate: A Renaissance Physician in the Second

Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Erastus is known for supposedly teaching that the Church should be

dominated by the State. Gunnoe suggests that in actuality, as a Zwinglian, Erastus merely thought that the

Church should not exercise public power in the form of legally binding church-discipline, but should leave this

to the secular government. This stood in contrast to the view of Calvin and those who modeled Church-State

relations on the basis of the Genevan model.

34 See basic summary in Norman H. Baynes, “Eusebius and the Christian Empire,” in Byzantine Studies

and Other Essays, (University of London: Athlone Press, 1955), 168-72; Reuben J. Penner, The Rhetoric of

God in History: Eusebius of Caesarea's Political Theology in His "Panegyric to Constantine" (Unpublished MA

Thesis: Dalhousie University, 2008); Michael J. Hollerich, “Religion and Politics in the Writings of Eusebius:

Reassessing the First ‘Court Theologian.’” Church History 59, no. 3 (1990): 309-25.

10

need but dig a little deeper and discover that the goal of the ecclesiastical community in

becoming a toady to the dominant political order is to secure for itself a place of power and

security.35 In spite of Flacius’ belief that the Church had the autonomous right to determine

its doctrine and practice on the basis of the Word of God,36 the de facto reality for the

Lutheran Church in Europe until the present has been State domination. The most evil results

of this move have become all too apparent in the Prussian Union of the 19th century37 and the

German Christian movement of the early 20th century.38 In both cases, church authorities

were only too happy to support wicked political authorities in order to secure for themselves

power and security.

Ultimately, in either scenario, the same corrupting influence of instutionalism and

legalism takes over. Erastianism proves itself only to be the other side of the coin from Papal

theocracy. When the Church tries to define its identity primarily as a legal institution, it must

de facto become a power-institution. This means it must either conform to or dominate other

power institutions. In the midst of all this, the gospel is often suppressed and the law of God

is more often than not blatantly violated under the sanctimonious cover of religion.

As we observed above, one may also define Christendom in a broad sense as a

cultural phenomenon. Although it cannot be believed that such a culture produces any more

sincere Christians than one that is overtly hostile to Christianity (after all, Christians are made

35 One can see this for example in the formal alliance between the Pope and the Carolingians. See

discussion in Thomas F. X. Noble, The Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680-825

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 275-76. Though it would be difficult to directly prove,

but one can detect similar motives behind the German Christians and the Russian Orthodox acquiescence to the

Tsarist autocracy.

36 Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Adiaphora and Tyranny:Matthias Flacius Illyricus on Christian

Resistance and Confession in the Adiaphoristic Controversy (Saginaw, MI: Magdeburg Press, 2012). Part of the

issue with Adiaphora was that Melanchthon believed that the Church was subject to the State in all things

external. See discussion in Irene Dingel, “The Culture of Controversy Leading to the Formula of Concord

(1548-1580),” in Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture: 1550 – 1675, ed. Robert Kolb (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 37-9.

37 See Stan M. Landry, Ecumenism, Memory, and German Nationalism, 1817-1917 (Syracuse:

Syracuse University Press, 2014), 9-17.

38 See Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich: The

German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Susannah

Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2008); Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945

(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

11

by God’s grace, and not by culture!), historically, such a culture did produce some tangible

benefits in the way of proper functioning of society. Moreover, such a culture may

encourage changes to laws of the State without explicit confessionalization of the secular

order. Indeed, Constantine did not need to make Christianity the official state-religion

(something, that actually only happened under Theodosius39) in order to have eliminate

crucifixion, gladiator games and discourage infanticide.40 Similarly, it was better when the

Popes (without exercising temporal authority) protested both the enslavement of Africans and

Native Americans in the early 16th century.41 It was better when Christians came together to

overcome slavery,42 racial segregation, 43 and other forms of discrimination, all within a

context of religious pluralism and toleration. It is undoubtedly also true that it was better

when people generally held standards of Christian sexual morality to be the correct ones,

even if they did not always live up to them. Therefore, observed from the perspective of the

positive effects of the law that Christendom brought about, the loss of a Christian culture is

extremely troubling.

Some might object that Christians should not worry about the degradation wrought by

the loss of Christian dominance in culture, because God in his providence will ultimately

preserve the Orders of Creation and sustain human life until the Last Judgment. Although

this is correct, the Orders of Creation can be preserved in more and less satisfactory ways.

The Orders of Creation are created givens within human life, and they can be regulated either

according to the arbitrary will of human beings or the law of God. For example, as Oswald

Bayer argues, in the Genesis commentary Luther assumes that all human beings are in one

39 Trombley, 1-2. 40 Brian Moynahan, The Faith: A History of Christianity (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 97.

41 Gerald O'Collins, Catholicism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),

96.

42 See John McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern

Churches: 1830-1865 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), and Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William

Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007).

43 Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon, eds., Rhetoric, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-

1965 (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006).

12

way or another part of the Order of the Church (in so far as all humans worship something).44

Nevertheless, there remain within that single Order a true and false Church.45 The true

community of believers regulates the Order of the Church according to the Word of God,

while others ignore or distort the Word. Likewise, marriage can exist in worse or better

forms. Polygamy, concubinage, polyandry, or homosexual unions are obviously forms of the

Order of the Family and Marriage (or at very least in the latter case, an attempt to imitate it).

Nevertheless, they are far worse (and indeed sinful!) compared to the union of one man with

one woman that God the creator sanctioned in the Garden of Eden. Finally, in terms of the

order of the State, it is beyond question that American constitutional democracy is preferable

when compared to Fascism, Stalinism, or Maoism. For this reason, we must again insist that

when judged by the standards of the divine law, Christendom was a definite benefit. Its loss

is therefore a tangible evil and should not be celebrated.

The Danger of the Immanentizing the Eschaton46

Noting these positive goods, it has more often than not been the mistake of many

Christian groups to identify the positive effects of Christendom on law and culture with the

coming of God’s kingdom. Although these goods are tangible and suggest that the presence

of Christianity articulation of God’s law has a positive effect on culture, this does not mean

that the implementation of the law in society as a means of spreading God’s kingdom. This

has been the mistake by and large of the Reformed and Roman Catholic traditions, with their

various attempts to control the kingdom of the world.

44 Oswald Bayer, Freedom in Response: Lutheran Ethics: Sources and Controversies (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2007), 93.

45 See discussion in Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology: Its Historical and Systematic

Development, trans. Roy Harrisville (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 281-3.

46 The idea of “immanentizing the eschaton” was made famous by the philosopher and political theorist

Eric Voegelin. See Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1987), 121.

13

Underlining this is the assumption that the law in and of itself has the power to enact

the new creation. In the case of the Reformed, the idea tends to be that the gospel makes the

law work by activating and motivating specially sanctified elect humans to implement God’s

will in society, and from this God’s kingdom is proleptically realized.47 Likewise,

Catholicism views the graced subject as cooperating with God in building up the infused

virtues of created grace within himself. 48 By working from the blueprint provided by

Aristotelian natural law (augmented and clarified by Papal pronouncements), the believer

may now use his grace-induced enlightenment to steer God’s creatures from potency to act,

and from sin to virtue. In this, Catholicism (in both its modern and pre-modern varieties) has

emphasized that the kingdom of God begins to be realized in history.49 In both cases, the

kingdom becomes partially realized now through the superior pressure of the law. By

implication (though certainly not explicit teaching), the Second Coming becomes a matter of

filling in the remaining holes left by the creative power of the law.

Two things seem to underline this outlook that are completely unacceptable from a

confessional Lutheran perspective. First, the law is not in itself creative and life-giving. One

could of course say that the law is life-giving after a fashion in the sense that preserves from

47 For Calvin, after all, the third use of the law is the main use. See discussion in John Calvin,

Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), 2 vols. (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 1:357, 1:360-2.

See discussion in William Edgar, “Ethics: The Christian Life and Good Works according to Calvin,” in

Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institutes: Essays and Analysis, ed. David Hall and Peter Lillback (Philipsburg,

NJ.: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 2008), 320-46. For a more extreme version of the same paradigm

see Karl Barth, “Gospel and Law,” in Community, State and Church: Three Essays, ed. Will Herberg (New

York: Doubleday, 1960), 71-100. In particular, Martin Bucer was very influential in promoting the notion that

the Church implements the kingdom through the law. See Martin Bucer, “De Regno Christi,” in Melanchthon

and Bucer, ed. Wilhelm Pauck (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969), 174-394. For the political,

revolutionary, and eschatological implications of the Reformed understanding of the law, see Glenn Moots,

Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology (Columbia: University of Missouri

Press, 2010).

48 See discussion of divine grace (created and uncreated) and its role in informing human agency before

and after the Fall in the following passages in Thomas Aquinas, the “Teacher of the Church”: Thomas Aquinas,

Summa Theologiae, 1a2æ. q. 110, art. 1-4; Summa Theologiae, Blackfriars Edition, 60 vols. (New York and

London: McGraw-Hill, 1964-), 30:108-23. ST. From this citation forward, the Summa will be cited as “ST,”

whereas the page citation from the Blackfriars’ edition will be cited as “BF.” ST, 1a. q. 95, art. 1; BF, 13:106-

11. ST, 3a. q. 7, art. 5; BF, 49:18-23.

49 See Michael P. Hornsby-Smith, An Introduction to Catholic Social Thought (Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press, 2006), 43-61. Hornsby-Smith focuses on modern attempts at accepting left-wing

ideologies as part of Roman Catholic teaching. Nevertheless, such attempts at implementing the kingdom

through politics are no different that the medieval two-swords theory.

14

degradation and gives boundaries to God’s good creatures this side of the Last Judgment. In

other words, it allows the good that God has established by his gracious fiat to thrive through

the law’s protection and ordering of life. That being said, the law can only order and protect

what God has created. In and of itself, it cannot create. “Do this” does not create the will to

do it. Likewise, the commandments “do not commit adultery” or “be fruitful and multiply”

do not create male-female relationships or sexual desire. They simply order these realities

(into marriage) and preserve their proper function through threats of judgment.50

In contradistinction to this, what the Catholic and Reformed traditions both assume is

that by applying the pressure of the law, potency becomes act and degradation becomes new

life. Within this scenario, humans can create themselves and others as better people through

their actions. This is especially the case of the Aristotelian virtue ethics promoted by

Catholicism,51 something Luther found extremely objectionable.52 Without intending to, both

traditions have deified creatures by giving them the ability through their actions to create

themselves (autopoiesis) and others.53 Ultimately, this is something only God can do through

the power of his Word.

The second difficulty that the Roman Catholic and Reformed conceptions create is

that they temporalize the eschaton in the social and civil order. In effect, Christ’s kingdom

has come now, not exclusively in Word and sacrament, but also in the kingdom building

activities of Christians. This not only has the rather unfortunate tendency of deifying

political institutions as instruments of God’s will (whether they be the US government’s

50 See similar observation in Werner Elert, The Christian Ethos, trans. Carl Schindler (Philadelphia:

Muhlenberg Press, 1957), 50-1.

51 See the newest popular example of this in Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

52 LW 31:12, 31:43. 53 See Reinhard Hütter, ‘‘(Re–) Forming Freedom: Reflections ‘After Veritatis splendor’ on Freedom’s

Fate in Modernity and Protestantism’s Antinomian Captivity,’’ Modern Theology 17 no. 2 (2001), 120.

15

“Novus Ordo Seclorum”54 or the Papacy’s two-swords55 and prolonged Incarnation56), but it

also ignores the real location of the fulfillment of the law in Christ and his gospel. In the

Reformed and Catholic scenario, Christ’s fulfillment of the law does in fact not make “all

things new” (Rev 21:5), but merely provides the grace for the real fulfillment of the law in

the earthly activities of Christians sprucing up creation in anticipation of the kingdom of God.

“It is finished” (Jn 19:30) cannot apparently be taken literally, and we ourselves must work to

complete the new creation with Jesus’ help.

Nevertheless, it should be stressed that even if the law cannot create the good, the

implementation of God’s law in the wider culture was as we saw above a tangible good.

Such a good was without a doubt more pronounced under the broader sort of Christendom

that persisted until recently under the guise of cultural Christianity. This nevertheless leaves

the question of how a confessional Lutheran can conceptualize this net benefit of the

implementation of the law without falling into the Reformed and Roman Catholic trap of

deifying institutions and attributing eschatological significance to political movements. In

order to do this, we will briefly examine the relationship between the law, the Christian life,

and politics in Luther’s writings and the later Lutheran symbols.

One problematic reading of Luther (that we were critical of in a past article regarding

Gerhard Forde57), is the notion that for Luther the law is something that can only exist in

relationship with sin. If sin is non-compliance with a demand, then the very fact that the

commandment has been given presupposes a person is in a state of non-compliance. “Clean

your room,” presupposes that your room is not clean. As we argued in previous pieces, this

54 See description in Peter Leithart, Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical

Perspective (Eugene, Or: Cascade Books, 2012), 72-6.

55 See Otto Von Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. F.W. Maitland (Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1958), 7-21; Ewart Lewis, Medieval Political Ideas, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1954), 2:506-38.

56 “The Church has always been conscious that it is the prolongation and perpetuity of the Incarnation.”

Henry Edward Manning, Why I Became a Catholic, Or Religio Viatoris (Sulphur, LA: Secret of the Rosary,

2004), 50.

57 Jack Kilcrease, “Gerhard Forde’s Doctrine of Law: A Confessional Lutheran Critique,” Concordia

Theological Quarterly 75, no. 1-2 (2011): 151-180.

16

interpretation of Luther’s theology is highly problematic. A better interpretation was

proposed by Theodosius Harnack58 and in keeping with the Formula of Concord,59 namely,

that the essence (wesen) of the law is the eternal statutory will of God and after the arrival of

sin, there is also an office (amt) of the law, which encompasses all things within the fallen

creation and which condemns and destroys sinners because they do not comply with that

statutory will.

Of the former reality, Luther also states in his Antinomian Disputations, that although

the law is eternal, its condemning effect will cease at the eschton. Part of the confusion on

this point comes from the fact that Luther sometimes he calls this condemning effect the

“office of the law” and sometimes just the “law.”60 Nonetheless, the Reformer is abundantly

clear that the law insofar as it is God’s eternal statutory will, will never cease, though it will

cease to threaten and condemn sinner.61 Likewise, as Luther notes in the Genesis

commentary, commandments were given to Adam and Eve prior to the Fall and therefore are

not dependent on the existence of sin. He claims those who reject the idea that there was law

prior to the Fall to be “wicked and full of blasphemy.”62 Hence, law existed as both will of

God and as his external commandment prior to the Fall, though certainly not in its office of

condemnation. Instead, the law ordered human work, familiar life, and worship within the

two primal Orders of Creation, the Family and the Church.63 For Luther in the Genesis

commentary, the State is established only in Genesis 9 and necessarily presupposes the

58 Theodosius Harnack, Luthers Theologie besonderer Beziehung auf seine Versöhnung und

Erlösunglehre, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1969), 1:368-401. 59 FC, SD III; CT, 935. States that "the eternal, immutable righteousness of God, [is] revealed in the

Law. FC, SD V; CT, 955. The FC quotes Luther's statement in the Antinomian Disputations approvingly:

"Anything that preaches concerning our sins and God's wrath, let it be done how or when it will, that is all a

preaching of the Law." Hence, the Formula presupposes both the objective reality of the law (wesen) and the

temporal effect of the law within creation and the human subjective experience of that law after sin (amt). 60 Martin Luther, The Second and Third Disputation against the Antinomians, in Only the Decalogue is

Eternal, 83-124, 125-27. 61 Martin Luther, The First Disputation against the Antinomians, Argument 34 in Only the Decalogue,

75. 62 LW 1:108.

63 LW 1:94-6; LW 1:115-39.

17

existence of sin and the need for coercion when the Orders of the Family and the Church are

not functioning properly.64

Therefore, insofar as the Orders of Creation will cease at the eschaton, the law will

also cease even in its ordering function that it possessed even prior to the Fall. In the Genesis

commentary itself, Luther held not unlike medieval and patristic authors that the original

humanity was destined to live on earth for a time and then be translated into heavenly

existence.65 While on earth, human vocation within the Order is shaped by the law, even

prior to the existence of sin. Indeed, Adam and Eve possessed commandments regarding

work and worship within the Orders. Hence, even in the state of sinlessness, it was necessary

for God to clarify how he wished them to regulate the created order. Similarly, as David

Scaer observes, even the sanctified believer still needs a “channel”66 to express his love for

God. Likewise, being sinless in their inner persons, pre-lapsarian humans already enjoyed

the empty law (lex vacua) that they would enjoy more fully in heavenly existence. Such an

interpretation is probably the best way to reconcile Luther’s seemingly contradictory

statements about the law ceasing with sin in the Antinomian Disputations and the law existing

prior to sin in the Genesis commentary.

In a sense though, the eschaton and therefore the total abrogation of law’s

commanding and condemning effect comes to the Christian proleptically by way of Word

and sacrament. Luther speaks of law being abrogated in that we are justified and sanctified

by faith.67 Hence for Luther, the law’s abrogation comes about in two ways. First, the risen

Jesus, present in Word and sacrament, has fulfilled the law and gives the believer his alien

righteousness by way of justification. Secondly, in sanctification, the Spirit renews the inner

64 LW 2: 140-1.

65 LW 1:106. 66 David Scaer, “Formula of Concord Aticle VI. The Third Use of the Law,” Concordia Theological

Quarterly 42, no. 2 (April, 1978): 152. 67 For example Luther, The First Disputation against the Antinomians, Argument 34 in Only the

Decalogue is Eternal, 58.

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person and fulfills the law within them by faith (Rom 14:23). For this reason, the Christian in

their inner being (much like for Adam and Eve) has a foretaste of heavenly existence where

the law will cease in its office and effect. Indeed, because of Christ’s fulfillment of the law

the saints may “rest from all their works” (Heb 4:10). Likewise, Christians possess through

sanctification in the present the “down payment of the Spirit” (2 Cor 1:22) in anticipation of

their reception of the fullness of heavenly rest that will be communicated to their external

person as well in the resurrection and glorification of the dead (1 Cor 15). Hence for the

inner person Christ provides justification and sanctification, and therefore makes himself

known as the “end of the law for all who believe” (Rom 10:4). In this, realized eschatology

comes through the means of grace and their reception by faith, and not by the kingdom

building activities of the institutional Church. As Luther states in the Small Catechism:

“[The kingdom of God comes when] . . . our heavenly Father gives us His Holy Spirit, so that

by His grace we believe His holy Word and lead a godly life here in time and yonder in

eternity.”68

Even if the eschaton comes in the present via Word and sacrament, and not by the

implementation of God’s law, the new being of faith is not hermetically sealed from the

outside world and its human and extra-human creational activities. Although the external

person still lives in the old age and is subject to the law, it nevertheless also participates (as

David Scaer puts it) in a sort of partial restoration of the Garden of Eden.69 Much like Adam

and Eve, Christians now have the foretaste of heaven in that the law has ceased to condemn

them before God. They also now have the desire and the means to use the law to engage in

68 SC, 3; CT, 547.

69 Scaer writes: “In a sense he [the Christian] has become like the original pair in Eden who knew God

and His law in a positive light; however, such a return to the pristine purity of the primitive situation is not

completely possible. Not only has the law as negative prohibition and sin entered the world, but the law has

been satisfied by Christ and sin removed by his death. The Christian goes back to Eden in a new and different

sense. He is not put back into the place of the first Adam and Eve, but he is made a new creature in the Second

Adam, the man from heaven. He does good works which do conform to the original relationship of law as

positive relationship between God and His rational creature, but more significantly he does good works which

now, not only conform to, but are motivated and, in fact, performed by Christ Himself.” David Scaer

“Sanctification in the Lutheran Confessions,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 53, no. 3 (July, 1989): 180.

19

their vocation on earth, just as our first parents did before the fall into sin. Indeed, Paul

places Christians in the wake of the coming of the second Adam (Rom 5). This being said, if

we follow Luther’s view that earthly existence was only something preliminary for our first

parents, it means that this restoration of the primal human vocation is not in and of itself a

realization of the eschaton. The Garden of Eden itself was only provisional in that heavenly

existence still lay before Adam and his wife.

Moreover, not only does the Church of the New Testament era have a fulfillment and

clarification of the gospel promise in Christ (first spoken in an abbreviated form in Genesis

3:15), it possesses a purified and renewed law for its tasks of serving neighbors in the created

order. As Jesus observes, although God had made many concessions to sinful human nature

(such as the allowance of divorce), the purer law was the law of the original creation wherein

“what God has joined together should not be driven asunder” (Mk 10:9). Jesus therefore

command his Church to follow this renewal of the natural law, and ignore the concession that

God made to sin in the era of the Old Testament.

Jesus’ remarks about divorce prompted the Church Fathers (notably Irenaeus),70 to

argue that the natural/moral law in its pristine form had been given in the Ten

Commandments. Only later was the ceremonial and civil law given, which often times

allowed for less than ideal social relations (such as slavery, polygamy, etc.). This was

suggested, as the Fathers observed, by the fact that in the narrative of Exodus the giving of

the Ten Commandments ante-dated the worship of the golden calf, whereas the civil and

ceremonial laws post-dated it. Understood in this light, the civil and ceremonial laws

therefore came about as a result of Israel’s inability to follow the primal natural law as

presented in the Ten Commandments, and therefore represent a form of divine concession to

70 Irenaeus, Five Books of St. Irenaeus against the Heresies, trans. John Keble (Oxford: James Park &

Co., 1872), 346-7.

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sin and judgment.71 This made the civil and ceremonial laws of the Old Testament no less

divinely inspired than the Ten Commandments, but by no means representative of God’s

ideal goals for human life on earth.

If such a reading is correct, it would suggest that those who become heirs of the New

Testament are therefore not only freed from the law in their inner person, but also in their

external person through the abrogation of the many concessions of God to fallen human

nature in the civil code of the Old Testament in favor of the original law of creation. This

deepens Christian enjoyment of the partial restoration of the original Garden of Eden by

being given creation’s original law as a means of fulfilling human vocation in the kingdom of

the world.

The Gospel’s Horizon and Heresy in Modern Politics

Now that we have examined the benefits of the second sort of Christendom in light of

the law, we will move to the gospel. Although the gospel is not a political program, or even a

pattern of life, it possesses an implicit relationship to the kingdom building projects of the

secular State. Insofar as the gospel promises God’s coming kingdom (which will replace all

kingdoms, see Dn. 7, Rev. 11:15) on the basis of the forgiveness of sins and the imputation of

righteousness given for the sake of Christ.

Indeed, this relationship of the gospel to the world’s kingdom projects has been the

case since the beginning of Christianity. As N.T. Wright has pointed out in his most recent

book, the Caesars offered the people of the Roman Empire their own eschatological hope.

Augustus commissioned Virgil to write the Aeneid in order to give a quasi-scriptural

canonization of this narrative of the Roman imperium’s own brand of political eschatology.72

71 Scott Hahn has recently made similar exegetical arguments. See Scott Hahn and John Bergsma,

“What Laws Were Not Good: A Canonical Approach to the Theological Problem of Ezekiel 20:25-26" Journal

of Biblical Literature 123, no. 2 (2004): 201-18.

72 N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 306-11.

21

Within this scriptural articulation of this vision, the eternal city and its Caesar had been

destined from the beginning to become an empire and bring a universal kingdom of peace

and prosperity.73 Early Christianity stood in opposition to all this. Jesus’ own lordship and

the kingdom he promised on the basis of the cross and the empty tomb, meant that whatever

positive things might be said about Caesar’s earthly kingdom and its ability to enforce order

on the basis of the law, it could only be relativized in light of the final hope present in the

gospel. Hence, just as the rule of the condemning office of the law is ended by justification

and sanctification in the case of the individual believer, so too the coercive rule of the all

temporal States is fulfilled and ended by Christ’s kingdom of glory and peace on a world

historical scale.

We will suggest in this section that in the modern period, the political outlook of

Westerners has ceased to be bounded by the ultimate nature of the hope presented in the

promise of the gospel. For this reason, with the decline of Christian hope’s ability to serve as

either the conscious or unconscious backdrop of the Western cultural mindset, the deification

of the State has run rampant. This trend became all too evident in the early part of the 20th

century (particularly with rise of Totalitarianism), and in some quarters appears to be reviving

itself yet again in the 21st century. This is not because (as many are wont to think) that the

modern Nation-State and secularity in general are non-religious. A more realistic assessment

is that in fact the modern secular Nation-State and cultural secularity are in fact theologically

charged realities. In truth, they merely masquerade as being something anti-theological or

non-theological, while establishing their own sacral order.

A number of scholars have made this argument,74 but one of the most skillful has been

John Milbank’s proposal in his now classic Theology and Social Theory.75 Milbank argues

73 Ibid., 331-43.

74 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University

Of Chicago Press, 2006). On page 36, Schmitt observes: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the

state are secularized theological concepts . . ."

22

that modern secular social sciences (and the political theories which are informed by them)

are in many respects a revival of ancient heresies and “bad theologies” in secular disguises.

Nevertheless, although we will agree to a certain extent with this, we would not see this “bad

theology” rooted in the separation of nature and super-nature, or the hated Scotistic univocity

of being (which Milbank does, as a result of his Thomism and Anglo-Catholicism). Rather,

we claim that the “bad theology” of secularity is a byproduct of the decline of the Christian

metanarrative and its implicit recognition (in some theological traditions, very implicit

indeed!) that the office of the law is limited by the eschatological nature of the gospel.

Without the limiting principle of the gospel, modern secular people have come to believe that

the office of the law as it is exercised by the State has no limits and therefore can offer

ultimate hope.

This belief is nothing new, but simply the revival of humanity’s oldest heresy, the

opinio legis. If the law is not limited by the gospel and the ultimate eschatological hope that

it brings, its office will come to be viewed as something that eternally persists as the ultimate

hope of humanity. The law is never fulfilled apart from Christ because the law never stops

demanding that sinful humans comply with it. God is infinite and therefore the law also

demands an infinite fulfillment. Therefore, the law is either fulfilled in the infinite theandric

person of Christ (Heb 9),76 or its condemning office persists forever and ever (i.e., eternally

in hell, Mt. 25:41, Rev 20:10, v. 14-15). Of course, self-justifying human beings do not feel

to full weight of condemnation and therefore twist the law into something that they can use to

perfect themselves via self-justification. Hence, the law becomes for them that which gives

ultimate hope.

75 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,

2006).

76 “In addition, it follows that our sins are so great, so infinite and invincible, that the whole world

could not make satisfaction for even one of them. Certainly the greatness of the ransom- namely, the blood of

the Son of God- makes it sufficiently clear that we can neither make satisfaction for our sin nor prevail over it . .

. But we should note here the infinite greatness of the price paid for it.” LW 26: 33.

23

This infinity of the law and the self-justification project of human beings necessarily

transfers to the question of State power as well.77 In other words, without the limiting

principle of the eschatological hope of the gospel, the law and its chief organ of the State can

only be viewed by those under the thrall of the opinio legis as something which is ultimate,

limitless, and as the chief instrument of eschatological hope. Fallen humans not infrequently

believe that the State is limitless in the perfection that it achieves through its coercion, much

as the legalist believes that obedience to the law can pound and shape him into a creature

worthy of the infinite kingdom. For this reason, fallen human beings have a tendency to

believe that to achieve this perfection, it is necessary to give the State a limitless power over

every aspect of human life (See Rev. 13:4).

In keeping with this, as the Lutheran Confessions state, the law without the gospel can

only produce pride or despair.78 Whereas pride manifests itself as self-righteous legalism,

despair manifests itself as either literal self-destruction (as in the case of Judas), or self-

destructive libertinism. In that governments are made up of human beings, this human

tendency can be observed working itself in State-power arrangements and political

philosophy. This is particularly true when the political projects of a civilization cease to be

contextualized within the eschatological horizon of the gospel. Below, we will argue that as

a result of this abandonment of the gospel, modern secularity has (broadly speaking)

produced two covert and heretical secular political theologies, one legalist and one

antinomian.

The first political heresy (the legalist one) comes with the invention of the modern

secular-State in the mid-17th century. The author that best exemplifies the construction of

77 I owe this insight and its relationship to the political question to the Rev. Adam Morton of Lancaster,

Pennsylvania.

78 FC Ep, 5.7; CT, 803.

24

this religious myth for the Anglophone world is the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.79 It should

be observed that Hobbes' treatment of the political heavily intertwined with his treatment of

the Bible. To many modern readers, the two subjects do not seem to have much in

common. Indeed, why would you write a treatise that is simultaneously a critique of the

legitimacy of secular authority and reliability of Scripture?80 Why would a person write on

how to form a social contract while at the same time discussing the validity of miracles?81

What is not immediately clear to modern readers is that Hobbes is constructing a new

political theology in conflict with the basic assumptions of Christian orthodoxy. In

particular, he conceptualizes the exercise of State power apart from the eschatological

horizon of the gospel.

In Hobbes’ magnum opus, Leviathan, he spends nearly half the work talking about

religion. He also constructs an elaborate ontology and epistemology at the beginning of the

book in order to put what he says in perspective.82 At the heart of the Hobbes' theology is an

argument (however veiled) for a doctrine of creation that has an uncanny resemblance to the

Ancient Near Eastern idea of the Chaoskampf. For those unfamiliar, the Chaoskampf was the

standard narrative of origins in the Ancient Near East,83 although in the Greek context it also

appears in the poetry of Hesiod.84 In this myth, the origin of creation is a pure chaos. Such

chaos is usually overcome by a god of order defeating a chaos-monster and then organizing

the universe. One can see how different this is from Genesis 1-3, where the primal order is

one of mutuality and grace (not force!) and where creation is not rooted in chaos, but in God's

79 Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan: or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of A Commonwealth,

Ecclesiastical and Civil (Cambrige, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1904).

80 Ibid., 304-18. Note that there may be a similar phenomenon present in Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus

Theologico-Politicus. This book constructs a theory of the modern secular State, while also being regarded as

the first work of modern biblical criticism. See Baruch Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise (Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press, 2007).

81 Hobbes, 319-26. 82 Ibid., 3-54. 83 See discussion in R. Watson, Chaos Uncreated (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005). 84 See Hesiod, Works and Days, trans. M. L. West (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988).

25

Word of grace. Creation comes about not by the application of superior force, but by the gift

of God's fiat in the act of creation ex nihilio.85

Hobbes endorses the idea of God, but states that generally God cannot be directly

known.86 Many interpreters have argued that he is secretly an atheist,87 though for various

reasons that are beyond the boundaries of this study, we must respectfully disagree. That

being said, Hobbes does largely remove God from temporal existence and ultimately makes

God almost completely irrelevant to his worldview. This is because creation itself is

understood as an essentially closed mechanical system, which God neither sustains nor

intervenes in through miraculous action.88

For Hobbes, this goes hand-in-hand with a belief in atomism, which he takes over

from Epicureanism as it was revived during the Early Modern period.89 Within this

worldview, everything that exists is made up of atoms. Atoms move in patterns according to

the autonomous temporal laws of motion and the result is the orderly structure of

reality. This is essentially a rehashing of the Epicurean idea that reality is constituted by

atoms, motion, and the void.90 Although Hobbes is slightly more convinced than Epicurus

that the atoms move according to uniform laws of nature, he nevertheless implicitly believes

that what is at the very heart of reality is chaos. The atoms are necessarily fragmentary and

chaotic. They lack meaning or direction, unless pressed upon by a superior force, such as the

laws of motion.

Implicit in this worldview is the notion that human beings are nothing but living

machines. Though Hobbes does not directly say this, he nevertheless begins his work with a

85 See the connection with the doctrine of justification in Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology, 95-104.

86 Hobbes, 21-8.

87 For example see Douglas Jesseph, “Hobbes’s Atheism” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26, no. 1

(2002): 140–166 88 Hobbes, 21-8. 89 Catherine Wilson Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2008), 179-83. 90 Ibid., 39-70.

26

description of epistemology wherein the human act of cognition is described in purely

materialistic terms in contradistinction from the Aristotelian/Scholastic concepts current in

the universities of his era.91 This suggests a materialistic and mechanistic anthropology.

Since humans are therefore purely material beings, they are products of the chaotic

movements of atoms and are therefore in their most fundamental reality chaotic themselves,

unless organized by superior force. For this reason, there is no suggestion in Hobbes' vision

of an original harmony (for example, of the Genesis narrative) descending into chaos after the

Fall. Rather, in contradistinction from the claims of the biblical authority, chaos is what is

most primal and order only comes about by superior force. So too, human beings in a

mythical "state of nature" are naturally violent and competitive.92

The solution to this problem of violence and chaos is the creation of the social

contract. Hobbes uses the term "covenant", which of course carries with it many biblical

resonances, most notably the idea of the promise of redemption through divine self-

binding.93 Nevertheless, the covenant here is not between the biblical God and humanity, but

between each atomistic individual in society with every other. Humans agree with one

another to create order out of chaos by contracting to obey the sovereign, that is, the State

(whatever form that may take). This covenant therefore also offers a form of redemption, but

in this case redemption is construed as salvation from social chaos. The sovereign is

responsible for bringing order to the chaos of the social universe through superior

pressure. The sovereign must be obeyed in any and every of its demands, since the

alternative is the state of nature (the "war of all against all"). Almost any amount of

oppression is better than the state of nature.94 In this manner, the social universe mirrors the

physical and ontological universe.

91 Hobbes, 1-53.

92 Ibid., 81-6.

93 Ibid., 89-103. 94 Ibid., 118.

27

What is most interesting about this political theory is how the sovereign for Hobbes

here essentially plays the role of the god of order in the Ancient Near Eastern creation

myth. He is the one who subdues chaos and brings about order through his use of violence

and superior force. Hobbes (though doubtless unaware of this similarity) states that the

sovereign is a "mortal god."95 This also has the odd resonance with the sacral political order

of the Ancient Near East. In the Ancient Near East, the king or the high priest of the nation

would often participate in a yearly festival in which he played the role of the deity of cosmic

order subduing chaos. In Babylon, for example, the king would in a spring festival (Akitu)

annually confess the nation’s sins and receive again his sovereignty from the god. Later, the

king would participate in ceremonies that recreated the creation myth of the Enuma Elish,

that is, the story of creation being forged out of chaos by Marduk's victory over Tiamat, the

primal chaos monster.96 The implicit message of this politico-religious ritual is clear: Just as

Marduk had subdued chaos through violence, so the Babylonian social order and its empire

were forge out of the application of superior force to its various subdued peoples.

Hobbes’ social contract theory of government played an extremely important role

(among others) in creating the ideological basis for the modern nation-State, and also

anticipates modern Totalitarian projects of various stripes.97 For this reason, it could be

argued that a significant element in the modern theory of the totalizing concept of the State is

veiled revival of the ancient chaos myth. Secularity is therefore not really "secular" (as the

term is conventionally used) but thoroughly theological. In other words, it is not based on a

neutral analysis of social relations, but implicitly accepts a particular doctrine of creation and

metaphysic that is quite antithetical to that of Christian orthodoxy.

95 Ibid., 119. 96 See Julye Bidmead, The Akitu Festival: Religious Continuity and Royal Legitimation in

Mesopotamia (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2002).

97 The aforementioned Carl Schmitt was of course a Hobbesian and is regarded by many as the court-

philosopher of the Third Reich. See Peter M.R. Stirk, Carl Schmitt, Crown Jurist of the Third Reich: On

Preemptive War, Military Occupation, and World Empire (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2005).

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As is clear, the Chaoskampf is ultimately a manifestation of the opinio legis. At its

heart, the Chaoskampf assumes that the realities of the present age are limitlessly recycled

and reshaped by the pressure of superior force, i.e., the coercive power of the law. So too,

sinners may justify themselves with superior applications of the law and its coercive

pressure. In society, it means that the office of the law and its projects are limitless. This

stands in stark contrast with Luther’s interpretation of Genesis, wherein the primal Orders of

the Family and the Church function properly on the basis of an original harmony and peace

brought about by God’s Word of grace. In other words, humans are in their original identity,

beings configured to God’s grace of creation. Also, human life is not at its most fundamental

level a chaos and violence, but was originally intended to be one of relationality and love,

lived out in communal institutions, i.e., the two Orders established before the Fall. The

subduing of the chaos of the social universe only becomes a necessary office of the law after

the Fall. Consequently, chaos and violence are not the fundamental order of the universe, but

rather they are a satanic revolt against it.

Similarly, the opinio legis does not recognize that God’s will and possibilities are not

exhausted by the law. God may by act of fiat bring about a new creation. As we observed

earlier, the law cannot create anything; it merely can apply larger and larger amounts of

pressure to reshape reality. Creatio ex nihilo goes hand-in-hand with the gospel, because it

means that just as God unilaterally spoke creation into existence by his grace, so too he can

again redemptively bring about a new creation through his omnipotent Word of the gospel

(Rom 4:17, 2 Cor 4:6). Just as God has nothing to work with in the beginning of creation, so

too, he finds humans totally sinful and yet is able to justify and sanctify them by his creative

grace. This does not abrogate the law in the sense of eliminating it, but it transcends and

fulfills its limitations. Recognition of God’s role as creator and redeemer therefore destroy

the ancient Chaoskampf myth and its acceptance of the divinity of the State.

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As a side note, Hobbes’ aversion to miracles and the supernatural in general98 would

seem to make sense in light of his claims of the totalizing power of the secular State. It could

be argued that for Hobbes, if the law and its coercive authority of the State are to possess a

totalizing authority, there cannot be any alternative sources of authority (such as supernatural

religion, a verbally inspired Bible, etc.) that can challenge them. For this reason, Hobbes

calls all spiritual realities into question (although, he does not directly reject them), for the

implicit reason that ultimately they cannot be controlled by the State.99 Everything must be

reduced to cold dead matter, which can be coerced and pushed about by superior pressure.

This is the only creative force that the law and State power can exercise.

Seen from this perspective, the modern secular attacks on the miraculous and the

supernatural are not so much an intellectual problem about whether God can violate the laws

of nature (it seems self-evident that if God exists, he obviously can!). Rather, it could be

argued that the rejection of the supernatural and the miraculous in the modern world has more

to do with the desire to narrate reality in such a manner so as to exclude religion from

possessing social and political authority.100 On a deeper level, it is the expression of desire

for self-justifying humans to protect themselves from the miraculous and unexpected in

breaking of God’s grace which curtails the ultimate authority of the law and the secular State.

This very well might go quite far in explaining why the majority of modern Totalitarian states

have been officially committed to atheism and materialism.

98 Hobbes, 319-26.

99 Carl Schmitt observes “The idea of the modern constitutional state triumphed with deism [over

traditional Christian] . . . theology and metaphysics.” Schmitt, 36. In other words, by positing no realities that

the State cannot control (i.e., supernatural beings that intervene in the world) the State and the secular order are

given limitless power. Hence, the law is also limitless.

100 Again, note that this appears to be the original imperative of the development of the Historical-

Critical method. See Baruch Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

Press, 2007).

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The other theological-political vision is the antinomian one and it is ultimately seeks

to revive a political theology based on the old Gnostic redeemer myth.101 In this myth,

creation was the handiwork of a lesser deity who was either evil or incompetent.102 This deity

was often identified with the God of the Old Testament and by implication, the law.103 The

human person was divided between a spiritual-divine nature, which it had received from a

higher and transcendent, purely spiritual god, and a physical body that the spiritual nature had

come to inhabit after a pre-temporal fall/cosmic accident.104 Having come under the

domination of matter and the lesser god of creation, humans were generally (though not

always exclusively) viewed as being hapless victims of forces beyond their control.105 The

current age is ruled by malevolent astrological deities named “Archons” who are servants of

the god of creation. Jesus was not a real physical man, but rather a phantom who rescued

humanity from the lesser god by disclosing secret knowledge of their real identity as true

divine children of the transcendent spiritual god.106 By accepting this knowledge, human

beings were able to shuck their physical nature and ascend to the spiritual realm.107

This tradition has appeared in various forms in Western thought, but the primary

promoters of the revival of this myth in secularized form were Hegel and Marx. Similarly,

many members of the bureaucracies of the mainline Protestant Churches and as well as their

seminary and college faculties were followers of the New Left in the 1960s and its injection

of Marxist philosophy into mainstream American politics. Hegel’s notion of God’s self-

alienation (a notion eerily similar to Valentinian Gnosticism!) for the sake of personal self-

101 See summary in Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism, trans. Robert

McLachlan Wilson (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1987). 102 Ibid., 74-84. 103 Ibid., 79. 104 Ibid., 92-3. 105 Ibid., 100-1, 104-5. 106 Ibid., 118-21, 144-52. 107 Ibid., 171-89.

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realization108 becomes in Marx’s thought the self-alienation of workers resulting from the

primal falling away from the hunter-gather state for an economy based on the division

labor.109 Marxism assumes that human beings have limitless possibilities and are therefore

quasi-divine. Feuerbach, from whom Marx took his philosophy of religion, argued this quite

explicitly.110 Humans are self-alienated because the division of labor (i.e., the reality of

created diversity and difference!) hold them back from exercising limitless autonomy.

Working for others, they do not do what they want to do, but must do what others desire to

live. Ultimately, the masses are held down from attaining full godhood by Capitalists.111 The

New Left also added other marginalized groups beyond workers and therefore added new

villains (whites, males, etc.). Such powers represent new kind of Archons, no longer spiritual

powers or astrological deities, but now social and political ones.

The genealogy of these ideas is clear. Marx was profoundly influenced by Hegel,112

who received many of his ideas (particularly with regard to history as a process of creative

divine self-alienation) from Jakob Boehme (a German Lutheran mystic) who took over much

from Kabbalah and Hermeticism,113 both of which were strongly influenced by

Gnosticism.114 This therefore suggests that Marxism and by proxy the politics of the New

Left are ultimately secularized versions of the ancient Gnostic myth.

Here within the Gnostic myth the presence of the opinio legis is also clear. Lacking

the gospel and its eschatological limitation of the condemning office of the law, the Gnostic-

108 See G.F.W. Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1976). 109 See Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (New York: International

Publishers Co, 2014). 110 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Prometheus Books,

1989). 111 Marx, 8-18.

112 See Norman Levine, Divergent Paths, Hegel in Marxism and Engelism: The Hegelian Foundations

of Marx's Method, vol. 1 (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006).

113 Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

2001), 37-9. 114 See Cyril O’Regan, Gnostic Apocalypse: The Haunted Narrative of Jacob Boehme (Albany: SUNY

Press, 2001) ; idem, The Gnostic Return in Modernity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001); idem, The Heterodox Hegel

(Albany: SUNY Press, 1994)

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antinomian cannot accept limitless condemnation. This condemning office finds its

expression through the natural structures of creation, which place a limitation on the

creature’s autonomy and judges them for their transgression of the boundaries that God has

established. For this reason, they must simply deny the law and its existence. At minimum,

on some level they might come to recognize the law, but then claim that it is not valid. They

must seek to achieve an impossible autonomy that moves them beyond the law by canceling

their creatureliness and therefore their status under the law. This has taken the form of either

the removing of created difference because it conflicts with desire (homosexual rights

movement, transsexualism, radical feminism, etc.), or projecting limitless possibilities on

liberated humans through Utopian projects, thereby elevating them to the status of divinity.115

Again, what is holding back the divine possibilities of humanity in both cases is the existence

of “false consciousness” imposed by the new Archons and therefore the solution is the true

knowledge of the hidden structures of oppression. This bears a rather uncanny resemblance

to the Gnostic belief in salvation through true gnosis.116

This is extremely clear in the homosexual rights movement, among others, that seek

to establish identities for themselves beyond the clear boundaries of the natural order (i.e., the

structures of their bodies and the primal Order of the Family). Ironically, antinomianism

proves itself to be the impossible heresy.117 First, having rejected God’s law, the Antinomian

is defined by his opposition to it and therefore, in a strange sense, implicitly acknowledges

the existence and validity of the law (why else would one fight it?). Secondly, having

rejected God’s law, the Antinomian must in fact create a new law of antinomianism for

115 Thomas Sowell contrasts two modern political tendencies in the form of a contrast between a

“constrained” view of human life (which is in keeping with the Judeo-Christian tradition), and an

“unconstrained” (which, we have been arguing leads to a kind of political Gnosticism). See Thomas Sowell, A

Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (Cambridge, Mass: Basic Books, 2007).

116 See the same observation in Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays

(Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1997). 117 See Gerhard Forde, “Lex Semper Acusat?: Nineteenth Century Roots of Our Current Dilema,” in, A

More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism, Steven Paulson and Mark

Mattes, eds. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 33-52.

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himself and force it upon others. Hence, anything that limits the autonomy and self-

affirmation of modern humans becomes prohibited. Rejection of the law of God becomes a

new counterfeit law whereby one will be prohibited from obeying God’s law.

There are numerous examples of this in our present situation. For example, marriage

is not so much destroyed as it is reformulated by the gay rights movement. Marriage must be

limited to a sort “public registry of best friends”118 and so it cannot be a sacred union between

a man and a woman, because this would exclude homosexuals. So a new law of marriage

must be imposed that more or less defines heterosexual marriage in terms of gay marriage

(i.e., purely in terms of companionship, rather than gender complementarity and the

generation of children).119 The issue then is not one of equality or toleration, but rather

whether one follows the law of gay marriage or the divinely ordained law of marriage.

Moreover, as experience in recent years has proven, no resistance or opposition to this new

law will be tolerated.

It is for this reason that the legalist and the antinomian heresies begin to merge into

one another. In a sense, legalism is antinomianism, and antinomianism is legalism. The

legalist must of course modify the law and cut it down to size so that he can obey it. So too,

the authoritarian and legalist State must be bound by no law in order to achieve boundless

legal authority. Likewise, modern secular liberation movements (the French Revolution,

Communism, etc.), for all their Gnostic-antinomian overtones, must imposes their own new

legalism in order to prevent others from obeying the old law. This is not only clear in

modern Totalitarian States (particularly the left-leaning ones), but also the modern secular

American obsession with quasi-Rabbinic politically correct speech codes, ostensibly aimed at

118 I owe this description to Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse of the Ruth Institute, who has used it in

numerous interviews.

119 I owe this observation to the aforementioned Anglican theologian, John Milbank, who has made it

in a number of public interviews that I have been unable to locate.

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promoting the liberation from older moral codes (particularly in the case of homosexuality)

by imposing a new set of rules.

To sum up then: In the era of Christendom, the gospel and its eschatological

limitation of the condemning office of the law helped make people’s political expectations

(as well as their general expectations for temporal life) reasonable. It made people realize

that if Jesus had died to bring people the kingdom, the earthly kingdom could never really

bring a hope that was ultimate. This tended to limit the power of the State by identifying it as

something merely creaturely and temporal, rather than eternal and divine. Without these

limitations on the earthly kingdom, Western society has since the time of the Enlightenment,

suffered from wave after wave of attempts to temporalize the eschaton. Therefore, the

question with regard to our politics is not whether they possess an implicit theology, but

rather what sort of theology: One in which the coercive office of the law is limited, or one in

which it is limitless.

Conclusion: Some Hope at the Beginning of a Difficult Era

In the previous sections, we have argued contrary to the popular zeitgeist in many

American theological circles that the loss of Christendom (in the broad sense) is in actuality a

genuinely bad development. The desire for Christianity to be an edgy counter-culture is

misplaced because it assumes that Christianity is a unique cultural and legal order. Working

from these assumptions many theologians implicitly claim that life in the Christian

community is only meaningful when it is lived out in opposition to the wider society.

Instead, we have argued what is unique about Christianity is the gospel, and not the

law, insofar as the latter is shared in its basic form with non-believers. For this reason, to the

extent that Christians have historically been able to cooperate with other non-believers (who

have access to the law through nature and reason, see Rom 1-2) and impose their moral

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standards on the kingdom of the world, society as a whole has benefited. Similarly, in the era

of Christendom, the edginess of the Christian hope found in the gospel helped restrained

hunger for an overly realized eschatology. Hence, the loss of Christian cultural influence on

the secular order is genuinely disturbing.

In spite of these negative developments, our faith in God’s trustworthiness in both

creation and redemption offers us hope. First, since God promised Noah that the normal

structures of creation would persist until the end of time (Gen 8:22), we can be certain that

they will continue to exist no matter how abused and battered they become. Among the

many natural structures of the created order, God will therefore also safeguard the Orders of

Creation. God in his providence will protect marriage, the State, and the Church until the end

of time. Human nature is necessarily forged in the molds which God established at the

beginning of creation through these Orders. For this reason, Brave New World and 1984 will

never become a reality. Even in North Korea (the real life society most resembling 1984)

ultimately cannot bend human nature to the point of breaking its original mold. Marriage, the

State, and the Church remain present there, even under the worst conditions.

Similarly, although the loss of the limiting principle of the gospel in the mindset of

the West has resulted (and will likely continue to result) in the loss of limitations on the

power of the secular State, it should be recognized that the Church often thrives when it is

most persecuted. Jesus promised those who believe in him no less (Mt 10:24-33; Mk 13:9-

13). Ultimately, persecution helps drive the Church ever more close to Christ, and to the

recognition that the establishment of a Christian civilization is not the goal of the Church.

Indeed, as the Epistle to the Hebrews rightly says: “we have no lasting city, but we seek the

city that is to come” (Heb 13:14).