The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty

Richard Hooker, the Puritans, and Protestant Political Theology

W. Bradford Littlejohn

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781467447027
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politik & Staat

How do Christians determine when to obey God even if that means disobeying other people? In this book W. Bradford Littlejohn addresses that question as he unpacks the magisterial political-theological work of Richard Hooker, a leading figure in the sixteenth-century English Reformation. Littlejohn shows how Martin Luther and other Reformers considered Christian liberty to be compatible with considerable civil authority over the church, but he also analyzes the ambiguities and tensions of that relationship and how it helped provoke the Puritan movement. The heart of the book examines how, according to Richard Hooker, certain forms of Puritan legalism posed a much greater threat to Christian liberty than did meddling monarchs. In expounding Hooker's remarkable attempt to offer a balanced synthesis of liberty and authority in church, state, and conscience, Littlejohn draws out pertinent implications for Christian liberty and politics today.

CHAPTER ONE

“Different Kings and Different Laws”

Christian Liberty and the Conflict of Loyalties since the Reformation

We may call the one the spiritual, the other the civil kingdom. Now, these two, as we have divided them, are always to be viewed apart from each other. When the one is considered, we should call off our minds, and not allow them to think of the other. For there exists in man a kind of two worlds, over which different kings and different laws can preside. By attending to this distinction, we will not erroneously transfer the doctrine of the gospel concerning spiritual liberty to civil order, as if in regard to external government Christians were less subject to human laws, because their consciences are unbound before God, as if they were exempted from all carnal service, because in regard to the Spirit they are free.

John Calvin, Institutes¹

Truly, we must take good heed that we bring not the Church of Christ into such bondage, that it may not use anything that the Pope used.... How shall we debar the Church of this liberty, that it cannot signify some good thing, in setting forth their rites and ceremonies?

Peter Martyr Vermigli, Letter to John Hooper²

From the moment that Christ enigmatically rebuffed Herod’s political theologians with the words “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” his followers have had to grapple with the challenge of living under “different kings and different laws.” At various times and places, some have been so bold as to imagine they had removed the sting from Christ’s statement, whether by bringing God and Caesar into alliance, by restricting their kingdoms to different worlds, or by ensuring that Caesar would adopt pluralistic policies that would grant free rein to any religious conscience. Each such solution has in due course been exposed as an overoptimistic illusion, leaving Christians to grapple anew with the tensions of their dual citizenship. Whatever the failures of Reformation political thought, it must at least be credited with its refusal to blithely dismiss the problem; indeed, fewer questions, as I hope this study will show, were more central to early Protestant theology and churchmanship.

The first of the quotes above can claim to be something of a classic text when it comes to Reformation political thought, appearing constantly in the secondary literature—although this ubiquity of citation hardly guarantees any unanimity of interpretation. The second quote, although coming from a reformer almost as renowned in his day as Calvin, is almost entirely obscure. Together, as I hope shall be clear by the end of this chapter (or at least by the end of this book) they mark out the profound tensions that attended the understanding of liberty and authority in the sixteenth-century European reformations, and which indeed remain with us right down to the present.

Let us begin with the first. Why is Calvin so concerned to warn us against a “transfer” of spiritual liberty to civil order? Why does he insist that we “call off our minds” from political issues when we consider this doctrine of Christian liberty? Certainly, most of those who have written on the topic of Protestantism and modern political thought have tended to ignore this warning. A host of preachers, writers, and scholars throughout the past three centuries have been busy making just this transfer, the so-called “Whig history” of liberty, in which Protestantism, with its protest against papal authority, unleashed an unstoppable impulse toward individual freedom, toppling tyrannical governments, establishing constitutional order, separating church and state, and eventually (for many of its twentieth-century advocates at least) generating human rights.³ Even if spiritual liberty and civil liberty ought not to be conflated, such historians argue, one cannot deny the historical fact that the proclamation of the latter closely succeeded the former, with a geographical as well as a temporal correlation to the centers of the Protestant Reformation. Are we to dismiss this as a historical accident or is there some inward connection, by which Protestantism served as the “midwife”⁴ for civil liberties and the separation of church and state? And if there is some connection, why is Calvin so eager to deny it; what is so bad about this “transfer”?

One answer is to say simply that Calvin was a reactionary conservative, fearful of losing the support of the Genevan magistrates if the Reformation threatened to upend the social order. Although it might be a stretch to label Calvin in such terms, given his obvious willingness to go toe-to-toe with the authorities when his convictions were on the line, it is standard to see such charges lodged at many of the magisterial Reformers, from Luther to Cranmer. And to be sure, they did rely heavily on the support of Protestant princes, did sincerely believe in the divine calling of such rulers, and were deeply suspicious of any doctrines that tended toward anarchy. Indeed, even the most fervent modern liberal can prove just as suspicious of ideologues who refuse their loyalty to the values that sustain the public order—as the backlash against conservative Christians in the wake of the marriage equality revolution has shown.

But perhaps more is at stake for Calvin. If we consider his words in light of sixteenth-century polemics against the Anabaptists as both seditious libertines and legalistic purists, it seems plausible that he meant “transfer” in the strong sense of the word. Taken literally, to “transfer” something from point A to point B generally means that it is no longer in point A, where it started; the transfer thus accomplishes an inversion. We could thus read Calvin here as warning that, by attributing to the civil realm a liberty that was properly spiritual, we might find ourselves no longer possessing such liberty in its original proper arena, the spiritual realm, and might find ourselves outwardly free while inwardly in bondage. Were this the case, it would be reason to worry indeed, since any outward liberty worth having would be unlikely to last in circumstances of spiritual bondage.

In this book, I hope to both challenge and defend the notion that Protestantism’s proclamation of “freedom of conscience” helped give birth to the modern liberal version. The challenge can be posed on multiple fronts. First we must face the obvious difficulty that whereas Luther’s ideal of the liberated conscience was one in bondage to the word of God, modern liberalism’s seems inherently pluralistic—it is the freedom of every individual to worship any God or none, and reflect that worship in their lives as fully or minimally as they like. This difference at the individual level is mirrored at the political level: modern liberalism’s sine qua non is its insistence that this freedom of conscience must be guarded as an inviolable political right, with apparent corollaries about the inappropriateness of religious establishment of any kind; Luther and his followers, however, had little hesitation in retaining and indeed insisting upon a Christendom model, in which orthodoxy was defended and indeed imposed by political authority.

Indeed, I will argue in this opening chapter that this reflects not so much a difference between Luther and modern liberalism, but a tension that runs right through any account of liberty of conscience, premodern or modern. If individual conscience is not to be aimless and anarchistic, must it not be bound to a higher law, and if so, must it not seek to remake the political order in obedience to that law, actively overthrowing injustice rather than quietly pursuing its own freedom of worship? Without such an activist idea of conscience, oriented toward some universal law, an appeal to liberty of conscience seems a call for the disintegration of society into an interminable conflict of myriad self-justifying preferences (the paralysis that grips late modern consumer society). If such an activist conscience dominates, however, the social order is always in danger of being overthrown by a band of zealots, whose campaign for justice and righteousness threatens to trample underfoot the liberty of any consciences that might beg to differ (the danger that religious traditionalists today fear from the successive waves of social justice crusades that have reshaped Western liberalism in recent decades). In either case, it should be noted, freedom of conscience seems to be pitted against the freedom of a commonwealth to be or act as a commonwealth rather than a mere collection of individuals or as the executive agent of the higher law.

The second quotation above, from Peter Martyr Vermigli, accordingly reflects a concern for some concept of corporate liberty over against a fissiparous demand for individual liberty. In the context of his argument, the appeal is to the liberty of the institutional church, but he and other sixteenth-century Protestants were also concerned to defend the liberty of the political state against both an overreaching church authority (the Catholic threat) and a seditious libertinism (the Anabaptist threat, at least as they saw it). The relation between these two institutional liberties threatens to add another wrinkle to any account of liberty in the shadow of the Reformation. For many Protestants, such as John Calvin and more so the English presbyterians who invoked his authority, the corporate liberty of the church and the corporate liberty of the state stood in a tense dialectic, always prone to break out in open rivalry. Perhaps due to our Puritan founding, Americans have always tended to think of the problem in such terms, often with a tendency to correlate the two kinds of liberty of conscience just noted to these two institutions: the state is the domain of a laissez-faire liberty of conscience, the church the domain of the activist conscience, captive to the word of God. Indeed, this is precisely how Reformed ethicist David VanDrunen describes the matter, together with a sophisticated new version of the “Whig narrative” of Protestantism and political liberty, in his recent book Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms. Such a construal, of course, threatens (or promises, depending on your perspective) to secularize the political realm and to burden the ecclesiastical realm with legalism. An alternative account, as we shall see in this book, was offered by Protestants such as Richard Hooker, for whom the institutional liberty of church and state, and the obedience of both to the law of God, were constituted together. Hooker’s account also challenges, as we shall see, our modern assumption that individual liberty and institutional liberty are a zero-sum game, such that one must choose between the freedom of a Christian conscience and the freedom of a Christian commonwealth; again, he argues, the two stand or fall together.

Perhaps more fundamental than all these issues, however, as a challenge to the Luther-to-liberalism narrative, is the essential inwardness of Luther and Calvin’s concept of spiritual liberty. When we speak of the liberty of individual conscience, for us the stress is likely to fall on the word individual, rather than conscience, so much so that we unproblematically assume that inward liberty of belief automatically entails outward liberty of action—if you are not constrained to believe in God, by the same token you must not be constrained to act out that belief in visible worship. Luther, however, as we shall see in Chapter Two, was well aware that the constraints that limit internal freedom are markedly different from, and much more profound than, those that limit external freedom, and the former were his chief concern. The “freedom of a Christian” that chiefly concerned him was not the freedom of a Christian to act as he saw fit (even if he frequently asserted this against burdensome ecclesiastical regulations), but the inward freedom of a conscience liberated from fear and animated by love thanks to the justifying grace of Christ. This central theological concern was never far from the surface in the tumultuous sixteenth-century debates about the freedom of a Christian man, the freedom of a Christian church, and the freedom of a Christian commonwealth. Indeed, I shall argue, a reassertion of this concern was crucial to Richard Hooker’s strategy for reconciling these rival liberties. With such a distinctively theological account of freedom as our sixteenth-century starting point, it should be clear that the road to a modern secularized political account of freedom will be, if it still exists at all, a long and tortuous one, and one in great danger of running afoul of Calvin’s warning about a “transfer.”

And yet I do not intend to altogether dismiss the relevance of the Reformation, and the achievements of Luther and Hooker, for the emergence of modern liberalism. While I hope that my arguments in this book will chasten any subsequent efforts to draw straight lines from Luther or Calvin to Jefferson or Rawls, I hope that they will also prove generative for new insights about the legacy of the Reformation in modern political thought.

I. “Captive to the Word of God”: Loyalties in Conflict

Let us begin, then, by tracing the legacy of Protestantism’s proclamation of freedom in relation to Western political order, and see if we can gain insight into Calvin’s worry. Certainly, few deny that a central contribution of Protestantism, what Alister McGrath calls its “dangerous idea,” was an epistemological revolution: the insistence on the freedom of individual Christian consciences to determine Scripture’s meaning for themselves.⁵ Luther’s famous words at Worms offer a memorable summary of this freedom:

Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.⁶

From this right of “religious conscience,” argues John Witte, flowed “attendant rights to assemble, speak, worship, evangelize, educate, parent, travel, and more on the basis of their beliefs.” And from these flowed, in due course, rights of constitutional order.⁷ Thus did spiritual freedom give birth to civil freedom. But obviously, this spiritual freedom was not a freedom to do just anything, but even in Luther’s formulation, goes hand-in-hand with obedience. We are free in relation to human authority because we are bound in relation to God; God has spoken in his Word, and “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29), as the apostles said. On the basis of this subjection, the Protestant could stand against all the demands of earthly authorities who might overstep their bounds, whether in church or in state.

Viewed in this light, then, Luther’s declaration that his “conscience is captive to the Word of God,” and the freedom this entails, is simply a manifestation, or an intensification, of the conflict of loyalties that is a recurrent feature of human society.⁸ The potential for such a conflict, between loyalty to God and man, conscience and community, is probably as old as humankind. Indeed, it is famously represented in the ancient Greek tragedy Antigone, which presents the possibility that a higher law than that of the state might demand civil disobedience by a pious individual. But the dilemma thus generated is not yet by any means the modern dilemma of conscience and authority. For Antigone represents the clash of two publicly available value claims, both of which would have been easily recognized by the play’s audience: the claims of piety toward the gods and loyalty toward the fatherland. The clash between these two equally ultimate claims is tragic, but not terribly destabilizing to the social order. For Antigone is not Kierkegaard’s Abraham, called to a lonely journey of faithfulness that none can understand; she remains firmly within the universal, ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Notes on Citations
• A Note on Spelling and Punctuation
• 1. “Different Kings and Different Laws”: Christian Liberty and the Conflict of Loyalties since the Reformation
• 2. Freedom for the Neighbor: Christian Liberty and the Demand for Edification
• 3. “Exact Precise Severity”: The Puritan Challenge to Prince and Conscience
• 4. Richard Hooker and the Freedom of a “Politic Society”: Between Legalism and Libertinism
• 5. Harmonized Loyalties: Conscience, Reason, and Corporate Moral Agency
• 6. The Soul of a Christian Commonwealth: Politics in Submission to the Word
• 7. “The Truth Will Set You Free”: The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty
• Bibliography
• Index