"Protestant Social Teaching" 2.0

(For my initial comments on this volume go here and here.)

Brad Littlejohn's contribution to Protestant Social Teaching, "The Civil Magistrate" follows the path trod by his prolific writings detailing the complex approach of the early Reformed theologians to the relationship of the Church and the local civil magistrate. You can find Brad's postings on many sites including World Magazine, Mere Orthodoxy, The Gospel Coalition, and the blog of the Davenant Institute. Brad's doctoral dissertation was published as The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty.

Drawing on first-generation  Reformers like Martin Luther, John Calvin, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and early successor Richard Hooker, Littlejohn asserts that their "profound respect for the mystery of God-given political authority is a jarring but needed wake-up call that can help us question our own deep-seated individualism."  Yet,

in an age when political authority has become increasingly unmoored from any sense of accountability to an objective vision of the human good, the Reformers' insistence on the divine mission and religious vocation of the magistrate as a sharp rebuke to the secularized, bureaucratized modern ideal of "the government" as manager ...

Indeed, "for the Reformers, the magistrate's responsibility for the temporal common good was never separable from a concern for the final, spiritual good of his subjects."

While Littlejohn begins with the Reformers, he takes the fraught relationship between ecclesial and civil authority further into Western history and develops the theme of popular government:

The Reformers ... declared the independence of Christian commonwealths from papal authority, but not--in general--from any earthly accountability. In place of the papacy, the people themselves, conceived of as no longer as passive subjects within the hierarchy of global Christendom, but rather as an active political and self-governing political nation, began to exercise increasing accountability over their rulers. (Emphasis added.)

In his modest temporal extension, Littlejohn sets the stage for John Witte, the author of The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism. I have been critical  of Witte's too-easy nesting of rights talk within the ambit of Calvinist theology. Still, as a historical matter, the theological grandchildren and their successors to the Reformers participated in the transition from a political philosophy of natural law to one natural rights. Whether their participation was wholly salutary is a question for another day.