Ben Dunson

Religious Liberty without Liberalism

Abraham Kuyper offers one non-liberal route for the state to organize itself in a way that is supportive of the basic truths of the divinely ordained natural law within a system that is more tolerant of diversity than the Constantinian settlement.

Abraham Kuyper, the Invisible Church, and Religious Establishments
Early Protestant politics, according to Abraham Kuyper in his famous lecture “Calvinism and Politics,” was in many ways a product of the Middle Ages, exemplified “in an article of our old Calvinistic Confession of Faith [which] entrusts to the State the task ‘of defending against and of extirpating every form of idolatry and false religion and to protect the sacred service of the Church.’…[and] in the unanimous and uniform advice of Calvin and his epigones, who demanded intervention of the government in the matter of religion.”1. It was indeed a relatively straightforward carrying over of the basic Constantinian settlement which brought “differences in religious matters under the criminal jurisdiction of the government” based on the conviction that there “was only one Church of Christ on earth, and it was the task of the Magistrate to protect that Church from schisms, heresies and sects.”2 Calvin’s view on this is stated succinctly in the Institutes:
[T]o the [civil magistrate] it is assigned, so long as we live among men, to foster and maintain the external worship of God, to defend sound doctrine and the condition of the Church…3
In this system, the state has a responsibility to protect and enforce the whole system of the true religion against all competitors. In such a scheme religious liberty is impossible. It would not even have been comprehensible, much less desired, even if it had it been an option at the time.
Religious liberty, however, is seen as one of the chief blessings of the modern world, at least in those nations that are heirs of traditions stretching back to the Enlightenment. Christians since that time, however, have argued for a variety of positions on religious liberty, many of which are not founded on explicitly Enlightenment foundations. Most such arguments are based primarily on a conviction about the dangers to the church when the state has power to regulate the church’s internal affairs and doctrine, rather than a fear about illegitimate influence from the church on the state. Such arguments—in distinction from ones derived primarily from the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment—make an argument from Scripture, whether it is the correct one or not. This is how it should be: if religious liberty is worth preserving, it is worth preserving on explicitly Christian grounds.
This is where Kuyper’s argument is particularly interesting. He, too, makes an argument for (limited) religious liberty on explicitly theological grounds. He argues on the basis of a central point of Reformed theology, even as he attempts to show that the essentially Constantinian vision of the Reformation regarding the state was partially mistaken. In so doing he argues for a form of religious liberty different from that offered by many Christians today. It may very well be a position that retains some of the beneficial aspects of classic Protestant political thought, while at the same time providing a more realistic vision of religious liberty for the modern world than a straightforward application of the earliest Reformed theology would allow. At the very least it could serve as a springboard for further discussion in this area.
It is the doctrine of the invisible church that Kuyper understands as necessitating a reformulation of the medieval relationship of church and state. If one accepts, as even the earliest Reformed theologians did, “that the Church of Christ can reveal itself in many forms, in different countries; nay, even in the same country, in a multiplicity of institutions” then “immediately everything which was deduced from this unity of the visible church drops out of sight.”4 That is to say, there is not necessarily only one institutional manifestation of the church in a given nation. A core conviction of the Reformed churches is that the visible church is always more or less pure, and that not everyone in it is chosen for salvation in God’s eternal counsel. Therefore, there is an “invisible church” within the visible.5
Kuyper insists, then, that since
in Calvinistic countries a rich variety of all manner of church-formations revealed itself…it follows that we must not seek the true Calvinistic characteristic in what, for a time, it has retained of the old [medieval] system, but rather in that, which, new and fresh, has sprung up from its own root…With Rome the system of persecution issued from the identification of the visible with the invisible Church, and from this dangerous line Calvin departed.”6
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Catechizing the Resistance

If we do not begin with ourselves, and with our families, nothing else we seek to do in the world will matter. The battle for the soul of our culture and nation will be lost before it can even begin.

The family as a resistance cell.
Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option, as well as his follow up Live Not By Lies, focuses on the necessary steps Christian believers must take to prepare for the trials that are quickly coming their way. There appear to be dark days ahead in our nation. The number of Christian believers in America declines with every passing year, even if some of the numbers are due to nominal Christians ceasing to identify as Christian in any sense. The impact of all of this has become particularly obvious in the realm of human sexuality where (even in ostensibly evangelical churches) biblical teaching is widely disregarded. Last year Norway passed a law making speech against homosexuality or transsexuality illegal, whether in public or in private, with one- to three- year prison sentences for transgressions. A Finnish Member of Parliament is currently on trial for simply stated the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality. This month Canada has made it illegal to urge someone to repent of homosexual desires. There are many in America advocating for similar laws (whether they will be successful remains to be seen).
The family, Dreher insists, is one of the primary bulwarks against the coming troubles. He calls families “resistance cells” against the attacks of a hostile world.
This call to battle has a long history in the Christian church, stretching back to the early church. As the tradition developed, many theologians appropriated and transformed the classical political tradition of Greece and Rome. Central to their thinking was the idea that the formation of a virtuous state must begin with the individual and the family.
Peter Martyr Vermigli, an Italian Protestant Reformer, provides a good example of this tradition in his posthumously published commentary (1563) on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics:
Among these moral subjects, the first place is surely held by ethics, then economics, and finally politics. I see this order as circular. Through ethics, those who are its students will, one by one, become good men. If they prove upright, they will raise good families; if the families are properly established, they will in turn create good republics. And in good republics, both law and administration will aim at nothing less than each man becoming a good citizen, for they have eyes not only for the body but also for the spirit, and they will take care that citizens live according to virtue.
In this article I will look, not at the idea of the family as a little commonwealth in general (as important as that is), but at the necessity of such commonwealths being properly formed and regulated through the practice of catechizing, which has a long and venerable tradition in Christian churches.
This tradition is of vital importance today. Without a vigorous program of Christian nurture and instruction in our families it will not matter what success is achieved in the broader commonwealth. Many Christians, rightly concerned about the state of society, fail to begin in the very place where they can actually have a significant impact: their own homes. If we cannot get our homes in order what makes us think we will ever be able to get our communities, states, and nations in order? Even more importantly, of course, the eternal well-being of our children is at stake.
The Danish Lutheran theologian Niels Hemmingsen put this “focus on the family” well in his 1562 work On the Law of Nature:
But since man is, as it were, a commonwealth in miniature, the result is that the virtues of the soul by which the soundness of the state of man is preserved should be transferred to the society and dominions of men. For by these four virtues—prudence, temperance, courage, and justice—men’s societies are preserved, that is, their households and polities.
Man is a commonwealth in miniature, as is the family. The reformation of our society must begin at home.
Why we must catechize the resistance.
When we consider the intense spiritual and moral challenges our children will face in the coming years, we must turn to the Scriptures as our guide. The Bible calls Christian parents to raise their children “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4 ESV; the King James Version of the Bible more famously says “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord”). What does this mean?
First, it means teaching our families the whole counsel of God’s word. That is what is indicated in the word “discipline” or “nurture.” The King James Version’s “nurture” captures the holistic sense of the word, which is not simply about correcting bad behavior. Second, it means to “admonish” our children. This includes instruction, but also includes correction when one goes astray. Taken together, Ephesians 6:4 gives parents a great responsibility: God has entrusted us with the spiritual and intellectual development of our children. We must teach them the Gospel, we must teach them “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27), and we must teach them how to think about culture and about all of the influences that will bear down on them in this world. We must be vigilant: our children will be bombarded with ideas that are contrary to God’s word. This will come at them in schools, in the TV shows they watch, in the music they listen to, and in the conversations they have with their friends. They will face a multitude of moral and theological untruths at every turn. It will not be easy to counteract this, but we must. God requires this of parents.
We see this imperative in the Old Testament as well. Deuteronomy 6:7, speaking of the commandments of God, tells parents: “You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” Speaking of the things of the Lord must be a constant in our family conversations, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. They must know what is true about God and themselves and they must learn how to evaluate the world accordingly.
Proverbs 22:6 shows us the way: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” God has ordained both the means (training) and the end (not departing) of the salvation, and spiritual protection, of our children.
If we do not teach our children what God requires and forbids, and how to discern which is which, they will be utterly defenseless in a dark world. Our children must be inoculated against all strains of unbelief through a steady exposure to the truths of Scripture. They must see and savor the goodness of Jesus Christ in his word so that, as the hymn says, the “the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.” God gives parents this awesome responsibility.
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