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Review: Good and Bad Ways to Think About Religion and Politics by Robert Benne
“Christianity is not first of all a religion of moral obligation or achievement. It is essentially a religion of salvation,” Benne writes (p. 41). But there is something to be said for the fulfilling of moral obligations. Distinguished Lutheran ethicist Bob Benne states in Good and Bad Ways to Think About Religion and Politics something that is almost never said in Lutheran circles but should be shouted: that the Lutheran tradition of the Two Kingdoms has something valuable to offer both the church and the world. He starts with the premise that the chattering class’s writing and speaking on the subject is almost endless and also usually ill advised and ignorant. Much modern commentary is void of the Lord’s statements about rendering unto Caesar his due, Saint Paul’s further affirmations and sufferings attendant thereto, Saint Augustine’s City of God, and Luther’s left and right hand distinctions...
Good and Bad Ways to Think About Religion and Politics by Robert Benne
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010
120 pp, Trade Paperback, $14.00
“Christianity is not first of all a religion of moral obligation or achievement. It is essentially a religion of salvation,” Benne writes (p. 41). But there is something to be said for the fulfilling of moral obligations.
Distinguished Lutheran ethicist Bob Benne states in Good and Bad Ways to Think About Religion and Politics something that is almost never said in Lutheran circles but should be shouted: that the Lutheran tradition of the Two Kingdoms has something valuable to offer both the church and the world. He starts with the premise that the chattering class’s writing and speaking on the subject is almost endless and also usually ill advised and ignorant. Much modern commentary is void of the Lord’s statements about rendering unto Caesar his due, Saint Paul’s further affirmations and sufferings attendant thereto, Saint Augustine’s City of God, and Luther’s left and right hand distinctions.
Of course with that bibliographic description, the vast majority of politically engaged American Christians (and that most assuredly includes, especially, the Lutheran laity) will respond, “Say what?”
So before Benne gets into the really difficult distinctions, he portrays the two broad camps that exist among those who contemplate the relationship of religion and politics. Some of these people are not religious and some are not political, while some are indeed both, but often incorrectly think they are well informed on both. Empirical data would often not support that assumption. The two groups Benne describes are the separationists and the fusionists. These exist on both the left and right sides of religion and politics.
Separationists believe that matters of faith and matters of politics should be utterly divorced from on another – as though Christian thought and morality is at best irrelevant and at worst dangerous to the commonweal. Fusionists, however, believe that God’s kingdom is supposed to be of this world and that the New and Heavenly Jerusalem should be planted in the United States. Benne provides examples galore of some quite intelligent people who say and write some very dumb things, though his language is a bit kinder than that.
Of course, the separationist and fusionist camps are not internally uniform. There are selective separationists and selective fusionists. For example, there are people who hold that the Christian should address legal abortion on the basis of moral belief but should never address economics, and vice versa. And there are those whose primary intellectual foundations are political and those whose are religious.
Benne well discerns the irony, a tragic irony, of politicized clergy pontificating over matters public in which their standing, experience, and knowledge is a good deal less than their competence or ability to influence any outcome. They thus reduce their sacred role to that of ugly cheerleader or useful idiot. Instead, the church and all that means would do better to be about the business of teaching the laity to live out “the faith once delivered unto the saints” from Sunday’s recessional until the next Sunday’s confession of sin. Benne cites C. S. Lewis’s concept of Christian trade unionists and Christian educators doing what the clergy can inspire and enable but never accomplish personally in the public square.
Let me cite a recent event which portrays the incoherence. Some months back there was a tragic interdiction of a Mediterranean relief convoy at sea bound for Gaza. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) halted the flotilla, though not without casualties and mistakes all around. The interdiction was roundly condemned by the hierarchy of the ELCA at Higgins Road, in my own Synod’s assembly, and from the parish pulpit. I have spent a good portion of my professional life conducting interdiction operations at sea. What I heard from my own church came from folks bound up in invincible ignorance of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Law of Naval Warfare, and the very real responsibilities of the IDF On-Scene Commander. Impersonating Old Testament prophets and righteously speaking truth to power in this case would not resonate with anyone having experience in seaward security.
Let me add that from my days long gone by as a military aide at the White House that the same sort of thing happened there – in both a Democratic and a Republican administration. Many epistles from denominational bureaucrats were briefly noted and mentally thrown away. I saw all the guest lists.
Though Benne does consider some sociology about how family and peer groups do influence one’s religious-political outlook, there is one related area which might have been better developed. Benne states that the worst separationist outlook comes not from faulty theology, but the laity who leave their faith in the narthex on Sunday. This important theme seems to have received short shrift. But maybe that’s the next book he’ll write.
Raymond J. Brown is an ALPB board member and an emergency manager living in New Hampshire.
Benne Book
further comment
Thanks for the book review.
The Faith Once Delivered...
Indeed there are passages of Scripture that speak to our submission to the Government (Romans 13) and that we should render the things that are the Emperor's to the Emperor (found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke). There are also passages which dictate the role of Government, like Psalm 72 (which calls for the king to care for the poor and to see that they have justice - these are things which Benne seems to want to call Marxism). In addition the prevailing Pauline construct of relating to civil government is not Romans 13. Rather, Pauline force of argument rests more broadly on the passing away of various principalities and powers (which are both spiritual and earthly in nature) and that, as Christians, our citizenship is not here, but in that kingdom which does not belong to this world (1 Cor. 7:29-31 and Phil. 3:20). Paul's typical discourse on political power is that it is being undone by Christ (1 Cor 15:24). And its not just Paul that's tilting against the Emperor. The third Sunday in Advent has reminded us, through Mary's song, the toppling of power.
I have called these texts to the forefront because I disagree with the core of Benne's argument: that the Church should only be explaining the faith to its people and then letting them go out and do the political thing. Benne's theology, on this point, is rooted in the myth of the modern state – the modern western democratic state, to be exact. It does not embrace the essential unity of the human race that the biblical story of redemption entails. Instead Benne's political scheme builds off of concepts of human individualism. Its closer to Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau than the Christian narrative. While the Scriptures may not give an explicit model for civil government or economics, it does communicate an anthropology. Benne is right to caution against both separation and fusion; for Christians have a responsibility to the government in place over them and Christ's kingdom is not of this world. But what Benne seems to neglect is that the Church qua Church has a responsibility to the world and its various governments. The Church reminds the governments of the world that they exists in order to care for the poor, maintain public order, and to promote peace. Therefore the Church can and should, as the body [politic] of Christ, condemn nation-states when they fail at these. In failing to meet them, they also fail to be governments. What the Church doesn't care about is political and economic theory. The Church really doesn't care about capitalism (which Benne is keen to defend as if were a gift from God) or socialism. What the Church will ask is if these theory's allow the state to care for its citizens in the way that a state should. Under Benne's scheme, the Church qua Church is to remain silent unless Nazis are involved. The truth is that poverty consumes the life of countless numbers of people every day. And sometimes it's greed in the form of American capitalism which does it.
Benne's ethic here is too shaped by American ideology and neo-conservative pride in said ideology than in a baptismal identity. I do not think that Benne's view can accept a Church that might compete with nations for the allegiance of citizens. He effectively redefines religion as inward and private. American political theory does the same. The consequences of this redefinition lead us to both extreme individualism and a reliance on violence – both of which are antithetical to true government.
A final thought on “rendering unto Caesar.” Tertullian, in his book “De Idolatria,” gives some thought to this passage. He points out that Jesus begins with asking who's image is on the coin. The language of image is important here as Tertullian goes on to demonstrate. It is an image of a human. Humans were created in the image of God. Tertullian suggests that we can let Caesar have his coin; but our selves belong to God. Our chief identity is not in political theories or powers. The identity that shapes us is our baptism into Christ. If we let American political theory dictate who we are then we have given everything to Caesar.
“Therefore, too, the Lord demanded that the money should be shown Him, and inquired about the image, whose it was; and when He had heard it was Cæsar's, said, Render to Cæsar what are Cæsar's, and what are God's to God; that is, the image of Cæsar, which is on the coin, to Cæsar, and the image of God, which is on man, to God; so as to render to Cæsar indeed money, to God yourself. Otherwise, what will be God's, if all things are Cæsar's?” - Tertullian “De Idolatria,” Chapter 15
brief comment
Of course this is true to the extent that 2 Kingdom concept ala Luther has to do with accepting the premise that God extends God's reign and power within two realms and thereby exhausting God's reach of authority: the civil order and the order of the "church". In this way most Americans are influenced by the political methodology of British Positivism in terms of their cultural outlook. This outlook has no coomon place with 2 Kingdom ideas because of the different strains of epistemological thrust, ie. one originating from English philosophy and the other from the German Kant.