The Political Pendulum Through the History of the Church

St. Augustine ranks as arguably the most influential Christian thinker after St. Paul, and his book The City of God may be the most influential Christian work of the Middle Ages. In addition to its many other significant achievements, this book created what has rightly been called a “theology of history.”

Augustine and Politics

It is to Augustine that we owe the concepts of the City of God and the City of Man—the former anchored in “heavenly hopes,” the latter in “worldly possession.” Tracing the history of these two cities, Augustine concludes that, ultimately, the City of God will triumph. Until then, however, we live in the City of Man, the result of the fall and of a defect in the human will.

For Augustine, the purpose of the state is to restrain evil and to advance justice, for, “in the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized brigandage?”[1] But such justice can only approach true—divine—justice insofar as it is informed by the “heavenly hopes” that flow from the City of God. As the theologian Robert E. Webber comments:

[T]rue justice exists only in the society of God, and this will be truly fulfilled only after the Judgment. Nevertheless, while no society on earth can fully express this justice, the one that is more influenced by Christians and Christian teaching will more perfectly reflect a just society. For this reason, Christians have a duty toward government.[2]

After Augustine

Martin Luther (1483–1546) propounded a different vision: two kingdoms, one carnal and the other spiritual, each needing to remain separate from the other and each making its own legitimate demands. Still, Luther’s views, while somewhat dualistic and quietist, did not advocate withdrawal from the world or preclude Christian participation in political affairs. We need both kingdoms, Luther maintained, “the one to produce righteousness, the other to bring about eternal peace and prevent evil deeds.”[3]

To John Calvin (1509–1564), God was not only Lord and Creator but “a Governor and Preserver, . . . sustaining, cherishing, superintending all the things which He has made, to the very minutest, even to a sparrow.”[4] The sovereignty of God, in other words, extends to all spheres, including all human institutions. The active purpose of the state, Calvin wrote, is “to foster and maintain the external worship of God, to defend sound doctrine and the condition of the church, to adapt our conduct to human society, to form our manners to civil justice, to reconcile us to each other, to cherish common peace and tranquility.” Beyond providing merely for peace and safety, civil authorities, according to Calvin, are the “ordained guardians and vindicators of public innocence, modesty, honor, and tranquility.”[5]

The nineteenth-century Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper struck a somewhat more moderate note. Arguing for “sphere sovereignty,” he saw three spheres—the Church, the State, and Society—each distinct but interrelated with the others, all part of the created order, all governed by God. “Instead of monastic flight from the world,” Kuyper wrote, “the duty is now emphasized of serving God in the world, in every position of life.”[6]

Modern Theologians and Their Political Ideals

Like Kuyper, the twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth also took a relatively benign view of the state, believing that it, like the church, served Christ’s divine purposes beyond simply restraining evil. Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the most influential twentieth-century articulators of the church-state relationship, believed in the necessity of politics in the struggle for social justice, even as he understood the sobering limitations of politics in this fallen world.

As we have seen, in historical experience, one can discern an ever-swinging pendulum of political engagement. Consider, in modern times, a single American denomination—the Baptists. For a long period, many Baptists were led by their dispensational theology to concentrate on winning souls instead of engaging the world. But it was also from within their ranks that ministers and activists like Jerry Falwell would emerge to argue for restoring America’s “moral sanity” as an urgent Christian imperative. “Conservative Fundamentalists and Evangelicals can be used of God to bring about a great revival of true Christianity in America and the world in our lifetime,” Falwell wrote in 1981.[7]

[1] St. Augustine, City of God, ed. Gerald G. Walsh, Demetrius B. Zema, Grace Monahan, and Daniel J. Honan (Garden City: Image Books, 1958), 88.

[2] Webber, The Church in the World, 71.

[3] Martin Luther, “Temporal Authority,” in Luther’s Works, quoted in Webber, The Church in the World, 108.

[4] Webber, The Church in the World, 127.

[5] Ibid., 132–33.

[6] Irving Hexham, “Christian Politics according to Abraham Kuyper,” CRUX 19, no. 1, March 1983: 2–7, http://people.ucalgary.ca/~nurelweb/papers/ irving/kuyperp.html.

[7] Jerry Falwell, “The Fundamentalist Phenomenon,” with Ed Dobson and Ed Hindson, in Piety & Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World, ed. Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie, (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1987), 123.