On the folly of arguing politics from Scripture

The following post begins a series of responses to an anonymous commenter whose comments on this post I have thoroughly enjoyed, and whose passion and moral seriousness I admire – even though I disagree with practically all of his conclusions. For convenience, I shall be addressing this commenter as “Arnie.”

The very first words out of Arnie’s keyboard, after reading what he considers “one of your worst posts” (a dire indictment indeed considering some of the posts that have appeared on this blog), were an incredulous, “You are a Christian?” And a significant percentage of the extensive commenting he has provided, has continued to strike the explicitly religious theme: Arnie thinks I am being a bad Christian by saying that I think waterboarding (for example) could be morally applied by the American government in certain situations.

I think Arnie is making a mistake that literally millions of Christians have made down through the centuries: he thinks that Scripture takes sides in most political disputes, and that the side Scripture takes is (most conveniently) his own. I think he is disastrously wrong in the first and most fundamental of those beliefs, and this post attempts to explain why.

(I should pause to say very clearly that I am not, in fact, a very good Christian at all. It is one thing to be able to think clearly about what is virtuous and what is vicious; it is another thing entirely to have the character to act virtuously. I would never set myself up as an example for other people to emulate, generally speaking. Let’s not have any confusion on that point.)

When we ask ourselves what side Jesus would take in any modern political dispute, I think one has to be struck by three remarkable facts.

1. Jesus himself refused to have anything to do with political power – despite the fact that, as the God of Israel incarnate and the Heir of David, he had every right to wield that power.

2. Jesus had very little to say about politics in general – for example, when specifically asked about taxation, he responded with a deliberately paradoxical and non-specific answer.

3. Yet it is practically impossible to find any political philosophy or program under the sun that doesn’t have Christian adherents who are absolutely convinced that their political program has Jesus’ special approval – from the God, Guns and Guts redneck fundamentalist who starts every day of Vacation Bible School by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and rides home in his Confederate-flag-adorned pickup truck, to Quaker pacifists, to the Inquisition-ridden regime of Ferdinand and Isabella, to the abolitionists John Brown on the one hand and William Wilberforce on the other, to modern Marxist liberation-theology nuns. If you were to assemble in a room all the people who have been convinced that they know from Scripture how Jesus wants government officials to carry out their duties, you would literally not be able to find a single significant point of agreement.

What this tells us is that we need to be very cautious before we declare that people who disagree with us about what the government ought to be doing, are disagreeing not only with us, but with God as well.

Now, the first question to ask ourselves is surely, “Are the pacifists right? Is it immoral for Christians even to be part of the government at all?” Government is coercion by violence or the credible threat thereof; there has never been and never will be a government that does not make use of violence. The government is the people who have, for some reason, the right to tell you what to do and to hurt you if you don’t do what they say. And so the very first question to ask is, “Is this ever morally acceptable?” The extreme pacifist would say that it is not.

Now, when I was a young man I thought that pacifism and opposition to the death penalty were both very stupid positions, and if you had asked me why it was stupid, I would have said something like this: “The death penalty is obviously moral, because God commanded the Israelites to execute people for all kinds of different crimes. And if it was immoral He certainly wouldn’t have commanded it.” Unfortunately – as so often happens when one thinks other people are being stupid – it turned out that my own argument was stupid, and it is very important to understand why.

You see, if we are trying to decide what America’s laws ought to be, then any appeal to the example of the Law of Moses is an appeal to analogy: “The Israelite government had the following laws, and our government should be like the Israelite government; and therefore we should have those same laws.” But any appeal to the example of Moses founders irretrievably, because the government of Moses was unique in human history: God chose to have a relationship with Israel unlike with any other nation, and part of the uniqueness of that relationship was that God was to be Israel’s king, the head of her civil government. The Bible comes right out and says so, in fact: in I Samuel 10 through 12, Israel says to Samuel, “Give us a king like other nations,” and the Lord tells Samuel, “It is me they have rejected, not you.” In the end Samuel gives the people their king, but tells them that in asking for a king they behaved evilly: “You said to me, ‘No, we want a king to rule over us’ – even though the LORD your God was your king.”

Furthermore, we know from St. Paul that the Law of Moses was a multi-purpose kind of thing – the one body of law served not just for establishing the rules of civic interaction, but also embodied the revelation of the moral code, and ceremonial measures designed to help establish categories of religious thought that could, once established, be used to help comprehend what God would ultimately do in the Passion and Resurrection. Indeed, it’s hard for me not to have the impression that God was considerably more concerned about the moral and pedagogical aspect than he was about the civil; but that is a subjective opinion. What is clear is that all three concerns were mixed up together, and that with the Law of Moses God was doing something amongst the Israelites that he didn’t do with any other nation or race – or government.

At the very least, any Christian who doesn’t keep all of the sacrificial and ceremonial law, has no choice but to admit that not all of the Mosaic provisions can appropriately be imposed by force upon a modern society the way the Law calls for them to be imposed by force upon the ancient Israelites. So we cannot argue that because the Law called upon Israelite magistrates to implement any particular measure, it is therefore moral for our own magistrates to implement that measure as well. God was doing something in the Law of Moses that He did in no other nation’s laws; he was doing something with his chosen Israelite people that He chose to do with no other nation. The appeal to an analogy between the laws of a modern nation and the ancient laws of Israel, in short, cannot but fail.

Unfortunately for the pacifist, however, this doesn’t mean that they’re out of the woods. We do have New Testament Scripture that addresses, in passing, the question of whether there are circumstances under which the magistrates of other nations may use deadly force, and its answer is definitive. The ruler, says Paul, is appointed by God and “bears the sword to punish the evildoer.” Now, there’s only one thing Romans did with their swords, and that’s kill people. What the state does, it does by violence or by the threat of violence; a state that won’t kill people is a state that will inevitably be overrun by people who will kill people; and Paul here clearly states that the magistrate is authorized by God to kill people.

But that’s as helpful as the New Testament gets. Obviously the magistrate can’t kill whomever he wants – Scripture has plenty of denunciations of evil Gentile kings and rulers in both the Old and New Testaments, and thus there clearly are moral principles that God demands be followed by all magistrates. But what, specifically, are those moral principles? Whom can the magistrate or soldier kill, specifically, and under what circumstances? The magistrate is authorized to kill “the evildoer.” Well, presumably he’s not supposed to kill people who shoplift or tell little white lies, and there are very few of us left who think he should kill teenaged girls who are engaged to be married to one man but lose their virginity in town to another man and don’t scream loudly enough to convince the judges that it was rape rather than seduction. So where is the line?

The New Testament simply doesn’t say.

You see, the New Testament is not, despite the efforts of lots of politically passionate Christians to pervert it into one, a political treatise; and the epistles in particular were addressed to congregations that consisted of the ruled, not the ruler – and therefore the epistles have no instructions to give to the rulers, who would neither have heard the instructions to begin with, nor paid any attention had they heard them. So when people try to find support for their political beliefs in Scripture, they have either to try to extend to the magistrates ethical teachings that were addressed to people behaving in a private capacity, or else to appeal to the example of Jesus (which I have tended to do myself in support of libertarianism, I hasten to confess).

But Jesus’ mission – which was a unique mission, as I’ll discuss in a later post – was clearly, for whatever reason, not compatible with the exercise of political power, even on such a minor matter as settling an inheritance between two brothers; and therefore appealing to the What Would Jesus Do question is even more pointless than it usually is. If we were going to make Jesus’ political behavior the standard to which all governors would have to conform, then we would have no choice but to say that Christians could never take part in government – indeed, no Christian could even serve as a judge in a case of disputed inheritance. But Jesus was constrained by his unique mission to avoid several kinds of behavior that are not intrinsically immoral – marriage and fatherhood spring obviously to mind – and therefore it is foolish to say, “Jesus refused to do x and therefore no Christian may engage in that activity.”

Again, the ethical teaching of the New Testament as directed to private persons...well, the most agressive way you can get away with expressing it is that violence, even in self-defense, is endorsed rather less than wholeheartedly. Yet clearly the magistrates are authorized – indeed, they apparently have an actual duty – to exercise the very same violence that private Christian citizens are not allowed to exercise on their own behalf. What Jesus says to private persons – turning the other cheek, not resisting an evil person – is clearly not applicable to magistrates, whose responsibility before God appears to be precisely that of resisting evil persons; and that means that a naive “but Christians aren’t allowed to take vengeance” sort of argument against, say, the death penalty, is out of court. But under what circumstances does this special license come into play? And what are the limits on this license? Why does God even authorize it in the first place? On not a single one of these questions does the New Testament speak.

What we find, in fact, is that the New Testament makes it clear, in passing, that magistrates have a special vocation from God, a vocation for which acts even of deadly violence are morally admissable in certain (unspecified by the New Testament) cases. Indeed, the magistrate actually has an outright duty to act violently under certain (also unspecified by the New Testament) circumstances. He has been appointed by God to punish the evildoer, for which purpose God has given him the sword; he is presumably answerable to God both for situations in which he has used violence unjustly, and also for situations in which God expects him to do his duty and (perhaps through foolish scruples) he fails to do so. But no further instructions are given, and in particular no explicit instructions are given on when he crosses the line he ought not cross.

This may seem very unfair of God, but only, I think, if we fail to keep in mind three critical and unquestionable truths. (1) Christians are not given a free pass on the use of our minds; indeed we are commanded to use them to the best of our ability. If God has chosen to give us a hard assignment rather than providing us the answers in nicely, conveniently, non-intellectually-challenging explict form...well, why exactly is that surprising? (2) Magistrates are as dependent on God’s grace as are the rest of us, and God’s grace is as available to them as it is to anybody else. A magistrate who gets these questions wrong is in the same situation before God as anybody else who makes a mistake. (3) God’s priorities are rarely our own, and He provides us with the answers that are important on His agenda, not with the answers that are important on ours. No matter how badly we want to be able to tell those who disagree with our politics that they are bad Christians and that God wants them to admit that we are right, Scripture remains stubbornly silent – but of course, that makes it just that much easier to put our words into Scripture’s mouth.

On politics, the Bible leaves us in the same position as it leaves on economics or physics or medicine: we have been given brains, God apparently expects us to use them, and He leaves it up to us to get to work on solving the problems He’s assigned us. A person who says, “Tell me where in Scripture God gives us the answer to when it acceptable to cause discomfort to terrorists, and how much discomfort you are allowed to impose, and under what conditions you are allowed to impose it,” is being roughly as reasonable as a person who says, “Tell me where in Scripture God explains Newton’s Laws of Motion,” or, “I don’t see anything in Scripture about the law of supply and demand,” or even, “Tell me where in Scripture God says that Christians are allowed to play electric guitars.” Would it have been nice of God to explain to us exactly when, and under what circumstances, the death penalty or “torture” could be used – or else to say explicitly, “You’re never allowed to do this”? Well, sure. But then it also seems like it would have been nice of God to tell us up front about, say, penicillen and smallpox vaccine, instead of letting the human race be ravaged by disease for several thousand years until we finally got around to working out those answers for ourselves. Just because it seems to us like God ought to have done something, is no evidence that He actually has done that thing.

Now, I do think that Jesus’ refusal to wield political power – and his apparent dislike of the Apostles’ wielding it as well – raises serious questions about the validity of the Church’s using violence in support of the special purposes of the Church. But even that case is very much further from definitive than I used to think it was, because one has to make judgments as to the extent to which the special mission of the Church coincides with the special mission of Jesus.

It remains true that the Religious Rightist or liberation theologian needs, I think, to pay very serious attention to Jesus’ plain statement that his kingdom is not of this world, especially when (like liberation theologians) the would-be theocrat is explictly wielding the rhetoric of “the kingdom of heaven.” There is a role in the Divine plan for the secular State; but there are clearly other ends and means for which the weapons of the State are rejected by Jesus. Yet even so, the principle of the separation of Church and State is not, I have had to conclude, definitively established by the New Testament. I think you have to admit that it leans in that direction. Certainly there is a dramatic difference between the example of Jesus and that of Mohammed. But an explicit endorsement of the principle, so clear that only intellectual perversity could lead a Christian to deny that God wants the Church to stay out of the violence business and the State to stay out of the religion business? Much as I’d like to think such a clear endorsement is there, I have to admit that it’s just not. To say, as I myself have said in the past, that Jesus definitely endorses the principle of separation of Church and State, is to go further than the evidence of Scripture alone really allows.

At any rate, my dear Arnie, when you ask me to show you where in Scripture God says that "torture" is justifiable in any circumstances, I cheerfully admit that He never addresses the question at all, and that both the pro- and anti-waterboarding political opinions, are compatible with the Scriptural evidence. I do not think, and have never argued, that believing that American interrogators should never waterboard captured terrorists makes you a bad Christian – even though I still think you’re wrong in that belief. That’s because I don’t think Scripture addresses the question. I don’t think, unfortunately, that that’s actually the answer you want to hear; and if you ever find yourself forced to the same admission, I fear it won’t be cheerfully.

UPDATE: corrected some typos.