A more nuanced ecclesiology: responding to Wood's review

A fifth review of my new book, Citizenship Without Illusions, has appeared in World magazine: Faithfully political. It is written by James R. Wood, who teaches religion and theology at Redeemer University. Before proceeding to look at his review, I should indicate that I know Wood slightly. Some years ago, he came to our house to discuss my first book, Political Visions and Illusions, possibly after the publication of the second edition in 2019, although my memory of the exact timing is a little foggy. We subsequently crossed paths at a downtown church plant here in Hamilton.

Wood's review is largely positive, and I am grateful for his kind words. All the same, he believes that I have left "some important threads unexamined."

This book builds upon Koyzis’ masterful earlier work exposing political ideologies by offering practical insight about how to comport ourselves politically in this world. It would benefit from more reflection on how our political allegiance to the kingdom of God and the political nature of the Church itself inform our loyalties to temporal polities. But as a practical guide for prudent political engagement in the various earthly cities in which we find ourselves, it’s an admirable introductory text.

Although I will not respond to every point he makes, I will reply to his charge that I do not take seriously enough the political nature of the church, given that his principal critique centres on ecclesiology. In fact, I deal with this topic in the second edition of my first book, Political Visions and Illusions, especially in the "Concluding Ecclesiological Postscript" (275-286). There I explore the crucial distinction Abraham Kuyper made between church as organism and church as institute. In the first edition, I addressed the impact of the dominant political ideologies from the perspective of the larger body of Christ, or corpus Christi. As members of the body of Christ—Kuyper's organism—we manifest our grateful obedience for salvation in every area of life, including political life. In this respect, our membership in the church has definite political implications, which I have tried to articulate in both of these books.

But in the years between the two editions, it became increasingly clear to me that I needed to treat more explicitly the role of the institutional church, including the work of clergy in the pulpits and synodical assemblies. Too often ministers have approached political issues in homiletically inappropriate ways, and wider ecclesiastical assemblies have improperly taken stances on prudential policy issues on which there is legitimate disagreement, thereby implicitly elevating them to dogmatic status. 

As a specific differentiated institution, the gathered church has the primary responsibilities of preaching the gospel, administering the sacraments, and discipling its members. Of course, these three central tasks of the church have a political side in so far as the church possesses a public legal status distinct from other communal formations. However, it is not especially helpful to speak of the political character of the church as institute without careful qualification. The Church Order of Dort gets it right: "In these assemblies ecclesiastical matters only shall be transacted and that in an ecclesiastical manner" (art. 30). This would seem to preclude making political pronouncements under most circumstances. (For possible exceptions to this general principle, see again my "Postscript.")

Those theologians—and they are theologians rather than political scientists—who too easily speak of the church as "alternative polis" (Stanley Hauerwas), "political church" (Jonathan Leeman), or of "the political nature of the Church" (Wood) risk tying themselves into logical knots as they attempt to sort out the task of the church relative to political life. (Victor Lee Austin struggles with this in his otherwise excellent Up With Authority, finally opting for an unsatisfying dialectical approach.) Recognizing Kuyper's distinction between organism and institute has the advantage of reminding us that our primary allegiance is to the kingdom of God even in political life while not overextending the legitimate jurisdiction of the institutional church beyond its central tasks. Kuyper's essay, "Rooted and Grounded: The Church as Organism and Institution" (On the Church, 44-73), is the place to start here, along with my own "A Neo-Calvinist Ecclesiology."

I will make one more observation about Wood's use of Augustine. Wood writes:

Augustine told a pagan public official that heavenly citizenship complicates and reshapes our loyalties to our earthly homelands. He explained that political agents who recognize this reality would do all that they could to serve that heavenly city by supporting “the small group of its citizens who are pilgrims on this earth.”

A true polity is one that is marked by justice, and justice requires giving to God what is His due, which is worship.

I happily acknowledge my own debt to Augustine by way of Calvin, Althusius, Groen, Kuyper, and Dooyeweerd. However, Augustine's understanding of justice is not without its flaws. Augustine famously declined to define a commonwealth, as Cicero had done, with reference to justice because the old Roman Republic had not rendered to God the worship due him (City of God, XIX.21). If God is not rightly worshipped, he reasoned, then justice could not have been present in the Roman Republic.

Here is where Augustine's residual debt to Plato did not serve him well. Justice is not a substantial form that is either present or absent in a given setting or an ideal to which we must aspire. Justice should instead be understood as a created aspect of life that is especially relevant to political order. Every political order undertakes to strike a balance between potentially competing interests. Some may get this balance wrong, perhaps egregiously so. But the balancing task is always present. This is what distinguishes the state as a differentiated institution from other communities, including the gathered church institution. Even a political order not all of whose citizens offer God the worship due him may still manage to balance other interests according to a proximate justice. This may be the best we can hope for in the present age. The gathered church plays at most an indirect role once again by discipling its members and preaching the gospel to the nation(s).

To conclude, here is Wood again: "Koyzis seems to subtly assume a form of sacred/secular dualism that fails to properly communicate the Church’s political significance." Not quite. If we follow Kuyper in distinguishing between the two meanings of church, then we can more easily account for the reality that everything we do falls under the lordship of Christ and thus within the purview of Christ's body, the church as organism, while the gathered church institution is free to do what it does best, thereby contributing in a distinctively ecclesiastical way to building up the political order.