During his interview with me, Rich Greydanus asked me why I chose, in chapter 8 of my book, to examine only Roman Catholic and Reformed Christian approaches as alternatives to the five ideologies I explore in previous chapters. I answered that these have come up with the only genuine alternatives. True, there are other christian traditions, such as Lutheranism, Anglicanism, anabaptism, free-church evangelicalism, Methodism and Orthodoxy. But the two alternatives favoured by Roman Catholicism and Reformed Christianity, viz., subsidiarity and sphere sovereignty (or, as I prefer, differentiated responsibility) respectively, pretty much exhaust the possible societal models, assuming we reject those of the secular ideologies. These other christian traditions must work with something approximating these two models or else fall back on one of the ideologies.
With respect to the relationship between the various human communities (“spheres,” if you will) and among communities, individuals and God, it seems to me that there are logically only three possible alternatives, with one of the two initial categories further subdivided in two:
(1) Something in God’s world is sovereign (and I’m using this term as Thomas Hobbes or Jean Bodin would use it, not Abraham Kuyper), whether it be the individual (liberalism), the nation (nationalism), the democratic people (Rousseauan popular sovereignty), the proletariat or homo faber (socialism), or some human tradition or collection of traditions (certain types of conservatism). Everything else in society is arrayed under this sovereign entity. This ideological approach is, I have argued in my book, fundamentally idolatrous and thus unacceptable for the believing Christian.
(2) God is ultimately sovereign, and within this alternative lie two sub-alternatives:
(a) God relates directly, immediately to the multiple entities in his creation, including societal formations and individuals. This is basically the teaching of the Reformed tradition, but antedates the Reformation by at least several centuries. For example, Dante Alighieri and John of Paris in the 13th and 14th centuries followed this approach. Kuyper’s notion of sphere sovereignty is basically an attempt to account for this immediate sovereignty of God over the diversity of his creation.
(b) God is ultimately sovereign, and the things of creation are arranged hierarchically below him. Typically the hierarchy runs as follows:
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CHURCH INSTITUTION
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STATE
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“MEDIATING STRUCTURES”
(or “civil society,” i.e., nonstate communities)
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INDIVIDUALS
This is the approach found in Roman Catholic social teachings, particularly the principle of subsidiarity. The assumption is that God relates to the multiple entities in his creation through the mediation of some other institution or set of institutions.
Logically it is not possible to postulate a fourth alternative. Either God is recognized to be sovereign or something created is (falsely) deemed to be sovereign. And if God is sovereign, then he can be so in only two ways: immediately or in mediated fashion. Differentiated responsibility is simply the approach that builds on the assumption that God’s sovereignty over his creatures is experienced immediately. If one rejects this, then logically one would have to embrace either some form of subsidiarity with its more hierarchical notion of God’s sovereignty or deny God’s sovereignty altogether in the fashion of the ideologies. Logically there can be no fourth alternative.
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