Last week I posted two back-to-back posts dealing with the Lockean and biblical narratives. Here I will try to bring these two subjects together and, in so doing, complete the argument begun there.
We noted in that first post that Locke borrows the basic framework of his political philosophy from that of Thomas Hobbes, employing the same categories and drawing similar conclusions. Leo Strauss argues that Locke is simply a more moderate version of Hobbes and can be understood only against the larger context of the Enlightenment. Yet we also observed that Locke owes a debt to an older tradition of philosophizing, stemming in some measure from the natural law theories of Thomas Aquinas, as mediated through Richard Hooker. It is this latter influence which often persuades contemporary Christians that Locke is a christian thinker putting forth christian ideas on the nature of the state. Given Locke's influence on Thomas Jefferson and the American founders, Americans anxious to emphasize their country's christian origins have an incentive to claim Locke as their own.
However, as I have suggested below, claiming a particular philosophy as biblical on the basis of certain apparently biblical features found therein, is deeply problematic, particularly if the larger animating narrative is glossed over. (I am here using animating narrative as roughly the same as worldview.) To be sure, one may be thankful that Locke, e.g., believed in limited government, opposed tyranny, favoured consent of the governed and advocated the protection of private property. But there is much more to Locke than this, and one needs to dig deeper to find the narrative undergirding his thought as a whole. Perhaps it would be helpful to compare what might be called the Hobbesian/Lockean and biblical narratives to illustrate how they differ at a basic level:
(1) The Hobbesian/Lockean narrative:
State of nature -> social contract -> civil government -> appeal to heaven
(2) The biblical narrative (in elaborated form):
Creation -> fall into sin -> redemption in Jesus Christ -> renewal in the Holy Spirit -> consummation of the kingdom of God
That these two narratives are in conflict should be apparent from even a superficial reading. A deeper reading will reveal, among other things, that each makes for a different understanding of the role of government in human society. According to the Lockean narrative, political authority is by no means intrinsic to humanity. The more "natural" state is one characterized by equality and independence, which can be given up or modified only by mutual consent. This consent is thus deemed the basis of legitimate government, and its absence removes this legitimacy. However much natural law limitations may make their appearance in Locke's thought, there is no avoiding the fact that the centrality of contract would tend to leave the interpretation of the meaning of such limitations up to the people themselves, who will likely change their interpretation from one generation to the next. Hence the stages in the development of liberalism, of which I detect five in my book.
By contrast, the biblical narrative affirms that the role of political authority cannot be understood apart from the larger context of God's dealings with his image-bearers. There is no prepolitical natural state in which we are all equal and independent of one another. Indeed, the state of nature might be seen as a parody of the Garden of Eden. Political authority arises, not from contract, but out of two elements of human nature: first, our created limitedness and, second, our sinfulness. The first of these elements is intrinsic to our status as creatures, irrespective of our fallenness. The second is, of course, rooted precisely in our fallenness. Because of the latter, the purpose of political authority is, in part, a remedy for the destructive effects of sin. Because of both elements, political authority is called by God to do justice, as affirmed repeatedly throughout scripture (e.g., Deuteronomy 16:18-20; Psalms 72, 82; Proverbs 29:4, 14; Isaiah 10:1-2; Romans 13; I Peter 2:13-14).
Another way to put this is that government has an intrinsic jural task to which the notions of contract and popular consent, with their potential arbitrariness, cannot do full justice. As for redemption and renewal, Christians acknowledge that political authority itself cannot redeem, despite the exaggerated hopes which the followers of secular ideologies might place in it. Yet government, like the rest of God's creation, is caught up in the larger drama of redemption, which is cosmic in scope.
Christian History Institute
Thomas Aquinas
This means that, although we are justified, because of God's common grace, in recognizing the moments of truth in the theories of, say, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Kant and Marx, one cannot simply lift these moments eclectically out of the larger narratives animating their thinking without doing damage both to the intregrity of these thinkers' ideas and to the biblical narrative which is, after all, the story we are called to inhabit, as Lesslie Newbigin puts it. What might be called a spiritual eclecticism is the central difficulty in, e.g., Thomas Aquinas' grand synthesis of Christian revelation, Aristotle's ethics and Stoic legal theory in his own philosophy. While I have a tremendous respect for Thomas Aquinas and particularly for his neothomist disciples of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is not clear that his enterprise, taken as a whole, succeeds in freeing itself from the aristotelian and stoic narratives from which he borrows so freely.
Two decades ago one of my Notre Dame professors wrote a series of journal articles attempting to determine whether Thomas Aquinas is a natural law or a natural virtue theorist. He argued for natural virtue, but others argue just as plausibly for natural law. My own response would be that Thomas is both and that, if the two positions are not exactly compatible, this is due to the unstable nature of his attempt to synthesize two conflicting narratives. Something similar could perhaps be said of Locke.
So where does this leave us? At square one? Do we spurn all pre-existing philosophies, including political philosophies, and start from scratch? Hardly. In any attempt to gain a theoretical understanding of God's world, we inevitably enter a larger conversation which has been going on for centuries before us and will continue for long after we are gone. Yet there are resources out there to help us make our way through the conflicting claims put forward in academia, in the popular media and in the context of government itself. I trust I am not too immodest in hoping that my own book might be one of these, though I am quick to recommend as well the writings of Skillen, Bob Goudzwaard, Paul Marshall, Bernard Zylstra, Rockne McCarthy, Jonathan Chaplin, Al Wolters, Mike Goheen and Craig Bartholomew, in addition to Kuyper and Dooyeweerd.
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