One of the benefits of being an author with InterVarsity Press is that the publisher occasionally sends me other books it has published in my field. One of these is Hopeful Realism: Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics, written by my esteemed colleagues Jesse Covington, Bryan T. McGraw, and Micah Watson, whom I regularly see at the biennial Henry Institute Symposia at Calvin University. The co-authors here undertake to address the relative paucity of evangelical political reflection and the tendency of flesh-and-blood evangelicals to embrace dubious political positions without engaging in the due reflection necessary for wise political judgement and action. Thirty years ago historian Mark Noll wrote that the "scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." As we approach the quarter-century mark, our co-authors express a similar lament:
Churches have become politicized, riven by partisan and ideological disputes that are at times more central than theological or biblical claims . . . . Selective, inconsistent, and divisive policy stances leave evangelicals open to critiques of incoherence, hypocrisy, and pursuing status and power over moral convictions, let alone biblical and theological ones (5, 6).
What is the answer? Our co-authors here offer their own alternative which they label Hopeful Realism. Realism, in that they acknowledge our pervasive sinfulness and finitude. Hopeful, in that, despite the impact of sin, we can genuinely know things and make a public claim to these things as a basis for a shared political order. This entails a recovery of natural law as a creational basis for living in community alongside those differing with our own ultimate allegiance to God's kingdom.
Our co-authors begin with a discussion of the Bible and politics, based on "the conviction that Scripture is the highest authority God has given us to govern our conduct and belief" (30). In beginning where they do, they intend to emphasize their evangelical credentials, given that a high view of the Scriptures as God's word is a distinguishing mark of this movement. Of course, too many people approach the Bible for proof texts to justify positions they already hold. Thus we need to read it with great care so as to hear what God is genuinely telling his people in its pages. Here the co-authors offer us four assumptions to assist us: first, everyone is capable of reading the Bible and understanding it; second, we need to read the Bible with our forebears in the faith; third, we need to read with humility, recognizing that even unbelievers have wisdom to offer; and, fourth, we ought not to read the Bible as a handbook for doing practical politics, something that lies beyond its central purpose.
What Scripture can tell us is that human beings, both male and female, are made in God's image and are created for community, analogous to the relationship amongst the persons of the Trinity. From here our co-authors guide us through two relevant scripture texts: Matthew 22:15-21 ("Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's") and Romans 13:1-7 ("For the one in authority is God's servant for your good").
On this basis our co-authors proceed to build a case for Hopeful Realism, relying on St. Augustine as guide. The 5th-century Bishop of Hippo points us to something called the natural law, "a set of stable, morally obliging norms for human action, grounded in a common human nature" (48). Our nature directs us to certain given ends that make for human flourishing and away from those that detract from that flourishing. Natural law offers moral guidance obliging for all human beings and in principle accessible to everyone, irrespective of their basic religious convictions.
Because natural law is historically associated with Roman Catholic philosophy and social teachings, our co-authors undertake to make the case for an evangelical natural law, which points them once again to Scripture. The relevant texts are Psalm 19 ("The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands") and Romans 1-2 ("the requirements of the law are written on their hearts"). Although our knowledge of the moral order is "twilight knowledge," as Augustine expressed it, it is genuine knowledge all the same, rendering us without excuse in our actions. "Hopeful Realism relies on the intelligibility of the created order, that God has rendered it accessible to human understanding" (59).
From here our co-authors unpack the political principles implied by Hopeful Realism. These are four in number. First, the common good and civic friendship as norms for life together in a diverse polity characterized by individuals and communities with distinct and sometimes conflicting interests. Second, confessional pluralism and religious liberty as ineradicable realities characterizing the ordinary polity. Third, restraint and liberty as limitations on the activities of government in recognition of the sinful tendencies of those wielding power. And, fourth, democracy and decentralization, implying that the most significant decisions affecting our communities should be those closest to the communities themselves and not promulgated from a remote imperial centre.
Of course, political ideas are helpful to the extent that they can be put into practice in the real world. The remainder of the book is devoted to the practical implications of Hopeful Realism. Hopeful Realism does not offer a ready answer to the thorniest of political dilemmas, but it can enable us to identify the goods we seek and possible means to achieve them in our diverse polities. Application of Hopeful Realism consists of three steps: first, identifying physical, rational, volitional, and relational goods and their relationship to human flourishing; second, surveying the various options that would balance and maximize the goods we've discerned in the first step; and, third, exercising prudence as we relate means to ends.
In the second half of the book, our co-authors apply the principles of Hopeful Realism to economics; marriage, sex, and family; coercion, violence, and war; and finally religious liberty. Each of these four subject matters requires considerable wisdom by which we might balance the various goods that sometimes come into conflict in the real world. For example, we might agree that a maximal degree of religious freedom is worth protecting, but what of a religion mandating the use of hallucinogenic drugs to induce an ecstatic spiritual state? What of a religion that requires human sacrifice? The co-authors mention the latter in passing, but I highlight it here because, in one way or another, the secular ideologies that have marred the political landscape of the past century or so have left massive numbers of human casualties in their wake. Yet we obviously tolerate these ideologies in our empirical political communities.
My overall assessment of Hopeful Realism is that it offers an excellent guide to making and assessing political decisions in a less than perfect world. It avoids the opposite perils of utopianism and pessimism while helping us to clarify the relevant norms applicable to our shared life in the public square. I especially appreciated our co-authors' treatment of marriage and sexuality, including the distinction they draw between a companionship model and a traditional (I would prefer institutional) model of marriage. Seeing marriage's institutional character frees us from the contemporary tendency to collapse marriage into one more variety of friendship from which it differs only in intensity rather than in kind.
While I deeply appreciate this book, I have two reservations about our co-authors' general approach. I understand, of course, that beginning with the Bible helps to solidify their evangelical credentials. However, I think it would make better sense to begin with creation. Or, if we employ such terms as general and special revelation, I believe we would have to admit the priority of general over special revelation. We are embedded in God's world and in the order by which he upholds it. Even before we are capable of reading—whether Scripture or anything else—we are inescapably subject to an array of interconnected laws and norms given by God for our good. These include the laws of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, which operate apart from our wills, but also social, economic, aesthetic, legal, moral, and religious norms, which require an active response from us to effect.
From our earliest moments, we are walking along the paths that God has put before us. But due to the effects of sin and its distorting impact on our understanding, we require guidance and correction beyond what our intuitive grasp of God's world can offer. As Psalm 119:105 puts it, "your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." This is where "special" revelation plays so significant a role in our lives. As our co-authors correctly express it: "Scripture encourages us to pay attention to what we can learn about ourselves through observation and reasoning—guided and corrected by Scripture as a lens" (227). The lens metaphor is used by Calvin to describe Scripture's role in clarifying our vision.
My second reservation may come as something of a surprise after what I've just said about creation. Yet I wonder whether the term natural law is the best one to use to describe what our co-authors are getting at. It is difficult to extricate the term from a larger history in which Plato, the Stoics, and the scholastic theologians and philosophers play a formative role. I have recorded my own reservations about natural law in my second book, We Answer to Another (123-131), so I won't repeat here what I wrote there.
However, a couple of observations are in order. First, the use of nature and natural may tend to obscure the distinction between laws that operate irrespective of our response and norms that require our response to give them effect. In popular parlance, nature is what we go off into the woods and mountains to enjoy, not what we encounter in Paris or Chicago or the university classroom. The natural sciences include physics, chemistry, and biology, and not political science, economics, or psychology. Obviously this is not what natural lawyers have in mind when they use the term nature. Second, natural law has been historically identified with a philosophical anthropology that sees humanity as reductively rational. Yet our logical capacities are only one element of what it means to be fully human. I myself identify the image of God in which we are created, not with the "rational soul" (Thomas Aquinas) of the natural lawyers, but with a grant of authority resident in a diversity of offices we exercise as we live out our callings within God's world.
Apart from these reservations, I am pleased to recommend a close reading of this important book, whose message could help to rectify the scandal of the evangelical political mind in an age of polarization in North America and elsewhere.
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