Eighteenth Century Christian Political Philosophy: Without a Sage
Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong.[1]
These, among others, are Paul’s words to a group of Christians in Rome. They are probably the most relevant to political theory. This passage might strike those familiar with Rome as hard to believe.[2] After all, Pilate executed Jesus under the authority of the emperor Tiberius. Similarly, it seems that the congregation would know that Paul was imprisoned by the state.[3] Surely, the readers would wonder what Paul means here. This confusion about Romans, which is the focus of this essay, is found also in 18th century Christian sermonizers. Specifically, a survey of election sermons from America’s founding era shows that the clergy struggled to interpret Paul. This is true, despite their general agreement that government must be limited to protecting the happiness, liberty, and property of its subjects. This general interest of this essay is to canvas major lines of interpretation found amongst these sermonizers. The narrower interest is in showing that our sermonizers do not employ Jesus as a sage. Instead, they rely on Locke’s view that reason is the voice of God when they need to interpret Paul.[4]
The sage, Juliana Annas tells us, is “the ideally virtuous person.”[5] Such a person is crucial to moral development, especially in virtue ethics. The sage is someone whom, in our moral development, we should aim to be more like. Annas refers to this as an aspirational element of the sage. Socrates seems to be the sage for the Stoics, for example. Epictetus advises that “Socrates became perfect, improving himself by everything, following reason alone. And though you are not yet a Socrates, you ought, however, to live as one seeking to be a Socrates.”[6] I will suggest that the sage seems ideally situation, at least within the Christian tradition, as a guide to hermeneutics.
While Annas laments the lack of the sage in contemporary moral thought, one would surely expect to find the sage in Christian political theorizing. Whatever one thinks the proper theory of political legitimacy is, a Christian would think that one should act like Jesus. This model of how one ought to behave would serve to motivate and flesh out a theory of a Christian’s obligations toward the state. Jesus’ behavior would serve as a model of what one should do when governed – especially when governed by an oppressive and persecutory regime. In the American south, where I live, t-shirts and bumper stickers bear the question, “What would Jesus do?”
This is not surprising. After all, there are many passages in the New Testament that exhort Christians to emulate Jesus. 1 John 2:6 tells us that “Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which (Jesus) walked.” Paul repeatedly reminds his Christian audience to “conform to the image of” Jesus.[7] And, in Philippines 2: 5-9:
Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, as He already existed in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself by taking the form of a bond-servant and being born in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death: death on a cross.
Paul then urges his audience to “Do all things without complaining or arguments; so that you will prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, children of God.[8] He urges them to do what Jesus did.
Annas notes that there is a challenge that those with the sage face. One must figure out which sage is right.[9] Many traditions have decidedly different images of the sage. These sages are not implausibly viewed as sages. So, the task is difficult. But at least insofar as one wonders which individual to model, there is a ready answer for Christians: Jesus.
I do not mean to trivialize the historical question of how Jesus behaved. Jesus is treated by some Christians as exemplifying a life of pacifism. The Anabaptists, Quakers, Amish, and Mennonites generally take Jesus to exemplify such a life.[10] At the other end of the spectrum, the devout Christian and scholar of early Christianity Dale Martin argues that Jesus was arrested and executed for leading an armed insurrection.[11] Both positions face difficulties. Jesus seems to have turned over the tables of people working relatively peacefully.[12] This does not seem like something a pacifist would do. Martin claims that it is natural to assume that more than two of Jesus’ followers were armed, given that we know that at least two were. It is far from obvious that this inference is natural, let alone correct. Whatever the case, there are sundry positions in between Jesus the pacifist and Jesus the aggressive seditionist. Fortunately for this discussion, there is no need to figure out exactly what Jesus was like. What matters is that nearly all Christian denominations have an image of how Jesus lived. The point, then, is just that whatever one believes Jesus did, it seems like a Christian should take those actions to represent the way Christians ought to behave.
Now, if one has a view of how Jesus behaved and one believes that one should emulate Jesus, one would question the very need for a separate political theory. There is no obvious reason not to base one’s view of political legitimacy on what Jesus did and would do. Indeed, this is what Leo Tolstoy does, and he is not among our sermonizers.[13]
Jesus lived a particular kind of life under the rule of a government antithetical to his moral and religious beliefs. He was also executed by this government. Surely this example could help us determine how a Christian should behave under any kind of government. Jeremiah Atwater makes this point.
The example of the Jewish nation is useful for our contemplation. Our land, like theirs, was originally settled for the purposes of religion…The uneasiness and discontent which they manifested, God severely punished…It cannot be denied, that in our own country, there are some things which bear very evident marks of the displeasure of the Almighty.[14]
One might expect Atwater to go on and argue that we ought to emulate Jesus, given the kindship he draws between America and Judea. But he does not. He instead argues that we should be grateful that we have a “good government and virtuous rulers,” whatever other problems we have.[15]
The practice of ignoring the life of Jesus to help interpret Paul is ubiquitous among our sermonizers. I do not mean to suggest that Paul is easy to interpret. Interpretations of Paul are notoriously varied. This is in part because Paul’s writings are not obviously consistent. Moreover, his writing style invites a multitude of interpretations. As mentioned, part of the motivation to interpret Paul is simply that the state treated Jesus and Paul badly. Paul’s prohibition on rebelling against the government rests on a claim that is dubious. Thus, he must not mean quite what he says, so it seems to our sermonizers. That is one reason how some justify engaging in hermeneutics.
Here is another. Simeon Howard observes that a great deal of the New Testament requires interpretation. He cites Jesus’s injunction to “resist not evil – love your enemies, do good to them that hate you” and Paul’s requirement that Christians “recompence to no man evil for evil. Avenge not yourselves.” Yet Howard engages in some hermeneutics to get around taking these and the previous passages from Paul and Peter absolutely. He says that Jesus “seems to have had in view only small injuries, for such are those which he mentions in the following words.”[16]
Howard seeks to show that he is not alone in his willingness to engage in textual criticism to arrive at a proper understanding of the New Testament. He observes that no one takes most of the requirements from the Sermon on the Mount in an absolute manner. He observes that Jesus says to “give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow from thee, turn not thou away.”[17] But he says, “I believe that nobody ever supposed, not even honest Quakers, that these precepts were to be understood so literally, as to…obligate us to give to every idle fellow all that he may think fit to ask.”[18]
The Quakers are not represented in the sermons in question.[19] Their general approach to Paul is as follows. Paul’s words are to be taken literally. Christians should not rebel against the government. Indeed, Christians should be pacifists. So, even if Christians do not go to war even if the government conscripts them, they should not rebel. Instead, if Christians are punished, they should peacefully accept the punishment.[20] This is what Origen did in the third century.
This interpretation of Paul is roundly rejected – at least by being ignored – by the sermonizers in question. Perhaps Simeon Howard’s general line of thought marks the primary reason why this is so. But one further rationale for not taking Paul’s remark as absolute is that some – perhaps most – authors find such a reading deeply immoral. Samuel West writes that “a slavish submission to tyranny is a proof of a very sordid and base mind.”[21] Indeed, Daniel Shute goes so far as to say that God “must design the happiness of those creatures he calls out of nothing into existence; to suppose the contrary is inconsistent with the absolute perfection, and implies the worst of characters.”[22] Shute then takes the happiness of the members of the government to be the whole purpose of government authority. This moral argument seems attractive to most authors. It is common for them to adduce limitations on government from their view of natural law and taking Paul at his word is incompatible with those limitations. Thus, Paul’s position would be at odds with natural law, as the sermonizer see it.
The general thrust of the authors in question is that Paul’s remarks are sufficiently ambiguous or otherwise problematic to require an honest attempt to interpret them. Intriguingly, one means of getting around interpreting Paul is simply to ignore him. Timothy Stone never mentions Paul.[23] Indeed, he confines his remarks almost entirely to the Old Testament. Peres (Perez) Forbes mentions just one line from Paul but does nothing with it vis-à-vis interpretation.[24] But these are minority approaches. As far as most scholars in the 18th century were concerned, Paul wrote half of the New Testament. Even now, no single author is regarded by scholars as having contributed more to the New Testament than Paul. Thus, most authors, and certainly most Christian theorists, put Paul at the fore of New Testament political theorizing.
In this vein, Samuel West grants that Paul writes that Christians should obey the government, but he finds Paul’s epistle incomplete. West writes that “it is a matter of utmost importance to us all to be thoroughly acquainted with the nature and extent of our duty, that we may yield the obedience required.”[25] He thus sees it as necessary to investigate the “nature and design of civil government” to settle the extent of that obedience.[26]
Here, then, is the position of our sermonizers vis-à-vis Paul. Paul tells Christians their obligations to the government. As our clergymen see it, Paul’s remarks cannot be taken to be universal or absolute. They thus try to determine what Paul means. The route to doing this is universally seen by the writers as requiring an account of the natural origin of government. By this time, Locke has already supplied a powerful account of why individuals would give away some of their rights to a government. Thus, the sermonizers adopt it and use it to interpret Paul. The details of this process are outside the scope of the present discussion. Still, some crucial lines of argument are worth observing.
The first stems from the reasons people have for entering civil society and later submitting to the government. The rationale stems from three crucial features about human psychology. The first is that each human has a natural drive to pursue their own happiness. As mentioned above, Daniel Shute argues that God is obligated to intend for his creatures to be happy. The second is a love of liberty. The second claim identified by most of the authors is a drive to preserve one’s own liberty. John Tucker writes that “the great and wise author of our being, has so formed us, that the love of liberty is natural.”[27] This claim is not present in as much of an overt fashion as the previous two. Still, even when it is not present, the sermonizers clearly find liberty to be extremely important. Phillips Payson, despite not explicitly identifying the drive for liberty as fundamental, nonetheless identifies “civil liberty as the greatest of all human blessings.”[28] Finally, all have “an equal claim to liberty.”[29] This idea is motivated by the idea that people are naturally equal because they are “imbued with like faculties and propensities.”[30] Now, Abraham Williams adds to this the claim that all are “descended to a common parent.”[31] While the former notion is ubiquitous in the sermons in question, the latter is not.
Here, some of the authors aim to determine the purpose of government. Then, they generally seem to argue that for any government, “tolerably answering to the good ends of it… [citizens] ought quietly to [submit] to it.”[32] This is intriguing on at least two levels. First, it is an attempt to make sense of Paul’s claim that “the one in authority is God’s servant for your good.”[33] Our good is happiness and liberty. When the government preserves those well enough, we ought to submit to it. That is the reading that many of the authors seem to offer.
Second, this general line is at odds with what Locke and many other sermonizers say about the proper origin of political authority. Most writes, including Williams, hold that governmental authority comes from consent of the governed. Here are just a few examples:
Abraham Williams: The general idea of a civil society or government is persons united by agreement for mutual defense and convenience in this world.[34]
John Tucker: The fundamental laws, which are the basis of government…can be no other…than what are mutually agreed upon and consented to.[35]
Gad Hitchcock: In… government, rulers have their distinct powers assigned to them by the people, who are the only source of civil authority on earth.[36]
The standard way to get around the problem that almost no government has ever existed by such consent is to appeal to tacit consent. One of the reasons that Locke, for example, introduces the doctrine of tacit consent to allow him to claim that obedience is owed to William and Mary.[37] Yet, one finds no whiff of the doctrine of tacit consent in most of the election sermons during the founding era. Surely, though, our sermonizers could not claim that Paul endorses the doctrine of explicit consent. Many of the Jews to whom Paul writes did not consent to be ruled by Rome. Rome conquered its way through the Middle East. So, the part about consent must be part of ideal theory for the sermonizers. Then, if governments get close enough to what people would consent to, those governments ought to be submitted to. This adds meat to Paul’s limited remarks. However, Paul says that God establishes governments. He does not say that citizens establish them. What is to be done about this?
The most direct attempt to make sense of Paul in this vein is found in John Tucker. He specifically attempts to address Paul’s claim that “There is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained by God. Whoever therefore resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God.” Tucker writes that “Civil government is not, indeed, so from God as to be expressly appointed by him in his word.”[38] God did not say that there should be a government on the American continent, for example. However, “civil government is founded in the very nature of man, as a social being, and in the nature and constitution of things.”[39] So it is our human constitution or makeup that marks God’s ordination of governmental authority.
Now, it must be noted that this seems in tension with Paul’s remarks. “The powers that be” looks like a descriptive phrase; at the very least, it identifies the powers in existence in first century Rome. Still, many authors outside the sermonizers in question take Paul to have elements of natural law in his writing. The idea is that one could find a justification for delimiting the scope of government in our natural drives or passions.
Paul writes that “when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.”[40] In the 20th century, Heinrich Rommen takes the passage in question to show that Christianity “took [natural law theory] over at a very early date.”[41] Well before Rommen, Locke paraphrases Paul when he writes that “no one who commits a wicked action is acquitted in his own judgment. Thus, the sentence which anyone passes on himself testifies that there is a law of nature…This law, then, is not written, but innate, i.e., natural.”[42]
The idea is that there is a special sense in which God establishes governments on earth. He does so by giving humans a drive to enter political systems though. We then owe obedience to governments that perform their proper function tolerably well.
Some thinkers who press the natural passions to the state line draw attention to another portion of Paul’s remarks. “But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.”[43] Because of this, Jeremiah Atwater writes that “rulers are appointed for the punishment of evil doers, and for praise of those who do well.”[44] It is not fundamentally our desire for happiness and our more admirable passions that drive us to the state. It is instead our wicked nature that makes the state necessary. “Government may…be considered as having its origin, primarily, in the vices of men.”[45]
The point of this move is to identify the need for an account of what might make a person wicked. Atwater, and nearly all other sermonizers in question, hold that our wicked nature is such that we are “prone to violate the rights of others.”[46] The idea here, then, is to identify our rights and hold that the government’s job is to protect them. If the government does not do so sufficiently well, it may be resisted. Otherwise, people are to submit to the government.
The claim here is not that the natural drive line and punishment line are incompatible. Indeed, both Locke and many of the sermonizers he influences combine the two. Instead, I am only drawing attention to the various lines of argument offered for interpreting Paul in particular ways.
I have mentioned the idea that governments must perform their function tolerably well for individuals to be obliged to submit to them. Paul motivates this requirement. He writes, “Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”[47]
Again, this seems to invite us to think about the life of Jesus. Indeed, given the importance that Paul obviously places on Jesus, one would expect our sermonizers to read the life of Jesus into the text when it is ambiguous – and perhaps even when it is not. Yet, every time an interpretation of Paul is required, the sermons in question appeal to concerns outside the text of Paul and the life of Jesus. In fairness to the clergymen in question, they seem univocal in assenting to something like the proposition that “reason and revelation perfectly agree in pointing out the nature, end, and design of government.”[48] So, perhaps they feel free to appropriate Locke’s political theory because it seems both so eminently reasonable and compatible with their interpretations of revelation. But they do not employ Jesus as a sage in generating their readings.
NOTES:
[1] Rom. 13: 1-4.
[2] It is not at all obvious that the sermonizers in question were aware of the reasons for believing it, but some have argued that Romans contains interpolations. Kallas, J. “Romans xiii. 1–7: An Interpolation.” New Testament Studies, 11(4) (1965): 365-374.
[3] Rom. 16:7
[4] It might be impossible fully to square the life of Jesus with the writings of Paul. In articulating a view commonly held by historians, Bart Ehrman writes, “The apostle Paul’s views were different from those of the Ebionites…, of Matthew, and of Jesus himself.” Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions of the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York: Harper Collins, 2009 ), p. 238.
[5] “The Sage in Ancient Philosophy” Anthropine Sophia: volume in memory of Gabriele Giannantoni, , edited by F. Alesse and others (Naples, Bibliopolis 2008), p. 11.
[6] “The Internet Classics Archive”, Enchiridion trans. Elizabeth Carter. Accessed November 18th, 2022. http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html. §50.
[7] Rom. 8:29
[8] Phil. 2:14-15
[9] Annas (2008), 13.
[10] Bender, H. S. “The Pacifism of the Sixteenth Century Anabaptists.” Church History, 24(2) (1955): 119–131. See also, Leo Tolstoy’s “The Kingdom of God is Within You” available here: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/43302/pg43302-images.html
[11] Martin, D. B. “Jesus in Jerusalem: Armed and Not Dangerous.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 37(1), (2014): 3–24.
[12] Matthew 21:12-13; Mark 11:15-18.
[13] See note 4.
[14] Benjamin Atwater “A Sermon” In American Political Writing during the Founding Era 1760-1805 Vol. 2 . Ed. Charles S Hyuneman and Donald Lutz. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 1983), 1186.
[15] Atwater: 1186.
[16] Simeon Howard. “A Sermon Preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artilliery Company in Boston, 1773” In American Political Writing during the Founding Era 1760-1805 Vol. 1. Ed. Charles S Hyuneman and Donald Lutz. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 1983), 193.
[17] Howard: 193
[18] Howard: 194
[19] Benjamin Rush, a prominent Quaker, was certainly politically active at this time. In particular, he signed the Declaration of Independence and openly opposed slavery in the America. He just did not give an election sermon. Of course, the Quaker William Penn obviously founded the great state of Pennsylvania. Quakers were a large group in Pennsylvania in the 1800s. It is reported that at least some beyond Rush were very politically active in the 1800s. See Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution eds. John Bach McMaster & Frederick D. Stone (Liberty Fund: Indianapolis 2011), p. 520.
[20] For a discussion, see Jane Calvert “Political Obligation and Civil Dissent in Quaker Theological Thought” Quaker Religious Thought, (2006) pp. 67-79.
[21] Samuel West “On the Right to Rebel Against Governors, 1776” in Hyneman and Lutz vol. 1, p. 422.
[22] Daniel Shute “An Election Sermon, 1768” in Hyneman and Lutz vol. 1, p. 110.
[23] “Election Sermon, 1792” in Hyneman and Lutz vol. 2, p. 839-857.
[24] “An Election Sermon, 1795” in Hyneman and Lutz vol. 2, pp. 990 – 1013.
[25] West: 412
[26] West: 412
[27] “An Election Sermon, 1771” in Hyneman and Lutz vol. 1, p. 159.
[28] “A Sermon, 1778” in Hyneman and Lutz vol. 1, p. 524.
[29] Tucker: 162.
[30] “An Election Sermon, 1762” in Hyneman and Lutz vol. 1, p. 5
[31] Williams: 5
[32] Williams: 18
[33] Rom. 13:4
[34] Williams: 9
[35] Tucker: 162
[36] “An Election Sermon, 1774” in Hyman and Lutz vol. 1, p. 288.
[37] Cf. Eric Mack John Locke (Bloomsbury Academic: New York 2013), pp. 85-88.
[38] Tucker: 161
[39] Tucker: 161
[40] Rom. 2:15-16
[41] Heinrich A. Rommen The Natural Law: a Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 1998), p. 31.
[42] John Locke. “Essay on the Law of Nature”, in Locke: Political Essays. Ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 117.
[43] Rom. 13:4
[44] Atwater: 1171
[45] Atwater: 1171
[46] Atwater 1171
[47] Rom. 12:4-5. Paul says nearly the same thing in 1 Corinthians 12-13.
[48] West: 431. See also, Williams:11, and Howard: 202. Of course, Locke himself thinks something very much like this. Locke thinks that God can command both through reason and positive revelation. He writes, for example, that “Adam was created a perfect man, his body and mind in full possession of their strength and reason, and so was capable, from the first instant of his being to provide for his own support and preservation, and govern his actions according to the dictates of the law of reason which God had implanted in him.” John Locke Second Treatise of Civil Government. The Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7370/7370-h/7370-h.htm. Dec. 25th, 2001. §56.
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