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Political theory of the Bible

Political theory of the Bible.

I taught both ancient and modern political theory for forty years, and it is widely held among experts in my field that the Bible contains no political theory. Political theory is a Greek invention. Only when God withdraws from this world is there room for human politics (Walzer, p 202). I disagree. There’s a lot of politics in the Bible, and while politics in the Old Testament differs from the New, the difference is one of degree.

Covenant and righteousness

The idea of covenant is the central political concept in the Old Testament. “God was thought to be a covenant-making, covenant-restoring, and covenant-fulfilling being.” (Ramsey, p 258) Conversely, human righteousness means sticking to the covenant. Period.

Though covenant plays a more central role in the Old Testament, both Old and New Testaments teach the same lesson about righteousness.

Biased in favor of the helpless, “justice” means care for the poor, the orphans, the widows, and aliens resident in the land. Why? Because the Bible measures what is required of man against the perfect righteousness of an utterly faithful, savior-God. (Ramsey, p 278)

Unlike ancient Greek thought, which so influences our own, justice or righteousness (both translations of the same Greek term, dikaiosynē) is neither corrective nor distributive. Justice neither punishes the thief nor restores what has been taken. Justice is redemptive, with a special bias in favor of the poor. This is as true of the Old Testament as the New.

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Navigating this website

The posts on this website scroll down in reverse chronological order. The most recent post comes first, the oldest post (Why I pray) comes last.

In the top left margin of the page (the black part) is a list of posts by category. These are:

Psychology and God
On some books of the Bible, from ones I like to ones that puzzle or thrill me
About me and this site
Topics, from grace to forgiveness to atheism to a whole lot more
Theologians (click arrow to get full list; it’s pretty long)
Natural Law

Or you can just start reading. Each post can stand alone.

Grace is not free

Grace is not free.

The Christian concept of grace (charis, Χάρις) has puzzled me for years. Its definition seems a good place to begin. Still, I hate to start with a definition, so I’ll start with a story.

During a British conference on comparative religions, the participants were heatedly discussing what’s unique about Christianity. C. S. Lewis wandered into the room. “What’s the rumpus about?” he asked, and heard in reply that his colleagues were discussing Christianity’s unique contribution among world religions. Lewis responded, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.” (Yancy, p 45) *

It’s a good point, but not strictly true. Hindus and Muslims believe in Grace, understood as God reaching out to humanity with love. Jews believe in chen (חֵן), a version of grace. Nevertheless, it is Christianity that has developed the concept most fully.

The standard definition

In Christianity, grace is the love and mercy given to us by God as a free gift. It is nothing we have earned.

Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become . . . partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life. (Catechism of the Catholic Church)

This definition leads some to see grace as part of a faith over works teaching. It leads others to think that if grace is free then it must be easy. Both conclusions are wrong. Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls this “cheap grace.”

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Does natural law exist? What is it?

Natural law isn’t something talked about very much these days, except in Catholic theology, which has kept the teaching alive. In this post I write about Saint Thomas Aquinas, the founder of modern natural law theory. By the way, Aquinas is often just called Thomas, so when I refer to Thomas I’m not being overly familiar.

Not only is natural law not talked about these days, but it runs against the cultural current of the age: that you can’t judge other people’s values. You can’t judge because, for many people, no culture is intrinsically better than another. The same goes for values. I taught natural law to undergraduates for several years, and I’m sure this affects my view of the cultural current. The post that reflects on my teaching experience is on this site.

Natural law doesn’t accept this relativity. Some things are good for all people, and other things are bad for all people. Not just good or bad just for others, but for yourself.

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Atheism or God as other

Atheism or God as other. My original idea for this post was to review a book defending atheism and promoting humanism. As I said in a previous post, on some days I think I’m an agnostic, and I’m open to a good argument against theism.

The book I chose, after looking at several, is The God Argument, by A. C. Grayling. It is so bad it’s hardly worth reviewing. Still, I’ll briefly summarize it before going on to explain the position shared by a number of theologians: that God is completely other. This isn’t the term used by most theologians, but I think it captures their position.

The reason the “God is other” argument is important is because most critics of religion criticize a version of Biblical literalism, showing almost no awareness of theology.

Grayling,The God Argument

The justifications offered by religious people for their beliefs very often turn out to be . . . rationalisations for something that is in its deepest depths is non-rational. (p 4)

Well of course religious people don’t base their arguments on reason; they base their arguments on faith. If you don’t understand this, then you don’t understand religion. Elsewhere Graying argues that religion hasn’t “passed the test of reason.” (pp 49-50) But of course that’s the wrong test.

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Does religion matter anymore?

Why does religion matter? Should we even take it seriously? The modern scientific worldview doesn’t, so why should we?

Huston Smith’s Why Religion Matters is not a defense of Christianity. It is a defense of the very idea of religion, which he defines as a belief in transcendence: that there is something beyond this material world, and it matters whether you let this other world into your life.

It’s a good book, but Smith gets off to a bad start when he argues for what he calls the traditional worldview (this world is not all there is) by saying that “the finitude of mundane existence cannot satisfy the human heart completely.” (p 3) All this shows is that we are needy creatures who want more than there is. The human desire for transcendence doesn’t prove that something beyond the material world exists, but only that we wish it so.

Myth and truth

Smith gets serious when he argues that belief in the traditional, non-scientific worldview, in which we experience this world, as well as another that transcends it, leads to a better life. In other words, we fulfill our human nature most fully when we recognize that while the traditional religious stories are myths, the truth beyond words that these myths express allows us to feel at home in the world. We can feel that we belong here. The alternative view, that each of us is but a tiny bit of matter in an endless universe, is not only hard to bear. It makes life less interesting, exciting, and fulfilling. We are creatures of narrative, and telling stories (myths) is how we make ourselves at home. The God myth (my term, not his) is a much better story than the story than this is all there is.

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Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A fine but flawed book

Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A fine but flawed book.

A recent (2018) book by Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?, has garnered great reviews. It’s a brave book, telling the story of the death of her six-year-old son from a long illness, and then her husband in a hiking accident, both in the space of about a year. It’s been almost thirty years since these tragedies, and the reader gets the sense that it took her this long to tell the story. Or rather, to weave her story of loss together with the place of religion in her life, and our collective lives.

I admire the book, but I have a problem with it. She seems unaware that people who are not well-off and famous might have a different experience of loss. She aims to be realistic about the politics of religious belief, but perhaps there is also a politics of loss, or better a political economy of loss. About this she says not a word.

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Basics of Bonhoeffer

Basics of Bonhoeffer. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not a systematic thinker, and I’ve had difficulty finding the themes that connect his thought. One problem is that his early writings, such as The Cost of Discipleship, differ from his latter writings, especially his Letters and Papers from Prison, written in the two years between his arrest and murder by the Gestapo when his link to the plot to assassinate Hitler was uncovered.

I’ve focused on his Letters, which ask how a Christian is to live in a world that barely pretends to believe in God, a question that has become more pressing in recent years, at least in the Western world. I believe these themes summarize the thought of the mature Bonhoeffer, who died at the age of 39. To speak of the “mature Bonhoeffer” who died so young might sound silly, but by then he had been a mature thinker for years.

An earlier post addresses The Cost of Discipleship; another post addresses his “religionless Christianity.”

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