Note: From Mortal Goods (Baker 2024). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
I never had a clear desire to write this book until I made an effort, a couple of years ago, to write a letter to my two adult children and son-in-law about the kind of life I wished for them and prayed that they might have. I tried to write it bearing in mind things I had learned, often at great cost but also with much joy, about my own life. I was getting older; I had been ill; COVID was upon us. I wanted to share my faith, certainly, but not in an immediate way. I was more interested in communicating a sense of what makes life valuable.
We Serve God by Giving Back Our Goods to His Vocation
I actually wrote the letter and sent it to them. The letter speaks of several elements that go into what I consider to be “the good life,” one that I would want for them: our particular, embodied being as women and men; our life in families and as families; our toil to live and sustain this; our life with neighbors; our friendships; our suffering and our joy. Only then, the church. All these are “goods” – the goods that are part and parcel of mortal life, the life God has given us and that, in a sense, must be who we are if we are not to be God. Tending these goods is our vocation, our “service” or “offering” to God – avodat Hashem – who is the giver of these goods.
The letter was fine, sort of. Perhaps a bit deflating: That’s all?, one might have responded. Just our bodies, families, work, friendships, sorrows and delights? Then you die? I realized that the letter needed some cultural context, as it were. I’m not sure I ever did a great job teaching my children about these goods as truly good, the good and the goods that go into our service of God, our creator. What has kept me from doing so? How do our environments in our day and place conspire to obscure this reality of meaning and purpose and instead give us other meanings and purposes that have so sapped especially younger people’s hopes today?
The present volume is meant to reflect on the political landscape in which the Good Life, in Christian terms, can be more or less helpfully pursued. As a result, this book is about how Christians might more faithfully and realistically imagine their political vocation, though “political” will turn out to embody no more than the conditions necessary for a father to write a letter to his children. Thus, the book is about earth, not heaven. It does not treat, except in a passing way, the resurrection, eternal life or the beatific vision. Neither, as we will see, does it treat grand political theories and civic landscapes. Earth is the space where politics is done, but it is an earth inhabited by people who struggle simply to live a few years and to live in a way that honors these years as God’s gifts, nothing more. I believe we need to reimagine and restrain the grand political hopes that churn up the soil of our lives and to think more modestly, more rootedly, within that soil’s own ground.
Earth and Heaven: We Must Affirm, But Should Not Parse, Their Connection
To be sure, the Christian tradition rightly connects earth with heaven in an essential way, especially when it comes to politics. The connection is frequently given in the form of a conditional. At its simplest, perhaps most simplistic, it goes like this: If you or I, or we, do this here on earth, then the shape of our existence in heaven will be that. The condition is usually, in fact, given in the form of an imperative: You or I, or we, must do this so that in heaven that might be the case. Both the conditional and the imperative mimic much secular political thinking – if, then; we must, so that – which is based on calculations, instrumentalities, predictions, probabilities. That the paradigm is held in common between the church and the enemies of the church should perhaps make us suspicious of the paradigm itself.
For myself, I actually do hold to the paradigm after a fashion, with its connections, condition and imperatives alike. But I find them so obscure in their details, so complex and difficult, that the application of the paradigm to calculations, instrumentalities, predictions and probabilities seems useless. Indeed, throw into the paradigm’s parts the reality of human sin, divine judgment, forgiveness, grace and the glory of the cross and thus of a certain kind of human suffering, and it seems clear that the whole connection between earth and heaven can only be affirmed, never parsed. If anything, we should resist seeing earthly politics and heavenly reward as bound to a common paradigm, precisely because the former is bound to infect our understanding of the latter, while in fact it is the latter that must inform the former. Let heaven push back upon the earth with its own energies; and let the earth be our concern, though with the hope of heaven’s power. Even this order has its problems, however: it can either turn into another version of striving and an instrumental version of the first set of conditionals and imperatives (if or since heaven is this, then you must do that on earth); or it turns the earth into some evanescent shadow of heaven (or of “the future” in some modern theological euphemisms). So perhaps what is best to say is this: let the earth be simply the earth, as created by the Lord God Almighty, King of the Universe, whom neither heaven nor earth can contain (I Kings 8:27).
Chastened and Reoriented Political Commitments
The argument of this volume is simple enough. If “politics,” in a general way, refers to the deliberate judgments and decisions ordering our corporate existence, then our Christian calling is to limit our politics to the boundaries of our actual created lives and to the goods that stake out these limits: our births, our parents, our siblings, our families, our growing, our brief persistence in life, our raising of children, our relations, our decline, our deaths. These mark the goods of our lives along with the acts that sustain these goods, like toil and joy, suffering, prayer and giving thanks. Christian politics is aimed at no more and no less than the tending of these “mortal goods.” That is the argument, and its exposition follows a cumulative reflection on some of the bits and pieces of human debate and experience that have clustered around and, more often than not, obscured the elements of this argument over time. The category of “mortal goods,” in fact, forms the main focus of the volume as a whole, and its definition will emerge only in the course of this reflection. Given that the theological value I will be giving the category of “mortal goods” is both enormous and counterintuitive precisely in theological terms, we can only get at what a “mortal good” is by dwelling with, rather than by formulating, its impinging character. On this score, Scripture will provide a constant, orienting tug at the discussion, on the presupposition that, without Scripture and its defining terms, we are in any case left with nothing but the centerless infinity of someone like Giordano Bruno’s universe, one in which human life is but a floating point in an endless sea of aimless and ultimately isolated entities. It is the God of earth and heaven who provides that center both by speaking it forth and by ordering its form through his Word.
From the perspective of political theory, my argument falls within the category of “political indifferentism” – that is, the notion that politics is mostly a matter “indifferent” to core human interests. In a broad way, my views cohere with some of the main arguments of the great twentieth-century French Protestant thinker Jacques Ellul, whose elaborated discussions of the “political illusion” were shaped by his pointed studies of the socially transformative power of contemporary technology and its “technocratic” application to large societies. The complicated challenge of organizing these increasingly intricate societies, Ellul argued, has involved a bureaucratization of life that has rendered the category of “democracy” an empty vessel and transferred decision-making to a range of other, often morally distorted and distorting, corporate forces. Ellul had little optimism that this situation was reversible, and he concluded that our dependence on political solutions to social and moral problems was, literally, an “illusion.” From a Christian perspective, in any case, Ellul argued that we should reorient our practical hopes more realistically and focus on matters more directly tied to the divine power that alone will properly transform the world, if mainly on an eschatological horizon. I would place far more emphasis than did Ellul on demography as divinely providential in its stark demands. Demography describes the life-constraints that God and human action place upon individuals and peoples, from which only secondarily flows the technological development Ellul worried over. Furthermore, divine (in the sense of created) demography relativizes the existential need for the eschatological shift Ellul, and many others, proposed. Still, most of Ellul’s political analyses are ones I would accept, along with what became, toward the end of his life, a fascinating form of biblical figural reading.
But an emphasis on divine demography significantly reorients my own reflections here with respect to positive political commitments, however chastened. I believe that our created frame ought properly to order our practical values in a substantive manner. Thus, the indifferentism I commend coheres with the traditional application of this category to certain strands of Christian thinking in particular, except in a crucial area that I will mention in a moment. Karl Marx was among the first to speak of Christians as political indifferentists. In a short essay of 1873 entitled simply “Political Indifferentism,” he attacked his near contemporary Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s practical political reticence with the charge of bourgeois class self-interest. Proudhon was a remarkable and influential social theorist. But for all his insight into the dynamics behind the oppression of the laboring classes, he counseled against activist revolution. Coercive violence, he argued, was counterproductive, upsetting the social applecart in ways that could only end up harming workers. In this worry, Marx notes, Proudhon was simply following an age-old “Christian” tendency to shy away from politics altogether and let rulers continue to oppress….
Early twentieth-century historians of political theory, such as Columbia University’s William Archibald Dunning – whose allegedly racist studies of American Reconstruction may or may not have been related to his larger historical survey – provided an influential outline of Christian political indifferentism. From Jesus through the early Middle Ages (and despite Constantine), as Dunning outlined the framework, Christians prioritized spiritual over earthly goods and power. Marx would have agreed, whatever his and Dunning’s different explanations. More recent scholarship has sought to upend this standard view almost completely, although in quite diverse ways. Most of these attempts, however, seem to reflect modern political concerns projected backward in a way that seems so obvious as to suggest the almost iron grip of academic and cultural ideology upon critical reasoning. There is, in fact, little to indicate that either the New Testament authors, in their variety, or early Christians held any driving political vision based on their faith; and where any political vision asserted itself, self-interest of one kind or another, or the longue durée of restructured social habits, brought on as much by demographic turbulence as by anything, is a sufficient explanation. The eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon, in his monumental The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89), is a far more convincing reader of this material than are many modern scholars, who seem overly eager to discover various contemporary modes of political action lurking in Jesus, Paul, Irenaeus, and Augustine. Such modes are not there.
Ephraim Radner, professor emeritus of historical theology, Wycliffe College
