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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53117992018-07-15T03:23:26.016-04:00Notes from a Byzantine-Rite CalvinistDavid Koyzishttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-65387461638205397162018-07-14T11:36:00.000-04:002018-07-14T11:36:00.206-04:00Canada's established religion

Since the adoption of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, the accepted narrative tells us that Canadians are better protected than they were under the statutory Bill of Rights (1960) and the centuries-old Common Law tradition. But are we really? In the wake of the Supreme Court of Canada's recent decision in the Trinity Western case we have reason for doubt.

Section 2 of the Charter claims to guarantee the fundamental freedoms of all Canadians, including "freedom of conscience and religion." However, section 1 also tells us that the Charter "guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society." Because this limiting clause is expressed in such vague language, it is up to the courts to decide which limits are reasonable and which not. However, the courts are under no obligation to admit that their criteria for doing so are rooted in an unstated religious worldview placing the individual at the centre of life.

Trinity Western University, an evangelical Christian post-secondary institution in British Columbia, attempted to establish a Christian law school but ran into difficulty when the law societies of Ontario and BC declined to accredit the institution. Why? Because its community covenant prohibits students from engaging in sexual activity outside of a biblical understanding of marriage. There once was a time when such a requirement would scarcely cause controversy, because the larger society understood the distinctive character of marriage as a unique and lifelong covenant between a man and a woman, capable in principle of bringing forth and nurturing the next generation. As such, marriage deserved protection as a matter of simple justice, because, without it, society as a whole would suffer.

Over the past half-century the advance of sexual individualism, pursued with religious fervour, has effectively downgraded marriage from the status of institution to a mere private contract between two persons to fulfil whatever ends they desire. The shift to contract is an integral component of the larger narrative that tells us that we are progressively liberating ourselves from the old customs and mores that once limited our options. This is a manifestation of what I have called the "choice-enhancement state," the latest stage in the ongoing development of liberalism.

This liberalism is by no means religiously neutral; it is based on a firm faith that the good of society is advanced by liberation from all sorts of constraints, including social, political, economic and even natural. The liberal faith is articulated as support for human rights. But these rights are now separated from the responsibilities that once gave them meaning. For example, freedom of speech, of the press and of assembly are fundamental to just governance in a democratic state. But now freedom is increasingly defined as the right to do as we please. We now have the apparent right to fulfil our desires irrespective of the standards of the variety of nonstate communities of which we are part.

In 1992 the U.S. Supreme Court declared that "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." This, of course, is incompatible with the ordinary demands of society and constitutes a revolutionary upending of all standards differing from the public law of the state. Canada's Supreme Court increasingly echoes this conception, holding that Trinity Western's community covenant is an oppressive imposition on individual choice.

Over the decades, the courts have used the Charter, less to protect Canadians from state overreach, and more to make it difficult for communities to uphold membership standards. While some think this progressive, it is actually a setback for public justice, which requires governments to weigh in the balance the interests of individuals and communities and in so doing refrain from imposing the parochial faith of liberal individualism on the larger society.

David T. Koyzis is author of the award-winning Political Visions and Illusions, which will be out in a revised edition early next year.David Koyzishttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-18376903388662698162018-07-13T18:41:00.000-04:002018-07-14T10:12:02.279-04:00Interview published in Brazil

I was recently interviewed by Guilherme Piton of Santo Antônio de Jesus, Bahia, Brazil, and he has posted the interview here: Fé Cristã e Política: uma pequena entrevista com David T. Koyzis. Here is the same interview in English. Piton's questions are in italics.

First, a brief presentation. Who is David T. Koyzis and how did he get involved with Christian faith, philosophy and politics?

I was born near Chicago and grew up in a Christian family that was politically aware. One of my earliest memories was of the assassination of President John Kennedy and of the huge impact that had on the American polity. As a young man I was fascinated by the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon. At virtually the same time, my paternal relatives in Cyprus became refugees after Turkey invaded the island state in 1974. All of these influenced me to study politics in a more focused way. When I was about nineteen I began reading Abraham Kuyper and his intellectual and spiritual heirs on Christianity and politics, and I was deeply impressed with their conviction that our faith has implications for public life. This conviction has animated my own work over the decades, including graduate studies and university teaching.

Secondly, how did the thesis of your book, Political Visions and Illusions, emerge?

The idea for the book came to me during my first year of teaching an introductory course on political ideologies. I was unable to find a book that did what I thought needed to be done in such a course, so eventually I wrote my own. Published originally in 2003, it is due to come out in a second edition early next year.

My thesis is that each of the contemporary political ideologies, including liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, democratism and socialism, is right about one thing, but they take that one thing and effectively make an idol of it. In the case of liberalism, the one thing is individual freedom, which is a genuine good. But as liberalism has developed over the centuries, individual freedom has come to squeeze out other legitimate considerations, including our obligations to the communities that have shaped us. Liberalism has attempted to make all such communities into mere voluntary associations, thereby masking the differences amongst marriage, family, state and church institution. No society can survive over the long term where such obligations are reduced to voluntary contract.

How do you see Christianity in the political spectrum? This includes the Christian's relationship with the state, militancy, and activities in the social environment. Can Christians position themselves on any spectrum? Is there a limit to that?

If you mean the left/right spectrum, then I don't think the Christian faith can be located along such a two-dimensional line. As Christians, our most basic confession is that our world belongs to God and not to us. We are merely stewards of the cosmos, responsible to the God who has created and redeemed us. This includes political life. We must recognize the irreducible complexity God has built into his creation, including human society. If we pursue only the rights of individuals, we risk neglecting the integrity of those communities that cannot be easily reduced to the products of an aggregation of individual wills. If we single-mindedly pursue the greatness of our nation, we are in danger of embracing a totalitarian policy ignoring the normative limits of the state and the integrity of nonstate institutions.

The Christian worldview is neither liberal, socialist nor nationalist. It recognizes what I have called the legitimate pluriformity of society, including the pluriformity of authorities to which we are subject and in which we are embedded.

Third: In Brazil, there has been a bias between right and left and a discovery of political and philosophical conservatism on the part of young people. We see Christians positioning themselves on both sides and fighting each other over the role of the church in politics, in supporting candidates and on the guidelines they advocate. How can we understand this question?

To begin let me indicate that I do not believe that the church as an institution should be endorsing political parties and candidates. This goes well beyond its divine calling, which is to preach the gospel faithfully, administer the sacraments, and to maintain discipline among its members. No one should ever harness the institutional church to a particular fallible political agenda.

On the other hand, the church as body of Christ must indeed be politically active, as it must participate in every other area of life. Yet even here we should avoid tying the cause of Jesus Christ to a secular ideology, which is a major reason for my writing my book.

Over the long term, it would be good if Christians could co-operate in establishing political movements or parties to pursue policies that would do public justice to individuals and the variety of communities of which they are part. In the short term, we may be forced to support those movements and parties we have reason to think will do the least damage. This is how we tend to vote in English-speaking democracies such as Canada, my current home. It's not an ideal situation, but the Christian life is often about trying to do the right thing when faced with less than happy choices.

Fourth: How can politics assist in the church's mission?

Well, I don't think I would phrase the question in this way. We shouldn't be relying on the state to facilitate the kingdom of God. Perhaps a better question is: What role does politics play in the church's mission? To this question I would respond by saying that if the mission of the church—the body of Christ—is as extensive as the whole creation, then it naturally includes political life.

Fifth: As stated in the third question, many young people have discovered philosophical and political conservatism here in Brazil. Especially in reaction to the leftist political vision that many scholars propagate since our redemocratization phase after the military period. At the same pace, these youngsters have also embraced the Reformed faith and are reading Abraham Kuyper, Francis Schaeffer and David Koyzis. What is your advice to these young people?

On one level I can understand the attraction of conservatism, which generally has no ambitions as such to remake society according to a single idea and to impose it on everyone. As a cautionary warning, conservatism has much to recommend it: If change is to come, it should come gradually and carefully. We should reject ideological visions that promise much and deliver little. We should respect history and refrain from pretending that we can somehow break with it.

On the other hand, conservatives often lack vision for a forward movement. Conservatives seem content to put the breaks on—to drag their feet and slow things down. But if the followers of other ideologies are moving us towards the abyss, conservatives can only delay the inevitable. As Christians we need a positive vision of justice with which to move into the future. Young people should be seeking to articulate and implements such a vision, while paying close attention to the writings and experiences of those who are older than they.

Sixth: What are your reading recommendations for the Christian who wants to understand the relationship between faith and politics?

I don't know everything that is available in your language. Of course, I would recommend my own book, Political Visions and Illusions. I hope that Vida Nova will see fit to translate the second edition into Portuguese. But there are many others. I have personally benefited from the writings of James W. Skillen, Bob Goudzwaard, Jonathan Chaplin and many others.

And lastly, when you want to go to Brazil and counsel the Brazilian church?

I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to your country two years ago and am greatly looking forward to returning soon. I am tremendously excited by what the Holy Spirit is doing in Brazil, and I would love to be a part of that in some way. I eagerly await the next invitation.David Koyzishttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-72611709700400106082018-07-04T13:59:00.001-04:002018-07-04T15:51:10.070-04:00The Glorious Revolution, American royalists and the War for Independence

One of the more fascinating books I've read recently is Eric Nelson's The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding. On this Independence Day it is worth recounting Nelson's argument, which differs somewhat from the conventional histories Americans are taught in their schools. The standard account has it that Americans disliked King George III and fought to free themselves from his tyranny. A surface reading of the Declaration of Independence supports this interpretation, as it charges the King with a list of offences, to wit: "repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States." In this reading, Americans are Whigs—heirs of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which unseated King James II and established parliamentary government in the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland.

But what if the Glorious Revolution inadvertently prepared the ground for revolt in the colonies nearly a century later? What if Americans were actually Tories and supporters of the king?

That's Nelson's thesis in this book. Recall that the original colonial charters in the early 17th century were granted directly by the Stuart monarchs without the intermediary of a parliament. Kings James I and Charles I had pretensions to absolute rule, antagonizing parliament and eventually leading to the outbreak of civil war in 1642. Charles was, of course, beheaded in 1649, but his son Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, to be succeeded by his brother James II in 1685. When the latter was overthrown three years later, the parliaments of the kingdoms effectively took control, setting the terms of royal succession. The parliaments of England and Scotland were consolidated in 1707 with the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain. Ireland retained its own parliament for nearly another century and remained in personal union with the new kingdom.

The stage was now set for the looming showdown with the colonies. Throughout the 18th century Parliament increased its control over the King's realms, including his American possessions. The advent of the German-speaking Hanoverian monarchs, the South Sea Bubble of 1720 and Parliament's increasing assertiveness worked to weaken the monarch and to transfer executive power to Robert Walpole, in effect the first prime minister. By the 1760s the ancient British constitution had changed to such an extent that the king was no longer taking the initiative, nor was he refusing assent to parliamentary bills submitted to him.

In the meantime, the American colonies had developed their own parliamentary bodies, beginning with Virginia's General Assembly, established in 1619. Though these assemblies were not elected by universal suffrage, the franchise was nevertheless fairly broad, reflecting widespread property ownership throughout the colonies. When the British Parliament attempted to exercise control over the colonies, especially in the wake of the Seven Years War, Americans objected, protesting their loyalty to the King and not to a parliament in which they had no representation. Their charters, they argued, were from the king, and it was the king's prerogative on which Parliament was encroaching. Right up until 1776, when Thomas Paine's anti-monarchist Common Sense was published and independence was declared, Americans were generally champions of the king over against Parliament. Their disappointment with George III had less to do with his vaunted tyrannical acts and more with his refusal—inability, really—to obstruct Parliament's unwarranted interference in colonial affairs.

Americans originally had no desire to abolish the monarchy. They saw their own polities having the same relationship to the king as Great Britain, Ireland and Hanover. George III was king in his own right of all of these realms, and the parliament of one of these had no proper authority over the others. Only when it became clear that the king would not defend their perceived interests did they decide to go it alone.

One of the striking features of Nelson's book is his exploration of the different theories of representation underpinning the respective positions of the colonies and Parliament. Despite the absence of delegates from the colonies, Parliament as a whole believed it was adequately representing the interests of Americans. On the other hand, Americans believed that Parliament's claim to represent them lacked credibility, because they had not explicitly authorized it to do so and its authority extended only over the Kingdom of Great Britain. For Americans, if protecting their own interests meant recovering an older account of royal authority, then so be it. Ironically, of course, the Americans' understanding of the separate status of the king's realms would return in the 20th century as the British Empire became the Commonwealth of Nations, ratified by the Statue of Westminster of 1931. A position that seemed outmoded by the 1780s would come to appear progressive a century and a half later.

Nelson adduces persuasive evidence in favour of his account. However, if he is right that Americans were championing the king's executive powers in the late 18th century, could there be similar evidence of Americans defending their own legislative bodies against the British Parliament? Might their professed royalism have been a cover for defending local parliamentary government? There may be another book waiting to be written.

In addition to this book, Eric Nelson is also the author of The Hebrew Republic, an intriguing account of the rising influence of the Hebrew Bible and recently recovered rabbinic literature on the development of western political thought and practice in the modern era.

A side note. I discovered nearly two decades ago that one of my apparent maternal ancestors, Captain Cornelius Howard, Sr. (c 1637-1680), my 9th great-grandfather, served in the Maryland colonial legislature in St. Mary's City. My wife and I visited the building that housed the assembly on our honeymoon. What Capt. Howard thought of the contest between king and parliament across the pond we do not know.David Koyzishttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-48752059673140673042018-06-18T10:08:00.000-04:002018-06-18T10:08:15.397-04:00Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem

For my first 12 years, the map with which I was familiar showed a small Israel, some of whose territory was precariously thin, caught between its hostile neighbours and the sea. This all changed in June 1967, when Israel, attacked by those neighbours, pushed them back and occupied the territories west of the Jordan River. For the first time in nearly 20 years, Jerusalem was no longer a divided city bisected by a tense no-man's-land. Israel had restored the unity of its capital city.

Yet to this day few countries recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, maintaining their embassies in the coastal city of Tel Aviv. But wait. Doesn't a country have the right to name its own capital city? Shouldn't other countries with which it enjoys diplomatic relations honour this right without question? Ordinarily this would be the case.

Yet few things are normal in the Middle East, especially where Israel and Palestine are concerned. My visit there in 1995 confirmed this for me. Tension hung constantly in the air, and military personnel armed with machine guns were ubiquitous. Moreover, that was at a time of optimism in the wake of the Oslo Accords.

When the fledgling United Nations Organization drafted a settlement for the British mandate of Palestine in 1947, the land was to be divided between Jews and Arabs, with Jerusalem given special international status. Tel Aviv was the principal city in the Jewish section, while Jerusalem was wholly within the Arab zone, though not part of it. This partition plan was never put into effect due to the war that broke out the following year.

Although 70 years have passed and Israel is now a permanent feature on the landscape, its very existence is nevertheless disputed in the Arab world. Israel has made peace with two of its neighbours, and even the Palestine Liberation Organization recognized Israel's right to exist in 1993. Nevertheless, such nonstate actors as Hezbollah and Hamas, the latter of which took over Gaza in 2007, have managed effectively to weaken, if not nullify, this recognition, thereby casting a long shadow over Israeli-Palestinian relations. Not surprisingly, Israel is reluctant to cede too much control over territories that could pose a threat to its own security. Palestinians would almost certainly have their own state by now if they had been better served by their leadership and if foreign powers, such as Iran, hadn't interfered to advance their own ambitions.

Of course Jerusalem is in fact Israel's capital. The Knesset meets in the western part of the city which has been in Israeli hands for nearly three-quarters of a century. Nevertheless, because Jerusalem's status is still disputed in much of the region, virtually no other country is willing to risk inflaming the situation by relocating its embassy there. Back in 1979, Joe Clark's short-lived government promised to move Canada's embassy to Jerusalem but was defeated before it could do so.

But now Donald Trump has done what others had only talked about: last month the United States opened its embassy in a city holy to three religions, followed by an almost immediate outbreak of violence in Gaza. Was this a wise move? Probably not. Even if it is right over the long term – assuming Jerusalem's status can eventually be agreed on by all actors in the region – in the short term the administration had to know that its action would facilitate bloodshed, in addition to establishing a tempting future target for terrorists.

The psalmist's injunction to pray for the peace of Jerusalem (Palm 122:6) has never been more relevant. Yet the monastic motto of ora et labora ("pray and work") is also pertinent. As we pray, let us do what we can to encourage our leaders to seek a just peace that would regularize the status of this ancient city. David Koyzishttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-10221059556807615722018-05-19T16:36:00.004-04:002018-05-19T16:37:33.286-04:00Humour vs mockery

Political life has always had its humorous side. Policy-making is, of course, serious business, and it has a huge impact on large numbers of people. But in the midst of so many grave matters of war and peace, crime and punishment, we have always found ways to make light of difficult circumstances. After all, laughter is an all too human means of coping with our troubles. Some of this humour amounts to gentle ribbing of otherwise hard-working people whose offices we respect. But some humour is destructive, effectively coarsening the larger conversation and contributing to a culture contemptuous of duly constituted authority.

The German-born Thomas Nast (1840-1902) was the first of a long line of political cartoonists in the United States, famously originating the Republican Party's elephant and popularizing the Democratic Party's donkey. An ardent abolitionist and supporter of the Union during the American Civil War, Nast's cartoons mercilessly lampooned the racism of the secessionists. He hated white supremacy and turned his pen against those who sought to exclude Chinese immigration into the U.S. Nast was succeeded by other political cartoonists, whose caricatures of prominent political leaders simultaneously amused the public and irritated the powerful.

Perhaps no humourist was more beloved by Americans than Will Rogers (1879-1935), who once observed that "even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." Unlike Nast, Rogers did not generally poke fun at specific people but found humour in the ordinary business of politics: "Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for." "It's easy being a humorist when you've got the whole government working for you." "The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't get any worse every time Congress meets." When Rogers died in a plane crash in the midst of the Great Depression, Americans lost a treasured icon whose wit had immeasurably lightened the burdens of living through tough times.

Here in Canada we have our own political humourists. I was privileged to see the Royal Canadian Air Farce in person a quarter of a century ago. Who can forget the late Roger Abbott's impression of Jean Chrétien's heavily accented English? Or Luba Goy's rendition of a shrieking Sheila Copps? More recently we have been treated to Rick Mercer's rants and his lampooning of our southern neighbours. Canadian humour is famously self-deprecating, but some of it definitely is not.

How do we know when the line has been crossed? When does humour become mere mockery? I've been thinking of this a lot recently, especially with respect to the current occupant of the White House. Every new president is a gift to the cartoonists and comedians, especially one with exaggerated physical features or odd mannerisms. I've watched Alec Baldwin do Donald Trump and Stephen Colbert poke fun at the foibles of this most unlikely of presidents. And, yes, I find myself laughing, but I do so uneasily. As a political scientist I am aware of the importance of a culture of respect for authority and the rule of law. Where this is lacking, political institutions cannot withstand the ordinary storms that beset them, especially when the public is sharply divided.

Trump is easy to make fun of – more than virtually any of his predecessors. But does all this fun amount to mere mockery? Does it strengthen or weaken American political institutions? It's difficult not to laugh when the jokes are made, but I must confess to wondering whether, in so doing, we are not in some fashion co-operating with forces that might erode constitutional democracy over the long term. And that's no joke.

Principalities & Powers, Christian Courier, 14 May 2018David Koyzishttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-73348061932740185242018-05-15T10:54:00.003-04:002018-05-15T13:14:01.790-04:00European integration and political ideologies

Bad Liebenzell

Last month I was privileged to spend time in Germany at the Internationale Hochschule Liebenzell (IHL) in Bad Liebenzell, a beautiful village nestled in the Black Forest. The IHL is a ministry of the Liebenzell Mission, which was founded in 1899 and has its roots in a late nineteenth-century revival in Germany. It has branches in Canada, the Northern Mariana Islands, and six other countries around the world. The Mission is active in church-planting, Bible translation, education, evangelism, children and youth ministry, medical care, air service, substance addiction therapies, ministry to immigrants and community development in twenty-five countries. Remarkably, it also has monastic-like brotherhoods and sisterhoods, a fellowship of deaconesses, a retreat centre and a literature distribution ministry. It appears to be independent of any denomination, yet it does plant church congregations.

The thesis of my talk was that Europe's future may never be free of the ideological illusions that have struggled for supremacy since 1789, but that recovering the principle of subsidiarity, as embodied in the Maastricht Treaty, would serve to fragment their influence. Here is the relevant article, 3b, of the Treaty:

In areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence, the Community shall take action, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, only if and in so far as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member states and can therefore, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better achieved by the Community. Any action by the Community shall not go beyond what is necessary to achieve the objectives of this Treaty.

Subsidiarity is rooted in the Catholic social teachings that the various popes, beginning with Leo XIII, have articulated. These would come to have a profound influence on the architects of the European Union, including Robert Schuman (1886-1963), Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967) and Alcide de Gasperi (1881-1954), who were devout Catholics. Subsidiarity generally favours decentralization of shared endeavours in a plural society. If the current EU leadership in Brussels have largely forgotten these roots, it is all the more reason for ordinary Europeans to recall them to these roots, either directly through the European Parliament or through their own governments.

If we take subsidiarity seriously, Europe's future could look more like the Holy Roman Empire than Canadian or American federalism, with the member states relating to Brussels in different ways. In other words, it would favour, not symmetrical, but asymmetrical federalism, with which we have some experience in Canada due to the special place of Québec in Confederation. A future European Union could consist of a more tightly integrated core of the original six member states, with other member states opting out of some of its integrating features, including the euro zone and the Schengen Agreement. These would retain greater autonomy vis-à-vis Brussels, keeping their own currencies and central banks, along with other markers of independent nationhood. Such a two- or three-speed Europe could make even Brexit unnecessary.

This in itself would not liberate Europe from the distorting effects of the ideological illusions that have secularized the continent over the past three centuries. Given their basic religious character, ideologies do not die that easily, and even when they appear to do so, they can easily return in another form. Yet such decentralization might serve to weaken them by geographically limiting their influence, and this may be the best that we can hope for in the foreseeable future. But of greater significance is the possibility that decentralization could create sufficient room at the local levels for a dynamic Christian social witness to make its presence felt. The days of European Christendom are long gone, with few vestiges remaining. However, in a Europe that eschews imperial pretensions and glories in the diversity of its regions, there may be fertile ground for the gospel to spread and to take root in the very communities that are closest to the people and matter most to them.

David Koyzishttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-58318203842492038012018-05-08T13:33:00.002-04:002018-05-08T13:33:38.451-04:00Political Visions and Illusions, second edition

The second edition of Political Visions and Illusions is due out early next year. In the meantime, the new cover can be seen at right.

The new edition will include a reworking of the chapters in the first, with the addition of discussion questions after each chapter. A key difference from the first edition is that the redemptive narratives underpinning the ideological visions will be brought more explicitly into the foreground. This theme was present in the first, but it will be more visible in the second, enhanced by a series of illustrations highlighting these stories.

Finally, recognizing that this book has been used profitably in theological seminaries, I have added "A Concluding Ecclesiological Postscript," in which I take up the question of the role of the institutional church—as opposed to the larger corpus Christi, or body of Christ—in addressing political life, with references to the Barmen Declaration (1934), Mit Brennender Sorge (1937) and the Belhar Confession (1986). A new foreword will be written by Richard J. Mouw, former president of Fuller Theological Seminary and author of many books, including He Shines in All That's Fair and Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction.

I will let everyone know when the book is published. Stay tuned.David Koyzishttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-92206176059561312332018-04-30T13:18:00.000-04:002018-04-30T13:18:59.584-04:00Check the box and take the cash: Trudeau and Canada's summer jobs program

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

Justin Trudeau's Liberal government is well over halfway through its statutory four-year mandate, and the prime minister continues to cause controversy by imposing his contestable interpretation of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The provocations began with his parliamentary caucus before the 2015 federal election, when he proclaimed that he would no longer permit pro-life candidates to stand for a seat under the Liberal label. This action produced a dilemma for pro-life Liberals, such as the Honourable John McKay, who had previously served under the convention that controversial moral issues, if raised in the House of Commons, would be settled by a free vote so as not to coerce members into violating their consciences. Trudeau, in effect, unilaterally changed this convention, making "reproductive freedom" for the first time a nonnegotiable element of the federal Liberal program.

In January of this year, the government announced that federal funding for the Canada Summer Jobs program—which subsidizes wages for small business, government entities, and nonprofits that employ young people who are full-time students—would be available only to groups that accept its reading of the Charter. At issue was the expectation that organizations applying for funding sign the attestation at the end of the application form, including these sentences:

Both the job and my organization's core mandate respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, colour, mental or physical disability or sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.

The government followed up by briefing the members of parliament on its reasons for implementing this new requirement:

The objective of the change is to prevent Government of Canada funding from flowing to organizations whose mandates or projects may not respect individual human rights, the values underlying the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and associated case law. . . . Additionally, these changes help prevent youth (as young as 15 years of age) from being exposed to employment within organizations that may promote positions that are contrary to the values enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and associated case law. This change helps to ensure that youth job opportunities funded by the Government of Canada take place in an environment that respects the rights of all Canadians.

Following protests from religious groups and the media, the federal government appeared to pull back on its requirement, with this clarification appearing on the relevant website:

[The phrase "core mandate" denotes] the primary activities undertaken by the organization that reflect the organization's ongoing services to the community. It is not the beliefs of the organization, and it is not the values of the organization but, rather, the primary activities undertaken by the organization in respect of this program.

Though some organizations were content to accept this semantic back-pedaling, others decided to forgo the funding for fear of compromising their missions. The government's response? It shouldn't be a big deal. Just check the box and take the cash.

The Charter is the most significant component of Canada's Constitution Act, 1982, which was engineered by the current prime minister's late father, Pierre Trudeau. Whereas the earlier Canadian Bill of Rights of 1960 had only a statutory basis and was thus effectively beyond the scope of judicial review, the new Charter was an entrenched constitutional document similar to that of the United States. Section 2 of the Charter claims to guarantee the following fundamental freedoms to all Canadians: "(a) freedom of conscience and religion; (b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; (c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and (d) freedom of association."

One need not be a lawyer or constitutional scholar to recognize that nowhere does the Charter describe abortion as a right, whereas it definitely guarantees religious freedom. Furthermore, whereas the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade (1973) that women have a constitutional right to obtain an abortion, Canada's comparable ruling, R v. Morgentaler (1988), though it invalidated the former section 251 of the Criminal Code, stopped short of declaring such a right. Thus the Liberal government's interpretation of the Charter is faulty on at least two points.

One generally assumes that constitutional bills of rights are needed primarily to limit the power of governments and to protect the legal space for those ordinary communal activities often grouped under the label of "civil society." These activities include, of course, the expression of political views and participation in debates over the issues of the day. To be sure, the Charter does not explicitly cover the disbursement of federal funds for various activities deemed to be in the public interest. Yet it is not unreasonable to expect that, given its guarantee of "freedom of conscience and religion," the government should be even-handed in its funding priorities, not singling out for support those groups that happen to agree with the ruling party's worldview. More to the point, the current government is using the Charter, not to reveal its own limits so as to work within them, but to limit citizens' freedom to differ from the government's debatable policy positions. This approach does not conform to the Charter "values" the government claims to uphold, and it certainly does not measure up to the standards of a healthy democratic polity.

Most practical politicians do their best to keep as many voters as possible on their side so as to stay in power. Deliberately alienating much of the electorate by supporting an obviously unjust policy is not exactly the way to accomplish this goal. Yet it is not unusual for those in the grip of a particular ideological vision to allow it to override such considerations. We can only hope that the prime minister will remove the disputed attestation, if not because it's the right thing to do, then at least because he craves re-election.David Koyzishttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-15103948516625772712018-04-13T16:07:00.000-04:002018-04-13T16:07:48.022-04:00Overlords and underdogs

Bishop Lesslie Newbigin

No one can read the Bible without recognizing that God is concerned for the plight of the oppressed. The first five books of the Bible tell the story of God delivering his people from oppression in Egypt. So central is this story for both Judaism and Christianity that it has been cited as prototype for God's deliverance of his people at several stages in the biblical narrative. Nevertheless, we need to be cautious in our use of oppression and liberation as political categories, because they can lead us astray.

Reformed theologians in particular have emphasized that the Bible is not simply a collection of pious ancient writings but a unified story of God's redemptive acts in history, culminating in our salvation in Jesus Christ.

As we read the Bible through this redemptive-historical lens, we will recognize that, yes, God hates people oppressing others but that the primary form of oppression from which he liberates us is that of our own sinful nature. Indeed, it is sin against God and neighbour that fuels every other form of oppression.

What exactly is oppression? An online dictionary tells us that it is "the state of being subject to unjust treatment or control." The Bible points to a number of evils that add up to oppression: to render perverted judgements (Ps. 82:1), to take unfair advantage of the widow and orphan (Isa. 1:17), to take what is not rightly yours (1 Kings 21), to tempt others to do wrong (Ps. 125:3), to kidnap and enslave others (Ex. 21:16), and even to express hate for someone else (Matt. 5:21-26).

Here is where things get tricky. The items that fall under the biblical rubric of oppression are also in effect prohibited in the Ten Commandments: You shall not steal, bear false witness, covet or murder. To oppress another is to deny her what she is due. In other words, given the universal reality of sin, there are no clear lines in the real world between oppressors and oppressed, contrary to the claims of so-called cultural Marxists in the universities and elsewhere.

As Bishop Lesslie Newbigin points out, "while oppression and injustice are undoubtedly an important part of the human scene, most people are in an ambivalent position, oppressors in some situations and oppressed in others." Though there is much to be said biblically for taking the side of the poor and the oppressed (e.g., Ps. 72:4, 13-14), we must recognize that the status of being oppressed does not exempt anyone from the all too human tendency to sin and to commit injustices against others. A key reason why the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians has proved so intractable is that both sides view themselves as victims and underdogs, blind to the possibility that they themselves might be guilty of oppressing others.

Yet as Newbigin observes, "Before the cross of Jesus there are no innocent parties. His cross is not for some and against others. It is the place where all are guilty and all are forgiven. The cross cannot be converted into the banner for a fight of some against others."

What does this mean politically? It means that we should definitely work to rectify oppressive circumstances, recognizing, of course, that ending all oppression outright is as utopian as an effort to stamp out sin in a fallen world. Furthermore, we should acknowledge that not every undesirable outcome constitutes oppression. Someone expressing disagreement with me, failing to approve my lifestyle, or simply not letting me have my own way, is not oppressing me. And, finally, we need to keep in mind that every one of us is both oppressor and oppressed, equally dependent on God for forgiveness of sin and salvation in Jesus Christ. David Koyzishttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-9181697003555894452018-01-29T08:07:00.002-05:002018-01-29T08:07:54.688-05:00Come & ƿatch ðis video pleaſeI þink ꝥ ðis is a great video & definitely ƿorþ ƿatchiŋ, þank you very much! Its æſthetic qualities are ſimilar to ðoſe of a Baȝ cantata. I truſt ðe creator ƿill keep up ðe good ƿork.

David Koyzishttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-45815421776566930902018-01-10T09:57:00.000-05:002018-01-10T09:57:02.539-05:00THE LAST TELEGRAM –(STOP)–

It always marked a turning point in those old movies from the '30s and '40s. Someone would receive a telegram, indicating that all was forgiven / someone had died / a couple had married / a ship had been lost at sea. In Alfred Hitchcock's 1941 classic, Shadow of a Doubt, Teresa Wright's family receives a telegram indicating that her Uncle Charlie would be paying them a surprise visit, little knowing the havoc he would unleash in their home and community.

On the last day of 2017, Belgium finally ended telegraph service, which had begun more than a century and a half earlier and was a fixture of daily life for so many people around the world. In so doing, it followed the earlier moves of Great Britain (1982), the United States (2006) and India (2013).

In 1837 the first electrical telegraph was developed separately by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in Great Britain and Samuel Morse in the United States. Although there were a number of means of communicating via the new medium, Morse Code attained such heights of popularity that the opening of an RKO Radio motion picture included the sound of Morse Code. Even now it is the rare person who does not know that an SOS distress signal consists of three dots, followed by three dashes, followed by three more dots.

By the early 1970s, when I was working for my father during the summers, I operated a telex machine, then the latest incarnation of telegraphy. Though my memories of this have faded with time, I recall typing text that would be translated into code on a length of paper tape, which I would then feed through the machine to transmit to the remote machine where it would be automatically translated back into text. During that terrible summer of 1974, when Turkey invaded my father's native island of Cyprus and our relatives' whereabouts were unknown, it took two weeks of anxious waiting until we received on this machine a brief message from my Uncle Angelos: "All are well."

Telex machine

By the closing years of the century, we had entered a new world. Yes, we were still "faxing" documents to people, and there were still telegrams in some places, but the rise of the internet was already changing the way people communicated with each other across vast distances. In fact, my relationship with my wife began as an email correspondence that eventually developed into marriage.

Of course, Hollywood was quick to make the most of the new technology, as seen in such movies as You've Got Mail (1998), a comedy that explored the complications of an email romance between Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. But if email has effectively connected people separated by thousands of kilometres, the proliferation of smart phones seems inadvertently to have isolated people sitting next to each other in the same room. How the movies will deal with this remains to be seen, but the notion of two young people staring longingly into separate screens isn't exactly charged with romantic potential.

Nevertheless, the world we inhabit nearly two decades into the 21st century would amaze our forebears, who had to wait for the occasional telegram to mark the important milestones in their lives such as birthdays, weddings, baptisms and funerals. On any day I am in almost constant contact with friends and relatives in all parts of the globe. I can keep track of a young cousin studying in Denmark, one of my oldest friends in Minnesota, second and third cousins I barely knew existed until a few years ago, and even elementary and high school classmates of whom I had lost track over the decades.

For this expanded sense of community we can rightly thank God, as long as it does not tempt us to ignore the people in our more immediate surroundings. IN THE MEANTIME, I WOULDN'T WASTE TOO MANY TEARS MOURNING THE END OF THE TELEGRAM – (STOP) –

Published in Christian Courier, 7 January 2018.David Koyzishttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-81194135333381399022017-12-29T10:37:00.001-05:002017-12-29T10:39:08.645-05:00Remembering Expo 67

The past year's celebration of Canada's 150th birthday reminded me of another anniversary: that of my first visit to this country, which occurred 50 years ago. I was 12 years old, and my father had promised us that we would be seeing Expo 67, the world's fair in Montréal. We had been expecting this all summer, but school rolled around and we hadn't yet made the trip. We children knew that the fair would not last forever, and we feared missing it if we waited too long.

October rolled around and still no fair. As Expo would be wrapping up at the end of the month, we got more nervous. But then, on the fifth day of the month, I came home from school to learn that we would be getting in our family's Buick Electra and leaving for the fair in only two hours! I can no longer recall whether my mother had already packed for all eight of us, but we soon headed off into the night, as prepared as we were ever going to be.

After stopping to visit my grandmother near Ann Arbor, Michigan, we headed into Detroit, which had just gone through a summer of unrest and violence from which it was never fully to recover. Driving through the city, we entered Canada through the Detroit-Windsor tunnel. That evening I wrote in my personal journal:

The streets of Windsor were lined with province [sic] seals and centennial flags. On we drove. Everyone was getting tired and hungry. We stopped at this store called Met and had something to eat at their snack shop. Everything in this store was truly Canadian and so were the words: centre, neighbour, theatre, etc. They had some tote bags for carrying souvenirs in. I bought an Expo 67 tote bag. We got our money exchanged for Canadian.

What we had not known when we started out was that we were arriving at the fair during Canada's Thanksgiving weekend. This, coupled with the imminent closure of the fair, ensured that huge crowds would be attending. The skies were grey, and we mostly wandered around for a few days, rode the Minirail through the American bubble pavilion, and then turned around and drove back to Chicago. But not before seeing Jackie Kennedy, widowed for just short of four years, who was touring Expo with her entourage of secret service men. Despite the gloomy day, she wore sunglasses, unsuccessfully disguising her true identity.

Twenty years later, fresh out of the University of Notre Dame with PhD in hand, I moved to Canada and have lived here ever since. By 1987 this was a different country. The metric system had replaced imperial measurements in the 1970s. Restaurants were more inclined to admit children. Lester Pearson was no longer prime minister. The dollar bill had been phased out of circulation and supplanted by the now iconic Loonie coin. Canada's population had increased from 20 million to almost 27 million. And, of course, I was no longer 12 years old.

Having lived in this country for three decades now, I've forgotten some things about my country of birth. "What? Americans don't have butter tarts?" "Sir, how am I supposed to fill up my tank when the pump keeps requesting a zip code with my credit card?" "You've never heard of poutine?" "When is Martin Luther King day again?"

Canada is a great country, and I am proud to be a citizen. However, some things I've never quite adjusted to. For example, I dislike seeing the Christmas decorations go up the day after Halloween. At least Americans have their late November Thanksgiving as a temporal barrier against the premature encroachment of Santa Claus and his minions. Or at least they did when I lived there.

Last month I suggested that we might give thanks to God for blessing us with the public legal community known as the state. This month I will be more specific: let us give thanks for Canada's 150 years and pray for many more.

Principalities & Powers, Christian Courier, 10 December 2017 David Koyzishttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-20353087642541553222017-12-28T20:55:00.000-05:002017-12-30T11:55:32.706-05:00What's in a name? Fundamentalism, evangelicalism and the fickleness of labelsA good friend of mine in graduate school was an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). A confessionally Reformed Christian, he admitted to me that he sometimes liked to call himself a fundamentalist just to see how others would respond. Though we were on the same page in so many ways, I personally didn't think I could go quite that far.

Nevertheless, I was raised in what might well be regarded as the first fundamentalist denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Established in 1936 by John Gresham Machen and others, it grew out of the controversies of the 1920s and '30s in the former Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. Confessional liberals, who elevated personal experience and rationalism above both the Bible and the Westminster Standards, gradually moved into the ascendancy, with the more conservative elements increasingly on the defensive. These trends had already begun in the post-Civil War era, gaining speed around the turn of the 20th century and achieving dominance after the end of the Great War.

As a result, a concerted effort was begun to forge an alliance among confessional Christians in several protestant denominations, culminating in the publication between 1910 and 1915 of The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, consisting of 90 essays bound together in several volumes. The 64 authors were a diverse lot, including B. B. Warfield of Princeton Seminary; C. I. Scofield, whose Scofield Reference Bible disseminated dispensationalism far beyond its original home in the Plymouth Brethren; the Rev. William Caven of Knox College, Toronto; the Rev. James Orr of the United Free Church College in Glasgow; Canon G. Osborne Troop of what was then called the Church of England in the Dominion of Canada; and many more besides.

The project was edited by A. C. Dixon, Louis Meyer and Reuben Archer Torrey, a close associate of evangelist Dwight L. Moody, with financial backing coming from oil tycoon Lyman Stewart, who also co-founded the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, later Biola University.

While the term fundamentalism is nowadays almost always used in a negative sense to dismiss a particular group as narrow and ingrown, the original fundamentalist movement was a broad effort to defend the fundamentals of the faith, such as the Virgin Birth, the Deity of Christ, the inspiration of the Bible, and the unity of Scripture against the fragmenting onslaughts of historical criticism. Any movement bringing together Anglicans, Episcopalians, Reformed Episcopalians, confessional Presbyterians and dispensationalists can scarcely be labelled narrow and exclusive. In fact, the original fundamentalist movement, like its neo-evangelical successor after the Second World War, would be better characterized by this well-known maxim: "in essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity." Over the decades many people were in the habit of describing a congregation or denomination as "fundamental" if it adhered to these fundamentals of the faith shared by all Christians throughout the centuries.

This effort to build a broad coalition of believers from a variety of traditions generally avoided such potentially divisive doctrines as baptism, the Lord's Supper, predestination, free will and the millennium (Revelation 20). These were judged less significant than the need of the hour, which was to confront head on the growing secularism in the churches. This makes it somewhat ironic that, a century later, the word fundamentalism is associated with a variety of unlikable groups, including outright terrorists.

Carl F. H. Henry (1913-2003)

Then came the evangelicals. After the Scopes trial of 1925, fundamentalism came to be associated with obscurantism, though a few groups jealously held on to the label, including the independent Baptist congregation where my mother came to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ in her late teens. Carl F. H. Henry and the Rev. Billy Graham were associated with this new movement, and Christianity Today became its flagship publication. So powerful was this evangelicalism after 1945 that it would eventually come to supplant the rapidly fading mainline protestant denominations four decades later. Evangelicalism as a label had the virtue of plugging into more than one historic movement, including the 18th-century evangelical revivals in the Church of England, the Wesleyan Methodist movement, continental European pietism and, of course, the Reformation of the 16th century. However, its chief defects were its lack of a robust ecclesiology and its emphasis on personal experience, which, while otherwise laudable, would eventually erode the lines between evangelicalism and liberalism, especially after the turn of the 21st century.

Many of us were proud to claim the evangelical label, because of the obvious reference to the gospel of Jesus Christ. (As Gus Portokalos would tell us, evangelion is a Greek word!) However, increasing numbers of Christians are now coming to reject the evangelical label, because of its association with a certain political commitment. Indeed, those still willing to wear the label are troubled that so many of their co-religionists seem to rank political ideology above the obvious ethical implications of their own faith. Whether these are genuine evangelicals or merely "court evangelicals" is subject to dispute. Wherever the truth lies, some high profile Christians have decided they can no longer describe themselves as evangelical.

It is true, of course, that some labels have been discredited through their abuse, making it virtually impossible for right-thinking people to wear them. (How many good and respectable people were sympathetic to national socialism before 1933?) However, I myself have become wary of discarding an otherwise perfectly good label for fear of association with those people, whoever they might be. Given that we are all sinners standing in need of God's grace, we might do better to look into our own hearts to determine whether we are worthy to be called by the name of Jesus Christ and his gospel of salvation. On our own strength we are not worthy, of course. That is precisely why we flee to Christ to find our true identity. It cannot be found in political parties or ethnic subcultures. It cannot be found in our own desires and aspirations, which, however legitimate they might otherwise be, are always caught up in the cosmic struggle between sin and redemption.

Labelling is a fickle enterprise. People often label others to discredit them. We label ourselves and expect people to respect those labels, which, of course, they may not. Often the labels do not endure for the long term, eventually being replaced by others that will serve for a time but probably not forever. I am personally willing to call myself a fundamentalist in the original sense, an evangelical, a Reformed Christian or even—tongue-in-cheek of course—a Byzantine-Rite Calvinist. But above all I am a follower of Jesus Christ, and it is by his name over all other names that I wish at last to be called, "for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12).David Koyzishttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-34437740908304690612017-12-27T17:51:00.003-05:002017-12-27T17:51:56.339-05:00The Queen's Christmas Message, 2017Exactly sixty years after the Queen first aired her annual Christmas message on television, the Palace posted this fresh message:

We who have faithfully listened to her broadcasts year after year have noticed that their content is more explicitly christian than in the past, as pointed out in this article from The Guardian: How the Queen – the 'last Christian monarch' – has made faith her message. The turn of the millennium appears to have marked the start of this unmistakable trend.

To the royal household, it is known as the QXB – the Queen's Christmas broadcast. To millions of people, it is still an essential feature of Christmas Day. To the Queen, her annual broadcast is the time when she speaks to the nation without the government scripting it. But in recent years, it has also become something else: a declaration of her Christian faith. As Britain has become more secular, the Queen's messages have followed the opposite trajectory.

This is how she closed her message two days ago:

We remember the birth of Jesus Christ, whose only sanctuary was a stable in Bethlehem. He knew rejection, hardship and persecution. And, yet, it is Jesus Christ's generous love and example which has inspired me through good times and bad. Whatever your own experience is this year, wherever and however you are watching, I wish you a peaceful and very happy Christmas.

God save the Queen! Let us pray that, when the time arrives, her heirs and successors will see fit to continue this emphasis in their own Christmas messages.David Koyzishttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-10191503960000947582017-12-27T10:43:00.000-05:002017-12-27T17:30:26.086-05:00Harry Blamires, 1916-2017

Harry Blamires (pronounced BLAMers) was not one of the best known of Christian apologists, overshadowed as he was by the likes of his mentor C. S. Lewis and, among Reformed Christians, Cornelius Van Til. Nevertheless, he was a scholar and theologian of the first rank, and he will be remembered for a single book he published in 1963, The Christian Mind. Because there have been so many books published in recent decades on the subject of a Christian worldview, we may forget that there was a time when the need to think in a distinctively christian way was unfamiliar even to regular church-goers, as it was to me when I was growing up. I acquired my copy back in June 1976 (so I wrote inside the front cover), and underscored those passages that leapt out at me. Blamires makes no mention of Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch polymath and statesman with whom I was becoming acquainted and increasingly sympathetic, but, with some exceptions, I saw them as co-belligerents in the effort to alert believers to the comprehensive sovereignty of God in Christ over the whole of life. Here is a wonderful sample of Blamires' writing:

It may be that the dominant evil of our time is neither the threat of nuclear warfare nor the mechanization of society, but the disintegration of human thought and experience into separate unrelated compartments. For a feature of the diseased condition of modern society is the parcelling out of human faculties—physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual—into distinct categories, separately exploited, separately catered for. Man is dismembered. In the high incidence of mental disease you can measure something of the cost of this dismemberment. In so far as the Church nurtures the schizophrenic Christian, the Church herself contributes to the very process of dismemberment which it is her specific business to check and counter. For the Church's function is properly to reconstitute the concept and the reality of the full man, faculties and forces blended and united in the service of God. The Church's mission as the continuing vehicle of divine incarnation is precisely that—to build and rebuild the unified Body made and remade in the image of the Father. The mind of man must be won for God (TCM, p. 81).
Christianity Today carries an obituary of Blamires here: Died: Harry Blamires, the C. S. Lewis Protégé Who Rediscovered 'The Christian Mind'. May he rest in peace until the resurrection.

David Koyzishttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-86007935904863648832017-11-13T13:21:00.006-05:002017-12-28T20:56:37.852-05:00A troubled anniversary

Next year we observe – perhaps "celebrate" doesn't entirely fit – the 370th anniversary of the modern state, which is generally said to have resulted from the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the devastating Thirty Years War and reshaped the map of Europe. According to this agreement, the European powers would henceforth accept the principle of state sovereignty, namely, that the state is sovereign within its own territory and exempt from interference from its neighbours. This new international order would replace the messy patchwork of feudal fiefdoms that had lasted for centuries in the western part of the continent.

Since that time we have come to see the state, not as a domain of a particular ruler, but as a community of citizens led by their government. But settling its territorial boundaries has been the tricky part. Where does France end and Germany begin? And what of the German lands where, say, Polish is the majority language? For as long as the modern state has existed there have been quarrels over its jurisdiction. Attempts to settle these quarrels have not always succeeded, with the two world wars of the last century among the most tragic of the failures.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson thought it possible to establish a postwar order based on the principle of national self-determination, which would grant all nations the right to decide their own fates. If the Czechs no longer wished to be part of Austria-Hungary, they would be permitted to go it alone. If the Poles wished to recover their ancient independence, then Russians, Germans and Austrians should allow this.

However, Wilson, ever the political idealist, underestimated the lethal consequences of what he had unleashed, as competing claims to nationhood set the stage for the resumption of armed conflict only two decades after the Treaty of Versailles had ended the first war. We are still living with the consequences today.

First, the Middle East. The Kurds are an ethnic group speaking an Indo-European language and straddling the borders of Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. At the close of the Great War, the Kurds were promised an independent Kurdistan, something the Kurds are still awaiting a century later. With the defeat of Saddam Hussein in Iraq more than 25 years ago, the Kurds established a Kurdistan Regional Government, currently led by President Massoud Barzani. With the seemingly inevitable breakup of Iraq, the Kurds hoped finally to have their own state – something understandably opposed by Damascus, Ankara and Tehran.

However, as the Iraqi military has been fighting to defeat the Islamic State and other insurgents, it has pushed well into Kurdish territory, ousting the Peshmerga, the Kurdish armed forces, from the key city of Kirkuk last month. Does this spell the end of Kurdish hopes for independent statehood in the region? Possibly, though the U.S. has called for dialogue between the disputing parties.

On the far western end of Europe, the territorial integrity of another state is threatened by secessionists, this time in the Spanish autonomous region of Catalunya, whose citizens voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence. After the vote, Catalan President Carles Puigdemont stopped just short of declaring full independence. As I write, Madrid is acting quickly to disband the regional government in Barcelona and impose direct rule before independence can be asserted. Readers will have the benefit of hindsight that I currently lack, but historical precedents compel us to recognize that this is a potentially dangerous situation. No state can acquiesce in its own dismemberment. At the same time, it seems unwise – possibly even unjust – to force Catalonians to remain part of Spain.

What does justice require in such situations? State borders are not sacrosanct, yet dismembering an existing state is a messy business fraught with great potential for injustice. True, the modern state has its flaws, but at its best it has managed to create a secure public zone of peace, justice and prosperity within its jurisdiction – something we take for granted until it's gone. If we are unlikely to see many celebratory events next year, we can nevertheless be grateful to God for the admittedly imperfect blessing of the state.

Originally published for Principalities & Powers, Christian Courier, 12 November 2017.David Koyzishttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-18913924499418991552017-11-13T13:16:00.001-05:002017-11-13T13:16:46.677-05:00One Year of TrumpNobody expected him to win. He was too boorish and crude. He couldn't hold his own in a debate, even as, by his sheer presence, he seemed to be trying to intimidate his opponent. He thumbed his nose at people he thought weak and made fun of the handicapped. Far from being a polished orator like his predecessor, his rhetoric consisted of monosyllabic words spat out with tremendous ferocity, coupled with monotonously repetitious outbursts of braggadocio. Read more.David Koyzishttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-88428556997147330602017-11-08T09:35:00.002-05:002017-12-28T20:58:12.522-05:00The Queen would not be amused: Julie Payette's ill-considered remarks

Governor General Julie Payette

As one of the Queen's Canadian subjects, I personally doubt she would approve of the remarks her freshly-minted representative made last week. Some months ago Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had advised Her Majesty to appoint Julie Payette, a former astronaut, to the post of Governor General, an office which she assumed at the beginning of October. In a Westminster parliamentary system, the Queen and her representatives must remain impeccably nonpartisan and avoid even a hint of partiality. The monarch is the guarantor of the constitution and a symbol of unity for the entire nation. In her sixty-five years on the throne, Queen Elizabeth II has discharged her weighty responsibilities admirably, more than living up to the vowshe took in South Africa on her twenty-first birthday.

Sadly, not all of her representatives have managed to follow her example. Last week, Payette addressed the Canadian Science Policy Conference in Ottawa, and in the course of her speech appeared to belittle her fellow citizens who have the temerity to believe in a transcendent God:

Can you believe that still today in learned society, in houses of government, unfortunately, we're still debating and still questioning whether humans have a role in the earth warming up or whether even the earth is warming up, period? And we are still debating and still questioning whether life was a divine intervention or whether it was coming out of a natural process let alone, oh my goodness, a random process.

The tone of incredulity can only be taken as a put-down of people of faith. Or, perhaps more accurately, of people whose faith differs from her own.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, apparently a practising Catholic, weighed in on the controversy with these words, inadvertently affirming that Payette herself is a woman of faith:

I am extraordinarily proud of the strength and the story of our Governor General, Julie Payette, who has never hidden away her passion for science and her deep faith that knowledge, research and the truth is [sic] a foundation for any free, stable, successful society. And I applaud the firmness with which she stands in support of science and the truth [emphasis mine].

No one can quibble with the Governor General and the Prime Minister in their recognition that the standards associated with the scientific method have led to greater knowledge of the universe and produced huge benefits for humanity. But there is a tendency among some, when this appreciation is not tempered by the recognition that our world belongs to God, to invest science with redemptive expectations. Those with a more modest appreciation for science might challenge Payette's rather naive belief that natural processes somehow rule out the existence of a creating and sustaining God.

Nearly a year ago, the Queen spoke these words in her annual Christmas speech:

Jesus Christ lived obscurely for most of his life, and never travelled far. He was maligned and rejected by many, though he had done no wrong. And yet, billions of people now follow his teaching and find in him the guiding light for their lives. I am one of them because Christ's example helps me see the value of doing small things with great love, whoever does them and whatever they themselves believe.

What she thinks of Payette's speech we likely will never know. If I were in Her Majesty's position, I would send the governor general a sharply worded reprimand, perhaps accompanied by a revised job description. It would serve as a warning that the authority of the governor general's office does not extend beyond the limits of the monarch's own authority relative to Canada. Payette is not entitled to establish scientism as the state religion. Let us hope she comes to see this better, as she becomes more accustomed to her official duties.

David Koyzis is Fellow in Politics at the St. George's Centre for Biblical and Public Theology. He is the author of Political Visions and Illusions and We Answer to Another.David Koyzishttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-51046421195127157812017-11-07T12:44:00.001-05:002017-11-07T12:44:22.913-05:00Commemorating a revolution

Exactly one-hundred years ago, a small cadre of revolutionaries seized power in the then Russian capital city of Petrograd. After the Tsar's abdication earlier in the year, a provisional government had attempted to run the fractious country, unwisely attempting to continue the war against Germany that had brought down the imperial régime. While Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein would immortalize the storming of the Winter Palace in his famous re-enactment three years later, the actions that brought the Bolsheviks to power were much less dramatic. Nevertheless the long-term consequences of the Revolution would reverberate throughout the twentieth century, leading directly or indirectly to the deaths of scores of millions of people in the interest of implementing a political illusion based on a fundamental misreading of human nature.

On this anniversary we do well to acknowledge that human efforts to reshape the world according to the demands of the gods of the age are not without consequences. In particular, when human beings deny the one true God, they don't cease to believe. They simply redirect their beliefs elsewhere. While there is little to celebrate on this solemn occasion, it is appropriate to remember those who lost their lives to the scourge of Marxism-Leninism in the decades following the Revolution. Господи, помилуй! Lord have mercy!David Koyzishttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-21496945787742245252017-10-19T10:45:00.003-04:002017-12-05T14:00:27.051-05:00How Socialism Suppresses SocietyLast month I was privileged to visit the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, where I lectured on "How Socialism Suppresses Society." A video of my lecture has been posted on YouTube with Portuguese subtitles for anyone interested. However, as my delivered lecture was an abbreviated version of the text, I am posting the full text here:

Until last year's presidential election campaign, socialism had long been a nasty word in the American political lexicon. It had been associated with the worst forms of tyranny, especially those of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. Thus many of us were surprised to see a certain United States Senator from Vermont gain a dedicated following among especially younger voters while proudly wearing the democratic socialist label. Their elders would have blanched at the prospect of a socialist president, while they themselves manifested no such fear of an ideological vision whose character and history is without doubt unfamiliar to them.

Norman Thomas

Nevertheless, virtually all western democracies can boast a sizeable socialist party of some sort. Britain has its Labour Party, while Australia has its Labor (minus the "u") Party. France has its Parti Socialiste, and Germany its Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands. Even my own country of Canada has its New Democratic Party, which, while never having governed at the federal level, has managed at times to form the government in half of the country's ten provinces, including Ontario. The United States had a Socialist Party in the first decades of the twentieth century, under the leadership of Eugene Debs (1855-1926), who famously campaigned for the 1920 election from a jail cell, and the venerable Norman Thomas (1884-1968), a Presbyterian minister who stood six times unsuccessfully for the presidency. But the high water mark for the party came in 1932, after which it lost its support base to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. As a consequence, the United States remains virtually the only country lacking a major political party adhering to the principles of socialism.

Defining socialism

What exactly is socialism? Definitions vary widely, of course, and it is probably more accurate to speak of socialisms in the plural. Yet despite the differences, most manifestations of socialism have a number of characteristics in common.

First of all, socialism is a powerful vision of economic equality. From the earliest of times, poverty has been a persistent ill plaguing either a majority or a substantial minority of the human population. Yet, alongside this poverty, some people have enjoyed great wealth shielding them from the burdens of economic necessity. Kings, nobles, dictators, successful entrepreneurs and—let's face it, criminals—have lived lives of luxury amid the penury of commoners and ordinary people. Down through the ages, right-thinking people have found such maldistribution of wealth a scandal and have sought to rectify this economic imbalance. The Bible itself recognizes the dangers of wealth, not only to the poor, but to the stewards of this wealth who are likely to let it go to their heads and to forget their dependence on God. The Old Testament law, as codified in the first five books of the Bible, contains numerous provisions for ensuring that the poor would not become a permanent fixture in the life of ancient Israel, most notably in mandating the series of sabbath years culminating in the great year of Jubilee, when all land would return to its original owners (Leviticus 25).

Obviously, the literal practice of sabbath years and jubilees is impracticable in an advanced post-industrial economy in which productive property is no longer connected exclusively with agriculture. Consequently, our societies have had to come up with other means of addressing what is euphemistically called the Social Question. Over the past two centuries socialists have sought to resolve the issue by extending the logic of democracy into economic life. Democracy gives the vote to all citizens equally, irrespective of their social standing. The manual labourer has the same vote as the graduate of Oxford or Cambridge. The employer has no greater say than his employees. This means that every segment of the citizenry has input into political decision-making or, more likely, in putting in place the public officials charged with making these decisions.

Why not extend this democracy to economic life as well? Indeed, socialism is often called economic democracy, its followers seeking to break the power of unaccountable private concentrations of corporate economic influence and to bend them towards seeking the greater good. This was the argument of, among many others, the late John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006), whose book, Economics and the Public Purpose had a profound impact on me as a young man. Rather than seeking profit for the few, economic policy should be ordered to the delivery of well-being to the many. At the turn of the last century, Teddy Roosevelt had sought to break up the monopolies of an "industrial baronage" then thought to dominate the American economy. But Roosevelt was a late liberal, not a socialist. Socialists sought instead to harness the larger corporations in one of a number of ways. The democratic socialists in the British Labour Party chose to nationalize the major industries, bringing them under the control of the people's elected representatives in Parliament. Marshal Tito's Yugoslavia, on the other hand, sought to implement worker self-management, in which factories would be operated by the workers themselves.

Socialist equality would, therefore, differ from other visions of equality. For the early liberals, equality meant the equal enjoyment of individual liberty. But because people are naturally unequal in their gifts and capacities, granting equal liberty inevitably means that some people will use their liberty to increase their wealth and influence, while others less able to do this will be left behind. For late liberals, equality means equal opportunity. Yet only in the game of Monopoly does everyone literally start out on the same footing. In the real world, someone growing up in one of the prosperous neighbourhoods of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, will have more opportunities than someone born in less prosperous Mitchell County, along the Tennessee state line where my great-grandfather was born. For small-d democrats, equality means an equal say in public affairs, while for socialists equality means equality of results or economic equality, equality being measured by who has how much at the end of the day.

A second shared characteristic of virtually all socialisms is the emphasis on community over the individual. In contrast to liberalism, with its somewhat lopsided focus on the individual, socialism is collectivist, meaning that the community takes priority over the individual. Which community? Generally, the economic class of which one is a member. But in effect, this usually translates into the priority of the state over the individual. To be sure, there are anti-statist versions of socialism, some bordering on anarchism, but in practice, where socialist parties are vying for power in a democracy, their policies generally result in empowering the state, possibly at the expense of personal freedoms, a major reason why in North America socialism has come to be associated with tyranny.

A third characteristic of socialism is its hostility to private property. As much as possible, property is to be held in common so that it will remain open for the use of everyone. This will presumably eliminate poverty and economic hardship. Many small-scale communities have been established on the basis of common ownership of property, some successful and some not. Monasteries are set up on this principle, as were various utopian communities in the nineteenth century. Not far from where I live in southern Ontario, there are two communities of the Brethren of Early Christianity, whose members share their property and their lives, eating together in a common dining room and working industriously for the good of the community. This is the sort of arrangement that socialists favour for everyone everywhere. Yet those communities that have been successful are small enough for genuine affection and care to develop among members. Whole nations organized on this basis are too large and impersonal, and they tend to become bureaucratic and oppressive, as in the Soviet Union and its clients before the end of the 1980s.

Co-operative Commonwealth Federation

Fourth, with socialism's hostility to private property comes an expressed preference for co-operative economic arrangements over competition amongst self-interested individuals. The assumption is that competition is bad because it brings people into conflict with each other. Hence Canada's socialist party was originally called the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, under its leader Tommy Douglas (1904-1986), a Baptist minister who became Premier of Saskatchewan in 1944 and then the first federal leader of the New Democratic Party in 1961. Co-operation, socialists generally assume, is an unmitigated good, because it brings people together to pursue shared goals. Who could fail to be affected by a vision of ordinary people from every walk of life working together to build a better society in which everyone will prosper? Isn't this obviously better than structuring a work environment that forces people to work against each other to enrich themselves? When posed this way, these questions must elicit from all right-thinking people a positive response to socialism.

Two more characteristics of socialism cut more closely to the core of the socialist vision, laying bare its anthropological assumptions. Thus the fifth characteristic is the tacit belief that there is no stable human nature and that, consequently, human beings can be shaped to conform to the aims and aspirations of social planners. If human beings tend to be self-centred, well then, we simply need to re-educate them and mould them into loyal citizens of the socialist commonwealth, whose primary motivation will be to seek the good of the whole. If people remain stubbornly loyal to particular attachments, such as family, church and neighbourhood, then, it is reasoned, we must undertake to alter their convictions at the deepest affective level possible, through whatever means we have at our disposal. If people doggedly defend their own private interests, they must be made to see the error of their ways. Or, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously put it, they will be forced to be free.

Sixth and finally, socialism posits an alternative redemptive story to that which we find in the Scriptures. The Bible is a grand narrative that tells the whole world's story, beginning with creation and moving on through the fall into sin, to redemption in Jesus Christ and culminating in the final consummation of the kingdom of God at his return. By contrast, socialism's redemptive narrative bypasses Jesus Christ and offers its own way to salvation. We ourselves will bring about all the blessings of God's promised kingdom, but on our own terms. This story is most evident in Karl Marx's writings. There is no creation, of course, because it assumes the existence of a Creator, which Marx's atheism could not permit him to accept. But there is an original state corresponding to the Garden of Eden. This Marx has labelled primitive communism, an hypothetical condition in which everyone works together, but without a division of labour. Perhaps this represents something close to the hunter-gatherer societies of prehistoric times, with everyone foraging for the means of subsistence.

For Marx the counterpart to the fall into sin occurs when the first division of labour is introduced into the productive process. Men and women do different things. Some work with their brains, others with their brawn. This results in society's division into economic classes, which are defined by their relationship to the means of production. This division inevitably produces conflict between the classes, and after that point history takes off, with class conflict being the principal motive force in the historical process. But eventually this will all come to an end, as the final class, the proletariat, or the industrial working class, assumes a messianic role, achieving a victory over the bourgeoisie, or the capitalists, thereby ushering in the classless society, Marx's counterpart to the eschatological vision of God's kingdom.

Admittedly, not all professed socialists buy into the Marxian story. For most democratic socialists, or social democrats as many prefer, socialism is simply about helping the disadvantaged through public policy. It may entail, not the nationalization of utilities and heavy industries, but the establishment and maintenance of a welfare state including such programmes as social assistance for the poor, old-age pensions and universal health care. It may further consist of such items as the progressive income tax, protections for workers in the work place, the minimum wage and the forty-hour work week. Falling far short of implementing communal ownership of all productive property, such measures have kept social democratic parties in parliaments around the world for more than a century and have given them governing power, either alone or in coalition with other parties.

All these, taken individually, are good things, I would argue. Socialism has properly made us aware of the economic forces that keep people poor through successive generations. Socialist and social democratic parties have properly championed in their respective countries the rights of workers who are often at a distinct disadvantage with respect to their corporate employers in a market economy. Since the end of the Second World War, virtually every western democracy has woven a social safety net to prevent people falling through the metaphorical cracks and thus being unable to live out their respective callings securely and healthily. One can justifiably observe that the influence of the gospel is behind such efforts, as Christians have always had a heart for the poor. In fact, Eric Nelson has plausibly argued that the recovery in the early modern era of ancient Hebrew rabbinic sources produced a fundamental reorientation in western political thought favourable to republican as opposed to monarchical polities, public policies redistributing wealth (remember the year of Jubilee), and even religious toleration. Only a culture formed even in part by the biblical redemptive narrative is likely to contemplate policies to aid the economically disadvantaged rather than to regard poverty as a deserved curse of the gods.

Digging more deeply: idols of our time

Yet in evaluating any ideological vision, we must dig deeper than the policies it advocates. After all, the welfare state has been supported by late liberals for distinctly liberal reasons (e.g., Franklin D. Roosevelt), by conservatives for conservative reasons (e.g., Red Tories in Canada, such as Conservative Prime Minister Richard Bedford Bennett in the 1930s), and by nationalists for nationalist reasons (e.g., Otto von Bismarck in imperial Germany). Moreover, while many socialists have supported the welfare state, others have not, believing that it is no more than a series of sops tossed to the proletariat to keep them from rising up and assuming their rightful place in history. These are the revolutionary socialists, often Marxist in orientation, for whom there can be no half measures. It's all or nothing: revolution or status quo.

Here is where we need to dig more deeply into the redemptive narrative that animates the socialist project. Historically plagued by terrible poverty, human beings have long sought liberation from both scarcity and the maldistribution of the world's goods. Yet we know from history that efforts at liberation, no matter which label they bear and which end they seek, so often result in a tyranny much worse than the petty oppressions of the ancien régime. The French Revolution of 1789 was not merely an effort to rebalance a constitution unhealthily dominated by the king, but a project to restart history from Year One and to build a more rational society from scratch. Similarly, the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II, presided over a corrupt political system in which ordinary subjects had to endure the inequities of a semi-feudal society and occasional harassment by minor officials. Yet what came after the Bolsheviks "liberated" Russia in 1917 was much worse as Josef Stalin in particular countenanced or actively pursued, not just corruption, but mass starvation, forced labour and deadly purges of the Community Party, the bureaucracy and the military. Something similar can be said of Mao Zedong's China after 1949 and of Islamist Iran after 1979.

Indeed the single-minded pursuit of any goal, however worthy it might be when considered on its own, has a tendency to crush the real world under its feet. If flesh-and-blood human beings fail to measure up to the goals of the ideology, efforts to transform them will have to be redoubled, and if that doesn't work, perhaps we will have to eliminate them altogether. As Greta Garbo's Soviet functionary Ninotchka famously put it in the eponymous 1939 film, "The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians." Political ideologies consider human beings expendable in the larger cause of implementing their grand vision. Or, as the Dutch political economist Bob Goudzwaard expresses the matter, an ideology subordinates principles to goals. While we may be inclined to conclude that vicious means ought never to be used to accomplish otherwise virtuous goals, the convinced ideologue sees things differently. In this respect, the goal becomes a surrogate god, jealously demanding total loyalty and even human sacrifice, if necessary.

This turn towards idolatry is true, not only of socialism, but of the other secular ideologies seeking to remake the world in their own image. Liberalism champions individual freedom and, in its later forms, the right to choose, seeking to exempt such choices from even social disapproval much less legal sanctions. Nationalism seeks to liberate a particular nation from foreign oppression, yet it often produces a régime willing to terrorize ordinary people in the interest of its liberating efforts. Ethnic Greek nationalists in Cyprus in the 1950s threatened at least one member of my father's birth family for considering marriage to a Turkish Cypriot. Because uniting Cyprus with Greece was seen as an obvious good, the EOKA terrorists felt themselves justified in attacking people who might be less than fully enthusiastic about this goal.

Gerhart Niemeyer

Similarly, an exaggerated belief in the universal efficacy of democracy may cause political leaders from one country to assume that democracy can be exported by guns and tanks, even if the cultural conditions for democracy are lacking in the receiving country. Or it could prompt an excessive democratization of a political system, producing national leaders who may be popular but have not been thoroughly vetted for basic competence. Conservatism may be less obviously ideological than its competitors, and at least two professed conservatives, namely Russell Kirk (1918-1994) and Gerhart Niemeyer (1907-1997), the latter of whom was one of my professors at Notre Dame, believed that conservatism is in principle anti-ideological. I believe they are in some measure correct. The best of conservatives are wary of the claims of utopians of all stripes, recognizing that reality is far more complicated than ideologues are prepared to admit. Nevertheless, conservatives err in assuming that tradition speaks with one voice and are perennially in danger of losing sight of principles that might enable them to assess their own traditions in a discerning way.

But let's return to socialism. The title of this talk is "How Socialism Suppresses Society." How indeed does it manage to do this? After all, socialists regularly sing Ralph Chaplin's 1915 labour union song, "Solidarity Forever," with fervour and appear to value the horizontal ties that bind them together in their struggle for justice. In the former Soviet Union, people called each other товарищ, or comrade, eschewing all titles of honour that might set people apart from or above others. Yet the irony of Soviet Russia is that, far from strengthening horizontal ties of solidarity amongst ordinary Russians, the Party effectively eroded such ties, making people dependent on the Party alone in virtually every area of life. In fact, during the darkest days of Stalinist terror, ordinary people lived in fear of each other and were radically atomized such that their vaunted camaraderie became a farce. Even in the less dark days of late Soviet stagnation, individuals were locked in a co-dependent patron-client relationship with the party-dominated state apparatus, discouraged from organizing independently to achieve their own chosen goals. When the edifice of communism finally collapsed nearly thirty years ago, whole populations found themselves unable to cope with the fallout, having lost the ability to take action apart from the Party.

Of course, very few professed socialists today would lionize the old Soviet Union, whose failure brought into the open the considerable flaws of the Marxist-Leninist experiment. It would be uncharitable to judge socialism as a whole by its worst manifestation. Nevertheless, socialism, like the other ideologies that have shaped the political landscape for more than two centuries, rests on assumptions that are profoundly antisocial, despite its avowed exaltation of society. How so?

Affirming pluriformity

We need to remember that our society is not a single entity and certainly not a responsible agent. Rather, it is a complex pattern of relationships and communities which have evolved over the ages into their present form. We are not a tribe with a single chieftain calling the shots for everyone in every activity. We are marriages, families, schools, business enterprises, labour unions, church congregations, political communities, art co-operatives, amateur choral societies, Little League baseball teams, garden clubs, and so forth. Each of these communities has its own internal structure with its associated authoritative offices. Within the state, for example, each of us bears an office of some sort. It may be president, representative, senator, queen, prime minister, citizen. For the vast majority of us, our participation in the state is limited to our citizenship. Yet to be a citizen is to exercise a significant office with certain attendant political responsibilities, most notably to obey the laws, to stay informed on public affairs, and to vote.

In the classroom, the instructor has authority, but so do the students. The two authoritative offices of instructor and student are not the same, and the relationship between them is not symmetrical and certainly not egalitarian. The instructor sets the course requirements which the students are obligated to fulfil. All the same, everyone in the class in whatever capacity has an authoritative office worthy of respect. More to the point, almost no one is likely to confuse the classroom community with, say, a family, a church, a parliamentary body or a trade union local. Each of these is a distinctive social form with its own proper structure and purposes.

An example will suffice to illustrate this. I am lecturing a class of eighteen-year-olds in the early afternoon on a Wednesday, and someone walks into the room without prior knowledge of what she will find there. She may be aware that people are inside, but as yet she has no idea who these people are or what they will be doing or what sort of relationships might exist among them. However, once she enters the room, she does not have to employ sophisticated analytical faculties to intuit the presence of an instructor and students whose interactions are structured by the classroom context. She knows, almost without thinking, that she is not in the presence of a family. There are unmistakable biological cues that this is not a familial community. The fact that the young people are seated at desks while the older adult is on his feet talking up a blue streak suggests that this is not a gathered church community either. Nor is it a parliamentary body, virtually none of which would have eighteen-year-olds as deputies and certainly not in these numbers. Nor is it a business enterprise, a labour union or a garden club. The reality of the classroom community presents itself to the visitor almost immediately upon entry. It is not an abstract entity created in her mind out of the raw data of aggregated individuals. Nor is it simply a local manifestation of a larger economic class struggle or of a national community. The classroom is a classroom. The labour union is a labour union. State is state, and church is church. It is as simple as that.

Is there a term for all this complexity? Different traditions call it different things. For example, in Roman Catholic circles, inspired by the teachings of recent popes from Leo XIII to Francis, the term subsidiarity is used. Under the principle of subsidiarity, society is viewed as a hierarchy, each of whose levels bears authority. In so far as the lower agents in the hierarchy are capable of achieving the particular goods for which they are responsible, the higher agents refrain from interfering. However, if the lower agents mess up, shall we say, then the higher agents are justified in stepping in, setting matters right again, and then withdrawing once they have done so. Yet in no case should the higher agents, capped by the state at the summit, simply take over the other communities within its jurisdiction.

Abraham Kuyper

In the Reformed tradition, following the great Dutch polymath and statesman Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), this complexity is known as sovereignty in its own sphere, or sphere sovereignty, a wonderfully flat and inelegant term that simply means that the state is the state, the church is the church, the business enterprise is the business enterprise, and so forth. In recent decades this has been relabelled differentiated responsibility (James W. Skillen and others), societal pluriformity or the pluriformity of authorities, the latter two terms appearing in my own published writings. Sphere sovereignty differs from subsidiarity in that the society it claims to account for is not hierarchical in nature. God relates to the various individuals and communities, not through so-called mediating structures, but directly. God confers authority on each sphere, not through the intermediary of church or state, but immediately. This theoretical account of society has obvious roots in the Reformation's understanding of the priesthood of all believers. As those made in God's image, redeemed in Jesus Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit, we have direct access to our God, who does not hide behind the walls of institutions but is constantly close to each of us in everything we do. In other words, Kuyper is at one with Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Bucer and the other Reformers in articulating, not only his soteriology, christology or ecclesiology, but also his sociology. We do well to remember this as we celebrate this year the 500th anniversary of the start of the Reformation.

Of course, it is not solely Christians who grasp this societal pluriformity. Everyone experiences it on a day to day basis and is confronted by its reality without needing to engage in theoretical reflection. Nevertheless, Christians have an advantage that nonbelievers do not have. As believers, we recognize, in the words of the Apostle Paul, that in Christ "all things hold together" (Col. 1:15). The entire cosmos hinges on the Triune God, without whom it simply cannot exist. However, if we fail to recognize this, we are almost certain to try to find the source of reality in something created. In this respect, everyone is a person of faith. We are created to believe. We are created to worship. It's what distinguishes us from the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. If we fail to worship the one true God, we will inevitably worship something else. And that something can be just about anything that God has created. The ancient pagan peoples fashioned idols of stone and wood. Our own idols are more subtle. We worship success, material prosperity, sexual fulfilment, and a host of other false gods. In the political realm, we worship individual freedom, tradition, nation, the democratic people, the economic class. And in so far as we do so, we bring a certain distorted understanding of reality into political life.

Let's apply this to socialism. If you are a Marxist, then you are likely to worship the god of history with the proletariat functioning as messiah. Or, to paraphrase the Muslim shahada, there is no god but History, and the proletariat is its prophet. If you are persuaded that history consists of a class struggle destined to be wrapped up by a redemptive working class, then nothing can be allowed to obstruct the historical process. If the aspirations of ordinary people do not line up with its trajectory—if they are on the "wrong side of history"—then we must prefer history to them. History takes priority. If history is moving towards the abolition of private property and people continue to cling to their property, it must be taken from them and they must be dealt with accordingly. We saw the results of such a worldview in the huge numbers of casualties in the Soviet Union and especially the People's Republic of China.

But even the moderate form of social democracy we find in the west harbours these antisocial sentiments. The socialist holds in suspicion at the very least the more proximate loyalties people owe to their families, their churches and local communities. It will be impossible to abolish capitalism and to bring about the classless society if people retain allegiance to communities based on other, nonsocialist principles. Even though Canada's Tommy Douglas was a Baptist minister and Norman Thomas a Presbyterian clergyman, in 1999 a New Democratic Party member of Parliament named Svend Robinson proposed a motion to delete reference to God from the Preamble to Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. While this effort failed, it indicates how far the NDP had strayed from its earlier roots. But perhaps it wasn't straying at all. Perhaps it was simply living out the logic of its larger commitments. If liberation of the working class becomes the all-embracing goal of political activity, then it may effectively have attained the status of god, supplanting the one true God.

What about property?

How does property fit into all this? Remember that socialists strive to abolish private property and to collectivize it in the hands of the larger community. Once communal ownership of property has been implemented, society will be characterized by a principle famously articulated by Marx: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. That is, everyone works for the common good, contributing to a common pot rather than hoarding it for him- or herself. Then, as the members of the community have needs, they take from the common pot to meet those needs. This, it is assumed, will ensure that there will be no gap between rich and poor and that wealth will be distributed evenly throughout society. However, this is the point at which socialism runs into difficulties. From a Kuyperian perspective, we need constantly to ask ourselves, in addressing various social issues, which sphere is properly responsible for which activities. If we are tempted to speak of the community, we need to remind ourselves that our society comprises many communities of various types.

Hence when socialists speak of communal ownership of property, we need to point out that this is something we already enjoy. Because society is made up of different kinds of communities, it is also made up of different forms of ownership. Yes, there is individual ownership, which is the focus of classical liberalism or libertarianism. I own my watch, my comb, my wardrobe, my books, my iPad, as an individual. I have clear title to them to the exclusion of everyone else. As it turns out, however, much of my property I share with others in a variety of communal settings. Our house, our furniture, our appliances, our automobile I share with my wife and daughter. It is precisely the family home, the family car, and so forth. The family is thus the owning subject of such property. As a member of Central Presbyterian Church in Hamilton, I am part of a larger congregational community that owns our century-old building. It belongs to no one member of the congregation; it belongs to the whole. It is church property. The same can be said of a variety of corporate entities, ranging from businesses to schools to charitable foundations. In so far as you are part of the SEBTS community, you can be said to share in the ownership of its property.

The political community, or the state, is also a legitimate owning subject of certain properties administered on behalf of the entire public. Government buildings such as the White House or the Capitol are public property. National, state and local parks are cared for by various governmental entities on behalf of their respective citizens. The list is endless: public libraries, monuments, cenotaphs, important historical sites, the United States Mint, the US Postal Service, and a huge array of agencies responsible for certain manifestations of what might be called the commons. In Canada, we speak of federal and provincial Crown lands, Crown corporations and the like to cover the same phenomenon. The point is that, in so far as government has a legitimate responsibility to care for the commons, it too is an owner or at least caretaker of property said to belong to all of us. Socialism errs in assuming that only one form of property ownership can supplant all others. It ignores the legitimate pluriformity of property ownership, or, when it does acknowledge it, finds it a threat to its long-range goals. In this and other ways then, socialism effectively suppresses society.David Koyzishttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-22290049820760725342017-10-17T11:32:00.001-04:002017-10-17T11:46:09.668-04:00October updatesHere are three updates:

Last month I was privileged to visit Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, where I spoke on "How Socialism Suppresses Society." My lecture has been posted on YouTube with Portuguese subtitles:

An article of mine has been published in the Autumn 2017 issue of The Bible in Transmission, of the Bible Society (also known as the British and Foreign Bible Society): Populism in Christian Perspective.

An excerpt:
One cannot simply blame political leaders for the direction of an entire culture. George Bernard Shaw was perhaps more realistic in his observation that 'Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.' An overstatement perhaps. Yet it is true that political institutions and leaders alike are conditioned by a complex of cultural assumptions characterising the polity as a whole. A people accustomed to autocracy is very likely to be ruled by autocrats. A nation whose people are corrupt in their daily lives are highly unlikely to be governed by leaders careful to avoid conflict of interest in the conduct of public affairs.

Finally, I have received word from InterVarsity Press that my first book, Political Visions and Illusions, has been approved for a second revised edition, which I will be working on over the next several months. I will keep everyone updated on its progress and projected date of publication. Thanks to the many readers who have made this book a success over nearly a decade and a half.

David Koyzishttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-41637986619529722902017-08-25T09:00:00.000-04:002017-10-20T10:02:10.650-04:00Abraham Kuyper and the Pluralist Claims of the Liberal Project, Part 4: The Kuyperian Alternative

Herman Dooyeweerd

In response to the evident defects of liberalism, we might well ask what the alternatives might be. We evidently cannot return to the religious establishments of old. Even the most dedicated communitarian is highly unlikely to make such an obviously retrograde proposal. Although at least one church body has long sought to amend the US Constitution to recognize the mediatorial kingship of Jesus Christ, no one would argue that, for example, the state's coercive apparatus should enforce ecclesiastical judgements issued against recalcitrant members.

Everyone now presumably agrees that the execution of heretics handed over by the Inquisition to the civil authorities was not only a very bad idea but fundamentally unjust as well. Nevertheless, the major Reformed confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries charge the civil authorities with the responsibility to "protect the sacred ministry; and thus [to] remove and prevent all idolatry and false worship; that the kingdom of antichrist may be thus destroyed and the kingdom of Christ promoted." By the beginning of the nineteenth century, this confessional charge to the political authorities was sounding less and less plausible in the increasingly pluralistic societies of Europe and North America.

In this context, the Dutch statesman and polymath Abraham Kuyper charted a different path in articulating the relationship between church and state. To begin with, Kuyper understood better than many of his predecessors that the church-state issue was part of a larger societal pattern characterized by a multiplicity of agents, including individuals and a variety of communal formations. In a mature differentiated society, an ordinary person would find herself embedded in many overlapping communities of which the gathered church and the state were only two.

The question is thus enlarged: How do church and state relate to each other? now becomes: What are the proper relationships among church, state, marriage, family, school, business enterprise, and a whole host of voluntary associations? If Thomas Jefferson's famous "wall of separation" is inadequate to account for the complex relations between state and gathered church, it is certainly inadequate for understanding how a variety of human communities function in the real world.

Kuyper came up with a description for this phenomenon: soevereiniteit in eigen kring, that is, sovereignty in its own sphere or sphere sovereignty. Of course, God himself is ultimate Sovereign, but in his grace, he has conferred limited sovereignty, or, better yet, authority, on human beings and institutions, none of which can claim this ultimacy for itself. "This perfect Sovereignty of the sinless Messiah at the same time directly denies and challenges all absolute Sovereignty among sinful men on earth, and does so by dividing life into separate spheres, each with its own sovereignty."

Sphere sovereignty corresponds to Mouw and Griffioen's "associational diversity," but it is not without relevance for spiritual or directional diversity, even if it is not identical to it. The very notion of sphere sovereignty can hardly be religiously neutral because it is dependent on the recognition that ultimate sovereignty belongs to God alone and cannot be monopolized by a mere human individual or institution. In other words, what I like to call the pluriformity of authorities cannot so easily be divorced from directional diversity.

In fact, the relationship between these two types of diversity is a complicated one. Although many tend to conflate the different forms of diversity as if they were all of one piece, this is not exactly correct. The tolerance of different claims to truth so championed by Crick would, after all, allow one's fellow citizens to believe in the very ideological illusions that would deny sphere sovereignty and ascribe ultimate sovereignty to the individual, the nation, the economic class or the state. This means that, despite the fact that the concept of sphere sovereignty, for many of us, seems better to account for societal pluriformity than does liberal individualism, the two approaches remain competitors and thus must be tolerated within the political arena.

Acknowledging pluriformity will thus stand in some tension with spiritual or directional diversity, which suggests that efforts at doing public justice to both realities will not reach an easy solution capable of commanding universal assent. The only way to lessen the tension may be for those of us who are persuaded that sphere sovereignty is superior to liberal individualism to show in practice how this superiority is manifested in ordinary life.

This is precisely what Kuyper sought to do both in his writings and in his practice. Two of his essays are particularly relevant to this effort. The first is titled, "Uniformity: The Curse of Modern Life," which he delivered fairly early in his career in 1869, that is, before he entered the Dutch Parliament and before he founded the Free University. Although this essay is perhaps marred by some of the elements of a typical nineteenth-century romantic nationalism, its central point has positive social and political ramifications: that God's creation is a diverse creation with its unifying principle found in God alone, while a secularizing modernity is improperly preoccupied with seeking another locus of unity in something created. Hence the longstanding efforts of the various pagan and modern rulers to establish an imperial unity that would bring order to the apparent chaos of created diversity. As Kuyper puts it, "sin, by a reckless leveling and the elimination of all diversity, seeks a false, deceptive unity, the uniformity of death." The world strives for a stifling uniformity that would erase all legitimate distinctions found in God's creation, but it does so in imitation of God's plan, which is to unify creation in himself.

The second essay is simply titled, "Sphere Sovereignty," and was delivered in 1880 on the occasion of the opening of the Free University. Sovereignty Kuyper defines as "the authority that has the right, the duty, and the power to break and avenge all resistance to its will." Of course, only God can possess sovereignty in this absolute sense. Nevertheless, God has graciously conferred a portion of this sovereignty on a variety of earthly agents. As Kuyper affirms, "This perfect Sovereignty of the sinless Messiah at the same time directly denies and challenges all absolute Sovereignty among sinful men on earth, and does so by dividing life into separate spheres, each with its own sovereignty." The state and the gathered church are but two of these spheres, which also include "a domain of the personal, of the household, of science, of social and ecclesiastical life, each of which obeys its own laws of life, each subject to its own chief." The differences among these spheres are irreducible in that the sheer variety of spheres cannot be reduced to or derived from a single sphere superior to all others. God has invested each with its own authority and given it a distinctive calling within the larger panorama of his creation. This is something for which liberal individualism cannot easily account.

An example will suffice to illustrate this. I am lecturing a class of eighteen-year-olds in the early afternoon on a Wednesday, and someone walks into the room without prior knowledge of what she will find there. She may be aware that people are inside, but as yet she has no idea who these people are or what they will be doing or what sort of relationships might exist among them. However, once she enters the room, she does not have to employ sophisticated reasoning to intuit the presence of an instructor and students whose interactions are structured by the classroom context. She knows, almost without thinking, that she is not in the presence of a family. The reasons are obvious. The oldest person in the room is decades older than every one of the young people and physically resembles very few, if any, of them. In other words, he is obviously not their father. He is too short and dark, whereas the males in particular tend to be tall and blond. There is no way he could have sired all of them, at least without the co-operation of a large number of prospective female partners. In other words, there are unmistakable biological cues that this is not a familial community. The fact that the young people are seated at desks while the older adult is on his feet talking up a blue streak suggests that this is not a gathered church community either. Nor is it a parliamentary body, few of which would have eighteen-year-olds as deputies and certainly not in these numbers. Nor is it a business enterprise, a labor union or a garden club. The reality of the classroom community presents itself to the visitor almost immediately upon entry. It is not an abstraction created in her mind out of the raw data of aggregated individuals. The classroom is a classroom. The labor union is a labor union. State is state, and church is church. It is as simple as that.

Many people tend to assume, drawing on H. Richard Niebuhr's categories, that Kuyper's sphere sovereignty is part of a grand effort at Christ transforming culture, perhaps through political means. Yet that is to misunderstand what sphere sovereignty is about. Yes, it has implications for political and other forms of social life, but it is above all a framework enabling us to understand the diversity of God's creation, especially the human cultural and social project. It represents an effort to grasp social realities apart from the distorting effects of the post-revolutionary ideological illusions that sought unity somewhere other than in the creating, redeeming and sustaining God.

However, it is fairly evident to even the casual reader of Kuyper that he did not develop sphere sovereignty into a sophisticated theoretical framework capable of making fine but necessary distinctions. For example, he rather easily conflated political federalism, contextual diversity and societal pluriformity. It would fall to Kuyper's more philosophical heirs, such as Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977), to articulate a more consistent theoretical foundation for sphere sovereignty, something that would have an impact on such organizations as the Center for Public Justice, the Canadian think tank Cardus, the Christian Labour Association of Canada, the Acton Institute, and the network of Christian universities loosely associated with the Christian Reformed Church. In some fashion these would all affirm principled pluralism, including the spiritual or directional pluralism described by Mouw and Griffioen, yet they recognize that they still have an important task before them, namely, to persuade their fellow citizens that a framework taking seriously the diversity of God's creation is superior to those attempting artificially to squeeze this diversity into a single principle, whether that be the sovereignty of the individual or that of the state, nation, people or class.

Acceptance of directional or spiritual diversity is not, in other words, a pretext for acquiescing in the persistence of differences of opinion that really do matter. There are still battles to be fought and there will continue to be such until Christ returns. But it does mean, in most circumstances, that we wage our battles with civil means, making our case before the watching world and demonstrating, as we are able, that recognizing and respecting societal pluriformity, better than its competitors, leads to flourishing communities and balanced social development. There will never be a complete congruence between these two types of diversity, but one provides a context for us to promote the other to the best of our abilities, and that may be the best we can hope for in between the times.David Koyzishttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-28726252948802767452017-08-22T09:53:00.001-04:002017-10-20T10:02:58.880-04:00Abraham Kuyper and the Pluralist Claims of the Liberal Project, Part 3: What Liberalism Implies for the Two Pluralisms

John Stuart Mill

In Part 2 we examined the implications of Kuyperian and liberal pluralisms for ecclesiology, that is, our understanding of the nature and authority of the institutional church. We noted, in particular, that liberalism, following John Locke, is compelled to reduce it to a mere voluntary association of like-minded individuals.

There are two implications to this liberal move. First, it is incapable of accounting for structural differences among an assortment of communities. State and church are not essentially different from the garden club or the Boy Scouts. Whatever differences appear to the casual observer can be ascribed to the collective wills of the individuals who make them up. Proponents are persuaded that, even if different groups of citizens operate out of divergent comprehensive doctrines, they must be made to look beneath these commitments to what are believed to be the raw data of human experience that bind all persons together. These data are, of course, the constituent individuals themselves.

Every community can be easily understood as a collection of individuals who choose to be part of it for reasons peculiar to each member. There is nothing unusual about this approach, the liberal insists. Michael Ignatieff believes himself justified in asserting that liberal individualism is not peculiarly western or historically conditioned; it is human and universal: "It's just a fact about us as a species: we frame purposes individually, in ways that other creatures do not." Therefore if the claims of groups and individuals come into conflict, as they inevitably must, Ignatieff confidently concludes that "individual rights should prevail," despite the contrary claims of nationalists, socialists and many conservatives of a communitarian bent.

The second implication flows logically from the first. If liberals claim that individualism is simply human and universal, then this implies that their own worldview must be privileged above any that denies this. Liberal tolerance is thus conditioned by a worldview that explicitly denies that it is a worldview, and thus finds no difficulty positioning itself as a supposedly neutral arbiter of the competing claims of the other alternative worldviews.

Yet there are those who object to this sleight of hand. Karl Marx, for one, famously denies that such neutrality is possible and argues that political institutions, like all other human agents, always act in behalf of a particular economic class, even if they claim impartiality. There is, in short, no neutrality in the global class struggle. Liberation theologians in Latin America and elsewhere refer to this lack of neutrality as a "preferential option for the poor," an oft-used expression that does not sit well with the liberal emphasis on the autonomous freely-choosing individual.

However, one need hardly be a Marxist or a liberation theologian to recognize what is at work here. James Kalb points to what he calls the tyrannical character of liberalism, despite its proponents' undoubtedly well-intended pleas for tolerance of religious differences. The liberal strategy for tolerance requires that the particular claims of traditional religions be softened to more manageable private lifestyle choices. "Even religion, to be legitimate, must transform itself so that it simply restates established egalitarian, rationalist, consumerist, and careerist values." Moreover, "No religion can claim superiority over any other religion or over irreligion. Each must understand itself as an optional pursuit, and thus as not a religion at all." Accordingly, the authoritative claims of church institutions will be tolerated only in so far as these institutions accept the norms of a liberal society. The church can continue to claim authority in some fashion over its members, but it cannot do so in a way that might be interpreted to negate the voluntary principle. No one has to belong to a church, after all, and those denominations emphasizing individual choice and free will tend to fit more comfortably into a society governed by a dominating liberal paradigm.

By contrast, an obviously hierarchical church body with a strong confessional identity may be seen as at least potentially disloyal, as was the case with the Roman Catholic Church in nineteenth-century America. As late as 1960, presidential aspirant John F. Kennedy felt compelled to assure the Greater Houston Ministerial Association that he would not be taking orders from the Pope in the conduct of his office. Similarly, in his famous 1984 speech at the University of Notre Dame, New York Governor Mario Cuomo explicitly stated that his belief in his church's teachings on abortion was a private belief with no bearing on his pursuit of public policy.

Of course, it would be unwise to state categorically that all professed liberals everywhere necessarily follow a consistent individualist approach to human communities and religious diversity. With some spectacular exceptions, most people are generally better than their ideological visions would make them if they were to follow them consistently. Remaining open to correction by the real world is key here.

Nevertheless, one cannot deny the historic tendency of liberalism in its various permutations to downplay the significance of nonvoluntary community and to individualize and relativize the claims of traditional religious worldviews. We see this in the increasing trend in the western world to reconfigure marriage as a mere private contract between (thus far!) two persons and to deny any intrinsic structure that might negate this contractual status and even to stigmatize those who adhere to a "thicker" understanding of the marriage covenant. We see it too in judicial efforts to redefine the limited personal liberties found in the English Bill of Rights and its successors (to, e.g., freedom of speech) as a more expansive and normless individual autonomy (e.g., freedom of expression) whose only limit is conceived in terms of John Stuart Mill's famous harm principle: "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

However, Mill's harm principle, despite its superficial libertarian flavour, has totalitarian tendencies in so far as it is suspicious of those communities bound by standards unrelated to this principle. Liberalism thus negates the very pluralism it claims to uphold. This suggests that another approach is needed.

Part 4: The Kuyperian AlternativeDavid Koyzishttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-50082845507667336152017-08-15T09:52:00.002-04:002017-10-20T10:03:56.899-04:00Abraham Kuyper and the Pluralist Claims of the Liberal Project, Part 2: The Church as Voluntary Association

John Locke

As we noted in Part 1, liberalism attempts to guarantee pluralism by empowering the individual, often at the expense of the very communities that go into shaping her. But in so doing, liberalism denies these communities any authority not reducible to the wills of the component individuals.

If, for example, we were to agree with John Locke's definition of the church, we would find ourselves in territory foreign to the mainstream of the historic faith. According to Locke, "A church, then, I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshipping of God in such manner as they judge acceptable to Him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls" (emphasis mine). While there are undoubtedly many Christians, especially protestants in the free-church tradition, who would implicitly agree with Locke's definition, the mainstream of the Christian tradition has viewed the church as the covenant community of those who belong to Jesus Christ, who is its Saviour and head.

Moreover, the gathered church, as distinct from the corpus Christi which is more encompassing, has been generally recognized to be an authoritative institution with the power to bind and loose on earth (Matthew 16:19, 18:18). As such it is more than the aggregate of its members but is a divinely-ordained vessel bearing the gospel to the world and especially to the church's members.

Throughout the last two millennia, ecclesiastical councils have been convened on occasion to decide authoritatively on difficult doctrinal issues threatening to divide the church. These have yielded creeds and confessions considered binding on the faithful, such as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, deemed authoritative for the major Christian traditions in both east and west. The (Pseudo-)Athanasian Creed is most direct in its claims: "Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith; Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly." It is, in short, the church, and not individual Christians, that defines the content of the faith.

It would be difficult to imagine an account of the faith and the church more inconsistent with the voluntaristic ecclesiology of Locke, who asserted that "everyone is orthodox to himself." By contrast, from the earliest centuries the church as an institution has claimed the authority to determine what is and is not orthodox. Those Christians professing to be orthodox are in effect acknowledging that the terms for their membership in the church are not theirs to set as individuals. Beginning already with the Jerusalem council recorded in Acts 15, the church as a body asserted its authority, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, to resolve potentially divisive issues in binding fashion. To dissent from such decisions was regarded as schismatic and thus sinful.

In past centuries political authorities assumed that ecclesiastical schism was a danger to public order and thus sought to uphold the church's authority in such matters to protect the unity of the realm. Although some observers like to describe this as a Constantinian settlement, it might better be labelled Theodosian, because it was the Emperor Theodosius who officially established Christianity as the favoured religion of the Roman Empire near the end of the fourth century.

It need hardly be emphasized that, two millennia into the Christian era, most of us live in polities characterized by a diversity of sincerely- and not-so-sincerely-held faiths. We in the west have become concerned, not with the presence of multiple faiths in our own societies, but with the lack of toleration of such multiplicity elsewhere, especially in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, where ancient Christian communities are increasingly besieged by the forces of radical Islam.

Nevertheless, the presence of faith communities adhering to a variety of ultimate beliefs is not without potentially troublesome political implications. This is something that our pre-modern forebears may have understood better than we do. Is law given by God or by the gods? And if by God, the God of Muhammad or the God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ? Few Christians would wish to live under Sharia law, but increasing numbers of devout Muslims believe they are called to establish Sharia as the law of the land, whether in Pakistan, Iraq, Nigeria or Great Britain. In the face of such evidently divisive efforts, how are we to go about living with each other? How can we come up with political principles enabling us to strike a modus vivendi with citizens of other faiths?

For several centuries now professed liberals have come up with what they believe to be the answer to this vexing question, and they think it sufficient to command the loyalties of all citizens irrespective of the "thick" comprehensive doctrines or worldviews to which they otherwise adhere. This liberal solution has profound implications for both directional diversity and societal pluriformity, and it amounts to this: every community and claimed communal obligation must be reduced to its component parts, namely, the wills of the individual members. To the extent that communal obligations exist, they can be justified only in so far as they conform to the voluntary principle. Communities, with all of their supposed differences, must be recast as mere voluntary associations.

We have seen how Locke did this with the gathered church institution, but he more famously did this with political community and even with marriage. In Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, a social contract among individuals comes to be deemed the source of all political obligation, as graphically illustrated in the famous frontispiece to the first edition of Hobbes Leviathan. Any authority that the state might claim over the individual can be legitimated only with reference to this originating contract.

In the later liberalism of Immanuel Kant and John Rawls, we see a certain level of abstraction added to the social contract, which is reworked such that individuals now use their common reason, ostensibly disconnected from their thicker worldview commitments, to articulate principles of right agreeable to all. Sounds good in theory, but, because it is based on a faulty understanding of human nature and ignores the role ultimate beliefs inevitably play in life, it is unworkable in practice.

Part 3: What Liberalism Implies for the Two PluralismsDavid Koyzishttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5311799.post-70430480087717123272017-08-09T09:34:00.001-04:002017-10-20T10:04:45.358-04:00Abraham Kuyper and the Pluralist Claims of the Liberal Project, Part 1: Liberalism and Two Kinds of Diversity

Although it can be misleading to seek the meaning of commonly-used words and expressions in their etymological origins, in the case of liberalism, the linguistic connection with liberty is all too obvious. The promise of liberty is an attractive one that holds out the possibility of living our lives as we see fit, free from constraints imposed from without. We simply prefer to have our own way and not to have to defer to the wills of others.

Yet even the most extensive account of liberty must recognize that it needs to be subject to appropriate limits if we are not to descend into a chaotic state of continual conflict, which English philosopher Thomas Hobbes memorably labelled a bellum omnium contra omnes, a war of all against all.

Here I propose to compare two approaches to liberty, viz., those of liberalism and of the principled pluralism associated with the heirs of the great Dutch statesman and polymath, Abraham Kuyper. Although each claims to advance liberty, I will argue that the Kuyperian alternative is superior to the liberal because it is based on a more accurate appraisal of human nature, society and the place of community within it.

Arising in the context of an early modern repudiation of ancient, and seemingly outmoded, customs and mores, liberalism proposed to anchor human community in rational principles oriented around the self-interest of sovereign individuals. From Locke to Rawls the liberal project has sought to liberate public life from the particularities of the "thick" accounts of reality rooted in the ancient religious traditions. Why? Because these had apparently proven hopelessly divisive in previous centuries, engendering nearly continual warfare from Luther's initial efforts at reforming the church 500 years ago to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

Better, it was assumed, to anchor political order, not in a highly disputable claim of divine revelation, but in principles capable of being affirmed by all. Such principles would have to be rooted in a rationality whose only underlying assumption would be that individuals pursue their own interests as they themselves understand them.

Liberalism is thus more than just about liberty. Even in its mildest form it assumes that community is rooted in the collective wills of its individual members, thereby privileging the voluntary principle, that is, the belief that human flourishing depends on the free assent of sovereign individuals to their multiple obligations. The liberal project represents an effort to address the central dilemma of human life famously summed up by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the following maxim: "Man is born free but is everywhere in chains."

Our very survival as a species in the face of hostile forces of nature depends on our ability and willingness to co-operate with each other for common purposes. If we do not do so, we are doomed at best to poverty and at worst to death. Nevertheless, in so far as we are interdependent, our individual wills are necessarily constrained by the rules we draw up to facilitate this co-operation. This is the paradox that Rousseau tried to address in his own proposals for political order. Although Rousseau, in his Social Contract, took these ideas in a superficially liberal direction, his recipe has definite totalitarian implications, thereby threatening to crush the very diversity that makes politics necessary and indeed possible.

According to the late British political scientist Sir Bernard Crick, politics is all about the peaceful conciliation of diversity within a particular unit of rule. What is meant by this diversity? Richard Mouw and Sander Griffioen identify three basic types: (1) directional or spiritual diversity, viz., the plurality of ultimate beliefs that bind particular communities but are potentially divisive of the larger body politic; (2) contextual diversity, viz., the diversity of customs and mores that come from people living together in local communities that are relatively isolated from each other; and (3) associational diversity, which might better be described as societal pluriformity, viz., the plethora of communal formations characterizing a mature differentiated society. While liberalism represents a longstanding effort to address all three kinds of diversity, for our purposes we shall examine its relationship to numbers one and three, viz., directional diversity and societal pluriformity. Although these two kinds of diversity are logically distinct, any effort to address one inevitably affects the other as well.

An obvious way in which these two types of diversity intersect can be seen in the often vexing church-state issue. If one is an unbeliever, one is unlikely to accord the gathered church a distinct status apart from the state except as a voluntary association of like-minded believers. In denying the authority of the gathered church institution, the political order formed out of this belief will nearly inevitably subordinate it to the political authority of the state, along with a variety of other voluntary associations, such as the Boy Scouts, the local garden club and little league baseball. This, of course, has profound implications for the protection of religious freedom, which is thought to belong only to individuals, and not to the institutions that have shaped them. A liberal worldview privileging individual rights, a particular manifestation of directional diversity, has effectively denied societal pluriformity, or Mouw and Griffioen's associational diversity.

Crick believes that ordinary politics requires the tolerance of multiple truth claims. While he is undoubtedly empirically correct in his observation, we must be wary of attaching a normative character to this reality because it may effectively mask the extent to which a particular conception of church-state relations is itself rooted in a religiously-based worldview. And, if so, we will need to be prepared to admit that not all pluralisms are created equal.

Part 2: The Church as Voluntary AssociationDavid Koyzishttp://email@example.com