SEMINAR ON METHODOLOGIES IN APPROACHING SOCIAL AND ETHICAL ISSUES
Morges, Switzerland
8 – 12 October 2003

Response by Lewis S. Mudge to "Traditions and Changes in Orthodox Social Ethics" by Deacon Andrei Kurayev

I thank Deacon Andrei warmly for his paper, which well serves the purposes for which we are gathered in this seminar. I think we are here to generate a kind of dialogical space in which certain "resonances" can occur. Not that we will very often simply agree. But maybe we can come to recognize in our respective traditions and experiences certain moments of parallel insight. Indeed I am struck by how similar are the issues with respect to social - and particularly political - ethics faced by our respective churches, and indeed how similar in some cases have been our responses.

At the same time, it is clear that we have been living in quite different worlds. I think that it is broadly true to say that nothing like either the Reformation or the Enlightenment has touched the Russian Orthodox Church within Russia (although of course expatriate Orthodox in many lands have encountered the intellectual and spiritual consequences of these Western movements). Reformation and Enlightenment alike have made a difference in how we of the West interpret both tradition as such and church-state relationships in particular. We have a longer history of critical approaches in each of these realms: more time to judge the consequences of the critical spirit (e.g. the use of "scientific historiography" and the value attached to the historical judgments of scholars) both for good and for ill in church life.

An example of this cultural difference is found especially in protestant attitudes to "tradition" itself. You may have noticed how careful I am in my paper (among the preliminary documents for this meeting) to stress that what we call, speaking theologically, "the Reformed tradition" is not very coherent as a historical phenomenon. This "tradition" is more like a continuing and unfolding field of argument taking many directions than it is like a single developing line of teaching. We tend to identify what "the Reformed tradition" is for us in whatever terms lead plausibly to wherever we believe we stand theologically today. Our "standpoints," all of them "Reformed," represent quite a range of possibilities! At the same time, our terminology and characteristic theological moves are quite identifiable across time. They are tangibly different from those of Lutheranism, or Anglicanism, or Roman Catholicism, or Orthodoxy.

We suspect that your own Orthodox past, if analyzed by Western historical methods, would look much the same way: not a single line of development but a wide swath of discourse including positions and arguments of various kinds, that looks to you more coherent than it does to us. We tend to think that what is called "tradition" in your community represents (like ours) the views held by victors in centuries of struggles. Your own tendency to support politically "the powers that be" in both church and state carries over to the definition and transmission of tradition. And we also acknowledge that there are many parallels to this phenomenon in the "Reformed" community as well. Seen in critical perspective, we are not that different.

The original Calvinist experiment
It is important to understand that the most important foundational document of Reformed Christianity, Calvin's Institutes, was the result of a long-term (five editions over more than twenty years) attempt to define the form of shared Christian faith presented to the world by a new kind of political community in sixteenth-century Europe: a city state that had declared its independence of the medieval papal-political system. Calvin was brought to Geneva by the authorities of this already "reformed" commonwealth to articulate what it meant to profess Christian faith in such a novel ecclesio-social frame of reference. He was determined that this new communal expression of faith should be, and be perceived elsewhere to be, thoroughly orthodox, despite its innovative characteristics. The dedication of the first edition of the Institutes to the King of France was designed to make this point. So, apparently, was Calvin's failure - or refusal - to intervene when the Geneva authorities decided to burn the heretic Servetus. He was in effect saying: "See, we here in Geneva are really orthodox: we burn heretics too!"

So, in a word, seeking continuity with "tradition," could mean making what we see now as serious mistakes. But it could also mean producing a brilliant re-framing of the theological patrimony. I use the latter word advisedly. John Calvin was an accomplished scholar of the works of the "church fathers" in their original languages. He quoted them often in the 1400 or so pages of the Institutes. To be sure, he quotes the Latin fathers more than the Greek ones. That was to be expected.

I draw now on parts of my paper included in our preliminary materials. There I argue that Calvin's views concerning public magistracy have conceptual roots at the heart of the Reformer's understanding of the interactions of law and grace. It is common to contrast Calvin's position with Luther's doctrine of the "two kingdoms." Caution is in order. We know that Luther spoke of the two "hands" of God, right and left. The right hand of God has to do with the grace in which, by faith, we have our salvation. Salvation takes place for persons in the realm of the church. Bringing human beings to God's throne of grace is the church's business, and the work of grace has nothing directly to do with those public matters reserved to the state. God's left hand, by contrast represents His providential care for the public realm, where law is an instrument of God's judgment. Here the conditions of salvation do not operate. Rather, expertise in matters of state is the criterion of service. Luther is noted for having spoken to the effect that he would rather be ruled by an intelligent Turk (i.e. Moslem) than by an incompetent Christian. It is not that public matters are outside God's concern. It is just that God deals with these matters in a different way from the way He brings human beings to saving grace.

Now Calvin's vision is subtly yet importantly different. Public magistracy is not simply a matter of expertise overseen by God's providence. Public magistracy can be a specifically Christian vocation, as Luther also thought, but grace is now at work in the world. The foundations of this conviction are everywhere, in many different forms, in the Institutes. We will mention only two: the so-called "third use of the law," and the priority Calvin gives to sanctification, expounding it in Institutes, Book III, prior to the doctrine of justification.

One of Calvin's innovations (although he may have been following a differently stated yet similar formulation in Aquinas) was to understand the Law (or Torah) as having three, rather than Luther's two, "uses." Law regulates not only private conduct. It is also the basis of public order, and hence an indispensable element in a Christian social ethic. By "law," Calvin undoubtedly meant first the Torah, but also the whole medieval tradition of civil law, thought compatible with Torah but also based on "natural law" principles, in which he was trained at the University of Paris. Not only does the law serve as foundation for public order, restraining the potential sinner, and not only does it convict us of our inadequacy thus rendering us open to grace, but the law also serves as a guide to conduct for the redeemed sinner. The redeemed person finds a new relationship to the law. He or she is rendered by grace more able to keep the law because the law no longer stands over against him or her as impossible demand. This means, quite simply, that the gospel is relevant to the standards that regulate the public world. The gospel, as Luther also believed but with a different emphasis, becomes directly relevant to citizenship.

A similar dynamic is at work in the sometimes overlooked fact that in the Institutes, Book III, the exposition of the Spirit's work in calling us to faith, regeneration and the Christian life - all that falls under the heading of "sanctification" - precedes the treatment of "justification." Luther, of course, has it the other way around. Calvin believes that the work of Christ's death and resurrection, applied to our lives by the power of the Holy Spirit, is such to start us on the road to becoming better (or at least more pious) persons up to the point at which we gain the gift of realization that we could not be better persons if God had not already accepted us through justification by grace alone.1 The is the "mode of becoming which true piety induces." It includes "love of righteousness" and other public virtues. "We are not our own" but our way of life makes a difference to the world.2

The upshot is that, for Calvin, grace is indirectly at work in making possible good conduct, even citizenship. It has to do with how we live. And since our living is inevitably social, it has to do with citizenship, and with the lives of public magistrates whole responsibility it is to maintain a body politic in which our citizenship is worked out. The final chapter of the Institutes is devoted to this issue. Calvin's primary assertions are based largely on Romans 13.3 On the one hand, he believes in a clear separation between ecclesiastical and civil government, yet at the same time believes - at least so far as Geneva is concerned - in a form of establishment of Reformed Protestantism that would be prohibited by the US Constitution. He regards civil government, and the civil magistracy, as a divinely ordained vocation, worthy of profound respect and obedience. Among other things such as keeping the peace, it is, he says, the duty of civil government to protect and promote the church and to help maintain Christian faith and morals as taught by the church. Civil magistrates enforce "both tables of the law," that is, those commandments having to do with religious duties as well as those having to do with civil behavior.

Calvin says that "Civil authority is a calling, not only holy and lawful before God, but also the most sacred and by far the most honorable of all callings in the life of moral men." Magistrates are "ordained ministers of divine justice." They are "vicars of God." In administering punishment the magistrate "does nothing by himself, but carries out the very judgments of God." And again, magistracy is a "jurisdiction bestowed by God and on that account to esteem and reverence them as ministers and representatives of God."

There is room here, and even an obligation (although the Institutes lays down rather stringent conditions) for people to rise up and replace magistrates who are not ruling according to the high standards Calvin sets. Even Catholic magistrates who rule justly are presumably in Calvin's view ministers of God. But we read that "Sometimes [God] raises up avengers from among his servants, and arms them with his command to punish the wicked government and deliver his people, oppressed in unjust ways, from miserable calamity." But, even then, Calvin admonishes us that such rebellion must be led by notable persons, and only after grave provocation.

If public authorities are already themselves "ministers of God," then public leadership by pastors does not generally mean an entry into political life as such. It does have to do with admonishment of civil rulers where necessary, and no doubt with certain modes of public advocacy. The important insight, however, is that the notion of righteous life in public sphere, for citizens as well as magistrates, depends for Calvin not only on political judgments as such but also on an understanding of the consequences of sanctification, in part guided by a "third use of the law."

Variations in the Calvinistic Tradition Through Time
The church-state pattern laid down by Calvin remains identifiable through subsequent variations, but yet it repeatedly shifts in many respects to meet new circumstances. I will illustrate such shifts in two cases: the "Puritan Revolution" in 17th-century England and the "separation of church and state" under Calvinist influence in late eighteenth-century America. I will close this section with reflections on what contemporary Americans call "civil religion."

The Puritan "Revolution of the Saints"
The tradition of monarchical rule in England (including, since Henry VIII, the custom of regarding the sovereign as head of the Church) had persisted unbroken for many hundreds of years in what might have been called, using Orthodox terminology, a kind of "symphony." But it is often forgotten that, by the 17th century, Calvinism had become the dominant theology (as opposed to polity) in the Church of England. In 1647 an Assembly of Anglican, Presbyyterian and other divines completed a document known as the Westminster Confession of Faith, an attempt to express the faith of the English church formally in Calvinist terms. The significance of this confession for our purposes is that it sought faithfully to recapitulate tradition but did so in terms appropriate to its day and time. And that recapitulation reflected increasingly democratic, anti-monarchical sentiment. During the 1630s and 1640s, the growing urban middle classes, many of the lesser country gentry, and the great majority of the Puritan Calvinists were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the established political order. Reflecting these sentiments, an equally dissatisfied Parliament rose up against the king and judicially executed him in 1649, just two years after the new Confession had been completed. The ensuing civil war ended with a triumph of the parliamentary army, and Calvinists (for the most part: it is only fair to say that there were many other, many quite innovative Christian groups in the picture) under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell found themselves ruling the British Isles. Compare Calvin's description in his Institutes of the stringent conditions justifying such rebellions.

By providing justification for these political moves the Calvinist tradition spawned a kind of republic offering more religious liberty to other groups than England had experienced before. Cromwell stood for a national church, supported financially and administratively by the state, in which the preaching of the Word would be assured and public morals enhanced but in which there would be no bishops and no use of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. The tradition of the Church of England with all of its traditional political connections was here interrupted for a period of approximately eleven years (the son of Charles I returned to the throne in 1660). The importance of this experiment lay not in its stability or persistence but in the alternative model of church-state relations it brought to the English-speaking world, influencing the role of the Puritan Calvinists a century later in forming the government of the United States.

An important book on the Puritan revolution, which I recommend, is The Revolution of the Saints4 by Michael Walzer, a political philosopher now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Walzer's book sees the Calvinist tradition as having turned into a revolutionary ideology, with the Calvinist clergy as "rootless intellectuals" and their followers as "self-disciplined agents of social and political reconstruction." Hence these Calvinists provided an archetype for modern radical politics. What the Puritans did was to adapt their tradition to meet the needs of a period of social disintegration, of "unsettledness," when a traditioned order was crumbling and had not yet been replaced.

I am not sure how our Orthodox colleagues will see this example of de-traditioning and re-traditioning, where the problem was to deal creatively with discontinuity. Perhaps they will say that the restoration of monarchy and Anglicanism in 1660 shows this Calvinist upheaval to have been an aberration. It will be more difficult, however (but of course far from impossible), to say this of the next Calvinist church-state experiment, that involved in the founding of the United States.

"Separation of Church and State" in America
What appeared in Europe (and also in Puritan New England) as a homology of religious and secular notions comes apart constitutionally in America's separation of church and state.5

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads:

"Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Calvin wanted to maintain a clear distinction - both theological and administrative - between "Christ's spiritual kingdom" and the realm of civil government. But he permitted what the First Amendment would call an "establishment of religion." Although Reformed thought has influenced the American experiment, the founders and framers were in a new situation. Mark Noll has shown that eighteenth-century America was not as "Christian" as right-wingers have typically claimed, still many of the writers of The Federalist Papers and of the Constitution held together some form of biblical religion and some sort of republican sentiment in their own minds while they were to separate them on the Federal level (and eventually in the states) in juridical terms.

The "framers," for the most part, were both believing Christians of various sorts and believers in Enlightenment reason. The Calvinists among them thought that the church-state separation that Calvin taught could not be maintained if one Christian denomination had "establishment" status. Hence establishment had to go, and a non-sectarian civic space for political life needed to be created. That did not mean that individuals and groups could not bring religious motivations into their civic participation as citizens, even expressing their religious reasons in public. But it meant that public decisions, as made by Congress or the courts or local governments, could not officially make use of the reasoning of particular religious groups, but needed rather to use arguments of a "public" type: lines of reasoning that everyone could follow whatever their private convictions.

Now prohibited in the USA is anything that can possibly be construed as government-sponsored religious establishment. The First Amendment was intended primarily to protect the freedom of religion and the activities of churches from interference by the government. It has often been interpreted the opposite way: as if it meant protecting the government from the churches! The "Establishment Clause" does not prohibit participation of individuals and congregations as such in the political process. But there is an irony in the fact that, if religious bodies are tax-exempt, that constitutes a form of government protection for such groups and they may not then run profit-making businesses or become directly involved in electoral politics. To do either - under the government subsidy of tax-exemption - is to create a form of "establishment." Similarly anything that can be construed as governmental sponsorship of religious activity, e.g. prayer at public school football games, is also a form of "establishment."

Thomas Jefferson's famous letter regarding the "wall of separation" between church and state has confused the issue, and given ammunition to those who want to make preachers "stick to the gospel" without seeing that the gospel has political implications. When the right wing discovers that it can be politically effective for its own causes, it takes a very different view of the relation between religion and politics. The Bill of Rights says nothing about a "wall." The issue is not whether some wall is breached but whether the activity in question is establishmentarian in tendency.

Contemporary "Civil Religion"
What has made possible this public, constitutional, separation of factors so often in various ways united in men's and womens' self-understandings? The American sociologist Robert Bellah would answer, "civil religion": that kind of public consciousness that accepts without much question the use of religious language on such occasions as presidential inaugurations. "Civil religion" explains a great deal about our public separation of perspectives that for many people are variously blended in mind and heart.6 How can this be so? To find an answer we need to turn away from constitutional interpretation as such and from the structural interests of sociologists to focus on the analysis of cultural power. The analysis of the relationship between religion and politics needs to come closer to human realities. Civil or civic religion can be understood as a collection of cultural resources drawing on religious symbols that have broad cultural rather than narrow sectarian meanings. These resources are used by different groups - including religious ones - to explain and justify their positions or agendas within the community.

Thus considered, the two themes of civic religion and separation do not contradict one another. Rather, they co-exist. Religious people may well support the separation of church and state because they find solace in civil religion, while secular people may well justify their participation in civic religion because of the limits prescribed by constitutional separation. Elements of each theme are thus contained within the other. This could be called a practical, rather than a juridical reweaving of religion and politics. Rather than seeing the participation of religion in politics as occurring despite societal secularization, we can conjecture that it is because of the separation of religious organizations from the official polity that churches are perceived as the carriers of morality in American culture. Though the dominant trend may still be toward religion's secularization, this process is limited by a sacralizing of civil culture. Secularization and sacralization thus call forth their own limiting conditions.

So Where Does This Lead Us?
I have sketched aspects of the Calvinist tradition, and two of its variations, with special attention to the relations of church with civil government. What is the yield of all this for the purposes of this meeting? My instinct is to say that the changes in the social and political position of the Russian Orthodox Church, especially since the early nineties as described by Deacon Andrei, present certain parallels with the Reformed experience. Calvinists have learned to deal with various kinds of social "unsettledness," and have taken leading roles in establishing new kinds of "holy commonwealth" in Western lands. The question is always how far traditional ways of thinking and acting in the Church are dependent on the maintenance of traditional social conditions and relationships in society as a whole. When social relationships and power structures change, we, too, often change. One does not have to think of such change as disloyalty to one's roots. Such change may be the only way to be loyal to tradition in its true essence. Remember Calvin's great stress on continuity with the tradition while reading it differently to accommodate new circumstances and challenges.

Can we derive from all this anything like a theological principle for regulating continuity and change in ecclesiology and ethics? I am hoping that our conversations here can help illumine this matter. If we were able to draw on our respective traditions to produce a genuinely ecumenical social ethic we would ipso facto be nearer to having a common mind with respect to our reading of tradition. My own tendency is to employ various forms of second-order language - both traditional and contemporary - to talk about the first-order languages of prayer and practice that genuinely constitute what we are about. There is danger in that: that we depart from the substance of our concern into esoteric explorations dependent for their seeming cogency on one's knowing a lot about the work of contemporary philosophers! And yet such second-order languages sometimes help us uncover what we presuppose when we pray and act as we do.

With all these caveats, I propose something like the following. In part, this represents my reading of elements in the Orthodox tradition in a way that I can understand from the standpoint of my own. First, the notion of imago Dei: I am told that the language of Genesis 1:27 expresses something that has been begun but remains incomplete. We are not God's image. We - together as ekklesia - are summoned to become God's image in the universe: God's representation or ikon. This is a process within history and its fulfillment depends on the kind of community-in-context we become. The responsibility self-consciously to manage this communal signification - to be sure that it really does signify the gospel - is handed over to us in the acts of creation and redemption. But all this also takes place in a larger, divine, context. Our humanity is already taken up into God through the death, resurrection of Jesus Christ. Through the sacraments we are enabled to participate in that ascended God-manhood. Indeed we thereby participate in the life of the "economic" Trinity that ramifies through the historical process, suffusing the household of God and adjusting it to the needs that present themselves along the way. Being a part of "tradition" means participating in this "householding" process.

Tradition, then, cannot be just books and words and liturgical actions; it must be a stream of life. We live it. And as we do, we become it and we, too, can be "read." As a people we express something to the world. We send a message. And what we express (let us say, by our "social being") depends in part on our "social location," by which I mean how we comport ourselves in relation to the structures of society, the power interests, and all the other factors that make up the fabric of human life. To consult tradition is to try to read the message our predecessors have sent, not merely by perusing their published works but by "reading" the transfigural properties of their lives and opening ourselves to the same expressive transfiguration of life. New social and political conditions may require such transfiguration to be visibly configured in different ways: in order to say the same thing to the world.

Thank you again, Deacon Andrei, for your paper, and thank you all for your attention.

Notes

1. This, by the way, is the logic by which Calvin, in the 1559 edition, places the doctrine of election toward the end of Book III instead of within the exposition of the doctrine of God in earlier editions. Election now arises as a theological reflection on the already established fact of my justification and sanctification. In short, salvation as well as evil prompts the question, Why me? Weal as well as woe prompts this question.

2. The "Declaration of Debrecen" voted by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in 1997 reads these "we are not our own" sayings in a decidedly public context.

3. Reformed theology, as we all know, tends to begin with issues about how the Bible is read. We are more likely to take our beginning from Romans 13 than we are from Revelation 13. That is, we cotton more easily to "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities..." than we do to "And I saw a beast arising out of the sea..." with its apparent reference either to Babylon, or, more likely, the Roman Empire. The first passage treats political authorities as authorized by God to give order to public life, therefore to be obeyed. The second passage sees the great empires as bestial and therefore to be resisted. How do we judge? Can both pictures be true under different circumstances? In fact we can see from church history that Christian communions occupying "establishment" positions in their society (e.g. Calvinists in 16th-century Geneva, Puritans in 17th-century Massachusetts) have stressed the Romans passage, while social outsiders (e.g. Anabaptists, Mennonites, etc) have read the second with more sympathy.

4. Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).

5. We all tend to see our own political experiences as normative. Americans, for example, need to realize that Britain, a far more secular country in terms of church membership and attendance than the USA, still teaches "religious knowledge" in state-run schools. Obviously a different interpretation of what democracy requires, (although we are just beginning to teach religion in the public schools under very strict guidelines). Just to remind us that what we take for granted is not taken for granted everywhere!

6. See Bellah, (et alia), Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), for a fascinating, interview-based phenomenology of these relationships.