Category: Public Theology

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Political Theology Public Theology

Review of D. Stephen Long, Augustinian and Ecclesial Ethics (On Loving Enemies)

This is my review of D. Stephen Long, Augustinian and Ecclesial Christian Ethics: On Loving Enemies (Lanham: Lexington Books / Fortress Academic 2018) to appear in the Englewood Review of Books.

Steve Long has a talent for seeing a way through tensions between competing movements in contemporary theology. In his 2014 book Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Preoccupation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2014), Long addressed the debates over natural theology and the analogia entis that still divide Protestant theology in a Barthian key from Catholic theology sympathetic to von Balthasar. As Long showed in that book, while there are real differences, contemporary theology can benefit from insights from both of these great thinkers, even as Barth and von Balthasar benefitted in their own lifetimes from their personal friendship.

Now, in Augustinian and Ecclesial Christian Ethics, Long takes up a related set of differences in Christian ethics, between “neo-Anabaptists” and “neo-Augustinians.” The “neo-Anabaptists” – or, as Long comes to refer to them, the “ecclesial” ethicists, are represented by John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, James William McClendon, and others who have taken up their work. The “neo-Augustinians” are represented by Oliver O’Donovan, John Milbank, Eric Gregory, Charles Mathewes, Jennifer Herdt, and others who are more sympathetic to the “Augustinian realism” of Reinhold Niebuhr. In many ways, the ecclesial ethicists represent the Barthian side of Saving Karl Barth, while the neo-Augustinians represent the von Balthasarian side (though O’Donovan is perhaps a Barthian Augustinian).

In his introduction, Long notes a common experience for many readers who have felt chilled both by right wing fundamentalism and left wing progressivism: ecclesial ethics “gave us a way to embrace Christian orthodoxy without coupling it to a bankrupt populist, evangelical Christianity.” Further, Long, suggests, people attracted to ecclesial ethics “saw it making common cause with what appeared to be a similar movement in the UK – radical orthodoxy.” Unfortunately, Long admits, “[w]e were, overall, wrong.”

I count myself as one of those disappointed hopefuls. I even did a Ph.D. in the home of radical orthodoxy (the University of Nottingham) based on those hopes. I still very much appreciate radical orthodoxy’s early promise and energy, just as I remain grateful for the influence of Stanley Hauerwas and other ecclesial ethicists, but I think Long is correct that the vision of a more unified trans-continental movement has dissipated.

The bulk of Long’s text traces the lineaments of both the ecclesial and neo-Augustinian approaches in particular through the criticisms each approach has brought against the other. Long’s discussion suggests that one of the key reasons we were wrong in hoping that ecclesial ethics and radical orthodoxy could draw together Anabaptist and Augustinian streams of the tradition is the need for more attention to differences in ecclesiology and eschatology. The most basic, historic differences between these approaches, of course, concern how the Church should relate to the temporal governing powers in this present age. Long offers some important and helpful suggestions for how both ecclesial ethicists and neo-Augustinians could temper their views and move just a bit closer to each other, even if they finally also hold some of their differences in creative tension.

Long summarizes these places of convergence and creative tension in three main theses in his conclusion: first, any common project must agree that neither America nor any other nation-state is a “salvific institution”; second, the church’s role in relation to the nation-state is as a “conversation partner,” not as an institution that seeks control over the levers of temporal government; and third, the conversation must entail deeper reflection on the meaning of human “freedom.” As Long asks, “[w]ho will sustain an ancient, positive view of liberty,” that is, freedom as a freedom from evil that facilitates a positive vision of authentic human flourishing, rather than freedom primarily as negative liberty, a freedom to live however one pleases free of external restraints, so long as that freedom does not unduly impinge on another individual’s basic negative liberties, regardless of any other broader conception of the good. I think this is one of the most important points Long makes. The argument between today’s “conservatives” and “progressives” usually assumes the same radically libertarian view of “freedom” as negative liberty, which is not the predominant view of “freedom” in the Biblical literature or the Christian tradition.

There is one area in which I’d like to see more discussion on this front, which reflects my own background and interests: the role of the rule of law and its effect of mitigating the inherent violence in the exercise of police powers. Any discussion of the rule of law raises the question of “natural law,” which is not really addressed in Long’s text. This is perhaps not surprising, since both the ecclesial and neo-Augustinian ethicists Long surveys are contemporary Protestant theologians – indeed, even the moniker “theological ethics,” rather than “moral theology,” reflects a Protestant bent. This is true even of the Anglo-Catholic neo-Augustinians, notably John Milbank, who claim to be extending Roman Catholic social teaching rather than doing “Protestant” theology.

Part of the problem with any discussion of “natural law” in relation to Long’s central theses is the influence today of the “new natural law” – a school of thought led by John Finnis that emphasizes the capacity of human reason, apart from any specifically religious claims, to discern objective principles of the good. The ecclesial ethicists generally echo Barth’s “nein” to this kind of natural theology, and the neo-Augustinians for the most part likewise reject the claim that a meaningful account of social order can derive from human reason without at least glaringly begging the question of God — or, in Milbank’s case, without starting with the question of God. But there are also Catholic neo-Augustinians, such as Jean Porter, writing on natural law from a more classically theological perspective in ways that could help further bridge the gaps Long identifies.

For any reader of this Review who is disturbed by our current political culture, Long’s Augustinian and Ecclesial Ethics is important reading. If you are not already deeply versed in the contemporary political theologians Long surveys it may be difficult reading at points, but keep at it, and take notes. Even as someone knee-deep in this world already, I have two pages of notes for further reading in the flyleaf of my copy of Long’s book. This is what thoughtful, engaged contemporary political theology looks like.

Categories
Biblical Studies Justice Political Theology Public Theology

James Cone: A Black Theology of Liberation

This is a book review I wrote on James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation for a class on modern theology.  I’m primarily posting it here because I need to reference my thoughts in another paper, but I hope readers might appreciate the review.

James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation was first written, as Cone notes in the Postscript to the Fortieth Anniversary Edition, at the height of the civil rights and black power movements in 1969.[1]  Cone says that “[n]o one can understand this book apart from the social and political context in which it was written.”[2]  In particular, at the time he wrote this book, Cone had become frustrated with theology written by “white privileged intellectuals.”[3]  He wanted to write a specifically black theology within, to, and for the black experience.

The book begins with a description of Cone’s theological method.  For Cone, “Christian theology is a theology of liberation.”[4]  In particular, Christian theology “is a rational study of the being of God in the world in light of the existential situation of an oppressed community, relating the forces of liberation to the essence of the gospel, which is Jesus Christ.”[5]  This definition of theology seems consistent with other kinds of liberation theologies, and indeed seems somewhat conventional.  Cone draws his existentialist approach from noted white theologians such as Barth and Tillich.  However, Cone not only argues for “liberation” as a central motif in an existentialist theology, but further states that “black theology affirms the black condition as the primary datum of reality . . . .”[6]

The centrality of blackness to existential reality and therefore to theology, for Cone, means that “whites are in no position whatever to question the legitimacy of black theology.”[7]  White theology, Cone argues throughout the book, is a theology of oppression, beginning with the extermination of Amerindians and running through the enslavement of blacks.  Indeed, for Cone, “whites have only one purpose: the destruction of everything which is not white.”[8]  The rationality of black theology therefore need not, and should not, remain subject to the criterion for legitimacy drawn from white theology.

Notwithstanding this strong affirmation of the independence of Black theology, Cone proceeds to describe the sources and methods of Black theology in apparently conventional terms:  they include scripture, experience, and above all Jesus Christ.[9]  The “experience” Cone thinks is relevant, however, is the black experience of oppression.  The black experience is in fact the lens Cone uses to interpret scripture and Christ:  “[t]he meaning of scripture is not found in the words of scripture as such but only in its power to point beyond itself to the reality of God’s revelation – and in America, that means black liberation.”[10]  The meaning of “black liberation” is crucial to Cone’s theology in this book.  As noted above, Cone wrote the book in the midst of the black power movement.  Cone’s view of “black liberation,” therefore, included potentially violent resistance to white America.  For Cone, “[t]he black experience is the feeling one has when attacking the enemy of black humanity by throwing a Molotov cocktail into a white-owned building and watching it go up in flames.”[11]

Cone then proceeds to a discussion of what “God” means in black theology.  Consistent with his existentialist bent, he understands the term “God” to point to a transcendental reality that interprets history.  For Cone, this means in particular the history of God’s liberation of Israel as narrated in scripture and the history of God’s liberation of black people.[12]  At this point in the text, an apparent contradiction arises in Cone’s argument.  While “[t]he black theology view of God must be sharply distinguished from white distortions,” Cone suggests that “[t]his does not mean that black theology rejects white theology entirely.”[13]  Nevertheless, on the very next page after this statement, Cone says “[t]he goal of black theology is the destruction of everything white, so that blacks can be liberated from alien gods.”[14]

This contrast should be read as intentionally dialectical, as begins to become clearer in the next two chapters on theological anthropology and Jesus Christ.[15]  While Cone does identify blackness with black bodies, he also notes that “[i]n the literal sense a black person is anyone who has ‘even one drop of black blood in his or her veins.’”[16]  In Cone’s chapters on anthropology and Christology, blackness begins to seem more like an existential condition summed up in the black American experience rather than merely a skin color.

The final chapter discusses ecclesiology, culture, and eschatology.  Cone’s eschatology is strongly immanent.  He criticizes futurist eschatologies as means by which whites have encouraged blacks to remain docile in their servitude in hope of a future reward.[17]  His view of culture is similarly immediate to the lived experience of oppressed black people:  “[t]he world is not a metaphysical entity or an ontological problem. . . . It is very concrete.  It is punching clocks, taking orders, fighting rats, and being kicked around by police officers.”[18]  Similarly, eschatology, for Cone, must be realized in the present struggle for black liberation.  Nevertheless, he also recognizes the importance of “the future reality of life after death” as “grounded in Christ’s resurrection” because this hope supplies the courage to face death in the struggle for liberation.[19]

It is somewhat jarring for me – a white middle-aged lawyer, studying theology in a historically mostly white evangelical context – to read this text.  Cone’s frequent use of terms like “whitey,” his apparent calls to violence by blacks against whites, and his insistence that whites cannot critique black theology, initially seem to suggest that this text bears little value for a broader theological conversation, if it is not in fact completely unhinged.  But a more careful reading of the text within its own historical context argues for a subtler interpretation.  Cone brilliantly deploys modern white existentialist theology to challenge the very notion of “whiteness.”  He shows that what American culture has assumed as “normal” – the white middle class – is in fact not consistent with the fundamental norms of scripture and Jesus Christ.  Cone challenges us to see that what white American culture has despised – blackness – is, in fact, the true Christian norm precisely because it has been despised.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to know how to interpret some of the passages in this text that seem to call for black violence against whites.  At times Cone seems seriously to endorse immediate violence, and at other time he seems to suggest that violence is more of a possibility than a necessity.  In his chapter on eschatology, for example, Cone concludes that “[l]ooting, burning, or the destruction of white property are not primary concerns.  Such matters can only be decided by the oppressed themselves who are seeking to develop their images of the black Christ.”[20]  Although even the suggestion that violence might be appropriate seems shocking, Cone repeatedly invokes Nat Turner, the heroic leader of a slave rebellion prior to the Civil War, in a way that brilliantly disarms modern white liberals who eschew violence.[21]

Ultimately, I suppose I must accept Cone’s judgment that, as a white man, I cannot judge black theology.  As a white man, I learn from Cone what the experience of “blackness” in America can mean in relation to the existential core of the Gospel.  I cannot endorse the calls to violence in this text, but I can at least recognize how my requirement of nonviolent social change implicates a long history of racism that is anything but peaceful.

[1] James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll:  Orbis Books 40th Anniv. Ed. 2010), 152.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., Preface to the 1986 Edition.

[4] Ibid., 1.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 5.

[7] Ibid., 8.

[8] Ibid., 12.

[9] Ibid., Ch. 2.

[10] Ibid., 34.

[11] Ibid., 25.

[12] Ibid., Chapter 4.

[13] Ibid., 64.

[14] Ibid., 65.

[15] Ibid., Chapters 5 and 6.

[16] Ibid., 69.

[17] Ibid., 145.

[18] Ibid., 140.

[19] Ibid., 150.

[20] Ibid., 130.

[21] See, e.g., ibid.

Categories
Music Political Theology Public Theology

Thoughts on the U2 Joshua Tree Tour: Running into the Arms of America

My wife persuaded me at the last minute last night to go with her and my son to the U2 Joshua Tree concert at MetLife Stadium.  She got nosebleed seats on Stubhub.  I have to admit I was reluctant.  Big stadium concerts aren’t my thing, particularly when you’re far from the action.  And though at times in my life I’ve been a huge U2 fan, I haven’t followed them much lately.  But this was really an extraordinary event in our present cultural moment.  You know Bono is going to hit you with some social activism, and you wonder what he might say or do in the Age of Trump.

Between the warm up act (The Lumineers) and U2 the stage screens displayed scrolling poems from some great American poets — Walt Whitman, of course, but also poets such as Carl Sandburg and Sherman Alexie.  How many rock concerts involve that kind of literary performance art?  During the show the big scrolling screen behind the stage showed video vignettes of a American themes — rolling prairies, jagged mountains, deserts, middle aged veterans putting on their helmets. a Salvation Army band, and much more.  I was waiting for the irony to drop, but it didn’t.  This was a sincere tribute.  Bono noted at one point how America had historically been a great partner to his native Ireland.  This was, of course, a reference to immigration, but it was sincere, not angry.  He also expressed admiration for Presidents Bush and Obama for leading the global charge against AIDS, what he termed a historic bipartisan victory.  There was one really stinging moment, featuring an old video clip with a character name “Trump,” but that was the most heavy-handed it became.  (The clip really is from a 1950’s TV show featuring a character named “Walter Trump” who claims only he can prevent the end of the world by building a wall!).

I came away from this show having enjoyed some great rock songs performed by a great rock band and thinking this Irish guy really, deeply loves America.  And I came away myself feeling a bit of a deeper love for what America is and can be at its best.  That alone is pretty amazing these days.

 

Categories
Political Theology Public Theology

Religious Speech, Conscience, and Political Office

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Sohrab Amari opines that progressives are targeting conscience by censoring leaders with unpopular religious opinions.  This is a key front in today’s culture wars, and as usual, both sides fail to appreciate the question’s difficult nuances.

I think Amari is right to note that there are issues conservative religious people should be able to raise in the public square without vitriol.  Hot button issues such as abortion and gay marriage remain subject to reasonable debate.  Many, many religious people have views about those issues that are not palatable to progressives, and the progressives don’t have the only morally defensible views.

But one of the missing nuances is that the problem folks like Amari raise is about political censure, not legal punishment.  The politicians highlighted in Amari’s article are not in any danger of criminal prosecution for their expressed opinions.  Rather, they are unwelcome in progressive political circles, and progressive politicians criticize them in the public square.

It would be better, I think, if we could debate issues like abortion and gay marriage without overheated rhetoric from either side, but we’re still free to debate.  Of course, one of the subtexts in pieces like Amari’s is that legal censorship and the suspension of freedoms of speech and association is just around that corner.  There’s room here for an appropriate call for vigilance, but not for alarmism.

A much more difficult missing nuance is that neither Amari nor anyone else really believes that all religiously motivated speech should be expressed without any political censure — or indeed, without any legal censure.  Amari is offended that Bernie Sanders publicly questioned President Trump’s nominee for Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russel Vought, over a blog post in which Vought said that Muslims “do not know God, because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.”  Amari suggests “Mr. Vought’s was a particularly stark summary of the basic Christian teaching that faith in the God-Man is essential to salvation.”  Amari finds Sanders’ rebuke of Vought as Islamaphobic “depressing” because he thinks “Mr. Sanders implied that a devout Christian can’t hold fast to his faith’s most demanding claims and at the same time exercise public authority with decency and honor. If you disagree with someone’s theology, in other words, it must mean you hate him.”

But what if Vought were writing about Jews?  If Vought’s theology is consistent, he must think the same about Jews as he does about Muslims.  For Vought, it must be the case that Jews “do not know God, because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.”  I suspect that many serious Jewish people would — rightly — be horrified by such a statement.  I also suspect that in a civil society after Auschwitz, we would — rightly — want our political leaders to censure other politicians who claim in the public square that all Jews “stand condemned.”

Now, Vought, I presume, would say that his statement about condemnation is taken out of context because he is referring to a particular doctrine of justification for sin and not to the political sphere.  I suspect Vought’s understanding of prevenient or common grace, justification, eschatology, and so-on is confused, that he’s misusing some Pauline language here, and that he’s forgetting Romans 2.   Most Christians in fact don’t hold these views as starkly as Vought or Amari suggest, even while still maintaining the salvific uniqueness of Christ (see, for example, the Roman Catholic Vatican II document Nostra Aetate and related statements:  “The Church has also a high regard for the Muslims. They worship God, who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth.”).  But, fine — Vought can hold some kind of quasi-hyper-Calvinist view about all this if that’s what he thinks.  Yet the observation that such extreme or at least poorly explained theological views can have serious implications when expressed by a public figure is not out of line.

Imagine, for example, that a political leader opined that

  • White people should be allowed to enslave black Africans, because slavery is approved by the Bible and is the process God has ordained for the eventual Christianization of Africans.
  • Women should not be allowed to vote or hold elected office, because God has ordained that only men should be political leaders.
  • Marriage between races should be forbidden, because God has ordained differences between the races.

All of these, of course, were opinions previously held and vigorously defended in American politics, and encoded into American law.  The defenders of these views often claimed they faced religious persecution because their views were being censured as society changed — and indeed we fought the Civil War over slavery, which both sides viewed in religious apocalyptic terms.  Today, we would — rightly — want our political leaders to censure other politicians who express such views.

Or, perhaps closest to home, what if a political leader opined that “all non-Muslims are infidels and must either convert of face execution.”  I’m pretty sure that Russel Vought himself would publicly censure this opinion, because it is of course the view of radical Islamic extremist groups such as ISIS.  And Vought or anyone else would be right to censure this opinion, because it is abhorrent to a diverse society that values religious freedom.  Moreover, expressions of opinion such as this one might even become legally actionable if they incite specific acts of violence.

We could go on with many more examples like these.  The point is that Amari’s stark caricature of the problem is unhelpful.  Religious people should be free to express specifically religious views in the public square, but at the same time a society of diverse people with different religious views can respond vigorously to religious views that clash with common public values.  So long as we’re free to engage in such public debate, and so long as we’re free to form associations with like-minded people and to leave associations when disagreements become too basic, this is a feature of civil democracy, not a bug.

IMG SRC (Constantine holding a cross and sword)= Staro 2, Wikimedia Commons

Categories
Political Theology Public Theology

Political Theology from Augustine to Hobbes

Here’s a clip from one of my videos for a Christian Theological Ethics class I teach.  This discusses the nature of the “state” from Augustine to Hobbes.

Categories
Political Theology Public Theology

Three Qualities Political Leadership: Acting, Performing, Speaking

djt_headshot_v2_400x400Like many others, I’ve been reflecting on the theological and pastoral significance of Donald Trump’s election to the Presidency.  And, like many others, I’ve been troubled by the support Trump garnered from some evangelicals.  As a law professor and theological ethics professor, I feel I need to risk a few public thoughts about political leadership, so here they are:

  1. Character Matters.  Character matters because a leader’s character will inform his or her substantive policy decisions, particularly on hard, contested, urgent issues.  Character also matters because a leader in high office serves a symbolic role that sets a baseline for conduct in every sphere of the commonwealth.  A person invested with the authority of political office bears a heave responsibility to act wisely, with gravity and restraint.

  2. Symbols Matter.  Human beings are a symbolic species.  It is part of our created nature to respond to symbols that identify authority and power.  This is no less the case for an elected President than it is for a hereditary King.  A person entrusted with stewardship of powerful symbols — whether they are clerical vestments, a royal scepter, judicial robes, or the Oval Office — bears a heavy responsibility to perform wisely, with gravity and restraint.

  3.  Words Matter.  Words are among the most powerful human symbols.  Language signifies both specific concepts and broader attitudes, and invokes transcendent realities of thought and truth.  Through his or her words, a political leader represents these transcendent realities to the commonwealth and in a mystical but real sense represents the commonwealth before these transcendent realities.  A person entrusted with the responsibility to speak to and for the commonwealth bears a heavy responsibility to speak wisely, with gravity and restraint.

There is nothing novel about these convictions.  They are present, I think, in the great tradition of political theology running through the Torah, the Old Testament histories and prophets, the New Testament’s reworking of the Hebrew scriptures, and in great Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas.  Until recently, I think they were widely acknowledged by most serious Christians on the right, left, and in between.

In recent American history, when Bill Clinton defiled the Oval Office by exploiting a female intern, even engaging in illicit sexual conduct literally at the President’s desk, most Christians agreed that it mattered.  When he lied to the public about the affair, it mattered.  When his defenders dismissed this conduct as a meaningless “sex lie,” it mattered.  Many of us, myself included, were outraged by this dishonest, facile defense.  I thought Bill Clinton was generally a good President on policy questions, particularly on economic issues, but such conduct cannot pass unchecked.  Whether or not this conduct merited impeachment and removal from office, it rightly provoked grave concern and approbation.

Many conservative Christians have now abandoned proper concerns about character, symbols and words because they think Trump is “pro life” and “small government,” in contrast to the deficiencies, real and perceived, of President Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton.  There are many reasons to doubt Trump’s commitments to these policy positions, and many reasons to question the strange brew of restorationism and libertarianism that characterizes much of the religious right.  Even granting those concerns, however, it is wrong, unprincipled, and dangerous to surrender the historic Christian conviction that earthly political leaders play a central role in mediating truth to and for the commonwealth through actions, performance and speech.  We must now hold President Elect Trump to account in this role.

(Image Source = @realDonaldTrump Twitter profile).

Categories
Public Theology

The "Marriage Vow" and African American Families

On today’s Brian Lehrer Show there was a segment on a “Marriage Vow” being promoted by a religious right group called the The Family Leader.  The original version of the Vow, as signed by Tea Party / Religious Right darling Michele Bachman (among others), stated the following:

“a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.”

After some public outcry, this clause apparently was dropped from the Vow. 

There are so many ways in which this clause is stupid and uninformed.  Let me focus on one:  the notion that a child born into slavery in 1860 was part of a “household.”  African American slaves were not permitted to run their own “households.”  In fact, in many states slaves were not legally permitted to marry.  Even where marriages were permitted, slaves remained the property of their owners, who could separate families at will. 

The truth is that no black child born into slavery in 1860 was raised in a “two-parent household.”  All such children were were raised in multi-person work-camp-prison compounds headed dictatorially by a white male, who owned them as his property.  (Rather ironically, but sadly not surprisingly, The Family Leader touts itself as a purveyor of Focus on the Family’s “Truth Project.”)

Does this suggest the authors of the original version of this Vow are racist?  Well, yes.  Here we get a glimpse behind the racial code-word curtain of American libertarian Tea Party politics.  Why anyone claiming to be a follower of Jesus would align him or herself with this sort of thing is beyond me.

Categories
Public Theology Theology

Al Mohler, Robert Louis Dabney, and Public Theology

In Al Mohler’s editorial on gay marriage in today’s Wall Street Journal, he states that “[s]ince we [Evangelicals] believe that the Bible is God’s revealed word, we cannot accommodate ourselves to this new morality.”  He concludes that “it is not the world around us that is being tested, so much as the believing church. We are about to find out just how much we believe the Gospel we so eagerly preach.”

Here is a quiz.  Did Mohler also say this:

it is a homage we owe to the Bible, from whose principles we have derived so much of social prosperity and blessing, to appeal to its Verdict on every subject upon which it has spoken. Indeed, when we remember how human reason and learning have blundered in their philosophizings; how great parties have held for ages the doctrine of the divine right of kings as a political axiom; how the whole civilized world held to the righteousness of persecuting errors in opinion, even for a century after the Reformation; we shall feel little confidence in mere human reasonings on political principles; we shall rejoice to follow a steadier light.

No, he didn’t.  This was written in 1867 by Presbyterian preacher and Confederate Army Chaplain Robert Louis Dabney, in his treatise In Defense of Virginia.  Dabney, like Mohler, was trying to stem the tide of a cultural revolution that Dabney believed had caught the Church flat-footed.  Dabney continued,

The scriptural argument for the righteousness of slavery gives us, moreover, this great advantage: If we urge it successfully, we compel the Abolitionists either to submit, or else to declare their true infidel character. We thrust them fairly to the wall, by proving that the Bible is against them; and if they declare themselves against the Bible (as the most of them doubtless will) they lose the support of all honest believers in God’s Word.

The obvious resonance between Mohler’s and Dabney’s public theology ought to give careful readers pause.  Certainly, Mohler is not in favor of Black slavery, nor do I suspect he’s a racist.  However, Mohler employs precisely the same reasoning and rhetoric as did Dabney — right down to the claim that only folks who agree with him completely are part of the faithful remnant of the true church.  It failed then, and it fails now.  It was a misguided form of fundamentalism then, and it is a misguided form of fundamentalism now.

This is not to suggest that the question of African slavery in the 19th Century is morally equivalent to the question of gay marriage in the 21st Century.  That sort of argument is anachronistic and fails to account at all for the theological anthropology and ecclesiology that inform both the rejection of slavery and the support of “marriage” as a life-long covenant between a man and a woman.

But Mohler utterly misses the fact that “marriage” is primarily a sacramental covenant inseparable from the life of the visible Church.  His Biblicism fails because the Bible simply doesn’t function as a stand-alone rule book for public thought in a liberal democratic state.  (This is also why Mohler, like Dabney, must deny the reality of modern scientific theories in favor of earlier mechanistic natural theology — though Dabney’s critique of materialism is relatively sophisticated in some ways.)

Though Mohler speaks in his WSJ editorial of the “believing church,” he doesn’t seem to have any notion of The Church as an institutional alternative to the secular city.  But it is precisely and only in this alternative community that the true meaning of “marriage” can be disclosed.  It is only in the Church that men and women who are so called by God can live out that calling in life-long union, in submission to each other and often accompanied by great sacrifice and difficulty; it is only in the Church that men and women who are so called by God can live out that calling in chaste singleness, submitting their sexuality each day before the cross; and it is only in the Church that gay men and women who are so called by God can live as faithful participants in the life of the Church and for the good of the world, bearing the self-denial that this may involve.  The problem isn’t that people aren’t willing to read the Bible literally.  The problem is that we have forgotten what it means to be the Church.