: Jesse Covington, Bryan T. McGraw, Micah Watson
: Hopeful Realism Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics
: IVP Academic
: 9781514007716
: 1
: CHF 20.10
:
: Philosophie
: English
: 264
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
A Natural Law Framework for Evangelicals Today During a time when political conversations are marked by deep polarization and difficult decision-making, what resources do evangelicals have to think critically and theologically about public life? For political theorists Bryan T. McGraw, Jesse Covington, and Micah Watson, a crucial resource is to be found in natural law, a rich tradition of Christian political thought often neglected by evangelicals. Grounded in the hope and realism of the gospel, their evangelical natural law theory is deep in moral conviction yet oriented toward practical political decision-making. Relevant to all dimensions of political life, they show how an evangelical natural law framework can speak into debates about the economy, family life and marriage, violence and war, and religious freedom. Hopeful Realism is a generous guide for evangelicals concerned with bringing their theological commitments to bear on their political judgments. A volume that brings together robust theory with practical cases, Covington, McGraw, and Watson show how evangelicals can participate as evangelicals in a pluralistic, often polarized, democracy.

Jesse Covington (PhD, Notre Dame) is professor of political science and director of the Augustinian Scholars honors program at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He teaches and writes in the fields of political theory, political theology, and constitutional law, with particular interest in the interrelation of religion and government.

1
The Bible and Politics


“IT MUST BE NICE, it must be nice to have Washington on your side.” So goes the lyric sung by the actors portraying Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s phenomenon and hit musicalHamilton.1 Jefferson and Burr are needling Alexander Hamilton for how much he relies on George Washington’s prestige to win an argument. It’s much easier to carry the day if you have an American icon backing you up.

Given how important Scripture is for evangelicals on any contested subject, including politics, it must be nice to have the Bible on your side. The dangers of such a sentiment are that we Christians can rely on the thin reed of proof-texting or we can be tempted to find in Scripture support for what we already want to be true. Abraham Lincoln was reportedly once asked if God was on his side. The story goes that his response was that he hoped that he was on God’s side, because God is always right. There’s something similar to be said about Scripture. We should want to be informed and directed by what God has revealed in his Word; we should be wary of shaping God’s Word to serve our political ends. There are important connections between authoritative biblical teaching and our political witness, but drawing these connections well is as important as it is challenging.

So how should the Bible inform a Christian’s approach to politics? Given two thousand years of disagreement about the uses and misuses of Scripture as applied to politics, we recognize this is fraught territory. We first describe our positive view of Scripture’s place overall and then briefly offer four guidelines for how Scripture relates to politics. Because such matters are so easily misunderstood, before moving to the treatment of our chosen passages we draw some crucial distinctions and try to state clearly what we arenot trying to do with Scripture.2

Scripture’s Place and Three Critical Passages


We start with the conviction that Scripture is the highest authority God has given us to govern our conduct and belief.3 We think of this commitment to a high view of Scripture as a cluster of claims. First, God speaks intelligibly through the Bible such that Christians individually and corporately can draw moral and political conclusions (among other things) from Scripture. Second, where Scripture speaks clearly it is the highest epistemic authority—though we recognize that the Bible does not address every political question nor provide unambiguous answers to every issue. As a result, and third, any approach to politics (or any other subject) that occludes the witness of Scripture, arbitrarily cordons off biblical truths from the public square, or undermines scriptural teaching contradicts Christian convictions. The positive corollary of this claim is that Scripture is the “norming norm,” the standard to judge all other standards. While we recognize the human and cultural influences that went into the inspiration of Scripture (and which impact its interpretation), Scripture itself provides the measure by which the church, guided by the Holy Spirit, measures everything else.

Moving from Scripture’s place generally to its application to the political realm, we rely on four ideas to inform our understanding of Scripture’s role for political thinking.

  1. 1. First, drawing from the Protestant Reformers and their antecedents, who themselves drew from Scripture, all Christians are capable and indeed encouraged to learn the Scriptures for themselves. (A corollary of the perspicuity and authority of Scripture is the use of Scripture to interpret itself, including using the New Testament to interpret the Old.4)

  2. 2. Second, the teachings of the church fathers and mothers, and tradition gene