By Adi Schlebusch
One of the core problems with the revolutionary political theory emerging out of the Enlightenment was its attempt to reconstruct the social order from abstractions, as opposed to recognizing the reality from which the social order emerges as foundational. The idea that liberal propositions constructed independently of the history and character of a people can serve as the basis of community life, national life and civil government lies at the very heart of the globalist drive for the universal homogenization of the human species. For the globalist, humanity itself is an abstraction and humans are reduced to mere constituents of that abstraction, as opposed to being recognized as real created persons with a God-given people, place and purpose.
While there is a primary or universal normative standard—the ten commandments—the created order itself testifies to the reality of a secondary or particular norm which is found in the organic volksgeist and distinct history of a particular people in a particular place. This interplay between the universal and the particular is vital to counter the monism which lies at the heart of the universalizing tendencies of globalism and statism. The Dutch political theorist Groen van Prinsterer (1801—1876) beautifully summarized this harmonious interplay between the universal and the particular with his famous motto: “It is written! It is given!”[1] With this he indicated that both the universal moral principles of biblical law as well as the very real historical and organic development of a particular people and place both need to be recognized as foundational to a healthy legal framework suitable to any given context.
This harmony is of course rooted in the absolute omnipotence of God, since his providential decrees and moral ordinances cannot ever be at odds with each other. There is one divine logic behind both Scripture and providence. This is not to say that all of history or all of nature is normative, of course, as such a view would border on relativism. History and nature always need to be understood through the lens of Scripture. After all, it is only by interpreting both history and nature by means of the infallible revelation of Scripture that the former two can be properly understood in terms of their genesiology, ontology and teleology. The German philosopher Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802—1861) therefore rightly noted that, insofar it does not conflict with biblical law, common law can and should be derived from the historical and organic development of a community—whether it be a national or local community—inasmuch this development manifests itself independent of human planning as Gottes Fϋgung, i.e. as divine decrees.[2] Not atheistic rationalist abstractions, but only such organic developments accord with the essence of the God-given reality in which people actually live their everyday lives.
In other words, communities, churches, villages, towns, corporations and counties do not derive their right to existence from the state. These are all legal spheres which exist in their own right as manifestations of divine decrees and do so independently of any higher authority save God Himself.
This idea that smaller, more basic social units which organically or freely develop independent of the state forms the basis of the social order was beautifully expounded by the Calvinist political philosopher Johannes Althusius (1563—1638) in his Politica, originally published in 1614. Althusius explains that is not that the family, the clan, the neighborhood or the town cannot exist apart from the state, but rather that the state cannot exist apart from these more basic social units, which are far more integral to an organic social order than the state itself. In fact, viewing the social order as rooted in the state (as the universalist does) or the individual (as the particularist does) as opposed to the nuclear and extended family, necessarily means abstracting the social order from reality. In a similar vein, R.J. Rushdoony beautifully explains how the Christian social ontology stands in direct contradistinction with the Enlightenment project of central planning:
One of the quiet goals of the Enlightenment was the disestablishment of Churches and of Christianity... A first step in this process of dis establishment was to reduce Christianity to an option for man, a matter of choice, not of necessity. The realm of necessity was held to be the civil government. Freedom came to mean deliverance from the Church to the State, from supernatural mandates and laws to 'natural' and statist laws. The Reformation had said plainly that Biblical faith requires belief in God's predestination, in God's sovereign choice... This was reversed by the Enlightenment, and then by Arminianism. Sovereign choice was transferred to man. Man, it was held, has the option to choose God or reject Him, to declare God to be elect or non-elect.[3]
Liberation from the centralization and statism of this Enlightenment project would of course also require some kind of return to res privata—a private legal framework in which, for starters, the autonomy of the family unit as primary to the social order is recognized. A first step towards this of course entails abolishing both property tax and estate tax, since the family and the household are free and independent socio-political and socio-economic entities under God.
Figuring out what the relationships between the covenantal units in a stratified social order for our 21st century context would look like will of course require some innovative ideas and further discussion, but what we all should agree upon is that absolutizing the particular leads to anarchy, and absolutizing the universal leads to tyranny. What we need is a social order based not in the sovereignty of the state and not in the individual, but in divinely-ordained socio-covenantal units. What we need is subsidiarity in the spirit of the judicial reform brought about by Moses and Jethro in Exodus 18—where the socio-political order is restructured with “rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens” (verse 21). It is only through a harmonious interplay between all of the basic units of that social order that the groundwork can be laid for the formation of a truly Christian state—a state that is not propositional, but the reflection of an organically developed national life rooted in a covenantal family, clan and community life.
Building the New Christendom means working towards a social order in which the state does not consume the other spheres of society, and where our socio-political life is fundamentally familial, tribal and covenantal rather than imperial, statist and global.
The author is a senior researcher with the Pactum Institute.
[1] Groen van Prinsterer, Ongeloof en Revolutie (Den Haag, 1847), p. xi.
The original Dutch words “Er staat geschreven! Er is geschied!” became the motto of the Dutch Anti-Revolutionary (or anti-Enlightenment) movement in the nineteenth century.
[2] Friedrich Julius Stahl, Siebzehn parlamentarische Reden und drei Vorträge (Berlin, 1862), p. 237.
[3] Rousas John Rushdoony, To be as God: A Study of Modern Thought since the Marquis de Sade (Vellecito, CA, 2003), p. 17.