Resist the lure of theological politics

The Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper, who—unusually for a theologian—served as prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905, is the major modern exponent of “Christian pluralism.” He believed that all ideas, when strongly held and believed, were effectively faith-based. According to his intellectual biographer, the American theologian Matthew Kaemingk, Kuyper thought that although one can find some individuals who wish to keep their belief private, “the absence of an ultimate point of loyalty, meaning, or purpose cannot persist for long.”

If this is the case, then it becomes a question of where individuals find their “ultimate point of loyalty.” Is it in a nation, rationalism, truth, God, or some mix of these things? The inherent risk of finding ultimate loyalty in a charismatic leader or a sovereign state is that they are of this world. To claim them, then, requires seeking victory in this world, because they are of this world and this world alone. As the writer Kyle Orton remarks, “Tolerance might not be possible from the secular world, tinged as it is with utopianism and a drive for final victories.” The fundamental question becomes how to clip such a drive.

Kuyper and Kaemingk offer one potential answer. Christian pluralism sees the city of man as inherently broken and fallen from sin, which, in turn, means that politics must be acknowledged as a site of uncertainty, rather than certainty. The solution, then, wouldn’t be walling off one’s Christianity from the domain of Caesar, but rather applying it in a more self-conscious manner.