True Politics and the Ethic of Love, Part 1
God’s required commandments of mankind are summarized by our Lord through first, loving God and second, loving our neighbor. This is the whole of ethics, the required oughtness of how mankind is to live in God’s world. And of course, politics is subsumed under ethics. If ethics is the study of how men ought to live in light of God, and politics is the study of how we ought to love our neighbor made in the image of God, then Christians ought to be the best and brightest of political thinkers. Alasdair MacIntyre reinforces this truth reminding us that “for Aristotle ethics is a part and aspect of politics and that the human good is to be achieved in and through participation in the lives of political communities. This is a familiar and uncontroversial thesis with respect to Aristotle.”[1] He’s not wrong. But is this familiar with respect to Christians, especially evangelical Christians today?
It seems to me that one of the major culturally corrosive acids to Christian political thought today has been the ubiquitous rise and presence of materialism (and with it an ever-invasive Marxism) which, in denying anything transcendently Divine, has made everything immanently Dire. If there is no God then all sickness, all suffering, and all sadness falls on us to alleviate.[2] We’re all we’ve got and therefore all responsibility falls on man. This of course plays out in unchecked Governmental growth and the increasingly magniloquent meddling of a the so called “expert class”. As a result, everything becomes politicized and polemicized. We become, in the words of R.J. Snell, overly excessive hand washers to control our unpredictably immanent world.[3] And if you don’t do as the experts say, then “right to jail!”[4] Gone is the transcendent Providence of a God who lovingly controls all things, fallen though our world is.
The result of this on Christian political thought seems to have been the reactionary adoption of a pervasive pietism. Only loving God is what matters now. Why? Because politics and political power are what the unbelievers do. They, in their denial of God, have made politics god. And what has Jerusalem to do with Washington D.C.? When Christ comes back, He’ll sort it all out.
But this is exactly the wrong move; it’s the holy-huddleism of early 20th century Fundamentalism. Ironically, the issue at hand is not that everything has become politicized, as is often attributed as a critique of Marxism, but rather that politics has been coopted as an ethics without God. In other words, the first and greatest commandment has been cut loose from the second, as if love of neighbor can stand alone. But what needs to be reclaimed, especially by thoughtful Christians, is the reality that true politics, politics as God has designed it, is inescapable. One cannot escape the oughtness of loving his neighbor as himself precisely because we cannot escape the oughtness of loving God. The second commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves only exists considering our creaturely condition whose telos is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.
This is why love as ethically conceived can only be defined in reference first to God and only then, secondly, to those around us. Any definition of love and thus of politics (love of neighbor) that omits the being and attributes of God as revealed in Scripture is not only deficient but also deformed. The late Iris Murdoch was certainly right when he wrote that “we need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be central.”[5] And yet, what is love if not rightly understood in reference to the greatest good – the summum bonum – for which true love finds its proper end. Christians believe and know (in that order) that that greatest good is God. In fact, Christians love God. And as such they can better love others, political creatures that we are.
And of course, the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ confirms all this. In fact, as Oliver O’Donovan has argued, it is only because of Christ, who is alive now, that ethics (and by default, politics) is even rightly understandable, much less doable. “The meaning of the resurrection, as Saint Paul presents it, is that it is God’s final and decisive word on the life of his creature, Adam. It is, in the first place, God’s reversal of Adam’s choice of sin and death: ‘As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.’”[6] That is, made alive to love. As the Apostle John writes, “We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1 John 4:19-21).
[1] Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, volume 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), vii.
[2] Note the rise in public animosity toward anyone offering prayers for those affected by some crisis or disaster. Admittedly, the phrase “thoughts and prayers” is cringeworthy but only because the idea that mere “thought” about the suffering will add any benefit or help. But praying, specifically praying to an omnipotent personal God who can enter into our timeline and into our suffering and “work out all things for the good of those he loves” – this in not only not cringeworthy but actually helpful and hopeful.
[3] R.J. Snell, Lost in the Chaos: Immanence, Despair, Hope (Angelico Press, 2023).
[4] Fred Armisen
[5] Iris Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’” in Revisions, ed. Hauerwas and MacIntyre (University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 68.
[6] Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (Inter-Varsity Press, 1986), 13.
