The Gospel, politics, and love of God

Like nature and grace, law and love have a complex and subtle relationship.

Many Catholics insistently favor bridges over walls, inspiration over tradition, the spirit over the letter, and love over laws and institutions. They can certainly cite passages from the New Testament to support that preference:

… for the written code kills, but the Spirit gives life. (2 Cor. 3:6)

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. (2 Cor. 3:17)

The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit. (Jn 3:8)

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal. 3:28)

If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. (Lk 14:26)

… but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin… (Mk 3:29)

Other passages tell us that love and humility matter more than true beliefs and correct behavior, and certainly more than institutional standing. It is the heretical Good Samaritan and the sinful tax collector we are to emulate rather than the priest, the Levite, or the overly-conscientious Pharisee. And Christ himself opposed the execution of Mosaic law against the woman taken in adultery, and slighted rules regarding the Sabbath for the sake of relieving suffering.

Such passages are essential to the Faith. They transcend limitations and point toward the infinite. That can be intoxicating, so it is not surprising that Christians who put these passages too exclusively at the center of their faith have sometimes lost their grip on everyday realities, including ordinary social and moral obligations.

That is one reason there has sometimes been a tendency to reject or at least soften the obligation of moral law. Thus, in our time, we have seen proposals to effectively put aside serious obligations relating to family life in the name of mercy, accompaniment, lived experience, and pastoral “praxis”.

There has also been a related tendency among many Christians to play down the role of institutions. What good is organized religion, someone might ask, when the churches are run by priests and Levites? The state, when it was the most highly regarded of states that executed Jesus, Peter, and Paul? Family or property, when Jesus emphasized their spiritual dangers, and showed little concern for either, when he called the apostles?

But we do live in this world, with its limitations, practicalities, institutions, and obligations, and Jesus also said things that point in a much more down-to-earth direction:

Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. (Mt 5:17-18)

So—not surprisingly—Christians are indeed bound by the moral law. And the Epistles show that from the beginning, they have supported social and religious institutions. They have honored and (unless morally impossible) obeyed religious and secular rulers. And they have emphasized family obligations—the prohibition of divorce is proof enough of that—and accepted the distinctions between the sexes that are part of what makes the family a definite, reliable, and functional institution.

The early Christians even accepted slavery as an institution, while enjoining masters to treat slaves with the love shown other members of the household—at least when, as in the case of Onesimus, they were Christians.

That’s surprising enough to people today to call for some discussion. The response made sense given the political and social arrangements of the time. People were subject to rulers—emperors, kings, governors, military commanders—and general arrangements for limiting their power did not exist.

The head of a household was another ruler, one who headed the most fundamental of all institutions, and his power tended to be equally broad. In Rome, for example, it included the power of life and death over family members. Abraham himself had the power to sacrifice his son and to drive members of his household out into the desert.

But in spite of their broad powers, rulers had far less effective control over their people than today, with our technological and bureaucratic means of supervision and control. Nor were they tempted by schemes of top-down social transformation in the name of inhuman ideologies. As a result, war and disorder, with their limitless violence and injustice, were far more pressing threats than domestic or public tyranny. The tyranny of Nero only affected a few; civil war, in contrast, could lead to the death of millions.

Under such conditions, the injustice of a slave’s situation was not his subjection to uncontrollable power—that was normal at the time—but the expectation that he would be treated as a mere tool. And the Epistle to Philemon did away with that.

It would hardly have been useful for Christians to propose innovations—a Bill of Rights, an independent judiciary, popular representation in government, conversion of all master/slave relationships into employer/employee ones—for which the world was institutionally unready, to the point that they would have hardly seemed comprehensible.

What, for example, could have been done with a defeated army—which would often be the enemy’s whole adult male population—in a world without international law, the material or organizational resources to run POW camps, or often a stable enemy government with a fixed territory to deal with? It’s not clear that any alternative to enslavement would have been realistic other than massacre.

So what made sense for Christians was to accept existing relationships of authority, which were what kept the peace and established whatever worldly justice could be had, and enjoin obedience on subjects and justice on rulers. And that is what they did.

After a long process of evolution, the emphasis on a ruler’s duties and the dignity of his subjects led, of course, to institutional developments. As institutions and social possibilities changed, so did specific obligations: it is no longer permissible, for example, for a Christian to hold slaves.

That process of political and social change leading to change in specific duties continues today. For example, the emergence of totalitarian government as an ever-present possibility has required further refinement of the Catholic attitude toward authority and obedience. So the Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us:

Regimes whose nature is contrary to the natural law, to the public order, and to the fundamental rights of persons cannot achieve the common good of the nations on which they have been imposed. (par. 1901)

A regime based on fundamentally wrong principles can thus lose legitimacy altogether. That loss of legitimacy evidently could apply even in the case of seemingly mild and humane governments. If “defense of human rights,” understood to include abortion and abolition of the family as a specific authoritative institution, is understood as part of a government’s basic reason for being, so that it must bring the whole society in line with those purposes, its consistency with the common good, and therefore its legitimacy, seem questionable.

The relation between scriptural passages that can at times sound antinomian and passages enjoining obedience to legal and religious norms remains complicated. How do we sort it all out?

The key can be found in Saint Augustine: “Love God and do whatever you please: for the soul trained in love to God will do nothing to offend the One who is Beloved.” To unlock the moral riddles inevitable in the tangled web of human affairs, we look to love of God. Otherwise, we will never find the right perspective.

That is why it is the first of the two great commandments. We are formed in the image and likeness of God. When we lose sight of Him and pay attention primarily to ourselves and our neighbor, we mistake the likeness for the original, and each of us becomes a god.

Love of God then reduces to love of self and neighbor. But without reference to something higher than the concerns of this world, love of self becomes narcissistic, and love of neighbor becomes a matter of promoting the satisfaction of our neighbor’s desires, which have also become narcissistic, and thus of social progress as secular progressives understand it. The Kingdom becomes indistinguishable from a secular utopia, with perhaps an emphasis on secular self-realization tossed in. But neither works: man points beyond himself, so purely human concerns are not enough for a truly human life.

Jesus made the command to love God the first and greatest commandment for a reason. God cannot be subordinated: if He could, He would not be God. To follow Jesus—to be Christlike—is first of all to follow him on that point. And love of neighbor must be interpreted by reference to it, excluding all sentimentality and all indifference and self-seeking—and thus everything that now counts as secular idealism. Catholics need to bear that in mind when participating in secular politics.