Today being the deadline that it is, there springs to mind Our Lord’s famous saying, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Mark 12:17 and parallels [KJV]) This verse dramatically contradicts certain naive inferences that seem to follow naturally from God’s sovereignty over all of His creation, yet we are so accustomed to it that we do not recognize how strange an injunction it is.
God created Heaven and Earth and all things visible and invisible. Caesar created nothing; whatever the state has, God made. The logical consequence is that only God has a claim on men’s labors and lives. That is the response that the inquirers expected from Jesus and the one given by his contemporaries, the Zealots who not long after rose in revolt against Rome. That Jesus gave the unexpected answer, teaching that some things do belong to Caesar, had profound implications for moral philosophy and the shape of Christian society.
Within the Christian world, there is no divine monopoly. States legitimately exist without regard to religion, and religious law does not preempt the entirety of life. Hence, secular states are not only conceivable but the norm. Their rulers, even if sincere Christians obedient to Christ’s teachings in every respect, are not, in their role as rulers, agents of the Church. There are, in the classic formulation, “two swords”, each supreme in its own realm.
But how can we allow the temporal sword to be wielded without reference to Christianity? Doesn’t that mean that Caesar will be free to act without moral restraint, that, except by happy whim or accident, he will be a tyrant?
That would certainly be the case if “good” and “evil” were categories dependent solely on God’s arbitrary decree; that is, if “good” were no more than a synonym for “what God approves”. The only way to ascertain the moral quality of an action would then be to find out what God thought of it, and that could not be known except through revelation.
The Christian view, inherited from Judaism (which perhaps expresses it more forcefully; “arguing with God” seems to be a peculiarly Jewish penchant), is the opposite: that good and evil are knowable to all rational beings, whether or not they have ever heard of Christ. Moral reasoning is very difficult, and men frequently make mistakes (if there were great short-term pleasure to be gained by believing that 2+2=7, we would make plenty of mistakes in arithmetic, too), but it is within the reach of Caesar. What cannot be accomplished by natural reason, the Church teaches, is release from the bondage of sin and death. That gift, which is not the business of Caesar, proceeds from God alone. In matters pertaining to our salvation, we dare render nothing to any being or power except God.
Natural law is the foundation of the secular state and therefore is a necessary implication of Our Lord’s endorsement of rendering unto Caesar. On this point, Christians and atheists used to concur. Their disagreement was over whether anything beyond natural law had reality. The most remarkable alteration in secularist thinking over the past century has been its abandonment of natural law in favor of dismissing “reason” as a human construct. It is ironic that the Gospels furnish stronger reasons to reject theocracy and greater reassurance about the potential virtues of a non-religious polity than does most of what passes nowadays for secularist discourse.
Comments