Review of The Contested Public Square: The Crisis of Christianity and Politics by Greg Forster. InterVarsity Press, 2008. 254 pages.

The current economic travails, as truly troubling as they are, and the political divisions between left and right are put in proper perspective when compared to the relative prosperity and peace that most continue to enjoy in North America and Europe. More important, most Westerners benefit from the liberty to practice or abstain from a particular faith—a good that is often taken for granted. The wealth and range of freedoms that North Americans and Europeans now expect were not normal even three hundred years ago. One of the most significant issues Westerners have faced is the relationship between religion and the state. Greg Forster’s incredibly readable and thoughtful introduction to political philosophy brings the history of Western political thought to an educated lay readership, especially lay Christians who have not been exposed to a political history that could have resulted in less hospitable forms of governance.

In his acknowledgements, Forster mentions that he taught some of the same themes in an adult Sunday school class over a period of years. Given the accessibility of the material contained in the book, those attending Forster’s class must have come away with a better knowledge of the relationship between their faith and political life than most Christians—Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox—normally have. He rightly suggests that the movement from the text of scripture to political forms and policy platforms is not straightforward in the least. The movement from what scripture does say regarding the appropriate role of government is tentative. Forster writes:

Almost the only political teaching it provides is that a person’s ordinary political duties (behaving peacefully, obeying the law, paying taxes, etc.) continue to apply when rulers deny God and persecute believers. . . . The New Testament’s silence on politics combined with the apostles’ setting aside the political order of the Old Testament leaves the faithful with no revelatory instruction as to how their political affairs are to be ordered.

Scripture does not provide the clearest guidance on these matters, so human reason must be brought to bear upon the basic concepts extracted from scripture, leaving considerable room for disagreement.

Forster deftly argues that the book would be different in other cultural contexts: “If I were writing a history of Christian political thought for Russian or Brazilian or Chinese readers, the focus would be different.” The principles drawn from scripture have been embodied differently in other cultural and historical contexts—Philip Jenkin’s recent book The Lost History of Christianity provides some interesting insight on this point. Forster avoids what Herbert Butterfield described as the Whig fallacy in which history is drawn as a clear line toward greater and greater human liberty. The history of the West involves much bloodshed and violence toward innocent people who dared to believe something different than their neighbors—and on many occasions those who were once persecuted became the persecutors when the opportunity arose. The advances or progress made frequently were the result of pragmatic decisions rather than enlightened wisdom. Thankfully the West developed political institutions with broad-mindedness to tolerate more and more religious groups who can live together in peace and pursue their particular ends without harm to others.

Forster begins with the ancient world in which the first Christian believers struggled to sort out a way to live within the context of the pagan Roman Empire. In the Mediterranean milieu into which Jesus was born, the two sources of wisdom about the world were mythology and philosophy. Mythology provided a religious framework in which adherents would seek the favor of the gods in the midst of what was for many people a relatively bleak day-to-day existence. Philosophy, as typified by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, challenged the reasonableness of serving the gods as such—or at least opened up the minds of ancient pagans to the possibilities that reason may create doubt about the religious rituals associated with mythological belief. The philosophers did not necessarily cast belief in the supernatural into doubt; they tended to see the natural world as limiting and riddled with problems. Mythological religion according to these philosophers kept people chained to superstition and overly anthropomorphic conceptions of deity.

One can see how the figure of Jesus would be a stumbling block to the Greeks, as Paul reportedly put it. Some Christian scholars of this period found much in the philosophical wisdom to be compatible with scripture and started to weave together reason and revelation. There was some resistance to this within the church—Tertullian famously questioned, “What is Athens to Jerusalem?” But the rapid growth of Christianity and wedding of Christian dogma with Greek philosophic wisdom brought the church into a symbiotic relationship with the Roman government. When Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, political philosophy as a concern came to the foreground.