The Pluralist Politics of the Canons of Dordt

Shadi Hamid said to me once that a proper democracy needs to believe in hell. I think I took his meaning, even if I would not quite put it that way. A proper democracy—a liberal democracy—needs a way to concern its citizens with proximate, penultimate matters of justice, without yielding the monstrous weapons of the modern state to the purposes of the ultimate, of salvation, of everlasting life. This is what scholars sometimes call religious liberty, and it is one of the first and most profound limitations on state power.

I would prefer to put it like this: liberal democracy—where regularly cycled elected representatives wield political power under limitations like the right to freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and so on—must, by definition, be pluralist. It must have within it competing ultimate claims which the state, again by definition, cannot suppress or resolve. It must have a citizenry that imagines those resolutions as either beyond the competency or capacity of the state.

The state must be limited. But religion, also, must somehow be limited. It may imagine itself the whole of life, the very foundation and end of humanity, but it must not take upon itself the powers of that very state to execute its celestial calls. This is why a little Calvinism is a dangerous thing. Christ may be Lord over every square inch, as bumper sticker Kuyperian theology professes, but that call must be embedded into a broader Calvinistic worldview of ethics and political theology—here we come to Dordt—or else the natural consequence can only be triumphalistic cultural conquest.

It is my argument that Calvinist political pluralism rests in a fundamental sense on the confession of the Canons of Dordt. And that while this may not have been the intended political consequence of the authors of the theology of Dordt, it is a logical and even essential one.

Let me start with the overall argument of the Canons. As I read it, it is among the most pastoral of the three forms of unity. It takes up an enormous amount of time on assurance, on comfort, and gratitude. There are very good reasons of historical theology for this, but I want to point out the unexpected political posture that this yields on the front end. God’s work of redemption, of salvation, of making all things new is something that begins and depends primarily on him. The Canons are written to make this specific point abundantly clear. Even the most particular work of God’s salvation, our very own selves, depends not one bit on us. How much more the sweeping scope of God’s redemptive work in history? In culture? In human civilization? Peace, say the Canons: ours is only to respond in grateful obedience to work that is already done by someone who has called it finished.

The politics of Dordt begin to come into view from this soteriology: if we, the faithful, the redeemed, cannot by one bit of our own personal effort, by one bit of an expression of our own independent will, save our own souls, how much less do we expect to save others? Or to save cultures? Or to conquer fields or disciplines or territories for Christ? The Canons of Dordt preach to us that we cannot conquer these for Christ because they are already his. It is only ours to uncover his marvels, awaiting us, and to live in grateful obedience for the act that he himself, alone, has accomplished.

Under the third and fourth main points of doctrine, Article 10 of the Canons of Dordt puts it like this:

The fact that others who are called through the ministry of the gospel do come and are brought to conversion must not be credited to human effort, as though one distinguishes oneself by free choice from others who are furnished with equal or sufficient race for faith and conversion (as the proud heresy of Pelagius maintains). No, it must be credited to God: just as from eternity God chose his own in Christ, so within time God effectively calls them, grants them faith and repentance, and, having rescued them from the dominion of darkness, brings them into the kingdom of his Son, in order that they may declare the wonderful deeds of the One who called them out of darkness into this marvelous light, and may boast not in themselves, but in the Lord, as apostolic words frequently testify in Scripture.

The politics of this dependence on the sovereignty of God seem immediately clear to this political scientist: the use of any means, political power fore among them, to coerce or require a confession of Christian faith from among a people is not only an ethical violation, it is in fact a kind of blasphemy. It takes upon those in political power the work that can only be that of the Almighty.

This is a different kind of argument than non-Calvinists usually make about religious liberty. Broader evangelical arguments tend to rely on conscience or voluntarism, the idea that a coerced faith is no faith at all (correct), that coercion is a violation of human dignity and the image of God (also correct), and finally that true faith must be voluntarily chosen. On this latter point, Dordt demurs. And it is important because a faith that is chosen and a salvation in which human will plays a decisive role is one in which there is always the temptation to put power to work for the purposes of ultimate human destiny. A certain pragmatism is an inevitable temptation: so what, after all, if we violate an ethic or two on the way to the eternal salvation of a soul of inestimable worth? Awash as North Americans are in the pragmatism of the modern moral order, as Charles Taylor puts it, such a breaking of eggs may simply be the price Christians pay for the omelet of salvation. It is perhaps not hard to imagine such trade-offs today.

But Dordt conclusively rules this out of bounds. And it does this in two crucial ways, one explicit and one implicit. First, it explicitly argues that human will is not the decisive factor in salvation. Grace is a gift, it can only be received. The cornerstone here is not even consent, because Dordt would say apart from the work of the Holy Spirit we fallen humans could not even consent to the grace of God. Even what we could call consent, our choice, our testimony, every last bit of it, it is grace. Shall we use political power to move the needle on our missions? The mere suggestion, says Dordt, is blasphemy. No matter how awesome we imagine our human tools—and the state’s power can seem awesome indeed—it is a pitiful pittance to the power of the eternal God. It can do—soteriologically speaking—nothing.

Second, though, is an implicit ethical argument that is carried forward more strongly in the Heidelberg Catechism. Pragmatism, the ethical theory that sometimes bad things must be done in order to achieve good results, is not a Calvinistic ethic at all. The Calvinist’s political ethic is not aimed at utopian goods, but—as the third part of the Heidelberg puts it—at a life of grateful obedience. The connection to Dordt is this: such an ethic depends on the prior claim that history, its judgment, its patterns, and its justice, are not ultimately human responsibility—they are God’s. It is never right, to paraphrase the great Protestant ethicist Paul Ramsey, to do something evil so that something good may come of it. More voluntarist worldviews, more dependent as they may be on human choice, human consent, human control, may run the risk of such pragmatism, but the ethical worldview of the Canons of Dordt does not.

This argument actually suggests that when the Canons of Dordt were approved they in fact introduced a doctrinal dissonance into the Reformed churches. I speak here of the prior text of Article 36 of the Belgic Confession, which churches like the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA) revised in 1958. Some of those original paragraphs read as follows:

And the government’s task is not limited
to caring for and watching over the public domain
but extends also to upholding the sacred ministry,
with a view to removing and destroying
all idolatry and false worship of the Antichrist;
to promoting the kingdom of Jesus Christ;
and to furthering the preaching of the gospel everywhere;
to the end that God may be honored and served by everyone,
as he requires in his Word.

The 1958 CRCNA revisions read as follows:

And being called in this manner
to contribute to the advancement of a society
that is pleasing to God,
the civil rulers have the task,
subject to God’s law,
of removing every obstacle
to the preaching of the gospel
and to every aspect of divine worship.
They should do this
while completely refraining from every tendency
toward exercising absolute authority,
and while functioning in the sphere entrusted to them,
with the means belonging to them.
They should do it in order that
the Word of God may have free course;
the kingdom of Jesus Christ may make progress;
and every anti-Christian power may be resisted.

Which of these read more like the politics of Dordt? I am pleased to say that the revised paragraphs strike me as considerably more in accord with Dordt and its account of human will and God’s salvation. Read in that way, the adoption of the Canons of Dordt (1618–1619) was a seed of promissory pluralism, a confessional revision in waiting of the Belgic Confession (1561).

Finally, this leaves the church and Christians with a politics of rest. It does not depend on us. The plan is not ours. Its consummation is divine. Its patterns and designs are only those in which we may participate, as co-laborers, in gratitude, often shrouded in great mystery. It is a life of waiting. But it is a life of active waiting. The work may not be ours, but it is work that we receive nonetheless, and in gratefulness pursue as best the Lord reveals. We still do justice. But we know it is a proximate thing, piecemeal, partial. We still witness to the age. But we know that these too are seeds sown in obedience, for which we take no credit, in which we see deep mystery.

Could not such a posture lead to political passivity? This is a common question about Dordt generally, but one that seems oddly out of place in the Canons. Under the second main point of doctrine, Article 5 for example, we are taught that “the promise of the gospel . . . together with the command to repent and believe, ought to be announced and declared without differentiation or discrimination to all nations and people, and to whom God in his good pleasure sends the gospel.” This Article draws us back to the Great Commission, a restatement in part of the Cultural Mandate, and in so doing reminds us that the preaching of the gospel includes “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Such obedience—in everything—reminds us of following Jesus in law-patterned obedience. It reminds us that the good news is a joyful tiding not just for souls, but for systems; not just for persons, but for politics. This is certainly a picture I find consistent with Scripture, that such a witness is not only about a gathered worship, but also about widows, and orphans, about honest weights and measures, about judges and justice in the land. This is, as the Canons jubilantly describe it, the promiscuity of the gospel.

The politics of Dordt bring us not only assurance, but also compel us to mission. The difference is, and it cannot be more crucial, that this mission and its fruits are not ours, but the Lord’s. In that, we find rest. In him, our political posture, our polarized pressures, finds peace.