The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God

By Eric Nelson

One of our most important political theorists pulls the philosophical rug out from under modern liberalism, then tries to place it on a more secure footing.

We think of modern liberalism as the novel product of a world reinvented on a secular basis after 1945. In The Theology of Liberalism, one of the country’s most important political theorists argues that we could hardly be more wrong. Eric Nelson contends that the tradition of liberal political philosophy founded by John Rawls is, however unwittingly, the product of ancient theological debates about justice and evil. Once we understand this, he suggests, we can recognize the deep incoherence of various forms of liberal political philosophy that have emerged in Rawls’s wake.

Nelson starts by noting that today’s liberal political philosophers treat the unequal distribution of social and natural advantages as morally arbitrary. This arbitrariness, they claim, diminishes our moral responsibility for our actions. Some even argue that we are not morally responsible when our own choices and efforts produce inequalities. In defending such views, Nelson writes, modern liberals have implicitly taken up positions in an age-old debate about whether the nature of the created world is consistent with the justice of God. Strikingly, their commitments diverge sharply from those of their proto-liberal predecessors, who rejected the notion of moral arbitrariness in favor of what was called Pelagianism—the view that beings created and judged by a just God must be capable of freedom and merit. Nelson reconstructs this earlier “liberal” position and shows that Rawls’s philosophy derived from his self-conscious repudiation of Pelagianism. In closing, Nelson sketches a way out of the argumentative maze for liberals who wish to emerge with commitments to freedom and equality intact.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780674242951

Eric Nelson

Eric Nelson taught writing and literature courses for twenty-six years at Georgia Southern University, where he received the Ruffin Cup in 2009 for sustained excellence in teaching, publishing, and service. He retired, professor emeritus, in 2015, and moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where he teaches part time in the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His six previous poetry collections include Terrestrials, chosen by Maxine Kumin for the X.J. Kennedy Award; The Interpretation of Waking Life, winner of the University of Arkansas Poetry Award, and Some Wonder, which won the 2015 Gival Press Poetry Award.

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The Theology of Liberalism

Political Philosophy and the Justice of God

ERIC NELSON

THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England

2019

Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Jacket photo: John Sirlin / EyeEm / Getty Images

Jacket design: Jill Breitbarth

978-0-674-24094-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

978-0-674-24295-1 (EPUB)

978-0-674-24296-8 (MOBI)

978-0-674-24294-4 (PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Nelson, Eric, 1977– author.

Title: The theology of liberalism : political philosophy and the justice of God / Eric Nelson.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019012524

Subjects: LCSH: Liberalism—Religious aspects.—Christianity. | Liberalism. | Religion and politics. | Pelagianism.

Classification: LCC BR1615 .N45 2019 | DDC 261.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019012524

For Andrew Stern, in friendship

Contents

Preface

1.

Pelagian Origins

2.

Representation and the Fall

3.

The Bargain Basis: Rawls, Anti-Pelagianism, and Moral Arbitrariness

4.

Egalitarianism and Theodicy

5.

Justice, Equality, and Institutions

6.

"God gave the world to Adam, and his posterity in common": Appropriation and the Left-Libertarian Challenge

Conclusion: Back to Representation

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Preface

In Act III of King Lear, the wretched king finds himself marooned on the heath, confronting the tyranny of the open night. His loyal subject Kent entreats him to seek shelter from the storm, but Lear resists. Instead, he confronts the tempest and allows the experience of his own vulnerability to excite a new kind of empathy for the least fortunate:

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this!¹

This moment of recognition and self-reproach then provokes an extraordinary exclamation:

Take physic, pomp,

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them

And show the heavens more just.²

The first three lines of the passage are relatively straightforward. Lear is bidding himself, apostrophized as pomp, to undergo a kind of therapy. If he subjects himself to the living conditions experienced by the most wretched, he will be inspired (or so he thinks) to shake the superflux to them—to divest himself of his unnecessary wealth and assign it instead to those in need. The last line of Lear’s outburst, however, is striking and unexpected. By shaking the superflux to these wretches, he insists that he will show the heavens more just.

It is a claim worth dwelling on. Lear is suggesting that the inequality of fortunes enjoyed by human beings—the chasm that separates pomp from wretches—impeaches the justice of God. The fact that some have superfluities and luxuries while others must endure houseless heads and unfed sides strikes him suddenly as incompatible with the hypothesis that a just God could have elected to create the world in which these inequalities obtain. He feels that he must rectify this injustice by correcting the initial, faulty distribution, and supposes that by doing so he will somehow save the honor of heaven.

This book is about the long shadow cast by Lear’s intuition over contemporary political philosophy. For the past fifty years or so, liberal political theorists in the Anglophone world have taken it as axiomatic that the unequal distribution of advantage among human beings—not merely of social position, but also of natural endowments—is, in John Rawls’s famous phrase, arbitrary from a moral point of view, or inconsistent with the principles of justice or fairness. Not only is the mere fact of the unequal distribution unjust or unfair, they have claimed, but its injustice or unfairness must be seen to diminish our degree of moral responsibility for the actions we take. Each individual’s allotment of natural and social advantage, on this account, determines in important ways the choices that he or she will make and therefore renders traditional notions of merit or desert highly suspect. For some of these theorists, indeed, the way in which we play the cards we are dealt is itself simply a function of those cards, and inequalities deriving from our choices and effort are taken to be as morally arbitrary as those attributable to our talents and aptitudes. Contemporary liberals disagree with Lear only insofar as they tend to believe that the distribution of goods among human beings is incompatible with the justice of a God who doesn’t exist.

My central claim in what follows will be that these liberal political philosophers have been unwittingly taking up positions in the theodicy debate—that is, the debate over whether the justice of God is impeached by the nature of the created world. Moreover, their approach to the set of questions raised by this debate represents the sharpest possible break with the earlier liberal tradition. Those we anachronistically regard as liberal or protoliberal philosophers in the early-modern period arrived at their political commitments precisely because they rejected the notion of moral arbitrariness. Their animating conviction was instead the theological position known as Pelagianism, which inferred the possibility of human freedom and merit from the justice of God. The first two chapters of the book offer a reconstruction of this earlier liberal position, while the third demonstrates that Rawls’s approach to political philosophy derived from his self-conscious repudiation of the Pelagian theological tradition. The remaining chapters explore the ways in which the theodicy debate, rightly understood, exposes deep incoherencies in the various strands of liberal political philosophy that have emerged in Rawls’s wake. I argue that all of these fail in different ways to offer a plausible grounding for their egalitarian commitments. In conclusion, I propose a different way forward for liberal political philosophy.

My project is somewhat unusual, in that it attempts to bridge two customary intellectual divides. The first is that between those who write the history of political thought and those who practice what is now called normative political theory. Indeed, the whole of this book reflects a deep dissatisfaction with that division of labor. It is of course the case that historical scholarship and philosophical argument require different aptitudes and forms of training, and no one is likely to be equally proficient in both. I certainly am not. But the costs of the mutual outsourcing engaged in by these two fields of study have been unacceptably high. Put simply: getting the history right will often enable us to do better philosophy. And what follows represents my attempt to argue that the phenomenon of contemporary liberalism offers us a case in point. Once we see that early-modern liberalism simply was Pelagianism, we will be in a better position to understand the nature and implications of the Rawlsian challenge; and once we appreciate the degree to which contemporary liberals are implicitly taking up positions in the theodicy debate, we can use philosophical insights gained from the latter to expose errors and faulty assumptions made by the former. Liberalism, I believe, took a fateful wrong turn in the 1970s. If we have failed to register this fact, it is because we have been unable to identify the course it was initially on.

The second divide with which this book implicitly takes issue is the long-standing one between political theory and theology. Much of my previous work has aimed to challenge standard accounts of secularization in early-modern political thought, and this project is continuous with those earlier efforts to some degree.³ But here I wish to go further. My claim in this context is not simply that religious claims and premises played a central role in earlier political discourses, but rather that even to distinguish sharply between theology and political philosophy in most of Western intellectual history is to commit anachronism. Given the metaethical assumptions that most premodern theorists shared, the boundaries between these two disciplines were so porous as to be effectively nonexistent. And even in today’s secular age, it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to do one without simultaneously doing the other. The late Patrick Riley once wrote to me that theology is political philosophy raised to a higher power. I regard this as at once the cleverest and most profound statement I have ever read about the subjects that I study. By the end of this book, I hope you will agree.

CHAPTER ONE

Pelagian Origins

Nothing impossible has been commanded by the God of justice and majesty.

—Pelagius, Letter to Demetrias¹

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS early-modern liberalism. The concept is anachronistic for the obvious reason that liberalism is a nineteenth-century term, coined to denote a specific political program in post-Revolutionary France. But some anachronisms are indispensable, and this, I believe, is one of them. We who are heirs to the liberal tradition in modern political and moral philosophy have urgent reasons to understand the character of our inheritance, and, accordingly, to identify its pedigree. The search for the origins of what, in the nineteenth century, became distinctively liberal ideas leads ineluctably back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—to a series of theorists who did not regard themselves as liberals, but who jointly developed an intellectual program that would come to define the liberal persuasion in the modern Atlantic world. In what follows, I ask: what essentially was that intellectual program? And I want to propose an answer to this question. Liberalism, or the cluster of commitments defended by those we tend to identify as protoliberals—from Milton and Locke to Rousseau and Kant—was, at bottom, the theological position known as Pelagianism. Taking this claim seriously can, I hope, give us a clearer understanding of the deep structure of liberal political ideas, as well as a new appreciation of what is so striking and problematic about what has become of Anglophone liberal political philosophy in the last five decades or so.

The Pelagian controversy, from its beginnings in the fourth century, can best be seen as the product of two great and enduring dialectics. The first of these is the dilemma most famously posed in Plato’s Euthyphro: are deeds holy because the gods love them, or do the gods love them because they are holy?² Put more abstractly, are moral principles discovered, or are they made? Do they exist necessarily and objectively, as Plato insisted, or must they be seen as the product of some agent’s will—either a god’s or our own? This question posed a dilemma because both answers to it seemed to undermine traditional conceptions of the divinity. If moral principles exist separate and apart from God’s will, then they might seem to vitiate his omnipotence and threaten to render him superfluous, at least in the realm of morality. The laws of nature would then be just what they are, as Grotius famously insisted, even if there were no God.³ On the other hand, if we take the voluntarist path and define goodness or rightness as whatever God arbitrarily wills, then God begins to look like a tyrant whose commands are simply to be obeyed because we wish to avoid punishment. We can no longer offer as an independent reason for following God’s laws that they are good or just, for goodness and justice are now defined as whatever God’s laws happen to tell us to do. To ask "but are the laws themselves good or just?" is, on this view, to speak nonsense.

Most early-modern philosophers found the voluntarist answer to the Euthyphro dilemma unacceptable, and so embraced the Platonic, rationalist answer. But rationalism immediately yielded a dilemma of its own. If justice is a value separate and apart from God’s will, and if God is omnipotent and perfectly good, it follows that his every act and choice should be consistent with the principle of justice.⁴ Yet the world in which we live seems to contain a great deal of evil and undeserved suffering—and Christian doctrine insists that a large proportion of the human race will be damned to an eternity of punishment. How can these facts be reconciled with God’s justice? It was Leibniz in 1710 who coined the term theodicy to describe this problem, but it had by then been exercising Christian theologians for fifteen centuries.

The dilemma goes as follows. If we wish to acquit God of the charge of injustice, the most natural strategy is to insist upon the reality of human freedom. If it is always in our power to choose not to sin, then God can be said to act justly when he punishes our sins. But, as Leibniz observed, God’s punitive justice is only one of two branches of the theodicy problem.⁵ If we are free, then surely a sinner may be deemed guilty and open to punishment in a future life by a just God. But we would still need to account for the evils and suffering in this world, which appear contrary to the goodness, the holiness and the justice of God, since God co-operates in evil as well physical as moral.⁶ How is all of this suffering compatible with the hypothesis that a perfectly good and just God elected to create the world? Here again, freedom promised to supply an answer. If the human capacity for morality—that is, our ability freely to choose the right—is transcendently good and valuable, and if the existence of creatures who possess this capacity requires a set of physical realities that jointly produce suffering as a necessary by-product, then God’s justice in creation can likewise be vindicated.

This set of views is what I understand by Pelagianism, named for the fourth-century British ascetic who first defended something like it.⁷ A Pelagian, in short, is a rationalist who insists on the metaphysical freedom of human beings in order to address the theodicy problem. But this Pelagian insistence on human freedom seemed to pose grave dangers to orthodox Christian doctrine. If human beings are fully able to choose not to sin, and thereby to merit God’s favor, then why did Jesus have to come to earth to be crucified? Why the Incarnation and the Atonement? As Augustine canonically complained, to argue that man could have become just by the law of nature and free will … amounts to rendering the cross of Christ void.⁸ Those exercised by the theodicy problem may believe they are serving the cause of God by defending nature, but, Augustine counters, in declaring this nature to be sound they reject the mercy of the physician.… We should not so praise the creator that we are compelled to say, or rather [are] convicted of saying, that there is no need for the savior.⁹

To defend the Christian mystery, Augustine was therefore driven to formulate his mature doctrine of original sin, according to which human nature is depraved and incapable of meriting election by obeying the law. We depend utterly on God’s grace, which comes irresistibly to those he has predestined for salvation by means of faith in the Atonement: This and nothing else is the predestination of the saints, namely, the foreknowledge and the preparation of God’s favors, by which those who are delivered are most certainly delivered.¹⁰ If we ask why God delivers this person rather than that one, the response is simply, How incomprehensible are his judgments, and how unsearchable his ways.¹¹ Yet, while this Augustinian rejoinder to Pelagius may have promised to shore up Christian orthodoxy, it seemed to its critics to aggravate the initial theodicy problem quite badly. For how can God justly punish us for our sins if we cannot but sin—if not sinning is simply beyond our power? To reply that our incapacity, or unfreedom, is itself a just punishment for Adam’s sin appears to make matters even worse. Why should we have been so momentously punished by a just God for someone else’s sin? Surely such caprice would be the act rather of a tyrant.¹²

This, then, is the theodicy dialectic. The Pelagian defense of the transcendent value of human freedom promised to vindicate God’s justice, but only at the expense of Christian orthodoxy. Pelagians would deny the doctrine of original sin and attribute human evil, not to our depraved nature, but rather to the corrosive force of social convention (Rousseau’s second Discourse is, in this sense, the ultimate Pelagian text). They would likewise be attracted to a series of other heresies, including anti-Trinitarianism, Arianism, Socinianism, and mortalism (with its accompanying rejection of the doctrine of hell). The Augustinian rejoinder, conversely, seemed to rescue the Atonement, the Trinity, and the doctrine of hell at the expense of theodicy. There were no easy choices. Early-modern philosophers and theologians had to decide which horn of the dilemma was less painful to sit on.

At this stage it is worth pausing to identify an interpretive difficulty. Pelagian was a term of abuse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, much like atheist, Erastian, and democrat. Virtually no one used these terms to identify him or herself. And yet there undoubtedly were early-modern Pelagians, just as there were atheists, Erastians, and even a democrat or two. The challenge for historians is therefore as daunting as it is inescapable: we need to be able to identify genuinely Pelagian views where they are not advertised, but we must be careful to avoid attributing such views, as early-modern Calvinists incessantly did, to relatively orthodox Christians with whom they simply disagreed. In general, I reserve the label Pelagian for those who either deny the doctrine of original sin outright, or accept it in principle while denying that it brought about any effective change in the ability of human beings to avoid sin. We do no violence to the thought of these individuals, I claim, by placing them in a Pelagian theological tradition.

I

My first task is to demonstrate that those we identify in retrospect as protoliberals arrived at their political commitments because they all, to varying degrees, took the Pelagian side of the theodicy debate. Liberalism, in other words, began life as a theodicy. It is clear, first of all, that each of these theorists unambiguously endorsed the Platonist or rationalist answer to the Euthyphro dilemma. That is, they all believed that moral principles have objective, eternal validity and ought to govern the conduct of all rational beings, including God. They were all therefore deeply exercised by the theodicy problem. This, I take it, is obviously true of Milton, whose masterwork aimed entirely to justify the ways of God to men and whose God is constrained by the requirements of justice to demand satisfaction for Adam’s sin (Die he or justice must; unless for him / Some other able, and as willing, pay / The rigid satisfaction, death for death).¹³ But it is equally true of the other figures I mentioned at the outset. Locke clearly insists in The Reasonableness of Christianity that Christian doctrine must be consistent with the free-standing Justice and Goodness of God and the Eternal Law of Right.¹⁴ This law, he explains, is Holy, Just, and Good; Of which no one Precept or Rule is abrogated or repealed; nor indeed can be; whilst God is an Holy, Just, and Righteous God, and Man a Rational Creature. The Duties of that Law, arising from the Constitution of his very Nature, are of Eternal Obligation; nor can it be taken away or dispensed with, without changing the Nature of Things, overturning the measures of Right and Wrong, and thereby introducing and authorizing Irregularity, Confusion, and Disorder in the World.¹⁵

Leibniz—who tried hard to hold the line against Pelagianism, but proved nonetheless to be a crucial conduit for Pelagian ideas—was, if anything, even more emphatic on this point. He posed the Euthyphro question with great clarity in his 1702 Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice: It is agreed that whatever God wills is good and just. But there remains the question whether it is good and just because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good and just: in other words, whether justice and goodness are arbitrary or whether they belong to the necessary and eternal truths about the nature of things, as do numbers and proportions.¹⁶ The former opinion, he explains, has been followed by some philosophers and by Roman and Reformed theologians, but is in fact completely unacceptable. Such a view "would destroy the justice of God. For why praise him because he acts according to justice, if the notion of justice, in his case, adds nothing to that of action? And to say stat pro ratione voluntas, my will takes the place of reason, is properly the motto of a tyrant."¹⁷ Leibniz adds in the Theodicy itself that it would be as if the most wicked spirit, the Prince of evil genii, the evil principle of the Manichaeans, were the sole master of the universe.… What means would there be of distinguishing the true God from the false God of Zoroaster if all things depended upon the caprice of an arbitrary power and there were neither rule nor consideration for anything whatever?¹⁸ One must hold instead with Plato that goodness and justice have grounds independent of will and of force.¹⁹

Rousseau straightforwardly defended this aspect of Leibniz’s system in his reply to Voltaire after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755: If God exists, he is perfect; if he is perfect, he is wise, powerful, and just.²⁰ If the puzzle of the origin of evil forced you to diminish one of God’s perfections, Rousseau challenges his opponent, why would you want to justify his power at the expense of his goodness? If one has to choose between two errors, I prefer the first.²¹ Kant, as Michael Rosen has shown, likewise endorsed the Platonic / rationalist answer to the Euthyphro question so many times in his oeuvre that one could fill a good-sized book by simply quoting the various passages.²² But let this statement from his Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion stand in for many:

But moral theology is something wholly different from theological morality, namely, a morality in which the concept of obligation presupposes the concept of God. Such a theological morality has no principle, or if it does have one, this is nothing but the fact that the will of God has been revealed or discovered. Morality, however, must not be grounded on theology, but must have itself the principle which is to be the ground of our good conduct. Afterward it can be combined with theology, and then our morality will obtain more incentives and a morally moving power. In theological morality the concept of God must determine our duties; but this is just the opposite; for here one pictures in one’s concept of God all sorts of terrible and frightening attributes. Now of course this can generate fear in us and hence move us to follow moral laws from coercion or so as to avoid punishment, which, however, does not provide any interest in the object. For we no longer see how abominable our actions are, but abstain from them only from fear of punishment. Natural morality must be so constituted that it can be thought independently of any concept of God, and obtain zealous reverence from us solely on account of its own inner dignity and excellence.²³

The cognition of God, Kant adds later in the text, must therefore complete morality, but it must not first determine whether something is morally good or a duty for me! This I must judge from the nature of things in accordance with possible systems of ends; and I must be just as certain of it as I am that a triangle has three angles.²⁴ This is pure Platonism.

For each of these theorists, then, the rationalist question of God’s justice was meaningful and urgent. They were therefore required to seek a theodicy, and they agreed wholeheartedly on where it was to be found: human freedom alone could vindicate God’s justice, both punitive and creative. In relation to punishment, the case was quite clear. Milton’s God declares in Paradise Lost that man has only himself to blame for his sins: ingrate, he had of me / All he could have; I made him just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.²⁵ In the De doctrina christiana, Milton makes his rationale for this claim explicit: if, because of God’s decree, man could not help but fall … then God’s restoration of fallen man was a matter of justice not grace.²⁶ That is, if we were not created free and sufficient to have stood, then God would have owed us election as a matter of justice, despite Adam’s sin, since it is unjust per se to punish an agent who, by nature, could not have avoided committing the sin in question. Milton’s own understanding of the fall is more Arminian than that of his later disciples, insofar as he accepts that Adam’s sin did have the effect of enslaving the will of his descendants—or at least would have done, had God not immediately elected to renew man’s lapsed powers, though forfeit, so that Upheld by me, yet once more he shall stand / On even ground against his mortal foe.²⁷ But the end result is essentially the same: no man is ever punished by God for a sin that he did not freely choose to commit, and which he could not perfectly well have avoided.

Locke, for his part, went a good deal further. He opens The Reasonableness of Christianity by rejecting out of hand the view of some Men who "would have all Adam’s Posterity doomed to Eternal Infinite Punishment, for the Transgression of Adam, whom Millions had never heard of, and no one had authorized to transact for him, or be his Representative."²⁸ Such a view, Locke insists is little consistent with the Justice or Goodness of the Great and Infinite God. Human beings, on his account, experienced death as a result of the Fall, but their nature was in no way altered or depraved.²⁹ They remained free to live in sincere Obedience to the Law of Christ.³⁰ True, no human being can keep this law perfectly, void of slips and falls, but those who obey it to the utmost of their power will be justified through their faith in Jesus as the Messiah.³¹ Though he come short of Perfect Obedience to the Law of Works, God is willing to "Justifie or make Just those who by their Works are not so: Which he doth by counting their Faith for Righteousness, i.e. for a compleat performance of the Law."³² This act of forbearance on God’s part is not, however, an act of grace, but a requirement of natural law:

The Law is the eternal, immutable Standard of Right. And a part of that Law is, that a man should forgive, not only his Children, but his Enemies, upon their Repentance, asking Pardon, and Amendment. And therefore he could not doubt that the Author of this Law, and God of Patience and Consolation, who is rich in Mercy, would forgive his frail Off-spring, if they acknowledged their Faults, disapproved the Iniquity of their Transgressions, beg’d his Pardon, and resolved in earnest for the future to conform their Actions to this Rule, which they owned to be Just and Right. This way of Reconciliation, this hope of Atonement, the Light of Nature revealed to them. And the Revelation of the Gospel having said nothing to the contrary, leaves them to stand and fall to their own Father and Master, whose Goodness and Mercy is over all his Works.³³

Leibniz took much the same view, despite his efforts to distance himself from the Pelagian heresy.³⁴ Freedom is deemed necessary, he announces in the Theodicy, in order that man may be deemed guilty and open to punishment.³⁵ The word