By Jochem Hemink

David Koyzis (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame) is associate professor in Political Science at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario (Canada). I came into contact with the book of Koyzis while reading a review of his book in DenkWijzer of October 2004. DenkWijzer is the magazine of the Research Institute of the ChristenUnie political party in the Netherlands and of the directors association of the ChristenUnie. The review intrigued me because it seemed this was the book I was already looking for; a book clarifying the political landscape from a Christian perspective. When I began reading it became clear to me this was indeed the book I was looking for. Koyzis makes clear the inevitable connection between faith and politics.

Koyzis makes clear that secular politicians are not less religious than politicians from Christian political parties. Such politicians often say they are just looking for pragmatic solutions. In 1995 for example, (Dutch) Labour Party’s leader Kok called upon the party to ‘shake off its ideological feathers’ and move towards the center of the political spectrum. As the fall of the Berlin Wall was the end of the ‘great stories’, however, new political visions and ideologies appeared. When you ask them, secular politicians have their visions about the sources of evil and the road to salvation.

Koyzis views ideologies as modern types of that ancient phenomenon idolatry, complete with their own accounts of sin and redemption. Like biblical idolatries, every ideology is based on taking something out of creation’s totality, raising it above that creation, and making the latter revolve around and serve it. Koyzis, making clear the connection between idolatry and ideology, refers to Bob Goudzwaard who argues that the religious nature of human being can be understood in terms of “three basic biblical rules”: First, everyone serves a god of some kind. Second, everyone is transformed into the image of the god she serves. Third, people structure society in their own image. Think of Augustine, who said that our hearts are restless until they rest in God, and that a commonwealth is united by shared objects of love.

Politicians like Wim Kok, shaking off his ideological feathers, and philosophers like Francis Fukuyama, stating in 1992 that the end of history was near, are claiming the end of the ideologies. The irony in this is, however, that those ringing the death bell for ideology are themselves in the grip of a worldview through which they filter their perception of the political realm, though they are typically reluctant to label it an ideology as such. They are not bringing a new social order lacking ideological commitments; they are simply forecasting the truth of their own ideology, which is some combination of liberalism and democracy, augmented by the technocratic guidance of social scientists. Especially the Dutch elections of November 2006, however, clearly show the hope for politicians holding strong views. Ideology per se is not on its way out, though specific ideologies may have lost their attraction.

Koyzis gives an overview of historical definitions of ideology. If, In Christian perspective, ideologies represent a flawed conception of the world, we are obliged to take them seriously and to try to discern in exactly which ways they go wrong. He argues clearly, with the help of Lesslie Newbigin, that the rise of ideologies in some areas is only possible when the Christian gospel has been preached, and when cultures have been secularized. If ideologies view a humanly made god as a source of salvation, then salvation is always from something deemed evil. “Identifying its own source of evil”, Goudzwaard writes, the ideology furthermore “erect its own antithesis between good and evil”. Here Koyzis mentions Eric Voegelin, who has demonstrated the connection between mass ideological movements and gnosticism. So, Koyzis argues, libertarians tend to see government as the source of evil. Conservatives tend to see the dynamic character of creation, that is, change and development, as the source of evil. Collectivist ideologies, like socialism and nationalism, tend to distrust individual freedom or other alternative communities, thereby identifying their existence with evil. Ideologies also have a fundamental distorted view of government and politics. In the modern ideologies, goals supplant principles, as we have seen in national-socialism and communism. In a less destructive way, liberalism has brought broken marriages and families, abuse of workers, widespread poverty or environmental degradation.

In five successive chapters, Koyzis describes five modern ideologies: liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, democracy and socialism. He will argue that in the middle of the struggle among the ideologies and their distortions, God remains true to His creation. This explains how it is possible for the ideologies to have fragmentary insights into the truth; it also makes clear why even the most destructive ideology is not capable of altogether misshaping the world.

Koyzis makes clear that the widely used left-right axis is unhelpful for the classification of the ideologies. Instead he will try to discern the spirits in the ideologies: describing their creational basis, the facets of God’s creation they have rightly focused on even as they have effectively deified them, the inconsistencies that have led to internal tensions within the ideologies themselves, their source of evil and their source of salvation, and to what extent they are able to account for the distinct place of politics in God’s world. He describes the ideologies in their pure, unadulterated forms. Due to God’s grace, not every ideological politician is willing to follow the principles of his ideology to the end.

The liberal creed is the sovereignty of the individual and human autonomy. According to liberalism, communities only have their value insofar they serve the interests of the individual. In this chapter, Koyzis describes the history of liberalism to explain its different variants and its internal inconsistencies. There are classical liberals and there are liberals willing to give the state a greater task in intervening in the economic market in order to fulfill the wishes of the individual. Koyzis values the freedom liberalism has brought but he is critical about its tendency to view all relationships – including marriage and family – as voluntary contracts. Liberalism wishes to protect everyone’s religious freedom and tends so towards a neutral state. This is an impossibility however because even a liberal conception of justice is based on a notion of the good – something that the liberal is compelled by her own convictions to deny. Something must hold the political community together. Richard John Neuhaus observed that the “naked public square” cannot remain naked for long. Koyzis says that the naked public square is itself an illusion. The spiritually vacant state is never such in reality: liberals have successfully privatized all religions except their own, which they in fact have privileged above others.

Conservatism takes history as source of norms. Christians recognize in conservatism the awareness of the fragility of human undertakings and the tendency of human beings to fall into evil. Therefore conservatives are hesitant to reforms. The difficulty with conservatism is that its contents vary from time to time and from place to place. This is because it depends on which tradition they take as norms. Conservatism, like traditionalism, is uncritical adherence to ideas and practices that have long ceased to have any meaning for the practitioners. A tradition, living faith, is in constant change. Over time even a specific local or religious tradition develops and mutates to such an extent that in its later form it may look quite different from its earlier manifestation. Sometimes traditions have been largely lost and ought to be recovered. The danger of some types of conservatism is that is easily becomes romantic, it reconstructs an ideal past that never really existed in the sense imagined. Conservatism is unable to form a transhistorical criterion by which to distinguish what in a tradition is worth saving and what ought to be discarded. History and tradition can learn as very much, but they cannot be the sources of our norms. There is nothing Christian to conservatism and Christians know they live in God’s creation, which has the potential to become more differentiated and developed.

Nationalism is the nation deified. As Bernard Crick points out, “no single objective definition of the national unit has ever been found”. Nationalism has been very influential in the twentieth century. Nationalists identify ultimate evil with being ruled by someone unlike oneself, whether this unlikeness be racial, cultural, linguistic or religious. Koyzis distinguishes between civic and ethnic nationalism, state versus tribe, but he argues that in essence they are the same. Nationalism sees the state as the instrument of the nation’s aspirations and the expression of its will. Koyzis also describes patriotism, a modest form of nationalism. Patriotism is a necessary concomitant to the state’s central task of doing justice. Nationalism, on the other hand, is a perversion of a legitimate affection and ultimately runs contrary to justice. Since the Roman emperor Constantine connected church and empire, which was in fact Christianity Romanized, many Christians have been attracted by nationalism. Protestants have been attracted by Old Testament associations of God’s promises to his people. Concern for one’s political community is right and proper. Christian nationalism however unduly applies biblical promises intended for the body of Christ as a whole to one of many particular geographic concentrations of people bound together under a common political framework; it tends to identify God’s norms for political and cultural life with a particular, imperfect manifestation of those norms at a specific period of a nation’s history. Christian nationalists too easily pay to their nation a homage due only to God; those Christians most readily employing the language of nationhood often find it difficult to conceive the nation in limited terms.

Democracy seems to be merely a form of government. Koyzis argues that although democracy is indeed a form of government – and most certainly the best currently available in our complex, differentiated society – it can take on ideological dimensions insofar as it embodies a belief in the near infallibility of the vox populi, the voice of the people. Koyzis makes a distinction between democracy as structure and democracy as creed. As structure, democracy consists of institutional arrangements incorporating the participation of citizens on a regular basis. Democracy as creed is democratic ideology, the belief in popular sovereignty. While democracy as structure means, according to Crick, the peaceful conciliation of potential conflict among diverse interests, the ideological form of democracy can threaten this ongoing conciliatory process. Koyzis argues that democracy follows out of liberalism: the contract among sovereign individuals served to lay the foundations for the expansion of participatory rights within the body politic. Democratic ideology identifies evil with being ruled by someone else; ‘those making rules on my behalf are in some sense following my will’. In this fashion, democrats will be constrained to obey only those laws to which they have assented voluntarily; therefore, they have a pronounced affinity for direct democratic mechanisms. Democratic ideology may also become totalitarian by attempting to extend the democratic principle throughout the entire political system and even into the whole of life, including an array of spheres where for various reasons it is simply not appropriate, like school or family. What is not understood here is that democracy, far from being a panacea for such ills as abuse of power, authoritarianism and corruption, it becomes itself an oppressive intrusion of an undifferentiated social mass into communities normatively established on a variety of alternative principles.

In his chapter about socialism, Koyzis describes the impact of socialism and the various forms it has taken. Possibly more than the other ideologies, socialism claims to embody a radical social critique promising fundamental change, and thus salvation, to society as a whole. At its most ambitious, socialism offers a comprehensive program of architectonic critique extending well beyond the boundaries of the body politic. Like the chapter before, Koyzis argues that socialism follows out of democracy. Socialism is based on the principle of common ownership. The ideology of socialism is based on the assumption that a single form of communal ownership is capable of supplanting all other forms of ownership, both individual and communal. Socialism in practice tends to consolidate a dangerous amount of power in the hands of the state apparatus with its coercive capacity. The danger is that government officials will usurp power properly belonging to other institutions as well as to individual persons. The ultimate goal for socialists is material equality; they differ in their estimation of the meaning of equality and its relationship to other goals. As the idol of equality becomes a jealous god, it demands that worshippers go so far as to sacrifice their other, less egalitarian commitments and loyalties on its altar. Koyzis describes the pseudo-religious, transformative and scientific vision of Marxism. In the last paragraph, Koyzis describes the quest for a fair distribution of economic resources; for insofar as socialism can be seen as a quest for a fairer economic arrangement, there is something good to be found in it. A certain minimum claim to the fruits of God’s creation is needed for his image bearers to fulfill his diverse callings for their lives, which includes functioning as spouses, parents, workers, church members and so forth. Where they are unable to do so, one rightly speaks of an unjust economic system. Government is obliged to care for what is common to all citizens of its state; it has a minimal responsibility to play a redistributive role within the body politic, recognizing that the market does not always threat every participant fairfully; it has a role to play in protecting the economically disadvantaged.

In the last chapters, Koyzis tries to find a Christian answer to the idolatrous ideologies in a biblical worldview. He tries this in the hope of transcending the ideologies by affirming societal pluriformity. He states that because of the all-encompassing claim of the faith, Christianity has to say something to politics. Two approaches of Christians to the ideologies are: recognizing nothing good in them, as some antithetical Christians do; and trying to combine the faith with one or more of the ideologies, as for example Afrikaner Christian-nationalists or American Christian-socialists or conservatives have done. The first approach is according to Koyzis in danger of turning over a huge portion of reality to the kingdom of darkness and barricading themselves within the supposedly secure walls of their church institutions. The second approach leaves the body of Christ unnecessarily fragmented, bringing a “scattered voice”, as James W. Skillen puts it, to the political arena. Moreover, they don’t understand the character of the ideologies. They are not neutral accounts of reality, these Christians tend to ignore the spiritual roots of capitalism and socialism, which inevitably impact the way goals are chosen, articulated and pursued. Because of their false soteriology and distorted way of seeing the world, those promises would certainly be fulfilled at the price of other undoubted social goods. Believers who fail to understand the dangers of this goal orientation permit themselves to ontologize and instrumentalize the ideologies. To ontologize them means to ignore their spiritual, directional character and to ascribe to them a certain structural, creational status. To instrumentalize them means to see them as means to any of a number of ends.

History tells us that a number of ancient people worshiped the sun in some form. We rightly appreciate the sun and its innumerable benefits. However, the sun remains a creature, brought into being and sustained by God himself. In no way ought we to mistake creature for Creator. Christians understand that God is God and that individuals, nations, states, economic classes and so forth are radically dependent on him for their very existence. They are creatures and he is Creator.

Koyzis then explains the Christian worldview: creation, fall and redemption. The cosmic scope of redemption means that the whole of life has been redeemed, including family life, work life, play life, academic life and political life. Since the entire cosmos is the arena for the ongoing battle between the spirits of belief and unbelief, this means we have a God-given responsibility to discern the spirits within each of these realms. Human beings are cultural beings who cultivate or develop the world around them, as intended by God in the ‘cultural mandate’: Humanity’s culture-shaping activities (including politics) are in accordance with God’s creative intention. However the Bible acknowledges that creation is fallen into sin; all of our activities, however good in their motivations and effects, are tainted by sin’s destructive power. The story ends with redemption in Jesus Christ and the renewal of the Holy Spirit. Just as creation and fall are cosmic in scope, so also is redemption; redemption is, in the words of Albert M. Wolters, “creation regained”. If the good creation of God was disrupted and distorted by the fall into sin, Christ’s redemption restores creation to its original purpose. Once again, this includes political life.

God’s creation order cannot be derived from the historical process; it is dynamic and gives genuine freedom. Creation is more than nature. Although the notion of creation order has been abused several times for oppressive social and economic systems, or even to justify a totalitarian system; is does not necessarily rule out its legitimate use. How is it possible to know the contours of the creation order? Even when clouds obscure the sun, we can nevertheless distinguish night from day. As Calvin said, Scripture constitutes the spectacles through which we look to see the world with greater clarity.

How can this help us in politics? Everyone is dissatisfied with the world in some respects and most would like to make it a better place. Such a desire for change, however, must be anchored in an initial and foundational interpretation of the world as it is. Without such a proper understanding, would-be transformers of the world are likely to believe that their own recipes for a new social order correspond to the real world without actually troubling themselves to check their own proposals against this reality. A non-idolatrous approach to society and politics properly and unquestionably acknowledges the sovereignty of God over the whole of life. It sees a legitimate place for individual rights and freedoms while reminding us that the individual is not sovereign; it calls to recognize the proper place of tradition and repudiates those who facilely believe we can do without it, but it cannot countenance a simple and uncritical deferral to tradition but recognizes that traditions are human formation, subject, like all other human works, to the taint of sin; it recognizes the rightful place of human community, however defined, but rejects all efforts at positing such community as an all-encompassing focus of loyalty from which all other loyalties, to the extent they are permitted, are merely derivative; it recognizes the legitimate though limited capacity of government to effect economic equity, but it eschews socialist expectations of an eschatological consummation engendered by a salvific working class.

This suggests that the non-idolatrous alternative left is a kind of pluralism that spurns the reductive monism of the ideologies. What is meant by this pluralism? We live in a pluralistic society; Mouw and Griffioen call this pluralism spiritual or directional diversity. As Newbigin affirms, the church must accept plurality as fact, but it certainly cannot accept plurality as creed. The political question is not so much whether directional diversity is a good thing, as how we might go about conciliating that diversity given its empirical reality. This is a question of justice – not of final justice, to be sure, but of a penultimate justice well short of God’s complete justice to be realized on the Last Day. Our desire to protect such religious freedom issues not out of indifference or skepticism toward our own ultimate beliefs but out of a recognition that in the present age, in Newbigin’s words, God wills to provide a space and time for people freely to give their allegiance to his kingdom.

Koyzis also describes what can be called cultural pluralism, or what Mouw and Griffioen label contextual diversity. This is diversity in, for example, language, cuisine or architecture. Is this a good thing? Koyzis argues that such protection is a crucial element in the state’s calling to do public justice. A recognition of structural diversity or societal pluriformity is based on the understanding that, in the words of Oliver O’Donovan, “unity is proper to the creator, complexity to the created world”. Human beings are culture-forming beings, and our activities occur within a variety of communal settings, each of which is structured in accordance with its principal task. Diversity is denied in the interest of an idolatrous unity.

How has this non-idolatrous alternative been given form? The affirmation of societal pluriformity has deep roots within Christianity, especially in the Roman Catholic and Reformed traditions. On the Catholic side in a renewed interest in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, connected to Aristotle; on the Reformed side were free figures in the Netherlands of particular importance: Groen van Prinsterer, Abraham Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd.

The Catholic social teachings of popes Leo XIII and Pius XI have been important. These show a neo-Thomist revival and a recognition of societal pluriformity, especially in the principle of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is a hierarchical principle. The state seeks the common good of its members, understood to mean that which is conducive to a full community of persons and transcends the particular goods both of the various subordinate communities and of the individuals. The next level down in the hierarchy is occupied by a variety of subsidiary or subordinate communities that play a multiplicity of roles in the society. Sometimes this is referred to as civil society.

In the Reformed tradition, societal pluriformity has been emphasized by John Calvin and Johannes Althusius. The Reformed tradition of political reflection carried on one side of a late medieval dispute over the relationship between ecclesiastical and political leaders on one hand, and between both and God on the other. It was in the Netherlands that a distinctively Reformed Christian political theory was developed in the ninetieth and twentieth centuries. The general secularizing trends that had begun during the Enlightenment accelerated as a result of the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic invasion, and these caused concern to orthodox Christians who saw them sweeping into both their churches and public life.

A leading figure in what would come to be styled the antirevolutionary or Christian-historical movement was Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, an archivist to the royal House of Orange. Groen came to distinguish between the state as a res publica and the sphere of private law. He began to move along the lines of what he called ‘soevereiniteit in eigen sfeer’ (sovereignty in its own sphere). The broad aim of the antirevolutionary movement was to try to stem the tide of unbelief that been unleashed by the French Revolution.

Groen van Prinster’s successor in the antirevolutionary movement was the remarkable Abraham Kuyper. He went on to assume leadership in Groen’s movement, eventually organizing it as the Anti-Revolutionaire Partij (Anti-Revolutionary Party or ARP). Kuyper, a pastor, theologian, journalist and statesman, was not content to define the Christian faith solely in terms of church and theology, but expanded its scope into an all-inclusive life-and-world-view. The most significant notions of Kuyper’s thought have been antithesis, the implacable opposition between belief and unbelief; his emphasis on common grace, which means that God in his mercy preserves his creation against the full consequences of sin even amidst the unbelief of mankind; a third characteristic theme is ‘soevereiniteit in eigen kring’. The most important implications of sphere-sovereignty are that (1) ultimate sovereignty belongs to God alone, (2) all earthly sovereignties are subsidiary to God’s sovereignty, and (3) there is no ultimate locus of sovereignty in this world from which other sovereignties are derivative.

Koyzis mentions Herman Dooyeweerd as the theoretical completer of Kuyper’s theory after the dead of Kuyper. He makes use of the modal theory of Dooyeweerd to explain ontologically why certain responsibilities belong to certain institutions, and to eschew the reductionisms of the ideologies. A non-ideological politics is, according to Koyzis, not a matter of importing justice where it is absent, but of rebalancing the jural task of the state where justice has been perverted, that is, where injustice is present. Injustice is not so much the absence of justice, as a distortion in the performance of the state’s jural mandate.

The last chapter is about the task of the state: doing justice in God’s world. Political authority is the right possessed by government to exercise power over those subject to it. What then is the source of government’s authority? The Christian would affirm that it comes from God. It does mean that God has ordained an institution with a unique task in his world: to do justice to the diversity of communities and individuals in his world. Thus the authority of government must inevitably be related to its jural task, which is intrinsic to its makeup.

Justice, in Paul Marshall’s words, calls for “giving something its right, its created place in God’s world”. This created place is always a limited place. A healthy society, one characterized by what the Bible calls shalom, is one in which the various spheres of human activity develop in balanced, proportionate fashion. Koyzis gives several examples of such balanced spheres. What then is the state’s proper jural task? According to Marshall, “the governing authority is justly to interrelate the authorities – the areas of responsibility – of others”. Politics in the real world necessitates a willingness to compromise – of accepting less than we might like – for the sake of civil peace. A balance of power acceptable only to those able to voice their own interests in the public square would inevitably leave out those whom Scripture calls the widow, the orphan and the stranger or sojourner, that is, those who are most defenseless and vulnerable and lack their own economic resources to fall back on. Furthermore, if government attempts to conciliate the diverse interests of society without a proper prior sense of the principle of differentiated responsibility and of the boundaries of the spheres it must undertake to protect, whatever equilibrium it succeeds in facilitating will be an unstable one – one that simply leads to another form of lopsided social development.

Who is there to ensure that the state itself remain within its normative boundaries? The Reformed approach offered an internal and an external response. The internal response is a system of checks and balances to government power; the external response is the sense in which all of God’s image bearers are called to do justice in a variety of individual and communal settings. When the Old Testament prophets instruct the people of Israel and Judah to “let justice roll down like waters” they are communicating God’s word, not simply to the political leaders, but to every member of God’s covenant people in every capacity, whether political or non-political

Koyzis concludes his book with an appeal to alert government to its basic responsibility for doing justice He acknowledges that there is an inevitable complexity surrounding the doing of justice. Christians must be prepared to approach the political realm with both patience and confidence. Every act of justice, whether in the political realm or in any other realm of human activity, is a signpost to the coming of God’s final reign of justice over the new heaven and new earth.

In raising such signposts I would like to continue in study, work and life. Thanks to Dr. Koyzis’ book that it has contributed in making clear the direction they are pointing out and in making clear the false signposts there are in this world.