Beyond Political Ideas: What Do We Love?
October 15, 2008
By the time I got half way through Jonathan Edward’s A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, I was worried. Writing in 1746, Edwards began:
There is no question whatsoever, that is of greater importance to mankind, and that it more concerns every individual person to be well resolved in, than this, what are the distinguishing qualifications of those that are in favor with God, and entitled to his eternal rewards? Or, which comes to the same thing, What is the nature of true religion?
Or to put it yet another way, how do I know I am really a Christian?
The first half of the book is less than comforting. It is a wonderful thing, Edwards wrote, to have a conversion experience, love reading the Bible, know true doctrine, go to church, enjoy worship, sing hymns when no one is listening, serve others, and happily perform all manner of other Christian duties and activities. It is all commendable (at least on some level), but, he warns, none of those things can be trusted as a clear indication that you are actually someone saved by grace.
For Edwards, there is only one decisive indicator that we are walking in fellowship with God through faith in Jesus Christ: transformed affections. The true believers are marked by what they love.
For Edwards, affections move us in all our actions. Those affections are either ordered to toward the wrong objects or the right objects. He wrote:
‘Tis affection that engages the covetous man, and him that is greedy of worldly profits, in his pursuits; and it is by the affection, that the ambitious man is put forward in his pursuit of worldly glory; and ‘tis the affections also that actuate the voluptuous man, in his pursuit of pleasure and sensual delights: the world continues, from age to age, in a continual commotion and agitation, in a pursuit of these things; but take away all affection, and the spring of all this motion would be gone, and the motion itself would cease. And as in worldly things, worldly affections are very much the spring of men’s motion and action; so in religious matters, the spring of their actions are very much religious affections: he that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion.
As important as ideas are (and they are extremely important), it is love, not ideas, that “makes the world go ‘round.”
I thought of Edwards as I read “The Restless Evangelicals” by Caleb Stegall in the September 2008 Touchstone magazine.
Stegall writes, “Believing in American history as the progressive march of ideas about ‘the right,’ Evangelicals are captured by ideology” on the right and on the left. Since ideologies always fight each other, we end up in a deadlock.
To break the deadlock, Stegall point us to St. Augustine, the fifth century bishop of Hippo in North Africa. For Augustine, Stegall tells us, a person or a people “either obeys and moves toward God and rests or moves away from God into restlessness.”
The force that moves us toward God and rest or away from God and into restlessness is love—our affections. Edwards was an Augustinian who applied this principle to individuals. Stegall argues that Augustine in City of God applied a similar analysis of affections to politics.
Ideas alone cannot form us into a cohesive political community oriented toward the common good any more than ideas alone can make us Christians. Instead says Stegall, “politics is the collective act of ordering human desire. It is at root a question of love (that which orders our desires) rather than one of justice (that which orders our actions). … What does a man or a society love? That is the key political question as far as Augustine is concerned.”
Stegall lists “land, heritage, ritual, worship, forms, and kin” as concrete objects of love “around which Americans… can cohere and which they can protect as loved things held in common.” That is, it was not liberty as an abstraction for which the American founders fought. They loved liberty as a concrete reality impacting all aspects of their lives, their families’ lives, their neighbors’ lives, and the lives of future generations. And they loved their country not as an abstract idea, but the ground beneath their feet.
Stegall understands that, “There is still room for vigorous debates over questions of rights and justice and all the rest.” But without clarifying what we love, “Having achieved freedom to choose anything their hearts desire, [Americans] have forgotten what they wanted in the first place.” That is the source of our restlessness and the bitter partisan wrangling that goes along with it.
What is it that we love? I am not sure I know, but this much is certain: we are in the middle of a worldwide credit crisis, the economy will probably get worse, and Election Day will likely leave political conservatives including the vast majority of evangelicals extremely unhappy. Under pressure, what we love, I suspect, will show itself clearly and that, in turn, will tell us a great deal about who we are.
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Originally published October 15, 2008.
