Calvinists 4 Freedom

Deneen, Bavinck, and a Political Irony

Dear Friends,

Step into my study. Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent!

I’ve written quite a bit about post-liberalism, the idea that the liberal order undergirding our civil liberties was a big mistake and that we need a more muscular civil authority to organize society toward our proper ends (as the State views them, of course). I am reading Laura Field’s book, Furious Minds (again, more fulsome thoughts on that one coming at some point), and her chapter on Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermuele, and their recent revival of Roman Catholic “Integralism” is extremely helpful and eye-opening. They are not particularly shy about their views: Liberalism’s broad acceptance of individual freedom (i.e., giving people the “pursuit of happiness”) is the fatal error, the thing that has eroded all that is good in the world: moral consensus, community and familial bonds, and society itself. What is needed, by contrast, is a civil government that “shepherds” the whole of society toward the common good. In the Roman Catholic framework, the person to do that is the Pope, and so the “Integralists” do have distant dreams of a revitalized Catholic state. In the Protestant “Christian” Nationalist framework, it can be any old “Christian Prince,” but the aim is the same.

These folks really don’t like freedom. I suspect I should add “for other people,” as I’m sure they only want the “good” kind of statism that agrees with their worldview. Such is their vapid, childish expectation that there are no tradeoffs or downsides in life.

I bring this up because the other night I was continuing my careful re-reading (it’s probably more of a re-re-reading) of Herman Bavinck’s first volume of his Reformed Dogmatics. He was discussing the doctrine of the perspicuity (“clarity”) of Scripture. It is brilliant, of course, and most of it pretty familiar to me. But suddenly he just drops a quite astounding political comment I’d never noticed before (p.479):