Reason, Revelation, and the Civic Order: Political Philosophy and the Claims of Faith

Introduction

Introduction Carson Holloway and Paul R. DeHart This book offers a variety of essays exploring the contribution that revelation, or faith in revelation, can make to the practice of political theory or political philosophy . Its aim is to remedy what we take to be an unjustifiable neglect of the claims of revelation by mainstream secular political theory. Such an undertaking must immediately provoke some questions in the form of a counter-challenge. Is it true that contemporary political theory neglects religion and its claims? If so, might not that neglect be justified? After all, why should secular political theorists pay serious attention to the claims of revelation? With regard to the first question, we admit that reasoning on the claims of revelation is not entirely excluded from contemporary political theory. Some political theorists are themselves religious believers, and some of them reason from their religious beliefs in their theorizing. Nevertheless, such work is often addressed primarily to their co-religionists and rarely wins attention in the mainstream of the profession. This is not to say that this mainstream, made up primarily of secular political theorists, entirely disregards religion. But to the extent that it pays attention it treats religious belief as a political or philosophic problem to be addressed rather than as a positive body of thought from which we might derive important insights about the nature of politics and the truth of the human condition. On the academic left, Rawlsians and other liberals, protective of pluralism and individual autonomy, tend to view religion primarily as a threat to freedom. The claims of revelation and, indeed, all comprehensive doctrines, they suggest, are to be kept private and not introduced into the public discourse. On the academic right, Straussians often acknowledge 4 C ar son Holloway and Paul R. DeHart religious belief as necessary to a stable society, but they exclude the claims of revelation from philosophy itself, insisting instead on a strict distinction between political theology and political philosophy, with the latter taking its guidance only from autonomous reason. In other words, secular political theory, to the extent that it takes notice of revelation, does not treat it as a potential fund of wisdom from which something of genuine value might be learned; and this, we contend, is to fail to treat the claims of faith with the seriousness that they deserve. This last claim, however, moves us to the second question suggested above: why should secular political theorists treat revelation with such seriousness? Why should they agree that such attention is necessary to the soundness of their own theoretical investigations into politics? Ultimately, such questions can be answered satisfactorily only by some attempt at such serious attention followed by reflection on whether anything of value was learned. Or, to frame the point more narrowly, secular political theorists might try reading this book with a view to seeing whether what it contains is fruitful for their own thinking. Nevertheless, it is possible beforehand to sketch some reasons why such an undertaking is likely to prove useful. There is, in the first place, a practical argument for seriously attending to the claims of revelation: it is probable that one cannot fully understand the world we live in, the civilization we have inherited, without understanding those claims. Political theory, even normative political theory, must concern itself not only with what ought to be but also with what is. To be complete, a normative account of politics must consider not only what is best but also how society might move in the direction of what is best. This latter knowledge, however, presupposes an accurate understanding of the present state of society and how it developed. The fully competent political theorist must be like a fully competent physician: conversant not only with health as such but also with the current state of the patient. Nevertheless , the civilization in which contemporary political theorists find themselves— let us say, the civilization of the West, or of the developed world—was certainly influenced by revelation and by believers in revelation. The exact character of the influence is admittedly elusive. The modern liberal democracies were undoubtedly influenced by an Enlightenment philosophy that was in some measure critical both of the claims of revelation and of the quality of the society to which earnestness about those claims gave rise. On the other hand, the modern liberal democracies, and Enlightenment philosophy itself, first emerged in societies that had been deeply influenced by Christianity. The development of the modern world we...