A DAVENANT INSTITUTE PUBLICATION ISSUE 5.1 • SEPTEMBER 2020 ADFONTES A JOURNAL OF PROTESTANT RESOURCEMENT “ENLIGHTEN MY MIND IN THE KNOWLEDGE OF CHRIST”: EVANGELICALISM AND ENLIGHTENMENT AT THE CAMBUSLANG REVIVAL, 1742 BY MOSES BRATRUD What has Evangelicalism to do with the life of the mind? Christians, and critics of Christianity, have been asking this question since Evangelicalism first developed into its modern form in the early eighteenth century. The Victorian critic Leslie Stephen wrote that Evangelicals possess “a form of faith which has no charms for thinkers.”1 More recently, Mark Noll offered an indictment no less severe, writing, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”2 Long before Stephen or Noll put pen to paper, David Hume summed up the attitude of his generation toward evangelicals, commonly called “enthusiasts.” For Hume, the religious enthusiast rejects “human reason” and “delivers himself over, blindly, and without reserve, to the supposed illapses [inflowing] of the spirit, and to inspiration from above. Hope, pride, presumption, a warm imagination, together with ignorance, are, therefore, the true sources of Enthusiasm.”3 1. Thomas Ahnert, The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690-1805 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 15. 2. Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 3. 3. David Hume, “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm,” Essays, Moral and Political, 1741, https://davidhume.org/texts/emp/full. But Stephen and Hume are mistaken. There is an evangelical mind, it has great appeal to “thinkers,” and it by no means rejects “human reason.” The study of Evangelicalism before 1900 makes clear that its rich intellectual heritage dates to its earliest days. Unfortunately, the intellectual dimensions of evangelicalism have sometimes been forgotten or dismissed, by evangelicals and their critics alike (which, really, is Noll’s point). A study of Scotland’s largest eighteenth-century revival will reveal many of the commonly known hallmarks of Evangelicalism while also demonstrating Evangelicalism’s surprising commonalities with the most influential intellectual movement of its time: the Enlightenment. Neither Evangelicalism nor Enlightenment as such began in Scotland, but I contend that Scotland was the place where these two phenomena first met. Evangelicalism was arguably not present in other Enlightenment strongholds (France, Prussia), while the Scottish Enlightenment was far more developed than in other areas where Evangelicalism was taking off in the eighteenth century (England, New England). The unique circumstances of Scotland’s Cambuslang revival can teach us lessons about the interplay of vigorous intellectual output and vibrant Evangelical spirituality. How the old parish Chur Ch in Cambuslang, sCotland
2 do these forces conflict? How can they be reconciled? Eighteenthcentury Scotland can help us answer our questions. • • • A phenomenon of heightened religious experience gripped the inhabitants of Cambuslang in the Scottish Lowlands in 1742. What would become known as the “Cambuslang Wark” culminated on August 12, with the largest open-air revival in Scottish history at the “conversion brae,” a rolling hill outside Cambuslang that forms a natural amphitheater. Between 20,000-30,000 people were present for George Whitefield’s preaching, and about 1,700 received tokens to take Communion. For participants and many observers, it was an answer to fervent prayer and a manifestation of the Holy Spirit’s power. The parish minister at Cambuslang, William McCulloch, collected written accounts from hundreds of people attesting that their lives had been transformed through the revival work. For others, however, Cambuslang was an outbreak of dangerous and manipulative religious “enthusiasm.” Differing perceptions of the Cambuslang revival arose out of differing attitudes within the Scottish national Kirk. In Scotland, in contrast to some countries on the European continent, Evangelicalism and the Enlightenment were both largely ecclesial movements, their ideas disseminating among the black gowns and white collars of the Scottish clergy. Unlike in France, where the anti-clericalism of Voltaire and others led eventually to the storming of churches and ultimate disestablishment, the Scottish Enlightenment led to larger and grander churches and a learned, “Moderate” ecclesiastical elite with a firm grip on the reigns of churchly power. Clerical reactions to the events at Cambuslang provide a window into broader shifts within Scotland’s—and the Anglophone world’s—religious culture. A flurry of pamphlets published at Edinburgh and Glasgow attacking and defending the revival from various angles shows that the events at Cambuslang were extremely important to contemporaries. The Cambuslang Wark, in fact, revealed a cultural fault-line that would divide the Scottish church: between the Enlightened “Moderates” and “Evangelicals”—both, in their own ways, products of new intellectual movements in the eighteenth century. The Moderates who took part in what Thomas Ahnert has called the “religious Enlightenment” of the Church of Scotland had no place for “enthusiasm,” the belief that direct communication with God was possible.4 As seen above, David Hume had made his views on enthusiasm clear only the previous year, and though we tend to think of Hume as a “secular” figure, he had deep friendships with Scottish churchmen, and his sentiments were shared by most figures of the “religious Enlightenment” in Scotland, the majority of whom were clergymen.5 4. Ahnert, 10-11. 5. These included Dugald Stewart, William Robertson, and John Playfair. Cf. the pioneering work of the historian Richard B. Sher, especially in his Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment. But the enlightened Moderate clergymen had a new force to contend with in the mid-eighteenth century: open-air preaching and revivals that tested religious institutions. Evangelicalism’s Great Awakening had begun.6 This movement started in colonial America and spread throughout the British Isles between 1730 and 1750. Although “Enlightenment” is often seen as a competitor of revival, in the Anglophone world there were important commonalities. The influence of the Enlightenment on Jonathan Edwards, the doyen of eighteenth-century Evangelicalism, is well-attested.7 But the Enlightenment was also near at hand for the thousands who walked from Glasgow and even Edinburgh to participate in the revival at Cambuslang, such as John Erskine. Erskine was a student at Edinburgh University when he witnessed the revival. The son and grandson of prominent Scottish gentlemen, he studied law before switching to divinity, in part because of his revival experience: “I went to Cambuslang on Saturday [August 11, 1742]. The place where their tent [covered preaching stand] was, the most commodious for hearing ever I saw…It was reckoned there were 20,000 there that day, but I’m certain a voice near as good as Mr. Whitefield’s could have reached a greater number had they been there.”8 On the following Monday, Erskine entered McCulloch’s own dining room, where more than twenty people were assembled in the “deepest distress.” He writes that it was “impossible for any that saw them to doubt the reality of their concern…What they seemed most affected with was the sin of unbelief, and a sense of the hardness and perverseness of their hearts. Some of them were so over poured with grief that they could not speak.”9 Erskine’s reasoned defense of the revival, which appeared in his pamphlet The Signs of the Times Consider’d in late 1742, is particularly noteworthy.10 It is a point-by-point refutation of the skeptical attacks which were already being directed at the Cambuslang revival. But in defending Whitefield and McCulloch’s work, Erskine did not accept the validity of the testimonies of revival participants simply because they were expressed in religious terms. He writes that “there may be foolish virgins, mixed with the wise.”11 For Erskine and Scotsmen sympathetic to the Cambuslang Wark, it was important to portray the revival as “orderly and rational” rather than “enthusiastic,” in the words of Erskine’s most recent biographer.12 6. “Modern” Evangelicalism is understood to have arisen in the 1730s along with the transatlantic wave of revivalism. The term is notoriously difficult to define, especially in modern contexts, but for our purposes evangelicalism is religion that emphasizes (1) religious experience, which provided evidence from the senses for the truths of religion, and (2) personal sanctity, within or outside traditional confessional boundaries. 7. Josh Moody, Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightenment: Knowing the Presence of God (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005). 8. Jonathan Yeager, Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 33. 9. Yeager, 33. 10. John Erskine, The Signs of the Times Consider’d: Or, The High Probability, that the present Appearances in New-England and the West of Scotland, are a Prelude of the Glorious Things promised to the Church in the latter Ages (Edinburgh: T . Lumisden and J. Robertson, 1742). 11. Yeager, 35. A reference to the Parable of the Ten Virgins in Matthew 25:1-13. 12. Yeager, 36. FOR SCOTSMEN SYMPATHETIC TO THE CAMBUSLANG WARK, IT WAS IMPORTANT TO PORTRAY THE REVIVAL AS “ORDERLY AND RATIONAL” RATHER THAN “ENTHUSIASTIC.”
3 The Cambuslang revival needed defenders. Hume’s essay on enthusiasm could not have been far from the minds of Moderate clergymen suspicious of Whitefield and revivalism. A heated argument over the revival’s validity broke out among pamphleteers publishing at Edinburgh and Glasgow and dueling for the attention of literate Scots. There were three main viewpoints: (1) For Erskine and the revival participant Rev. Alexander Webster, the Wark was a genuine outpouring of God’s Spirit resulting in real conversion and repentance; (2) for some clergy, the revival was invalid and Whitefield was a fraud (he was, after all, an Anglican priest, not a Presbyterian minister)—thus, the Wark was indeed of supernatural origin, but diabolical rather than divine;13 (3) a third perspective, in contemporary pamphlets and later written accounts, must be teased out at more length. For Moderates within the church, the events of Cambuslang were indeed disorderly, but not the work of the devil. Instead, they were caused by unscrupulous ministers (and their assistants) who worked the common people up into a frenzy, and exploited the decidedly nonspiritual phenomena of mass hysteria and delusion for their own profit. This passage from the first known pamphlet to attack the Cambuslang revival is typical for a hostile description of Whitefield’s preaching: [T]he speaker delivers himself, with the greatest vehemence both of voice and gesture, and in the most frightful language his genius will allow of. If this has the intended effect upon one or two weak women, the shrieks catch from one to another, till a great part of the congregation is affected; and some are in the thought, that it may be too common for those zealous in the new Way to cry out themselves, on purpose to move others, and bring forward a general scream…being told such things were arguments for the extraordinary presence of the Holy Ghost with them.14 Ministers under the influence of Whitefield and others changed their preaching styles to take into account the winds of revival issuing from New England, sometimes with dramatic results. But the evangelical appeal to new birth through a harrowing process of conversion was not the only new preaching movement in the Kirk.15 Elizabeth Mure of Caldwell notes a change around this time among students of divinity, who were “falling in with the English fashionable way of 13. Charles Chauncy, A letter from a gentleman in Boston, to Mr. George Wishart, One of the Ministers of Edinburgh, Concerning the State of Religion in New-England (Edinburgh: 1742). 14. A Letter from a gentleman in Scotland, to his friend in New-England. Containing an account of Mr. Whitefield’s reception and conduct in Scotland, the two visits he made there; and also of the work at Cambuslang, and other parts: wherein many mistakes, relating to these things, that have been formerly and lately transmitted to this country, are rectified, and the whole affair set in a true and impartial light (Boston: T . Fleet, 1743), 12-13. 15. Arthur Fawcett, The Cambuslang Revival (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1971), 18. preaching…And love to call grace virtue…which differs much from our good old way in this Church.”16 To “call grace virtue” was to deny the doctrine of original sin and to assert human perfectibility. This was a common theme for thinkers like Francis Hutcheson and for the clergymen who, under Hutcheson’s influence, formed the “religious Enlightenment.”17 Evangelicalism and Enlightened moderation: these two movements—one dedicated to making Christian belief and practice rational and modern, and the other focused on the emotional resonance of being miraculously born again through God’s Holy Spirit—seemed destined to clash with one another. But there were also harmonies between these different expressions of Scottish Christianity in the eighteenth century, and they could be found at Cambuslang. The best example of this is Rev. McCulloch’s remarkable Examinations, the written accounts he collected from many whose hearts were changed during the revival. The Examinations has been called Scotland’s first oral history because it presents the experiences of common people in their own words.18 The narratives are intensely compelling even today, but McCulloch’s exhaustive work recording and validating these religious experiences is the most striking thing about them. His immense regard for truth led him to present the Cambuslang conversion accounts in their untutored plausibility, with few embellishments. McCulloch defended the reasonableness of the seemingly miraculous events at Cambuslang simply by letting firsthand accounts speak for themselves. In one account, a young man speaks of falling into a “trance” while at the Lord’s table, where Christ shows His wounds which “He had suffered for me, in satisfying Justice.” Speaking of a “trance” would have confirmed the dark suspicions of anti-revivalists, and this is perhaps why McCulloch or another redactor emended the “trance” from the main narrative. However, in the same account, the young man hopes that Christ, “in his oun due time, [would] enlighten my mind in the Knowledge of Christ…”19 We see, then, that the narratives feature displays of such emotional intensity that modern readers, to say nothing of moderate clergymen, are made uncomfortable. And yet, many of the narratives beseech God for the “knowledge of Christ.” This hunger for knowledge, although it is expressed in religious terms, is reasonable—it is, after all, a request for “enlightenment.” 16. Fawcett, 15. 17. Ahnert, 1. 18. Keith Edward Beebe and the Scottish History Society, The McCulloch Examinations of the Cambuslang Revival (1742): A Critical Edition: Conversion Narratives from the Scottish Evangelical Awakening (Woodbridge, UK: Scottish History Society, 2013), xxii. 19. Beebe, 212-14. a Cartoon, entitled “enthusiasm d isplay’d,” depi Cting g eorge Whitefield prea Ching (1739)
4 For this reason, McCulloch, Erskine, and others were not altogether mistaken when they defended the revival as a reasonable occurrence. Pushed by pamphlets attacking the revival, the revivalists vigorously fought back, seeking to prove the success of the revival by winning over members of the literate Scottish public. Such was the scale of the revival that most Scots would have been familiar with it, and indeed the near-term success of the revival can be inferred from the fact that it was so threatening to Moderates within the Kirk. Though the Enlightenment per se in Scotland was at this point confined to the “high culture” of universities and wellread gentry clergymen, the Cambuslang revival was defended in terms that prefigured the Scottish Enlightenment philosophy of common-sense “realism,” as David Bebbington argues: This realism, or common-sense view, allowed that certain basic axioms of thought are grasped intuitively. It enabled Evangelicals to express in a fresh way their belief in the accessibility of God. Defenders of the validity of the conversions at Cambuslang anticipated an aspect of [Thomas] Reid in asserting the trustworthiness of their senses.20 In other words, revivalists rested part of their argument on human sense perception, against “sense skeptics” like David Hume. McCulloch, Erskine, and other defenders of Cambuslang made conscious choices about how to portray the events they witnessed. Instead of appealing to the authority of the church or to the a priori validity of religious testimony, they appealed to reason and the reliability of human sense perception. They spoke in terms their Enlightened compatriots would have understood. By shrewdly moderating their language and defending spiritual events in secular terms, the revivalists broadened their appeal and ensured their place in the history books. Though the revivalists hoped for more expressions of God’s favor on the scale of Cambuslang, no revival on a similar scale occurred until the twentieth century.21 But the written accounts of the Cambuslang revival make it clear how many lives were changed by what they encountered at Cambuslang and, crucially, preserved the events for posterity. The last of McCulloch’s Examinations is that of a young man from Carmunnock, close to Cambuslang. He writes, “[S]ince that time, the habitual prevailing bent of my heart, is after communion with God in Christ & conformity to him…so neither does my poor heart ever settle or take rest, till it fix on God in Christ, & find rest in him: To him be Glory Amen.”22 20. David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1993), 59. 21. Billy Graham’s All Scotland Crusade in 1955. 22. Beebe, 308. Using firsthand accounts and arguing for the trustworthiness of what the men and women at Cambuslang heard and saw, the defenders of Cambuslang presented an Enlightenment defense for a supernatural work. Though this at first seems contradictory, given the hostility of some strands of Enlightenment to all revealed religion, it is in fact a natural development of the well-read and highly religious tone of Scottish print culture during the mid-eighteenth century. The winds of revival from New England, just as much as the winds of Enlightenment from the continent, blew on Scottish soil and produced a rational revivalism, and a religious Enlightenment, that could be found nowhere else in the eighteenth century. What we see in the Scottish “enlightened revivals” is a small and intensely literate society grappling with intellectual and religious currents of change, while not being utterly divided over the most basic epistemological questions. For revivalist and Moderate alike, the betterment of Scottish society was to be accomplished largely within the institutions of the established Scottish Kirk (and in convenient nearby fields), not in a secular lycée, nor yet in a parliament. While far from perfect, this moment in Scottish history provides a beautiful vision of settling religious differences in a common forum (through pamphlets, books, and letters, or more formally through the Kirk’s General Assembly). The positive interplay of Enlightenment and Revival should inform our work to repristinate the Church as a sanctum for both high learning and vigorous spirituality. True religion is as deep intellectually as it is emotionally—that is the legacy of the Scottish Reformation and of the eighteenth-century revivals. Christians who would recover these virtues face an uphill battle, but we serve a God who promises, in the words of a young woman who participated in the revival at Cambuslang, “I will guide thee by My Counsel & afterward receive thee to my Glory.”23 Moses Bratrud is a Master’s student in History at the University of Edinburgh. He is a graduate of New Saint Andrews College and serves as Director of Communications for Minnesota Family Council. He and his wife and daughter live in St. Paul, Minnesota. 23. Beebe, 145. portrait of sCottish enlightenment philosopher t homas r eid, sir henry r aeburn, 1796
5 MARTIN LUTHER AND TAX: A PROTESTANT PERSPECTIVE ON REDISTRIBUTIVE TAXATION BY ALLEN CALHOUN Along with many other Reformers, Martin Luther advocated taxation as an instrument of poor relief. Protestants today are divided on the advisability of using tax policy to redistribute society’s resources, but at the very least, an understanding of the place that Luther’s view of redistributive taxation occupies in the history of political theology might lead us toward a distinctly Protestant conception of taxation. That Luther wrote more about taxation than the other Reformers is perhaps not surprising. In his early political theology, Luther sharply differentiated between the ways in which Christians and non-Christians related to civil government and its laws. “Christians should be subject to the governing authorities and be ready to do every good work,” Luther wrote, because “in the liberty of the Spirit they shall by so doing serve others and the authorities themselves and obey their will freely and out of love.”1 Citing Matthew 17, Luther insisted that the “children of the king, who need nothing,” should nevertheless freely submit and pay “the tribute.”2 For the unbelieving subject, on the other hand, the “temporal sword” is a “terror,” restraining “the un-Christian and wicked so that—no thanks to them—they are obliged to keep still and to maintain an outward peace.”3 Following the peasants’ revolt, Luther began drawing the line between the two kingdoms, the spiritual and the temporal, in a different way. Fearing anarchy, Luther felt obliged to refine his political theology so that it could accommodate intervention by civil authorities in ecclesiastical affairs. The two kingdoms no longer meant a simple distinction between church and magistrate; now even earthly church life became a part of the earthly kingdom. Luther’s two kingdoms theology had initially earned him the rebuke of Huldrych Zwingli and others who considered it dangerously close to the teaching of the Anabaptists, who believed that the government should not have any power over 1. Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” LW 31:369. Unless otherwise noted, citations from the works of Martin Luther are from Luther’s Works ( LW) (American Edition), ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T . Lehman, 55 vols. (Philadelphia: Muehlenberg Press and Fortress Press, and St. Louis: Concordia, 1955-86). 2. Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” LW 31:369. 3. Martin Luther, “Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed,” LW 45:91. religious matters and that civil laws should not be imposed on Christians. However, as a practical matter Luther’s doctrine later came to resemble Zwingli’s Christian commonwealth.4 Even before the peasants’ revolt, however, Luther was eager to place the task of relieving the needs of the poor in the hands of civil authorities. He was deeply disturbed by how the church in his time handled poor relief—primarily through the system of almsgiving, which represented for Luther a particularly pernicious form of works righteousness. Calling for social reforms in his “Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate” (1520), Luther urged the princes and nobility to eliminate the mendicant orders in their territories to help erase begging from the land.5 Lu ther’s views on poverty stand in stark relief against both the medieval system of almsgiving, with its promise of salvation to the generous, and John Calvin’s later insistence that poor relief form an integral part of the church’s mission. Luther’s conception of government-administered social assistance uniquely situated him to reflect on the use that the civil authorities could and should make of taxation in helping the needy. THE LEISNIG ORDINANCE In September 1522, Luther traveled south from Wittenberg to assist the parish at Leisnig in preparing an ordinance for a “common chest.” The citizens and authorities of Leisnig had been impressed with Luther’s calls for social reform in his sermons and his “Open Letter,” namely (among many others), his requests that the princes forbid their subjects to pay the pope’s taxes, that they prohibit the alienation of German benefices, that they eliminate the mendicant orders from their territories to help erase begging from the land, and that they cease referring any temporal matters to Rome for adjudication. Lu4. See Matthew Tuininga, Calvin’s Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church: Christ’s Two Kingdoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 46. 5. Martin Luther, “An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate,” LW 44:172–73. luther p rea Ching, p redella of the r eformation a ltarpieC e, lu Cas Crana Ch, Cir Ca 1547-1548
6 ther not only helped draft the Leisnig ordinance; he endorsed it by writing its preface and having the two documents published together. The ordinance provided for ongoing taxation to maintain funding of the common chest so that it could disburse money for relief of the poor: We the nobility, council, craft supervisors, gentry, and commoners dwelling in the city and villages of our whole parish, have unitedly resolved and consented that every noble, townsman, and peasant living in the parish shall, according to his ability and means, remit in taxes…a certain sum of money to the chest each year, in order that the total amount can be arrived at and procured which the deliberations and decisions of the general parish assembly, on the basis of investigation in and experience with the annual statements, have determined to be necessary and sufficient…By the grace of God these practices have now been restored to the true freedom of the Christian spirit.6 Not only was this ordinance probably the genesis of the modern welfare state in Germany and the Nordic countries, and not only did it influence how Western Europeans and North Americans eventually came to think of “state-funded social assistance,”7 it is also historically significant because (1) it anticipates the ability-to-pay principle of progressive taxation (“according to his ability and means”); (2) it distributes the chest’s funds based on need; and (3) the collection of revenue, maintenance of the chest’s funding levels, and distributions from the chest were to be carried out in a regular, universal, consistent, and methodical manner.8 Restoration of the practice of poor relief “to the true freedom of the Christian spirit” meant, for the drafters of the Leisnig ordinance, that the task of meeting the needs of the poor passed from the sphere of individual charity to that of political justice. This was not because Luther decried voluntary charity, but because he abhorred the abuses in the medieval system of poor relief, i.e., in almsgiving. As early as 1517, in the Ninety-Five Theses, he rejected the long-standing view that the poor are the treasure of the church, providing the rich with a “sin-redeeming” benefit through acts of charity.9 But there were deeper theological currents at work, too. Luther’s emphasis on the doctrine of communicatio idiomatum and the redistributive grammar of his theology of the Lord’s Supper underlie his vision for poor relief and, thus, implicate redistributive taxation—at least in the embryonic form that it took in the Leisnig ordinance. 6. Martin Luther, “Fraternal Agreement on the Common Chest,” LW 45:192. 7. Samuel Torvend, “’Greed Is an Unbelieving Scoundrel,’” in The Forgotten Luther: Reclaiming the Social-economic Dimension of the Reformation, ed. Carter Lindberg and Paul A. Wee (Edina, MN: Lutheran University Press, 2016), 38. 8. See Carter Lindberg, “Luther on a Market Economy,” Lutheran Quarterly 30 (2016): 379. 9. See Jacob Viner, Religious Thought and Economic Society, ed. Jacques Melitz and Donald Winch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978), 76. LUTHER’S THEOLOGY OF REDISTRIBUTION Through faith, Luther writes, the soul is united with Christ “as a bride is united with her bridegroom,” and, thus, “everything they have they hold in common, the good as well as the evil.”10 This “happy exchange” (fröhliche Wechsel) between Christ and the believer models the exchange between the two natures of Christ,11 and, therefore, Christ distributes to Christians the “prerogatives” of “priesthood and kingship” that he obtained.12 Christ’s distribution of the prerogative of priesthood carries the redistributive dynamic beyond the relationship between Christ and believer. Because priesthood implies a redistribution of what is received, Christians distribute to others what they have received from Christ.13 Luther’s distributive logic turns the believer’s attention to the need of his neighbor. The “good things” flowing from Christ to the believer “flow on to those who have need of them.”14 Because the believer is distributee as well as distributor, she lives in a place of abundance, free from all the anxieties that would beset her if she were responsible for securing her own welfare. For Luther, the goods of the church are (or should be) common property, not because of a pre-existing state of communal ownership,15 but because “there is no greater service of God than Christian love which helps and serves the needy.”16 The common chest, therefore, was “for all who were needy among the Christians.”17 Nor are the redistributed “good things” only spiritual: they include material benefits for the materially needy. Luther writes: In this sacrament [of the Lord’s Supper], therefore, man is given through the priest a sure sign from God himself that he is thus united with Christ and his saints and has all things in common, that Christ’s sufferings and life are his own, together with the lives and sufferings of all the saints.… But in times past this sacrament was so properly used, and the people were taught to understand this fellowship so well, that they even gathered food and material goods in the church, and there—as St. Paul writes in I Corinthians 11—distributed among those who were in need.18 10. Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” LW 31:351. 11. Martin Wendte, “Mystical Foundations of Politics? Luther on God’s Presence and the Place of Human Beings,” Studies in Christian Ethics, August 7, 2018, accessed April 27, 2020, journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0953946818792628. 12. Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” LW 31:354. 13. Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” LW 31:355. 14. Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” LW 31:371. 15. Compare Thomas Aquinas’ view of property in the Summa theologiae (Latin-English Edition), trans. Fathers of the English-Dominican Province (NovAntiqua, 2013), II-II, questions 58 and 66. 16. Martin Luther, “Ordinance of a Common Chest, Preface,” LW 45:172. 17. Luther, “Ordinance of a Common Chest, Preface,” LW 45:173. 18. Martin Luther, “The Blessed Sacrament of the Holy and True Body of Christ, and the Brotherhoods,” LW 35:52, 57. LUTHER ABHORRED THE ABUSES IN THE MEDIEVAL SYSTEM OF POOR RELIEF…HE REJECTED THE LONG-STANDING VIEW THAT THE POOR ARE THE TREASURE OF THE CHURCH, PROVIDING THE RICH WITH A “SIN-REDEEMING” BENEFIT THROUGH ACTS OF CHARITY.
7 After the peasants’ revolt in 1523, Luther might have become more reticent to analogize life in the temporal order to life in the church, but the early Luther, in “The Blessed Sacrament of the Holy and True Body of Christ, and the Brotherhoods” (1519), draws a parallel between communion in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper and the common citizenship of those in political community.19 When resources are scarce, the neighbor’s needs are a threat and self-interest drives society. Justice becomes the resolution of conflict between each person’s self-interest, a matter of striking a balance between those interests. In Luther’s extended metaphor in “The Blessed Sacrament,” on the other hand, the fellowship with Christ and the saints in the Lord’s Supper “is like a city where every citizen shares with all the others the city’s name, honor, freedom, trade, customs, usages, help, support, protection, and the like, while at the same time he shares all the dangers of fire and blood, enemies and death, losses, taxes, and the like.”20 But the Lord’s Supper is not merely a “figure” of solidarity and commonality; it is also a “sign” that the believer does, in fact, hold all things in common with Christ and the saints.21 A sign in this sense is something material that contains “something spiritual.”22 A sign, in Luther’s theology, is like a sacrament, except that it has no salvific effect. Scripture, Luther writes, is full of signs “given along with the promises”—the sign of the rainbow given to Noah, the sign of circumcision given to Abraham, and the rain on Gideon’s fleece, to name just three.23 Material things mediate the Word, so that something accompanies the Word “to which we may cling and around which we may gather.”24 In Luther’s theology, the Lord’s Supper, which is both sign and sacrament, erases the distinction between “the sacred and profane spheres,” according to Martin Wendte. It is the most salient example of the way in which “God and God’s Word are always working for humankind in a materially mediated way.”25 Communion discloses “God’s way of acting with all creation.”26 In the Lord’s Supper, the distribution of the spiritual benefits Christ possesses is a means of salvation. The distribution of material goods 19. Luther, “The Blessed Sacrament,” LW 35:50-51. 20. Luther, “The Blessed Sacrament,” LW 35:51-52. 21. Luther, “The Blessed Sacrament,” LW 35:52. 22. Martin Luther, “Treatise on the New Testament,” LW 35:86. 23. Luther, “Treatise on the New Testament,” LW 35:86. 24. Luther, “Treatise on the New Testament,” LW 35:86. 25. Wendte, “Mystical Foundations of Politics.” 26. Wendte, “Mystical Foundations of Politics.” to the needy is also a means of grace, though not in a salvific sense. The formal logic is the same; what changes in the shift from sacrament to “mere” sign is the soteriological content. Thus, Luther can affirm on the one hand that distributing “alms to the poor” and “food and other necessities…to the needy” is “quite another thing from the testament and sacrament, which no one can offer or give either to God or to men,”27 while bemoaning with equal force the fact that, in the Roman Catholic mass, possessions are not “given, with thanksgiving to God and with his blessing, to the needy who ought to be receiving them,” as Luther believed they had been in the practice of the Early Church.28 TAX AND NEED Luther was undoubtedly influenced by the understanding of the relationship between property and necessitas domestica [domestic necessity] that prevailed in his world. Historian Renate Blickle brilliantly summarizes that understanding as it stood in late medieval and early modern Germany: “Domestic necessity” was a legal norm, not just a moral and social norm, dictating that economic resources in a society of scarcity be distributed according to the principle of need, defined in terms of household subsistence.29 The principle was both a sword against lords who lived luxuriously to the detriment of others and a shield against poverty for the peasants. Necessitas domestica was an egalitarian principle, one to which all households of all ranks could appeal, so it was not tied to class.30 Need, Blickle writes, gained legitimizing power through the concept of “subsistence,” just as freedom would later be justified by the idea of “property.” Need and property are both answers to the question “to whom do the goods of the world legitimately belong?”31 To those who need them, or to those who possess them legally but may not need them? The question remains the same; the two answers are based on drastically different foundational principles. Blickle argues that the legitimizing concept of subsistence gradually gave way to the legitimizing principle of property in the eighteenth century. “Property as a private right,” according to Blickle, no longer included “any kind of responsibility toward another person. It was the legitimate right of its owner regardless of the needs of others.” The 27. Luther, “Treatise on the New Testament,” LW 93-94. 28. Luther, “Treatise on the New Testament,” LW 96. 29. Renate Blickle, “From Subsistence to Property: Traces of a Fundamental Change in Early Modern Bavaria,” Central European History 25, no. 4 (1992): 381. 30. Blickle, “From Subsistence to Property,” 377-82. 31. Blickle, “From Subsistence to Property,” 377. t he p easant Wedding, p ieter b rueger the elder, C ir Ca 1567
8 idea of the needs of the poor, to be sure, still has force in tax theory;32 ultimately, however, property became “a material guaranty and a manifestation” of the civil individual’s freedom, with the consequence that property was finally “elevated into a sacrosanct human right.”33 Luther lived before the elevation of property into that kind of right. His thinking bears the imprint of necessitas domestica. That is not to say that he devalued private property. He was adamant, especially after the peasants’ revolt, that the Seventh Commandment (“Thou shalt not steal”) prohibits any form of interference with another’s property: “God forbids every kind of robbery, theft, and fraud, as well as sinful longing for anything that belongs to our neighbor.”34 But that is only what God “forbids.” Luther characteristically includes in his catechism what the Seventh Commandment “requires” as well, namely, that “[w]e should help our neighbor to improve and protect his property and business” and “help him in every need.”35 How can Luther’s theological reasoning for a redistributive form of taxation to meet the needs of the poor help us formulate tax policy today? How might Luther help us develop a distinctively Protestant theory of taxation which nevertheless possesses broad appeal? EQUITY AND EFFICIENCY Taxation is generally regarded as having three uses: (1) to fund the provision of public goods and services; (2) to influence the behavior of the members of society; and (3) to redistribute resources directly or indirectly. The third use—redistribution—is the most controversial of the three, at least in American discourse, and it has surfaced as a matter of urgency and contention in recent political debates and as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Equity and efficiency are the two standards by which tax systems are typically judged. A tax system is “efficient” if it collects the amount of revenue that the state needs with as little impact as possible on the decisions taxpayers make. The meaning of “equity” is less clear. It often refers to “vertical equity,” which means that those with greater ability to pay should pay more taxes. The idea of vertical equity exerts powerful influence in liberal democratic societies because of the happy coincidence that imposing higher rates of tax on those with more income or wealth (which seems fair) does the least amount of damage to economic productivity (which seems to be in everyone’s interest). Equity and efficiency are taken to converge in progressive 32. See, e.g., Marc Fleurbaey, “Welfare, Libertarianism, and Fairness in the Economic Approach to Taxation,” in Taxation: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Martin O’Neill and Shepley Orr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 47: there are “good reasons” in optimal tax theory to give “absolute priority to the worse off ”—good utilitarian reasons, it turns out. 33. Blickle, “From Subsistence to Property,” 384. 34. Martin Luther, Small Catechism (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1943), 73. 35. Luther, Small Catechism, 74. tax (especially income tax) rate structures, justified by the “ability-topay” principle.36 In the context of the ability-to-pay principle, the term “equity” means little more than fairness, that is, how fairly the tax burden is allocated. We can call this “thin” equity. Sometimes, however, “equity” can refer to “thicker” equity, i.e., a move toward greater economic equality or at least less inequality. Prominent among “welfarist” approaches, which give thicker accounts of equity than the ability-to-pay principle, are the “optimal” tax models: formulas that offer a three-step method for arriving at the “optimal” balance between equity (in the thick sense) and efficiency. First, set the state’s revenue target; second, determine the society’s “social welfare function” (i.e., a ranking of social outcomes, typically reflecting how inequalityaverse the society is); and third, use the resulting degree and curve of progressivity, proportionality, or even regressivity in tax rates as benchmarks against which to judge the equity and efficiency of actual taxes. 37 Policy has not followed theory. In recent U.S. tax policy, inequality-aversion has remained low. So have top marginal individual income tax rates. It has proved easier to shift the equity component of tax-and-spending arrangement to the spending side. As of 2018, three-quarters of redistribution at the federal level occurred through spending and only one-quarter through tax itself, i.e., most redistribution occurs through money being given to the poor, not through progressive income tax rates.38 Especially since the popularization in the 1980s of the “Laffer curve,” which showed that there is a tax rate somewhere between 0% and 100%, but much closer to 0% than to 100%, that maximizes government revenue, many Americans have assumed that lowering taxes can increase revenue. Regardless of the validity of this assumption, it reflects an important social belief, prominent among welfarists in the United States and many other liberal democracies, namely, that society as a whole is better off materially when the tax system preserves the maximum amount of private wealth and creates conditions for the maximum amount of private wealth-creation. This belief entails a strong commitment to efficiency. Thus, once equity in either its thick or thin form is taken to merge with efficiency, equity is no longer a separate variable in the tax balance. It is seen, rather, as a fortuitous byproduct of the alliance between government and job-producing, wealth-creating large corporations and top income-earners. TAX AND PROPERTY All that has been said up to this point about U.S. tax policy can be reduced to one phrase: the government should interfere with prop36. “Progressive” means “graduated.” It refers to tax rates (i.e., percentages) that increase as income or wealth increases. Since the late 1800s, theories of tax justice in the United States have predominantly, but not exclusively, focused on progressive income tax. For the sake of brevity, this article does not explore the different ways in which equity can be brought to bear on income, wealth, and consumption taxes. 37. “Proportional” refers to flat tax rates throughout the rate schedule. “Regressive” means that the rates drop as income or wealth increases. 38. James R. Repetti, “The Appropriate Roles for Equity and Efficiency in a Progressive Income Tax,” Florida Tax Review 24 (forthcoming 2020): 28. REDISTRIBUTIVE TAXATION HAS SURFACED AS A MATTER OF URGENCY AND CONTENTION IN RECENT POLITICAL DEBATES AND AS A RESULT OF THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC.
