Over the last few years, Protestant arguments about political theology have fallen into a familiar pattern. Debates usually go like this: one interlocutor asserts a widely-taken-for-granted proposition about democracy, racial equality, the Constitution, or some other lodestar. Immediately after, a chorus of (usually online) voices immediately pops up to criticize the historical situatedness of that ideal. You appeal to “Reformational” values, but nobody talked like you until the 20th century. If you REALLY want to take the theology of the Reformers seriously, why are you ignoring their social and political teachings against the Jews and heretics and blasphemers?

Consider, for instance, the following exchange:

X: Our constitutional tradition of religious liberty protects everyone. It’s worth defending. And it has philosophical antecedents in our American and Christian tradition.

Y: The Reformed executed Michael Servetus for denying the Trinity, and that was basically a good thing (though we can fight about whether it made prudential sense). Liberal neutrality is a lie. Nobody would have defended abstract “religious liberty” up until a few decades ago.

This is a fairly representative example of these arguments. And the basic “shape” of this argument lies behind a whole host of subsidiary clashes over “Christian nationalism,” the political philosophy of “liberalism,” gender roles, ethnic diversity, and so forth. Both sides claim to speak from within the same theological milieu, and often appeal to the same authorities, but reach radically different substantive conclusions.

The ur-question beneath all these is a question regarding Christian tradition—posed in a distinctively Protestant key—fought out among those who both claim to take their tradition seriously. Interlocutor X appeals to a form of the Protestant tradition as it has developed up to the present day; interlocutor Y wishes to re-norm that tradition by reference to older patterns and practices. I’ve explored this larger question of tradition elsewhere, and don’t intend to simply regurgitate those points here:^[1] part of this contestation is simply what it means to stand within a living tradition.

What seems notable, though, is that this fight is playing out among those interested in the methodological practice of Protestant retrieval, specifically the revisiting and retranslation of primary-source texts from the era of Protestant scholasticism. Interlocutors X and Y, for the most part, are both interested in returning ad fontes—to the sources—in search of a deeper understanding of the theological-intellectual tradition to which they profess allegiance. And yet they reach very different conclusions in the course of that process.

In what follows, I want to explore a rather basic question: what do we do when we do Protestant theological retrieval? This question isn’t often posed as such. But much hinges on the answer.

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The interest in Protestant retrieval over the last few years has been driven by a number of factors, including the desire to build out a more intellectually rigorous Protestant identity relative to the Catholic philosophical tradition. Such ressourcement efforts were intensified and accelerated by the 2015–2016 debates over the “eternal subordination of the Son” or “eternal relation of authority and submission” within the Triune life of the Godhead. Converging with this was a recovery of “classical theism”—spearheaded by James Dolezal, Matthew Barrett, and others—over against models of “social trinitarianism” or “theistic mutualism.”

The argument of such retrieval proponents was straightforward: if virtually the entirety of the Protestant tradition was agreed on certain theological claims (such as divine simplicity, or the equality of persons in the immanent Trinity) up until the last few decades, then this should count as strong evidence against a revisionist view. And this critique of prevailing trends was well taken. It did not take long for retrieval proponents to discover, for instance, how much evangelical/Protestant theology had tacitly assumed Karl Barth’s critique of classical natural theology—despite Barth’s own divergence from prior streams of Protestant thought. What should be underscored, however, is that most of these Protestant retrieval efforts were focused on a comparatively narrow band of theological topics, mostly within the domain of “theology proper.” (Richard Muller’s well-known case for the analogia entis as a principle of Reformed scholasticism comes to mind.^[2])

In recent years, there has been an effort to expand the scope of this retrieval into other areas of doctrine, especially material pertaining to social and political order. And it is precisely this “expanded retrieval” that has sparked so many of today’s controversies. To take just one example, Zachary Garris—author of the recent book Honor Thy Fathers: Recovering the Anti-Feminist Theology of the Reformers—defends an “expanded retrieval” position with admirable candor:

In recent years, the Reformed world has seen a resurgence of interest in recovering the doctrinal work of these men and others from the shadows of centuries gone by. This work of retrieval often requires courage, as we modern heirs of the Reformers inevitably discover that some of what we thought to be “Reformed” proved to be theological novelty in the face of the primary sources. We often discover that 19th- and 20^th-century social movements and cultural pressures have successfully smuggled their ideas into the bedrock of our thinking.^[3]

Elsewhere, Garris emphasizes that while “[i]t is easy to praise a Knox or a Calvin of the history books,” if they lived in the present age “many Christians would surely reject them for being too controversial and offensive.”^[4] For Garris, “follow[ing] the historic Reformed teaching on male rule in the home and its applications to the church and the civil government” simply follows from a due regard for “conservative, Reformed theology and practice.”^[5] In the same vein, Stephen Wolfe—author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, which argues in similar fashion for a revival of early-modern Protestant political theory—characterizes Garris’s book as “forc[ing] us to choose between the safe retrieval of doctrine alone and the dangerous retrieval of both faith and practice.”^[6]

There’s a logic to this move. Framing the question in this way implies that somewhere in the course of recent time, an “authentic” Protestant tradition was abandoned in favor of a limp modern substitute. From then on, the argument runs, the “authentic” tradition did not develop in meaningful ways, but basically withered on the vine. “Expanded retrieval” proponents tend to locate this point of departure in what Rusty Reno characterizes as the emergence of the “postwar consensus”—a post-World War II “atmosphere of opinion” in which “[w]e continue to define ourselves culturally, even spiritually, as anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist.”^[7]

And so, the battle lines are drawn. Interlocutor X and interlocutor Y understand themselves as standing within a shared theological tradition, but are fundamentally separated by their views of the contours of that tradition. The former camp wishes to retrieve historic Protestant resources to critique modern doctrinal deviations like “eternal functional subordinationism”; the latter camp asks “why not retrieve even more?” (I hope that both of these camps can recognize themselves in this framing.)

That being said, I’ll put my own cards on the table: I don’t find the “expanded retrieval” position to have much a priori force. That is to say: I don’t think there’s a good reason to grant normative priority to the Reformers’ claims about social and political order simply because they were the Reformers’ claims. Nor do I think that proponents of theological retrieval are acting inconsistently when they take this stance.

This is because it simply isn’t true that all claims asserted from within a particular intellectual tradition are of the same sort. If the Pythagorean Theorem were lost tomorrow and recovered a century later, it would still be valid whether or not the discoverers made any effort to revive the forms of Pythagoras’s mystical spirituality. The former truth is perennial; the latter, not so much (at least, few would argue so today).

Consider a more contextually specific example. A truth-claim regarding (for instance) the simplicity of God is “necessary” in that it is integral to the definition of Him: God would not be God were He not metaphysically simple. On a classical theist account, to be actus purus, without unrealized potentialities, is simply what it means to be God. What this means is that the claims of Protestant scholasticism in the context of “theology proper” are, in principle, likely to be uniformly applicable across time and space. If those scholastic claims are true, they are eternally true.

But obviously not all claims made by Protestant scholastics are of this sort. Many claims in this tradition have to do with contingent aspects of human experience. For instance, a rather notable swath of the confessional Lutheran tradition has insisted on the necessity of geocentrism, in order to do justice to the data of Scripture.^[8] Set aside the merits of the argument; the crucial point is that this truth-claim regarding the location of the earth in the solar system is, in principle, falsifiable—or perhaps more correctly, contingent, in that it is logically possible that things might be otherwise. The baseline principle—Scripture is true—can be valid; its contingent working-out, by a particular cluster of scholastics at a particular historical juncture, need not be.

It can be true (and I would argue that it is) that to do politics is, as a matter of perennial principle, to be concerned with the common good. That is an analytic, not merely a synthetic, claim—and modernity, with its discourses of interest-balancing or libertarian maximalism, can often obscure the basic truth of that statement. But retrieval of this fundamental insight—that the good sought in politics is in fact the common good—in no way entails that the Reformers’ context-specific musings on political order reflect perennial principles in all ways. Actual normative demonstration, not merely prooftexting, is required.

With this distinction in view, it makes sense to treat the retrieval of “theology proper” differently from the retrieval of certain social and political doctrines. Reformation-era claims about social and political order are in general more likely to be contingent and time-bound, while the former are not. This is basically conceded by the liberal references to “prudence” that proponents of “expanded retrieval” tend to deploy today, whenever questions of pragmatic implementation come up. Appeals to “prudence” function as discursive mechanisms that occlude more than illuminate: they allow the speaker’s actual policy commitments—what they would really do if given power—to remain perpetually opaque, all while permitting them to invoke the rhetorical weight of “the Protestant tradition” in support of their claims.

Indeed, the appeal to “tradition” here is itself contestable.^[9] Arguments for comprehensive social order are always put forward against a backdrop of certain material and civic conditions. The old logic of households as sites of economic production, for instance, was profoundly unsettled by industrialization and its concomitant changes.^[10] Similarly, cultural exchange—and the possibilities for formulating common ground between representatives of different religious traditions—became quite different once global travel and intellectual exchange became easier. To call for a restoration of “Reformational” patterns of social order (on gender roles, religious toleration, or what have you), under circumstances where those patterns would—if revived today—necessarily be disembedded from the material and social context that was operative in the Reformers’ day, is not really to call for a return to tradition, but for the creation of something entirely novel and untried.^[11] Background assumptions matter. Hence, it does no good to claim that simply because Luther or Calvin or Althusius said something, that necessarily settles the matter for today. Even assuming the normative force of the Reformers’ teachings, that social configuration which would be instantiated under present conditions if their words were heeded would be fundamentally unlike the pattern of social order the Reformers no doubt envisioned in their own time.

A better path, it seems to me, is to argue on a case-by-case basis about the correctness of the Reformers’ views on the role of women in society, the feasibility of democracy, the relationship between Christianity and continuing Judaism, and so forth.^[12] And to the extent that the Protestant tradition does in fact develop (as do all traditions), theologians can reasonably ask whether development in any of these areas is warranted. The writings of the Reformers are not Scripture, though they should be taken seriously.

Before going on, I want to note a specific assumption that sometimes seems common to both “factions” of this debate: the notion that Protestant ressourcement is best understood as a quest for the identification and application of positive dogmatic principles in contemporary theological or political debates. Retrieval thus operates as a kind of data-mining, a quest for argumentative ammunition.

Interestingly enough, on this approach, the reified “Protestant scholastic tradition” functions—in practice if not in description—as a quasi-magisterial sort of authority. The structure of such arguments tends to be analogous to the structure of the arguments that play out within Catholic moral and doctrinal theology—with proponents marshaling theologians on their respective sides, and weighting the normative force of confessional statements (which, in the Catholic context, would be conciliar statements) more heavily. Of course, this sort of argument-within-the-tradition is crucial. It is, as Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us, constitutive of that tradition’s life.^[13] But is the value of Protestant retrieval only bound up with winning contemporary doctrinal arguments?

Putting the matter another way: suppose my argument is correct, and the Reformers’ social and political claims count for rather less than their claims about theology proper. Does that position counsel in favor of jettisoning everything but, say, doctrine-of-God or Christology issues?

I don’t think so. Properly understood, when we do Protestant retrieval, no matter how obscure the topic, we do more than mine quotes. We engage, or ought to engage, our minds devotionally—as a theological practice.

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Even a cursory student of Talmudic debates is aware of the extent to which Jewish rabbinic law (halakhah) stipulates the details of Jewish existence in exhaustive (and exhausting) detail. And the sweep of halakhah extends even beyond actual conditions to encompass potential conditions: for millennia, rabbinic scholars have debated the applicability of Torah to any number of hypothetical scenarios.

There is a fascinating parallel between the sweep of halakhah and the elaborate political-theological edifices envisioned by some “Christian nationalists” today. Both seek to order public space and social existence to the service of God, through the enforcement of theological norms that derive, directly or indirectly, from sacred text. Halakhah is the Jewish analogue to the Christian scholastic tradition—a hugely comprehensive, intellectually all-encompassing, incredibly technical and abstruse body of reflections on the propriety of human conduct in the world.

But despite its scope and detail, halakhah is not readily operationalized in the real world. In a 2018 study of halakhah as a concept, Chaim Saiman reflects on the reasons (what philosopher Kevin Vallier would call transition-related objections^[14]) why a form of halakhah has never been implemented in Israel, despite the fact that Israel is presumably the likeliest candidate for a state regime that might back up halakhic proscriptions with coercive force.^[15]

[S]everal of halakhah’s core features make it ill-suited to serve as the legal system of a modern state. This would be true even if the majority of the population adhered to the halakhic constitution; how much more so in the actual State of Israel, where large numbers of citizens do not. But whereas the shortcomings of halakhic regulation are evident in the modern Jewish state, these same features may enable halakhah to serve as a regulatory force in Jewish society.^[16]

Saiman’s last sentence is particularly interesting, and suggestive. He goes on to clarify, explaining that the practice of debating halakhah solidifies the discussants’ commitment to their Jewish faith and community. “By inviting the student into the law’s internal forum, halakhah ideally becomes less about commands imposed from the outside than about an internal desire to follow in God’s path. Thus, in contrast to the ‘hard’ regulation associated with the bureaucracies of state law, Torah study may operate as a ‘soft’ form of halakhic regulation and enforcement.”^[17] In other words, for Saiman there is clear theological value in halakhah wholly apart from its ability to be translated into real-world political conditions. There is value in debating this law wholly apart from any plans to ever implement it in the contemporary world.

The cross-applicability of Saiman’s point should be clear. If he is correct, then it stands to reason that there is theological value in studying the social and political teachings of the Reformers—even those that strike us as strange and disquieting today—wholly apart from whether we embrace those teachings as normative or politically salient today. This theological value derives from the fact that when we debate these teachings in a scholastic context, we argue over these issues from within a fundamentally Christian frame—where baseline Christian convictions are not excluded from the analysis on Rawlsian or other grounds, but where all discussants share these theological precommitments. It is a practice by which we Christians honor God with our minds, and by which we teach ourselves to better live as Christians under conditions where our precommitments are not universally, or even widely, shared.

There is, of course, a crucial caveat to this: scholasticism as an intellectual culture can, at its worst, become spiritually inert. As Johannes Zachhuber reminds us, writing in the context of Christology, “the requirements of doctrinal purification and conceptual clarification, on the one hand, and the needs of a religious and spiritual life that is based on ‘Christ alone,’ seem to pull in altogether different directions,” and scholastic abstractions “have, more than any other part of Christian doctrine, led to distinctions and speculative subtleties that seem far away from the lived practice of the Christian faith.”^[18] Much the same can be said for scholastic doctrines of political order, which by their nature tend to prioritize homogeneous categories over the messiness of experienced political community. But it is possible to take Zachhuber’s concerns seriously, I think, and still acknowledge that when we debate difficult questions of human life together, we ought to do so in a consistently Christian way—with due regard for logical precision and conceptual clarity.

Of course, this proposal for a more modest use of the Reformers’ social and political teachings is unlikely to satisfy those longing to see a “new Christendom” realized within their lifetimes. Candidly, I think it rather unlikely they will get the pan-Protestant ideal they desire—or, if they did, that they would particularly enjoy residing in it. The “postwar consensus” has endured for a reason. But none of this is to say they should intellectually settle for the status quo—merely that their imaging of ideal political orders ought rightly to be understood as a devotional act, and less as a political program translatable into direct action.^[19] That is what maturity, under modernity, asks of us.

John Ehrett is a Commonwealth Fellow, and an attorney and writer in Washington D.C. His work has appeared in American Affairs, The New Atlantis, and the Claremont Review of Books. He is a graduate of Patrick Henry College, the Institute of Lutheran Theology, and Yale Law School.

1. See John Ehrett, “Tradition and Antisemitism,” American Reformer (Aug. 15, 2023), https://americanreformer.org/2023/08/tradition-and-antisemitism/. ↑

2. See Richard Muller, “Not Scotist: Understandings of Being, Univocity, and Analogy in Early-Modern Reformed Thought,” Reformation & Renaissance Review 14 no. 2 (2012): 127–50. ↑

3. Zachary Garris, Honor Thy Fathers: Recovering the Anti-Feminist Theology of the Reformers (Ogden, UT: New Christendom Press, 2024), back cover. ↑

4. Garris, Honor Thy Fathers, 6. ↑

5. Garris, Honor Thy Fathers, 117. ↑

6. Garris, Honor Thy Fathers, back cover (Stephen Wolfe endorsement). ↑

7. R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 2019), ebook ed. ↑

8. See Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics Vol. 1, trans. Theodore Engelder (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1950), 473–74. ↑

9. On this point, see Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2 (describing “invented traditions” as “responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition”). ↑

10. Cf. Ivan Illich, Gender (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 116. ↑

11. Adrian Vermeule’s analogous effort to remap the categories of traditional Catholic integralism onto a modern account of administrative law and bureaucracy represents the most ambitious proposal along these lines. For a response, see generally John Ehrett, “Virtue and the Administrative State,” Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy 37 (2022). ↑

12. For similar reasons, the strongest non-biblical arguments for traditional Christian sexual ethics are not appeals to antiquity and past precedent, but appeals to Christian metaphysics. For an excellent example of such an appeal, see Joshua Ryan Butler, Beautiful Union: How God’s Vision for Sex Points Us to the Good, Unlocks the True, and (Sort Of) Explains Everything (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2023). ↑

13. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 222. ↑

14. Cf. Kevin Vallier, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 117. ↑

15. On this point, Saiman emphasizes that the highly intellectualized culture of halakhah makes it particularly untranslatable into the categories of modern administration. See Chaim N. Saiman, Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 234 (explaining that “the deep structure of halakhah described throughout this book . . . makes it difficult simply to plug-and-play existing halakhah into the law of the state” and that implementation would require “a spirit of cohesion, institutional authority, and unity of purpose that has eluded the Jewish polity for nearly two millennia.”). But this does not mean that halakhah, even under modernity, is incapable of affecting the lives of those who take it seriously. See Saiman, Halakhah, 244 (“While the centrality of study may make halakhah a poor basis for the regulatory apparatus of a Jewish state, it can be surprisingly effective in creating a culture of halakhic compliance outside the arena of state power.”) ↑

16. Saiman, Halakhah, 243. ↑

17. Saiman, Halakhah, 243. ↑

18. Johannes Zachhuber, Luther’s Christological Legacy: Christocentrism and the Chalcedonian Tradition (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2017), 131–32. ↑

19. Cf. Michael Hanby, “For and Against Integralism,” First Things (March 2020), https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/03/for-and-against-integralism (arguing, regarding Roman Catholic integralism, that “[t]he point of persisting in this seemingly quixotic form of thought is not the practical goal of establishing this city on modern shores, but the speculative goal of establishing this city within the soul.”). ↑
    

    
    

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