An Interview with Brad Littlejohn: Reformed Irenicism?

on April 29, 2014

This is Part 2 of a four part series. Here is Part 1.

IRD: Speaking of vision and foundations, where is the center of gravity for the renaissance of Protestant social thought?

Dr. Brad Littlejohn: Ha, good question.  Well, I can’t speak for everyone involved here, as there’s a fair bit of diversity even among the Board of Directors.  Dr. Jordan Ballor, you probably know, helps direct the Acton Institute, which tends to represent a robustly pro-“free market,” and in times past even somewhat libertarian standpoint.  I, and some other members of the board, are perhaps more “distributist” in our socio-politico-economic views, though certainly not card-carrying distributists.

On the whole, I would say our own social thought, and that which we see fairly consistently articulated in the Reformed tradition, is that of classical conservatism—which of course is a far cry from much that goes by the name today.  It has a robust doctrine of subsidiarity which emphasizes the role of families, churches, other intermediate institutions, and the lesser magistrates in maintaining justice and social order, but is resolutely anti-libertarian in recognizing the irreducibly social character of human life and the comprehensiveness of justice as the norm of that social life.  It is much more worried about the poor and economic injustice than most modern conservatives, and much more worried about the family, and open to certain forms of hierarchy, than most modern liberals.  Richard Hooker and Johannes Althusius were two of its great leading lights, although of course there are many more that we want to get back onto the reading lists of Protestant ethicists today.

IRD: I hear much discussion about “Protestant irenics” or “Reformed irenicism.” Could you clarify what that means?

Littlejohn: Yes, that’s another question I get a lot.  I think it’s counter-intuitive because many of us grew up in Protestant, or perhaps especially Reformed, churches in which there was a spectrum between more strict confessionalists on the one hand and more least-common-denominator, “mere Christianity” evangelicals.  And the further you were toward the narrow dogmatic end of that spectrum, the more likely you were to display great interest in historical theology, quoting Turretin and Ursinus and the WCF; whereas the further you were toward the more irenic end of the spectrum, the less likely you were to care two cents about the formulations of a company of old dead guys who were always arguing with one another. But it needn’t be that way; indeed, C.S. Lewis himself, the great purveyor of “mere Christianity” (or at least “mere Protestantism”), was deeply anchored in the tradition.

The “Reformed irenicism” that we’re all about insists that “irenics” (that is, all getting along peaceably) without history is only skin-deep, a shallow foundation to build a church or a witness to the world.  And it insists that when you look more deeply at the history of our Protestant forebears, you find that it’s not, actually, a bunch of narrow dogmatists arguing over everything.  Sure, they enjoyed disputation, but many of them had a very well-developed sense of the distinction between the essentials and non-essentials, far better than we do today.  And they shared (and more often than not recognized that they shared) enormous common ground on the essentials.  Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, they shared a confidence that by reasoning together in submission to Scripture and in light of history, they could make real progress toward the resolution of the differences they did have.  It’s that vision and style, embodied by such great churchmen as Philipp Melanchthon, Zacharias Ursinus, Richard Hooker, and of course, John Davenant, that we want to recover for contemporary Protestants.  (And as that list of names suggests, we use “Reformed” in a fairly broad sense.)

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