That Spinks mentions St. Augustine in this last installment of his “meditations” on the Declaration of Independence is both surprising and unsurprising. It is surprising because there is no mention of Augustine in the Declaration itself. It is unsurprising, given Spinks’ approach throughout the series, which has drawn heavily from extraneous theological terminology and references. In this concluding commentary, Spinks employs a number of important terms not found in the text itself—terms with decided theological resonance. These include “faith,” “love,” “communion,” and “covenant.” One might include “conscience” in this category as well; in any event, it too is absent from the original text.
There is a danger, of course, in substituting one’s own meanings for those of the text and its authors. One man’s acceptable synonym, or purportedly necessary implication, can be another’s eisegesis. This ambiguity gives rise to the need for critically discerning reading.
The Nature of Spinks’ Discourse
These extra-textual additions raise a more general question: What exactly is Spinks doing in this final commentary? More than once, he says that he’s “reading the declaration itself.” This suggests an aim of exegesis, or what an older biblical hermeneutics called explication: bringing out the original and intended meaning of a text. This aim would set certain boundaries and give a certain definite purpose to one’s reading. One would be accountable to the text and its original authors and audiences. In places, it would require the assistance of scholarship, including looking up then-accepted meanings of important terms (such as “Nature”) and allusions and references. Spinks, however, explicitly eschews these interpretative requirements and desiderata, while applying them as it suits his preferred reading. He regularly claims to know what the authors of the document had in mind, while saying it is impossible for him to do so, and he appeals to scholarship on eighteenth-century linguistic meaning in some instances – the meaning of “man,” for example, while denying its utility in other important cases. He practices what I call “involuntary textual exegesis.”
In his reading, he looks both at and beyond the Declaration—the beyond being, or including, “the course of American history.” High points of that history include the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Civil War; an unspecified American debate over “democracy” versus “republicanism”; and today’s civic tensions and dissensions. Merely alluding to these, he avoids specific claims that could be critically engaged. In particular, today’s political situation and climate loom large over him and drive his meditative reading, but he doesn’t tell us enough about the situation to judge that he has accurately captured it, or that his rather personal way of reading best yields its relevance to us today. Below, I will indicate the chief lesson I believe that we can draw today from the document.
Third, there is a kind of dialectical movement to the reading, one propelled by the dynamic structure of Spinks posing questions and then questioning answers. Most generally speaking, his reading moves from politics to theology—from a political conundrum to a theological affirmation that needs constant reaffirmation. And somewhere in between, there is “an entire philosophy of history.” We will consider this movement more closely below.
Spinks further characterizes what he is doing in the fifth installment (and indeed from the beginning) as “meditations”. I confess, however, that I am unsure what exactly he means. Unlike exegesis, it seems to be a second-order sort of thinking, thus the name he gives to the personal quality of his reflections. If so, it leads us back to the problem of eisegesis with which we began.
Logic of the Installment
Spinks begins by raising and pursuing at length a political question implicit in the text and reprised by subsequent American history: How can “one people” be united as “free and independent states”? The original American answers—the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution—proved insufficient, leading to Civil War. Spinks ultimately asserts that no definitive political answer can be based on the Declaration. Happily, though, the document does possess an answer to the question of national unity—if one that requires moving to a different plane and register. In the Declaration, a “common theology, and a theology of community” are available, which can ground a national union in “faith and love” toward one another and our common beneficent Creator—overcoming our political divisions, both structural and ideological.
Thus, the theologian finds theology at the culmination of his reading and ruminations. In important respects, however, it looks more like a production than a discovery—for to do so requires him to take two unusual steps. In a departure from his usual rule of seriatim reading, Spinks collects all of the document’s references to the Divine and synthesizes them in the aforenamed “common theology, and a theology of community.” This, of course, is something that the work itself does not do. As the final step in the Declaration’s argument, this section has a very specific job to do: declare independence. There may be other things that can be added to that core objective, but Spinks’ reading makes the final section into something rather different: a political puzzle that leads to, or requires, a theological answer. Given the significant differences between the two characterizations, one cannot but suspect the theologian’s ingenuity and concerns are at work at least as much as the exegete’s docility.
While these steps raise eyebrows, noting them is not tantamount to critically understanding them. Respecting Spinks’ own approach, we will begin with politics, with what he says about them and what the Declaration says about them. This will require us to address the important theme of representatives, about whom he makes so much.
Politics
In the opening section of his exposition and commentary, Spinks engages in what one could call political philosophy. In this vein, he speaks of what is true and needed “in politics generally and in the American context especially.” To identify politics’ true nature, he proceeds by the method of division and tells us that
politics, by its nature, has no experts. It is an art, not a science, so it cannot rely on exact method. Further, it is an art about people, not things.
The last is key:
And people have passions, desires unreasonable as well as reasonable, hopes and fears—none of which can be controlled by other people, though they can be steered. And the right steering of people, like the right direction of anything living but only more so, requires constant attention and tender care much more than it requires, force. For this reason, politics is only for amateurs, in the old sense of people who do something for the love of it.
So, politics is a work of love, requiring, inter alia, “tender care.” To illustrate and exemplify this truth, Spinks invokes the declarers and “signatories” of the Declaration. This allows us to say a few words about a specific political figure at work in the document: the representative. According to Spinks, the representatives in the Declaration are lovers. This, however, is not the terminology the document itself uses.
“Representatives”
To understand “representatives” and “representation” in the Declaration, one needs to put them in the context of the document as a whole and receive from it all the light it provides. This begins with the aims of politics, as well as what it says about good (free) and bad (tyrannical) government. After all, the Declaration expresses the American representatives’ understanding of politics and government, both in principle and in practice. Picking and choosing individual passages in lieu of dealing with that whole is to miss out on a rich and sophisticated vision. This selectivity can also lend itself to interpretive injustice. Here, of course, it is out of the question to lay out the entirety of the Declaration’s understanding of politics and government. One, however, must acknowledge that the Declaration’s “representatives” are aware of these elements and act coherently with this vision. The document itself is the proof.
There are more particular points that one can glean from a close reading, one focused on the term and its cognates. Spinks’ seriatim reading, however, inhibits him from bringing together the various passages where they appear. Earlier, the document refers to the colonial institutions of “representative bodies,” that is “legislative bodies,” through which they exercised self-government. And in these bodies, at times representatives had to exercise “manly firmness” to resist the depredations of the king. These historical reminders indicate that the “Representatives” who signed the Declaration were self-consciously participating in an estimable tradition of colonial political life, exercising and defending self-rule via representative legislative bodies. And while Spinks makes “love” and “conscience” the keynotes of the Declaration’s view of representation, the text itself notes other qualities, starting with manliness.
To it, one must add “prudence”. Representatives in the American framework practice it in discerning a “Design” on the colonists’ freedom, and in so doing they educate their fellow citizens in the art of applying principles to facts and making informed judgments. In my judgment, this is the chief contemporary value of the Declaration: that it instructs and shows us how to detect and track encroaching would-be tyrants and despots, as well as how to respond to them and their threats. America today has many such enemies, both at home and abroad.
Spinks’ focus on love as the defining motive of the fifty-six men who represented “the good People of these Colonies” is counterintuitive. I ask the reader to consider its signers, starting with George Washington. Is “tender,” “caring,” “steering” love how you would characterize them and their motives? Instead, these men were driven by personal honor, the prospect of fame, and the noble ambition to bring into being a polity devoted to human liberty. The historical record demonstrates this devotion to a liberty understood as the protection of rights and self-government, both individual and collective.
In this light, one begins to see the rather incredible character of the “loving” rendering of the men of the Declaration of Independence. Dr. Spinks’ animadversions on the great men speaking and acting in and through the Declaration do not illuminate the political animal in his glory. To be sure, the phrases “political animal” and “statesman” need to be modified from their Aristotelian origins, as they were enriched by the subsequent history of the Christian West, of England, and the colonies. The American statesmen were formed by all three influences. They certainly possessed theological convictions which were essential to their self-understandings and to the polity they sought to bring into being. However, the relation of these convictions to the Declaration was neither simple nor straightforward. This brings us to Spinks’ concluding themes and affirmations.
Sketching the Problem
More than once, Spinks characterizes his way of reading as “charitable.” In a different sense than he intends, I agree: he attempts, with considerable ingenuity, to read the Declaration through the benevolent lens of biblical religion. This is particularly the case with the concluding section. Listen, for example, to his description of “Nature’s God” here:
Nature’s God is the “Creator.” He has created, and creates, all things of Nature. The wind which blows where it wills, the foxes with their holes, the birds who do not sow or reap, the lilies which neither toil nor spin.
This goes beyond biblical echoes and resonances: one hears Jesus Christ speaking.
Now, I would be among the first to grant that the theology that Spinks unpacks, including the theology of “communion,” are inconceivable apart from biblical religion in its two great versions: Judaism and Christianity. A Creator-Legislator-Providential-Supreme-Judge Deity of the sort affirmed in the Declaration is unthinkable without the historical revelation of the biblical God.
However, the Declaration does not mention the two central Particulars found in Judaism and in Christianity: the Torah and the Church of the redeeming Christ. To this, one could add that its anthropology is silent on the indispensable means of entrance into the Kingdom: “Repent, and believe in the Gospel!”
These reminders serve to cast the distinctive—and relatively limited—character of the otherwise quite robust theology of the Declaration in relief. The document features authoritative expressions which are both reminiscent of and distinct from biblical language. Faced with these “shortfalls” vis-à-vis the originals, one can take any number of tacks. One can name a category of eighteenth-century theological thinking called “theistic rationalism,” halfway between Deism and the orthodox Christianity of the day, and find considerable evidence that a certain number of the most prominent founders subscribed to it. While I am sympathetic to this view, I am not convinced that the greater number of orthodox Protestants at the time would have simply subscribed to this inadequate expression of their various confessions. The same would, a fortiori, be true of the few Jewish believers and the somewhat more numerous Catholics. It seems more likely to me that the orthodox believers either went along, or saw enough of themselves in the Declaration, to subscribe to it. Like the old adage says, there are no atheists in foxholes: confessional differences take a back seat when the shooting starts.
Today?
That was then. It seems to me that today, Spinks wants the pared-back theology of the Declaration to do the work that only the two biblical faiths can do, and that he wants a contemporary America that resembles a church in important respects. More than a political community, he wants an expressly theologically grounded community, with a “communion” of absolutely universal love which extends to all created. And he wants all this at the national level of 342,534,000 people and counting.
There are reasons for being dubious about this proposal. First of all, in its original and proper sense, such universal love is called “charity” and is only found flowing from a supernatural Source, most often through supernatural institutions: churches and synagogues. Scriptural religions make clear that true love—both for the Creator and for one’s fellow human beings—comes from grace. It is the free gift of the Divine. I don’t think even Spinks would use the term “grace” to characterize the love he ascribes to the Declaration.
In Spinks’ Declaration-deduction, “love” is a consequence of a certain understanding of “being created” (and its cognates: Creator, creation, creatures). God created me; the only motive for doing so must have been love, and since we are all in the same creaturely boat, we must love one another equally, as well as our Creative Source. QED. One is reminded a bit of Anselm’s ontological argument: it is hard to dispute but not entirely convincing.
One can still ask: where does this great capacious and unifying love come from? If it derives from the logical implications of a belief in “creation,” as Spinks derives them, then one must subscribe to a deductive metaphysical belief-system—though not one that has real human purchase. If it comes from sources laid out in Sacred Scriptures, then one has to respect the sources and incorporate the full catalogue of revelation contained therein—going well beyond the theology of the Declaration.
In my view, the official theology of the Declaration is, strictly speaking, parasitic. It is beautiful, suggestive, elevating, perhaps necessary for a time and effective for a purpose—but finally, a distillation and simulacrum of the religious beliefs of the day which is inadequate for believers today.
Where does that leave us? It depends in part on who we are. As I suggested above, the great political relevance of the Declaration today is its instruction in how to recognize and deal with encroaching tyranny and tyrants. Regardless of our religious beliefs or convictions, the phenomenon of tyranny is, in principle, visible to all. The Declaration remains both our birthright and our guide for safeguarding specifically American liberty.
As for orthodox believers of the two Testaments, the inadequate theology of the Declaration can be a spur to theological and political reflection. All parties submit themselves to a providential order, all seek to order their own community well, and to provide a model—to be a light—unto humanity. Within those grand visions, one encounters America, with its own claim to be part of God’s providential order. Here is a task for what I call theological dialectical reason: faithful reason that listens respectfully and attentively to others’ self-understandings and normative claims. In this engagement, religiously grounded views do not necessarily have the upper hand in all respects. Quite the contrary: America and its advocacy of liberty under God may turn out to be a providential contribution that religious confessions can and should accept. The biblical God, after all, included “the nations” in his providential design, and chose particular institutions to shelter and assist his chosen people—whether Israel or the Church. Within biblical religion, therefore, the question of God’s purpose for America is legitimate and, for us today, pressing.
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