Christian Realism

Through a Christian realist lens, the police officer’s mission closely corresponds to the just war tradition’s aim of promoting order, justice, and peace. Marc LiVecche reviews how the police failed in the killing of George Floyd.

Matthew A. Sutton’s Double Crossed is an important book that offers a case study of how religious leaders contributed to national security in a challenging wartime environment.

Abraham Kuyper unquestionably had his failures and his blind spots. But he also labored to find balanced and faithful Christian realist positions on international affairs. We would do well to imitate those principles today.

What does the Bible teach us about nuclear weapons treaties? Nothing. That’s right. Nothing. If one scours their Bibles, they will find not one single passage that tells us what God thinks about nuclear non-proliferation treaties.

We have an introductory, if provisional, picture of anti-Revolutionary foreign policy and Abraham Kuyper’s platform coming into the highest political office in the Netherlands in the early twentieth century. How did this platform fair? What “necessary adjustments” (as Kuyper called them) did he need to make between his Calvinistic international theory and the actual work of foreign policy?

Simply being good in order to do good is not enough. That is true. But simply being skilled—to have what Machiavelli calls virtú (as opposed to virtue)—in order to do good is also not enough.

Scott McKnight recently posted a blog on Christian realism quoting long sections from Lee Camp’s new manifesto Scandalous Witness. Daniel Strand responds.

On May 8, 1945, the Allies accepted Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender. Shortly thereafter, Reinhold Niebuhr explained why the victors should be sober and humble.

While much has been made of Abraham Kuyper’s Calvinistic contributions to domestic political theory, very little (in English) has been said of his foreign policy.