Christian realism. I want to talk broadly about it. I spend more time talking about it from who I take to be the head of Christian realism, which is Augustine of Hippo, same Augustine who wrote Confessions and City of God. And you may or may not be familiar with Christian realism.

One of the names that gets thrown around is Reinhold Niebuhr, who is a theologian of sorts. He was a public intellectual who was a pastor and then moved into politics and organizing. He was most famous in the 1930s and 1940s for developing this concept called Christian Realism.

He’s very influential. He influenced on correspondence with people as broadly as George Kennan. If you mention Christian realism today, he’s the figure that people most point to. I think Christian realism has been, at least as of late—or at least the 20th century, let’s say—what’s true, rooted around the person of Niebuhr.

So, part of what I want to do, I think reading Niebuhr is important, but I want to go beyond Niebuhr. Niebuhr is helpful, and he’s instructive in some ways, but I think he’s also limited.

Another figure that was just mentioned was Paul Ramsey. Ramsey is another great feature, I think, in this tradition.

So what is Christian realism? Christian realism holds together, I think, throughout its long history. Starting way back with Saint Augustine in the fourth and fifth century AD, it holds together two basic convictions.

The first is that the world and human persons are sinful. Right? Not just sinful, sort of like, “Oh, they’re bad,” but really sinful, like the Bible talks about. We find in the letters of Paul that we are fallen creatures. You know, “the line of good and evil runs through the human heart.” That has profound implications for how we think about not only individuals and the way individuals act but also society, political entities, and states—how they function.

The second conviction—and then you could say this is sort of constructive tension—is this realistic sense about human sin combined with also an equally strong conviction that we have an obligation to love our neighbors. Right? Those two, I think, are held in a sort of tension.

The world is broken and sinful, and yet we are called to act with a sense of obligation and love towards those close to us, but also even in our politics. You don’t talk about loving politics, especially not today, but that is a bedrock conviction.

Contrast this view of Christian realism with, if you’ve taken international relations, you’re probably familiar with the idea of liberal internationalism or liberalism. These are two ideological schools in contemporary international relations: liberal internationalism and realism.

Now, to say that Christian realism is not just a sort of mesh between the two. It actually transcends them and offers something more. It’s more realistic, I would say, than realism is, but it also doesn’t jettison morality as realism tends to do. Right?

You might have some realists who deny that, but mostly realism is where morality should not or is not a primary feature of the way that nations ought to be interacting or should interact.

Christian realism is realistic. So it takes, I think, the best of both of these ways of thinking, and it provides something that they don’t.

Let me just say a little bit more about Christian realism before I turn to Augustine. As a layperson, you’re not going to hear a lot of people. If you Google Christian realism, it’s all going to say stuff about Reinhold Niebuhr.

I think what we’re trying to do at Providence, what I’m trying to do, what a lot of people associated with Providence are trying to do, is to recapture this idea. Right? The way that I would like to recapture it is what I said yesterday: grounding it in a broader, longer trajectory that goes back to Augustine.

But also, you find it really—this kind of intuition—it’s a vision, let’s say. Right? It’s a vision. It’s not me giving specific policy prescriptions here or there, but it is a vision of human life under God and political life, both internationally and domestically.

So it’s not going to give you, “What am I doing in this situation or that situation?” It’s not like the just war tradition, which has more specifically defined norms. Even though you’d say the just war tradition develops out of this Christian realist conviction, the just war tradition—we trace it back to Saint Augustine—is rooted in the idea of neighbor love.

It’s the sense that Christians are obliged to protect the innocent and to punish evil. At least when Augustine is writing, oftentimes he writes to generals or to people who are in political authority. Even though he says, you know, he says the soldier is serving God in a noble vocation, he says it must be done with love.

The phrase that I think captures this tension—that is sort of realistic but also this deep sense of obligation to love our neighbor—is Augustine’s use of the phrase “harsh kindness.”

Harsh kindness. Right? That in political life, you have to use coercion at some points—not always, but the spear, passing laws, using the full power of the state, exercising power. There’s coercion in laws. Right? So it is a harshness, but it also needs to be motivated and guided by this sense of kindness.
I know that sounds strange to our ears. We think if you’re engaged in some sort of coercion, it’s always evil or it’s just bad things to preserve society. But Augustine doesn’t believe that. He believes you can use this harshness in politics, and it should be done, especially by Christians, with a sense of benevolence.

So, I’m going to add just what I think to be six points of what might define Christian realism. I’m going to do this primarily in conversation with Augustine, that fountainhead. This is not the authoritative account; this is my account. People are going to argue about Augustine, but I think people like Luther and Calvin definitely fit into some of this.

People like Reinhold Niebuhr and even folks in contemporary modern Augustinian point of view, Mark LiVecchi and I were advised by Jean Elshtain, who passed away four years ago. I think she’s probably one of the best in embodying this sort of Christian realism—pulling together this realistic view of the world with also a strong sense of our obligations to one another.

So here is what I present as a vision. Right? You need to have the vision in politics. I’m not going to give you specific things we can do—that’s for the Q&A—but here’s what I take to be a broad-based vision.

Now, you’re not going to learn this—maybe you’ll learn it at Regent, I don’t know. Maybe you’ll learn it at a Christian school where you have access to the riches of theology and philosophy. Maybe CUA offers something along these lines. I’m not sure.

But you’re not going to find this at any other kind of regular public policy school, right? They’re going to teach you all the ins and outs of working in that area or doing national security, but it needs to be—and I think all of our politics uniquely needs to be—grounded in a vision. Right?

We need to ask ourselves, “What is the truest vision possible?” And it’s not something we can just assume. You have to work at really developing this vision. Seeing reality as it is, is actually an extremely hard thing to do.

At the base conviction is that we don’t see reality as it truly is. Right? So, we need to cultivate the vision all the time—pushing, challenging, striving—to have a vision that’s guiding what we’re doing.

So here’s what I take to be a Christian Realist, or more closely, an Augustinian Realist view. You derive more directly from Augustine. The points that I have for my realism are:

First, it needs to be architectonic. It’s a long word, but it means it needs to be comprehensive. Right? Augustine, I think more than anybody, really has this giant historical perspective. If you’ve ever read City of God, his masterwork—it is enormous in scope. He’s going back and reading all of history, he’s reading all of the Bible, and he’s doing this grand synthesis of history. It’s breathtaking. What he’s doing is cultivating this architectonic vision of both history and reality.

Secondly, providential. You see the conviction that God is working through all the ways that God works, but He’s also working through government. Government plays a vital role in God’s purposes. We call this common grace that God gives to humanity.

Third, responsible. You could say normative, but this really gets at the idea of love. A view of politics needs to be grounded in a sense of responsibility, or what we call neighbor love. You have an obligation both to those close to you and even to those far away. Now, there are different levels of responsibility.

Here’s where I would push back against the challenges like Paul was saying yesterday. As we said yesterday, we do have loyalties and obligations to those who are closest to us. We have those special obligations to our family, to our neighbors, to our cities, states, and even to our nation. But I think we don’t owe nothing to those beyond our walls. Even beyond our walls we do owe something to those in other parts of this world.

Fourth, tragic. I would say this vision is grounded in what I’ll call a tragic vision. I’ll explain that a little bit. It’s just the idea that the world we live in is filled with tragedy. Right?

Heartbreaking things are happening this morning in the United States. Heartbreaking, terrible, evil things are happening around the world. We can never blind ourselves to that reality. Right? People are suffering. Let’s not pretend that everything is getting better all the time. You need to have a realistic view of what the world is actually like.
My fifth point might feel redundant, but I don’t think it is: Christian realism, Augustine’s variety, is realistic. Now, I’ll explain that. It’s different than the tragic element, but it is a sense of our own limited ability—especially the limited ability to achieve things through politics.

Politics is something we need. It’s a common grace given to us, and yet it serves a limited good. It needs to be hedged, and we need to understand its possibilities.

Lastly, I’ll say Augustine’s realism is hopeful. It’s grounded deeply in a Christian conviction that God will restore—not just here and now, partially, but fully in the end. So, our vision needs to be grounded in this deep sense of hope, even amidst the obvious pain and suffering that we see.

This is just part of what it means to be a human being, even in the United States today, which is a country that enjoys wealth. Despite what our pundits claim, and despite what our bills say, we live in a time of more abundance than at any point in the history of the world. And yet, you still see misery and suffering. Right?

Even in this world of abundance, material abundance, there is still misery. And there are areas experiencing massive privation around the world. We know this. I think Christians are painfully aware of the realities of the way most of the world lives.

So, let me just go back—that’s the basic outline. Let me say a few quick things, and then I’d like to get to Q&A.

Let me go back to the architectonic vision. The overall vision is that Christians need to be striving constantly to have the truest vision possible. I think this is where the Bible really does come into play. Right?

The Bible is a complex, wonderful, fantastic Word of God—authoritative—and yet capturing the vision of the Bible is something that we will spend the rest of our lives doing. Right? It is magisterial. We should go in fully, reading and appreciating the vision that it gives us.

The Bible, as it says, is like spectacles. Right? It allows us to see the world as it is, not just the way that we experience it. There’s truth to that. But we can’t understand our world without it.

This is a mission that all realists share. Reinhold Niebuhr used to say that human depravity was the one Christian doctrine that could be empirically verified. I’ll dispute that. I think a lot of people, based on their experience, think humans are pretty great and that we can achieve a lot of things. And there’s truth to that.

The world around you shows that we can achieve great things. But the full glory and power and majesty of God—and the utter rebellion and the depths of human sin—are also evident.

When I talk about the sinfulness of humanity, it’s not just that we’re these kind of beastly creatures. We’re complex creatures, and Augustine appreciates this psychology more than anybody. If you read him—read his Confessions or any of his works—you’ll be amazed at the depth of psychology he understands.

Yes, he’s well-known for the idea of disordered love: the way that human beings have this really complex psychology in the way that we love things. A lot of what we love is good. Right? But what he says we often do is that we take things that are good—like family, a spouse, a girlfriend or boyfriend, wealth—all things that are good and sustain human life, and we love them inordinately.

We love them more than we love God. Right? This is the disorder of the human heart, and Augustine sees that all throughout society.

He has this very rich view. It’s not just that we’re acting in this bestial way, even though humans can descend to that level. Right? We can descend. If you want to read about it, I mentioned this yesterday. There’s a fantastic book called A Problem from Hell by Samantha Power, where she talks about genocide. If you want to see the bestial aspects of society, of humanity, read that. Right? That’s us.

We’re also capable of great things. There are times when human-ordered love gets our order right—or more right, let’s say, than we do at other times. When that happens, we can achieve decent and moral outcomes.

So, you need this architectonic vision, which we can’t grasp by ourselves. Augustine’s great vision, his big contribution, is the two cities. It’s not a simple idea. Go look at the scholarly literature—people have been debating what these two cities are and what they mean.

It’s not simply the church and the world, even though the church is part of that. He goes back to the very creation of the world and traces what he says are two communities that are interwoven.

They’re identified with Israel, and he’s reading the Bible, but he sees how it interplays also with ancient history up to his time. He looks at the way these two cities are diametrically opposed.

One is guided by love of self, and one is guided by love of God. But that vision he developed—the two cities—it would not be possible. It’s not something where you can look out at the world today and still see the two cities. Right? It is a Christian vision, as Christian as they come, and it is something you can’t know apart from revelation. Right? So it is a vision that’s given to us—given to us by grace. Right? It’s not something we can achieve. It’s something, really, that God gives to us.

Not to get too into the weeds on scholarly debates, but people will argue: what is this? How are these two cities to be parsed out in the way we view history? Can we read history? Is it all ambiguous? Here’s where spending time, especially for me overseas with Christians in India and other parts of the world, really helped me to read Augustine a little differently.

Augustine was in North Africa. He’s probably of Berber descent—at least that’s what scholars argue or believe. But he comes from a time and place that was very rationalistic, a sort of antiseptic Western way of seeing. That needs to be challenged.

As Augustine sees the world, I think the best description is a sort of spiritual warfare. Right? These two cities are fighting. He calls one the city of his birth or the city of demons, which has Satan as its head. It’s real.

But it’s not the way that, you know, wild-eyed TV evangelists open up the Bible, quote prophecies, and look at Russia and China today to give us this really direct interpretation of what’s going on in history. No, it’s not that simple.

And let me say, that’s a very reductionist and simplistic way to view it. But what I want to affirm with those wild-eyed TV evangelists talking about the end times is that they are right in a sense.

This world is, and this is not something you’re going to say in a public policy meeting—just given the culture and the world we live in—but if we want a true vision, we need to be honest, at least with ourselves, so we can engage with this.

The big sin of world history maybe is not so easily discernible, but Augustine does say this: the most fundamental conflict in this world is not politics. Right? It is happening in the spiritual world.

The conflicts we see in the visible world are manifestations—what he would call signs. Right? The signs don’t interpret themselves. They manifest themselves. The challenge for us, as humans living in an ambiguous, ambivalent, and complex world, is to use our spiritual discernment.

Sometimes, the people who appear to be good are actually bad. Some people who appear to be bad, in God’s providential purposes, turn out to be good—or maybe not so bad. Right?

So, it’s not a simple vision of dividing up good from evil, but we have to have a conviction that beyond the visible, empirical world we live in, there is a conflict going on. Right? It’s a fundamental conflict that runs through all of reality.

And to really understand what’s going on, you need to have that conviction. It doesn’t mean you can’t then go and do good public policy, or work in the State Department, or do all these other things in government. But doing so with that kind of conviction is good.

Second, providential. How much time do I have left? Five minutes? Okay. Let me just say a few things. I really wanted to focus on that kind of architectonic point. Providential, I think, is explanatory enough. Augustine, in Book 5 of City of God, goes back and reads Roman history.

The view of Roman history in the first couple of centuries of Christianity was wholly negative. The Romans were pagans, vicious imperialists. The church stood in opposition to Roman society, for good reason. It was a society grounded in a sort of pagan civic religion, and Christians were able to see it for what it was—the sort of viciousness at the heart of it.

Later on, with the slow conversion of the empire—the story goes— Christians begin to see Rome much more positively. Once they take up the reins of power, they slowly trickle into positions of authority in the fourth and fifth centuries. So, they take a more benign view.

What Augustine does in City of God is hold that tension together. He looks back at Roman history and says, “Yeah, Romans were vicious. But I can see the way that God was using this group of people.”

In particular, he uses this word—he says their virtue may not have been true Christian virtue, but it was less vicious than others. He calls it “splendid vice.” It’s not true virtue, but it’s a less vicious version of what other options were out there.

So, Augustine goes back and makes an argument for what God was doing through the Roman Empire, in His, you know, ultimate plan. The point being, that’s something I think we need to do.

Even though we don’t have God’s view of things, it’s a kind of looking back and having the conviction that God is working, whether we understand His purposes or not.

We have to discern and try our best with our limited knowledge, but nonetheless, we need to hold that conviction that God is working—and working through government to rule and reign and bring about some sort of peace and order.

The normative piece, I think, is self-explanatory enough. It’s just the idea that love ought to be central to what we do in politics.

Now, that doesn’t mean it should be sentimental. It doesn’t mean that we can’t have a realistic view of the world, in which we understand there are bad actors in the world who are out to do harm to people. But we need to feel that sort of weight and obligation. This is not something we can leave behind when we enter into the realm of international politics.

Finally, let me mention the point I made about tragedy. In City of God, Book 19, Chapter 6, Augustine tells the story about a judge. It’s a hypothetical story, but it’s a story that would have happened in his time.

He brings out—I think this is the best one I’ve ever read on this idea of tragedy—the sort of tragic nature of life. Let me close with this. Augustine gives a scenario of a judge who feels compelled to judge, even though he knows he’s possibly going to make the wrong decision.

Here’s what he says: “For this reason, the ignorance of the judge is very often a calamity to the innocent. And what is still more intolerable, a thing to be greatly lamented, bathed in a fountain of tears, is the fact that the judge tortures the accused.”

He describes the judge interrogating someone, using forms of interrogation that were, by modern standards, pretty rough. But Augustine says the judge has to do it, right? He’s trying to get the information—this is ancient courts, whatever the case may be.

The judge has his coercion, and we have to figure out some way to try to get to the bottom of things. Augustine says in this case, the judge tortures an innocent man to discover the truth and, in doing so, kills him, yet still does not find the truth.

Augustine plays this out for a while, exploring all the nuances. He concludes with this: “Here, therefore, granted that it does not rise out of malice on the part of the wise judge, we certainly have an instance of what I call the wretchedness of man’s condition. If it is through unavoidable ignorance, unavoidable duty is thereby required. It is unavoidable ignorance—that is human life. We do not have omniscience, and yet unavoidable duty compels us.

We are compelled into public life to seek order, to seek peace, right? These competing tensions are the hallmark of a real Christian realism.

It’s an unavoidable duty that the judge tortures an innocent man. Then, he himself is not guilty. But then Augustine asks, is he also happy? The term “blessed” translates here as “happy.”

So, is this judge, who is compelled to make a decision without having all the facts and who punishes the wrong person, happy? Augustine says, surely it would be more compassionate and more worthy of the dignity of man to acknowledge that the necessity of acting in this way is a miserable one.

He emphasizes the tension of punishing someone, using coercion on some person, people, or thing, knowing it might be wrong. But Augustine says that’s inevitable.

He closes with this: “If he hated his own part in it and in the knowledge of godliness he cries out to God, ‘From my necessities, deliver me.’”

I think that captures this kind of tragedy—the realistic sense in which politics and social life compel us to get out there and participate, knowing full well that our moral acts are not pure all the time, that we may do wrong. Yet, we are compelled because our love for our neighbors and the peace and order of this world require it.

Augustine says no one more so than a Christian should feel this compulsion.

Q&A

Question: What would a Christian realist say about natural law. How does that fit within the Christian realist paradigm?

Answer: Yes, I don’t think Christian realism has to be opposed to natural law.

I think some Christians are more ambiguous about it. Reinhold Niebuhr probably wasn’t as big a proponent of natural law, but you see natural law in Augustine. The difference between Catholics and Protestants, especially Lutherans and Calvinists, you would say they believe in natural law, but they are more skeptical because of human sin—that we can discern it clearly or act according to it.  

But I think natural law flows out of basic Christian convictions. That there’s a moral law that is discernible to the human mind. Some Protestants, such as Karl Barth—are any of you familiar with him? He’s one of the most famous and influential Reformed theologians of the 20th century and probably the most influential overall.  

Barth was notoriously skeptical of natural law. I think he called it the Antichrist. That’s partly because, during his time, the language of natural law had been used to justify Nazi ideology. In his fight against Nazism—he was in Germany and Switzerland during World War II—he’s saying   cling to Jesus Christ instead of this idea of natural law. But I think that was an extreme response.   

Question: What kind of Christian realist argument could there be against moral equivalence? How do you approach people, like those in our government, who talk about the herdsmen and the farmers in Nigeria as being morally equivalent? What do we use in Christian realism to argue against that view.

Response: What do you mean by morally equivalent?

Question: That one side is not doing evil and the other is a victim, but that they’re both equally culpable.

Answer: The Christian realist always wants to see things as realistically as possible. Seeing how victims aren’t always victims.  

I think your point about identity politics yesterday is relevant here. That kind of thinking rigidifies this sense that there’s this class of victims and they are pure victims. Then there’s this class of oppressors and they are pure evil, patriarchal oppressors. Christian realism punctures that idea.  

Question: Even when it’s true though? , 

Answer: No, but here’s where it hold in tension. It holds in tension the sense that the fallen and sinful is just humanity. And the moral and sense of responsibility exists. There is real injustice. We do name that.

Now, what we can do about it is important. Naming it is essential, but some people think that by naming it, we are then required to act in ways that might make the situation worse. Sometimes, not acting allows injustice to spread.  

So, I think description is important. As you say, it’s crucial to use the right language.  

You’re right—at least in my experience—when it comes to working with people in international politics and government, there tends to be more moral equivalence. This often aligns with national interests or other policy objectives.  

Using morally charged language in government is very hard, and you will face a lot of pushback. I think you’re right that we need a deeper conviction not to abandon that language. Thank you.