Christians frequently criticize the “secular” political order. These criticisms have not always succeeded in penetrating the foundational philosophical problems of political order, though their attempts have left secularists shaken. Recent efforts by Charles Taylor and Mark Lilla attempt to address fundamentals in an effort to keep what is good about the “secular” in light of some of these criticisms.

Jeffrey Herndon's account of Eric Voegelin's treatment of the problem of Christian political order sheds considerable light on our situation. Herndon does not situate his book the way I have just outlined, preferring instead to present his book as an extended response to some of Voegelin's Christian critics, who argued that Voegelin's work was hampered by his inability or unwillingness to account for the “person of Jesus as the incarnation of the divine substance on Earth” (15). Herndon shows how and why the problem of Christian political order was central to Voegelin's lifelong work, and why this work must be central to the contemporary situation (as Mark Lilla's recent review of Voegelin in the New York Review of Books indicates).

Herndon examines the problem of Christian political order in light of Voegelin's early (and only recently published in full) History of Political Ideas, where it receives the greatest attention as he considered it in early Christianity, medieval, and Reformation political ideas. Voegelin considered it less in his later work, with the exception of his notorious chapter on the “Pauline Vision of the Resurrected” in volume four of Order and History. Herndon convincingly argues that Voegelin's earlier studies inform his later ones.

Voegelin's analysis of the problem of Christian order revolves around two poles: (1) the series of “compromises” Paul made with the world, and (2) the related Tyconian problem of the righteousness of members of the ecclesia, especially those administering the sacraments. The dynamics of Christian political order revolve around these two poles.

The experience of faith in the Resurrected Christ by individual members forms the Christian community. Despite the awakening of faith, sin and human frailty do not eliminate the tensions of political life. According to Voegelin, the “greatness of Paul lies in his quality as a statesman that enables him … to transpose the community of the perfect with Christ into an idea that took into account the practical problems of a community that did not at all consist of perfect saints” (quoted by Herndon, 45). Paul's ecclesiastical and political statesmanship produced three great “compromises” with the world, which in subsequent generations of Western history have had to be renegotiated and refigured: (1) the compromise with history, including tempering the hope that Christ's return is imminent; (2) the compromise of the composition of the body of Christ with man's fallen nature; and (3) the compromise with the powers that be in light of Christian ambivalence toward political authority and worldly problems in general.

The compromises built into the institutional foundations of the ecclesia meant reformation (as a broader category than “Reformation”), “[became] an idea that distinguishes medieval and modern Western civilization from the Hellenic” (quoted by Herndon, 151-52). The relationship between ecclesia and political order is in flux because the ecclesia must constantly reform itself in light of experiences of the mystical body, whose substance, by definition, extends past its institutional expression. Voegelin treats medieval history, including the great monastic reforms of the 11th and 12th centuries, as an ongoing process of the Church attempting to absorb new spiritual movements as the compromise with history gets refigured, and new spiritual energies get released. With the publication of Unam Sanctam at the beginning of the 14th-century, however, the compromises had collapsed, which resulted in the church understanding itself simply as a temporal order treating the compromises as “legal jurisdictional claims” instead of spiritual ones (110). This spiritual closure leads Herndon to read Voegelin as more sympathetic toward Luther and Calvin than have other interpreters, and to explain why Voegelin insisted Machiavelli must be understood as a spiritual realist responding to the entire destruction of the world of symbols that sustained the Pauline compromises.

Herndon allows us to gain perspective on our contemporary questions in light of Voegelin's historical and philosophical overview of Christian political problem, though the book is somewhat limited because of its focus on the earlier History of Political Ideas. One needs to consider the History in light of other accounts of Voegelin's treatment of Christianity, in order to gain a fuller assessment of his views on the subject. One also wishes Herndon would have done more to situate Voegelin's interpretations of key thinkers, including Luther and Calvin, in light of some of the secondary literature on those thinkers. For instance, is Voegelin's assessment of Calvin bordering on “scandalous” because he has misread him, or because he reveals the problems in Calvin more adequately than others have found?

These are quibbles. Herndon has performed a very useful service in bringing together Voegelin's ideas on Christian political order into systematic fashion.