A Review of "Protestant Social Teaching: An Introduction"

With essays by Alastair Roberts, Matthew Lee Anderson, Brad Littlejohn, John Wyatt, et al. Protestant Social Teaching: An Introduction. Landrum, SC: The Davenant Press, 2022. 248 pages. Softcover.

When Protestant Social Teaching came out, it was presented as an introduction or a first step in crystalizing a unified Protestant code of doctrines concerned, as the back cover says, with “love, war, and everything in between.”

The project started in answer to a statement by Stephen J. Grabill, author of Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics, who wrote in 2009, “Neither magisterial Protestants nor evangelicals have a theologically unified body of social teaching” (iii-iv)

Grabill wrote this soon after the issue of Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate, which brought solidity to a corpus of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) already in existence. The encyclical raised much interest in some Protestant circles, posing the question of whether a similar code of Protestant teachings was possible.

Protestant Social Teaching then attempts to answer this question and demonstrate, at least in part, that Grabill’s statement can be challenged by drawing from the riches of historical Protestant Christianity “not by way of creation but of recovery” (iv). In his Introduction to Protestant Social Teaching, Steven Wedgeworth recognizes CST’s value: “Catholic Social Teaching has proven to be an incredibly powerful mechanism for offering moral guidance to Roman Catholics and for providing an alternative to the more common offerings in magazines, talk radio, or cable news channels. Importantly, Catholic Social Teaching claims to offer a unified and coherent body of moral discipleship that integrates doctrine and practice” (iii).

Wedgeworth admits that “there is no central institution, nor magisterium, which intervenes to resolve moral and social teaching for Protestants. ... Rather, Protestant Social Teaching exists more like a common law, an ongoing but nevertheless ascertainable collection of consensual exegesis of the Scriptures and moral philosophy, a philosophy built upon Protestant principles” (vi-vii).

Possibly then, the greatest merit of Protestant Social Teaching lies in its encouragement to Protestants to look back and reflect on our tradition instead of looking to Rome or attempting to reinvent the wheel. This encouragement is emphasized consistently throughout the book—although, as it often happens in collaborative efforts, some authors were more focused on it than others. Also, some chapters seem rather incomplete since they limit their recovery “of the riches of historical Protestant Christianity” to the sixteenth-century Reformers.

It is however important to remember, as the full title of the book reminds us, that this book is meant to be an introduction. Codifying a body of Protestant social teachings or even describing in depth the historical Protestant discussions on these issues will likely take many volumes. Likewise, this book is only an initial and partial answer to Grabill’s challenge, who clarified, “When I urge that Protestant theologians need to build a body of social thought, what I mean is that the first order of business is to settle on a theological infrastructure before attempting to resolve specific social questions.”

Only some chapters in this book seem intent on setting a foundation for this infrastructure. In my view, those that come especially close to Grabill’s wish are E. J. Hutchinson’s “Law and the Christian” (an excellent choice for an opening chapter, bringing attention to distinctions and definitions often blurred in Christian discussions); Steven Wedgeworth’s “Abortion”; John Wyatt’s “Death and Dying”; Joseph Minich’s and Colin Redemer’s “Work and Labor”; and Eric G. Enlow’s “Private Property.”

Some chapters are particularly thought-provoking. Matthew Lee Anderson’s “Procreation and Children,” for example, documents how Protestants have unanimously rejected contraception before the Anglican 1930 Lambeth conference. This seems to disrupt the claim that contemporary Protestants can find unity in our tradition, since few today will adhere to the same convictions on this topic. Anderson does not attempt to bring an answer to this conundrum since, in his view, “how this happened is a question beyond the scope of this chapter.”. He does, however, conclude that the remedy against current anti-natalist tendencies might not be to “adopt the Reformers’ account of procreation, but to embrace their theological merits and retrieve the fullness of Augustine’s ethics for our own time” (101).

A chapter that might challenge some prevailing socio-political notions among North American Protestants is Allen Calhoun’s “Taxation and Welfare,” which draws on Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican traditions of government involvement for the care of the poor. This is certainly laying a foundation for further discussion.

The back cover of the book states, “Now, for the first time, we are planting a flag for “Protestant social teaching, a coherent, catholic, biblical set of convictions about what it means to love one’s neighbor in both personal and political life.” After reading the book, however, I am still left with the same questions Steven Wedgeworth poses in the first paragraph of his Introduction: “Is there such a thing [as Protestant Social Teaching]? Which voices and positions should be included? Who has the right to decide?” (iii).

Although a difference of opinions on matters that are not clearly stated in the Bible is a privilege and a responsibility dear to Protestants, setting a unified code and theological infrastructure seems possible on certain biblical pillars of social teaching, such as the dignity of all human beings and the care for the poor and vulnerable. This code and infrastructure might be similar, if not identical, to those of Catholic Social Teaching—but they should still be stated in the context of our historical tradition. They should also expand the discussion to include important implications, such as the abuse of women and the stigma suffered by people with mental health challenges.

I hope the answer to the second question (“Which voices and positions should be included?”) will be broad. At this early stage of our discussion on Protestant social teaching, it would be useful to expand the research to include as many voices as possible from our tradition, including women, people with disabilities, and those who live in the majority world (Asia, Africa, South America, the Middle East, and Oceania). This is necessary if we want to avoid living with inevitable blind spots and to learn from those who have experienced these social issues in ways that might be different than ours in the West.

If you have not yet read this book, I recommend you do, keeping in mind its limitations and prayerfully considering how you can add to this important discussion.