The Innocence of Pontius Pilate by Dusenbury David Lloyd;

Author:Dusenbury, David Lloyd;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

“A king of truth”

Hobbes uses the Johannine Pilate trial in a glaringly novel, that is, untraditional (or ‘heretical’) way, to argue that Jesus is in no sense a king in this world-age, and that the church is in no sense a kingdom in this world-age. The dubiousness of this reading is brought out when we recall that the arch-humanist and jurist Grotius—writing a couple of decades before Hobbes—says that Jesus, in his reply to Pilate, claims to be “a king in a certain sense”.28 Where Grotius holds that Jesus is a king, but not “in the vulgar sense”,29 Hobbes shoots back that ‘the vulgar sense’ is the only sense.

Pufendorf’s contribution to the tradition is exegetically and legally brilliant and deepens the modern logic of tolerance. According to Pufendorf, the sense in which Jesus is a king in this world-age is that he is “a King of Truth”, and the sense in which the church is a kingdom in this world-age is that it is “a Kingdom of Truth”.30 Contra Hobbes, Pufendorf believes that the rights of the churches to formulate or celebrate the Truth of Christ are not ‘dissolved’ into the secular order, because, in Pufendorf’s unforgettable phrase: “Truth is not subject to human empire.”31

Situating truth and the question of truth outside the early modern state’s jurisdiction suggests—and Pufendorf sees this—that much error will fall outside the state’s jurisdiction. And that is how Pufendorf’s theory of the church informs his theory of tolerance. Like philosophy, he says, Christianity can thrive in numerous jurisdictions—even hostile ones.32 This bare fact indicates, to Pufendorf, the limits of “human empire”. Note the formulation: Pufendorf says that “truth is not subject to human empire”. It is of the essence of truth, he suggests, to be undecidable by means of human courts or edicts.

Pufendorf seems to voice a proto-romantic or a progressive conviction—for him, it is merely Protestant and Christian—that it is of the essence of truth “to be convincing in itself”.33 It is a divine right of truth, Pufendorf thinks, to convince and convict—even bureaucrats, judges, and monarchs. Pilate’s jibe might be relevant, here: “What is truth?”34 But Pufendorf, unlike the seventeenth-century philosopher-Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon, does not read that as a joke.35 Which returns us to the Roman trial of Jesus.

Pufendorf offers his interpretation of the Pilate trial in a treatise he wrote at a time when, as he states in the first paragraphs of On the Bearing of Christian Religion on Civil Life, “some of the greatest princes in Christendom (setting aside the ancient way of converting people by reason and force of arguments) have now recourse to open violence”, seeking to “force their miserable subjects to a religion” they cannot honestly confess.36 Confessional repression and coercion are not national problems in the late seventeenth century. They are European problems.

In this treatise, Pufendorf wants to “trace the very original of religion in general, and of the Christian religion in particular”, in the hopes of determining whether it is licit for any government—sacred or secular—to “compel their subjects to obedience by force of arms, in matters of religion”.

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