6.18.24: RECLAIMING THE CHRISTIAN IR TRADITION
I am very grateful to Tom Milosch for his thoughtful critique of my article, “Christian Schools Must Teach International Relations Differently.” Moreover, as Milosch is a teaching professor, I am certain his practical knowledge of “Teaching IR Christianly” exceeds my own. Nevertheless, I wonder if Milosch’s article exhibits symptoms of the very problem I wrote my article to address.
In my article, I critiqued Christian educators for accepting the perspective that IR theories may be fundamentally false, i.e. based on incorrect core assumptions, and still be valuable. As believers in Truth, I argued, we should hold IR theories to the standard of truth. When a natural science theory is found to be false, for example, it is either revised or rejected. Why should IR theories be treated differently?
Milosch, in contrast, though he advocates the application of Christian values to IR, nonetheless takes the standard IR line that theories are “inherently…flawed,” but still valuable as “analytical tools we use to understand and interpret our world,” even when their flaws are “known and understood.” “A worthwhile IR theory,” he adds, must further “mutual flourishing and security” when subscribed to by policymakers. But that theory’s “worth” appears to be technically independent of its accuracy.
This perspective is problematic for the reasons I laid out in my article: It departs from the scientific principle that theories should be rejected or revised when falsified, and by suggesting that ideas can be useful without conforming to reality, it calls into question the existence of any reliable account of the world. This does not endanger Milosch, because he has recourse to Revelation, which can be trusted as true when reason cannot. For non-believers, however, the notion that all theories are “inherently…flawed” could lead to nihilism.
I believe the root of this problem is definitional. Milosch, channeling the predominant IR view, describes theory as “the use of inductive reasoning and hypothesis testing to understand cause and effect relationships,” which “relies on observable, measurable data” and “ignores the much larger pool of [not observable or measurable] human knowledge and experience.” This definition may be uncontroversial to a modern humanities department, but it would be very controversial to most Christian thinkers throughout history.
The word “theory” comes from ancient Greek. For the ancient Greek-speaking Christians, as for the medieval philosophers who succeeded them, it formally meant “contemplation,” but broadly referred to any account of the world whose value lay in its truth, as opposed to a “practical” account of the world, whose value lay in its usefulness.[1] Already, we have diverged from most modern IR educators, who define theory as, in Milosch’s words, a “knowledge tool” (emphasis added).
Beyond this, most ancient and medieval Christians rejected the notion that only “observable, measurable data” could legitimately inform theory. To the contrary, they freely informed their theories of IR and politics in general with all the knowledge at their disposal, including not just Revelation, but anthropology, ontology, natural theology, and more. The vast majority of this knowledge was irreducible to “data”: When Augustine originated just war theory in Contra Faustum, for instance, he relied on his understanding of Scripture and ethics, not “hypothesis testing.”[2]
One may object at this point that the modern definition of theory does not do away with these value judgments, but simply distinguishes them from facts, which is an improvement at best and a merely semantic development at worst. But the value/fact distinction is actually at the core of the issue. Christians historically recognized that because humans are both physical and spiritual beings, we can only make sense of human affairs by referring to both physical and spiritual realities.[3] This means the social sciences, if not the natural sciences, must integrate, not separate, physical perception, reason, and the “apperceptive” (interior, participatory) experience of values.
In the words of the political philosopher Ellis Sandoz: “[I]t is…evident that the material and the quantifiable do not exhaust the whole of…reality…. No account that takes only these factors into consideration can form a sufficient basis for understanding man in his humanity or for understanding the science of politics.”[4] In fact, when IR scholars attempt to build political theories on facts with no reference to values, those theories frequently prove false, as the case of foreign policy realism demonstrates.[5]
Of course, IR theories informed by spiritual realities can also prove false, and even unfalsified theories cannot tell us how to solve concrete political problems, because all social science theories, by their classical definition, deal more with the abstract than the particular. This means Milosch is right to assert that only the virtues of wisdom and prudence can show students how to finally judge or act on IR concepts.
But the fact remains that Christian educators tread on dangerous ground when they accept the standard IR view of theory. Per the Christian intellectual tradition, theory should not be valued for its usefulness, but for its truth, and theories of human affairs will always be inadequate if they restrict themselves to “data.” Can we really “teach IR Christianly” while diverging from this tradition? I hazard the answer is no.
[1] Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, Simon & Schuster: 1945, p. 34.
[2] Bk. XX, sec. 74.
[3] Eric Voegelin, New Science of Politics, University of Chicago Press: 1952, pp. 11-12.
[4] The Voegelinian Revolution, Transaction Publishers: 2000, p. 148.
[5] Brian C. Schmidt and Colin Wight, “Rationalism and the ‘Rational Actor’ Assumption’ in Realist International Relations Theory,” Journal of International Political Theory, 19:2, pp. 158-182.