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7/29/2019 Exodus 32 and the Theory of Holy War_The History of a Citation
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Harvard Divinity School
Exodus 32 and the Theory of Holy War: The History of a CitationAuthor(s): Michael WalzerSource: The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Jan., 1968), pp. 1-14Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity SchoolStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1508946
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HARVARD THEOLOGICALREVIEWVOLUME 1 JANUARY968 NUMBER
EXODUS 32 AND THE THEORY OF HOLY WAR:
THiE HISTORY OF A CITATION
MICHAEL WALZER
HARVARDUNIVERSITY
THROUGHOUT much of the history of political thought in the
West, the Bible was at once a constitutional document and a
kind of case book, putatively setting limits to speculationas well
as to conduct. Theologians and political theorists were forced to
be judges interpretinga text or, more often, lawyers defending a
particularinterpretationbefore the constituted powers in church
and state or before the less authoritative court of opinion. The
Bible became, like other such texts, a dissociated collection of
precedents,examplesand citations, each of which meant what thelawyersandjudges said it meant.
But the lawyers and judges did not agree. Indeed, the historyof any particular citation will suggest that arguments from au-
thoritative texts are not necessarily less controversial or erratic
than the speculations of men who admit no authorities what-
soever. The appeal to such texts is not a way of endingdiscourse
and settling disagreements though of course the appeal to an
authoritative interpreter of texts, possessing political or ecclesi-astical power, is just that - it is rathera way of carryingon dis-
course. But it is a special and highly formal way, restrictive in
the argumentsit permits even if not in the conclusions it allows.
The recognition of an authoritative text by a group of writers
imposes a common style; it makes necessary certain intellectual
motions. It compels a writer to extract his meaning from am-
biguous, obscure or irrelevantpassages and, what is most impor-
tant, from passages with which other men have already wrestled.Because of all this, it makes possible detailed comparisonsamongwriters committed to the same authority. Their different inten-
tions are often most sharply revealed in the way they approacha disputed passage: one man after another confronts the same
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HARVARDTHEOLOGICAL EVIEW
words of Holy Writ, twists and turns them, qualifying, rejectingor ignoring the views of his predecessors,and inevitably reveal-
ing (as he may not do when he sums up his doctrine) the goalsat which he aims and the anxieties which attend him on his way.
The purpose of this brief essay is to examine the history of a
particularcitation which figures significantlyin the work of three
very different thinkers--St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas,and John Calvin-and which provides a useful key to their
different views of a crucial form of political activity: holy war
or, in Augustine's words, the struggleof good men against wicked
men.
Then Moses stoodin the gate of the campandsaid,Whois on the
Lord's ide? let himcomeunto me. Andall thesonsof Levigatheredthemselves ogetherunto him. And he said unto them,Thus saith
the LordGodof Israel,Put everymanhis swordby his side, and
go in andout fromgateto gatethroughouthe camp,andslayeverymanhis brother,and everymanhis companion, nd everymanhis
neighbor.And the childrenof Levi did according o the wordof
Moses;and therefell of the peoplethat day about threethousand
men.
In the context of the Five Books of Moses, Exodus 32:26-28is an uncharacteristicpassage. It forms one conclusionto a kind
of doublenarrativeof the storyof the
goldencalf
(inthe alterna-
tive conclusion,Moses intercedes for the idol-worshippingpeopleand God forgives them: "Andthe Lord repentedof the evil which
he thought to do unto his people"). The text is disjointed and
confusing, evidence- so we have been taught by moderncritics
-that it is a compilation from different sources or a late re-
constructionof an early, now partially obscuredtale. The narra-
tive as a whole is differentfrom earlier and later descriptionsof
popularrebelliousnessagainst Moses and his new God. Through-out the books of Exodus and Numbers (and also in the Deuter-
onomic recapitulation) rebels and idolators are punished by
Jehovah directly. He sends fire, plague, and serpents.1 But here
1 Compare, for example, Numbers II:i, 1:4-34, I6:4I-49, 2I:5-6.
2
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EXODUS 32 AND HOLY WAR
and only here the punishment is carried out by human agentsand at the direct command of an infuriated Moses -"Moses'
anger waxed hot." There is no command reported in the textfrom Jehovah himself. More than this, the executors of the
punishment,the children of Levi, have at this point in the Exodus
story no defined political or religious position. The only consti-
tuted authoritiesin the Mosaic polity, such as it was at that early
time, were Moses himself, Aaron the high priest, and the judgeschosen by Moses, presumably from among the tribal elders.2
The establishment of the Levites as priests (or as one set of
priests along with the descendants of Aaron) comes later in thebiblicalnarrative.
The entire passage relating the golden calf incident has been
described by some biblical critics as a late interpolation whose
possible basis in fact or in memorycannot be known, and which
may indeed have no basis at all. It is excluded by Professor
Winnett from what he calls "the Mosaic tradition," a specula-tive reconstruction of the earliest narrative which includes all
the other stories of rebellion against Moses (the ten "murmur-
ings"). The purpose of the interpolation, Winnett and others
believe, was to justify the role of the Levites in the later Judaeanstate. It was designed also, perhaps, as a propaganda thrust
against the northernkingdom of Israel, where golden bulls were
set up and worshippedduring the reign of King Jeroboam.3These are, of course, recent notions; so long as the Bible was
considered the revealed word ofGod,
suchspeculation was im-possible. Theorists did not then question the historical value
of particular passages, but rather sought out the divine inten-tions and injunctions which they contained, even if obscurely.But faith in revelation was not an adequate guide in that diffi-cult search. Inevitably, particulardiscoveries of God's will weredetermined chiefly by personal and social needs (in contrast,presumably,to the discoveries of moderncritics which are other-
wise determined). Thus the notion conveyed by Exodus 32:26-2
Exodus I8:2I.
F. V. WINNETT,The Mosaic Tradition (Toronto, I949), 48-50, I46f., I6I;S. A. COOK,Critical Notes on Old Testament History (London, I907), 75; T. J.MEEK, Hebrew Origins (New York, I96o), I34ff. But see the different view ofW. F. ALBRIGHT,From the Stone Age to Christianity (New York, I957), 299ff.
3
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HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
28 -that there existed around Moses a special group of men
whose function it was to enforce divine law upon the recalcitrant
multitude- had enormousappeal to certain groups of theoristsand theologians in the medieval and early modern periods. It
appealed to men who sensed the immediate relevance of the tale
of the golden calf because they lived, or so they thought,among
idol-worshippersand lusty sinners. The Levitical onslaught re-
quired of them also a vigorous struggle against the enemies of
Jehovah and Christ. But among other men, who did not feel
with the same immediacy the dangers of idolatry, who were
uneasy with religious militancy, the tale evoked only concern-and then called forth a considerabletalent for exegesis. If it was
not yet possible to declare the text a late interpolation,it could
always be arguedthat Goddid not intend it as a direct command,
or, that it was a command to be obeyed only in special circum-
stances unlikely ever to recur. Whatever God's intentions, Ex-
odus 32 was frequently cited in the long debates which ragedover the
questionsof
religious persecutionand
holywar (and
later over the relatedquestionsof political purge and revolution).From the time when Augustine first grappledwith the problemsof a Christian empire until the collapse of Calvinist radicalism
in England in I660, the dramatic onslaught of the Levites uponthe idolatrous people was an example which, if it was not to
be imitated, needed to be elaborately explained.
II
It cost St. Augustine many years of anxious study and reflec-
tion before he brought himself to defend the persecution of
heretical Christiansby the Roman state.4 When he finally did
so, he offered in justification of his new position an interpreta-
tion of Exodus 32. Earlier in his career, Augustine had main-
tained that spiritual men would struggle against heresy armed
only with the Word of God. They would not, that is,make war
with heretics, but would rather seek to persuade them of their
folly or wickedness through the example of holy lives and the
The development of Augustine's thought on persecution is carefully traced
by HERBERT . DEANE,The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New
York, I963), Chapter VI.
4
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EXODUS 32 AND HOLY WAR
preachingof true doctrine. Wars with the sword, Augustinehad
insisted, could bring only secular victories. They might lead to a
worldly peace-or rather to a few moments of worldly peace,since war was chronicin the City of Man- but they could never
bring that eternal peace which God offered to the souls of his
elect. Christians might fight in the wars of the earthly city,
seeking the only peace that was possible on earth; indeed, theyshould fight (and their wars would be just), for peace on earth
was a worthy goal even for God's pilgrims who sought a higherend. But as a community the City of God had nothing to gain
from such wars; they were civil wars of the earthly city, andthe heavenly city was, so to speak, a foreign power which was
not involved and had no possible interest in intervention.5
Augustine's defense of religious persecution resulted from (orat any rate required) the discovery of anotherkind of war. This
was a war very different from the endless encounters of ambi-
tious and lustful men, and one which necessarily culminatedin a
peace verydifferent from those brief moments when ambition
was satiatedor lust controlled. It was not a civil war,but stemmed
instead from the deep-rootedand perpetual enmity between the
City of God and the City of Man. "Thus," Augustine wrote,"we have two wars, that of the wicked at war with the wicked
and that of the wicked at war with the good."6 So long as the
two cities existed, there would be war between them, and reli-
gious persecution, Augustine concluded, was nothing more than
one form of this perpetual struggle. "The truth is, that alwaysboth the bad have persecuted the good, and the good have per-secuted the bad: the formerdoing harmby their unrighteousness,the latter seeking to do good by the administration of disci-
pline. .. . 7
In his Letter to Vincentius, one of the first pieces in which he
5AUGUSTINE, City of God, Book XVIII, 2 and XIX, 7, 12 (trans. Walsh,
Zema, et al.).
' City of God, Book XV, 5.7 Letter XCIII, paragraph 8 (trans. J. G. Cunningham). It is necessary to dis-
tinguish this struggle of wicked men and good men from Ithat defense of the peaceof the earthly city (described above) which Augustine calls "just" (City of God,Book XIX, 7). Good men may fight against wicked men in a just war, but theydo so as members of the earthly city and so represent only the limited goodnessthat pertains to that city. Hence they fight a limited war. A just war has a begin-
5
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HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
defended the persecution of the Donatists, Augustine used the
book of Exodus to illustrate this double persecution: Pharaoh
was the oppressor of the good; Moses of the bad. The two usedthe same weapons. Faced with the threat of a militant and suc-
cessful heresy, Augustine was unwilling to rely on holiness and
the Word. Now worldly men and spiritual men employed alike
the weapons of the world. Yet the Bishop of Hippo had no diffi-
culty distinguishing them.8
When good and bad do the same actions and suffer the same afflic-
tions, theyare to be
distinguishednot
bywhat
theydo or
suffer,but by the causes of each: for example,Pharaohoppressedthe peopleof God by hard bondage; Moses afflictedthe same people by severe
correction when they were guilty of impiety [reference to Exodus
32:27]: their actions were alike; but they were not alike in the
motive of regard to the people's welfare-the one inflated by the
lust of power,the other inflamedby love.
A close examination of this citation will suggest some of the
difficulties of Augustine's position. Pharaoh, he argues, oppressedthe Israelites out of lust, that is, in his own interest. Moses acted
out of love for the people, in their own interest. These different
motives point to another difference of greater significance which
Augustine's political purposes required him to establish. A "re-
gard for the people's welfare" was thought by the classical writers
whom he knew so well to be one of the crucial signs of a legiti-mate ruler. The mere "lust for power" marked the tyrant.9 Moses
afflicted the people for their own good, then, but also as their
true sovereign, their prince, chief or judge chosen by God to
lead them out of Egypt. In another passage, citing the same
ning: it begins with a specific violation of worldly peace. And it has an end: it
ends when that peace has been restored (not improved upon) by defensive action.But the war of the wicked and the good has no beginning or end, or rather, it is
coterminous with the earthly city itself, which had its beginning at the Fall. It
is not started anew by each particular aggression, nor is the activity of the good
necessarily defensive (or limited). The theories of the just war and the holy
war (or crusade) represent two radically different Christian defenses of the useof violence. Both have their origins in Augustine and a long history thereafter.
For a discussion of the two traditions in later history, see ROLAND AINTON, on-
gregationalism: From the Just War to the Crusade in the Puritan Revolution,Andover Newton Theological School Bulletin 35:3 (April, I943), I-2o.
8Letter XCIII, paragraph 6.9See ARISTOTLE'S olitics, Book III, C. VII.
6
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EXODUS32 AND HOLY WAR
text, Augustine similarlystressed the "justice"of Moses's action.10
He was, after all, defending the activity of Roman magistrates
and opposing the violence of self-appointed Donatist saints.Hence, he had to argue not merely that persecution was a war
of the good against the wicked, but also that the good as a grouphad representativeson earth who might even by earthly stand-
ards legitimately wield the sword. He was not ready to hand
that sword to private Christians. And it was for this reason that
he omitted any mention of the Levites and attributed the "afflic-
tion" of the people simply to Moses: for the Levites had appar-
ently volunteered for their bloody mission and never beenordainedor appointed. To have emphasizedtheir activity would
have been to suggest the prerogatives of saints-out-of-office.
Augustine seems to be maintaining that Christians may hold
office in worldly states and empires and then act officially, and
only officially, in pursuit of religious purposes. It is an argu-ment which, as his most recent interpreter has pointed out,
fundamentallycontradicts the dualism of his
general theory.llMagistrates who persecute heretics in the name of Christ turn
the City of Man into a theocracy or, since Augustine does not
pretend that Moses acted at the direct command of God, into
a kingdomof the godly.But suppose the godly did not hold power in state or empire.
Might they still wage that second war which Augustine describes
as perpetual? Augustine's response was firmly negative.12 But
his own world-historical conception of permanent persecutionvitiated the effectiveness of that response. He would have been
more successful in limiting the use of the sword to secular magis-trates if he had also limited the purposes for which the sword
might be used to secular affairs. He would have been more suc-
cessful, or at least less useful to later Christian crusaders, if
he had maintained his dualism consistently. It was simply not
possible to defend worldly religiousactivity without calling forth
all sorts of religious activists, enthusiastic imitators of the chil-dren of Levi.
10 Oeuvres Completes de Saint Augustin (Paris, 1873), Vol. 23, 279.11DEANE, Political and Social Ideas, 2i5ff.12 See the discussion in DEANE, p. 199 and references there. One of the criteria
for a "just war" is that it be waged at the command of a legitimate sovereign.
7
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HARVARDTHEOLOGICAL EVIEW
The theoryof eternal warfaredeveloped by Augustinewas elab-
orated in the Middle Ages into the full-scale legal and theologi-
cal doctrine of holy war.l3 Until the age of Hildebrand, holywars were fought only between Christiansand infidels, and since
in such wars the Christians were usually led by their secular
lords, the problem which had worried Augustine did not arise.
But Gregorian writers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
citing Augustine's defense of religious persecution, insisted that
the doctrine encompassed also the struggle of true Christians
against heretics, schismatics and excommunicants." Even this
struggle might, of course, be carried on in accordancewith Au-
gustinian restrictions. Given the political position of the Gre-
gorians, however, they could hardly leave it to secular officials.
They urged instead that holy wars might be fought at the com-
mand of the church alone and that soldiers who struggled
against the enemies of God required no secular sanction what-
soever. The radical papalist Manegold of Lautenbach forth-
rightlytook the very position that Augustine had hoped to
preclude: "those who kill excommunicants,"he declared, "are
not considered murderers." That the accusation was even im-
aginable indicates that the men involved were not public officials
enforcing the laws of the state. They were presumablyprivateChristianswho had taken the holy war, so to speak, into their
own hands.l5 To vindicate Manegold's extreme position it was
only necessary to cite the example of the Levites, so carefully
ignored by Augustine. And judging from the rebuke whichAquinas later administered to the more enthusiastic defenders
of the holy war doctrine,this appeal to Exodus 32 was frequentlymadeby medieval radicals.
III
St. ThomasAquinasdid not believe that war was either chronic
or perpetual, or that human history since the Fall had involveda continuouspersecutionof the good by the wicked and the wicked
13MICHEL VILLEY, La Croisade: essai sur la formation d'une theioriejuridique(Paris, I942), 3off.
14VILLEY, 36ff.15
VILLEY, 39.
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EXODUS32 AND HOLY WAR
by the good. His Aristotelian conception of political life dis-
posed him towards a view of peace as the natural condition of
mankind. Even between Christiansand infidels,he thought,therewas no necessary state of war (and in his discussion of war in
the Summa Theologica, Aquinas made no mention of the most
importantwars fought in the centuryand a half before he wrote:
the Crusades).16 All men were ruled by the same natural law,
imprinted on their minds at birth and not entirely effaced byAdam's sin. Aquinas did, of course, accept the notion that here-
tics might legitimately be persecuted, but since he did not view
this persecutionin world-historical erms, he was able to go muchfarther than Augustine in limiting it. The difference between his
own position and Augustine's is evident in the new interpreta-tionhe offeredof Exodus32.
Christian radicals (unnamed in the Summa) had apparentlydrawn two argumentsfrom the biblical descriptionof the Leviti-
cal onslaught,both of which Aquinaswas eager to refute.' Theyhad argued first that it was lawful for any private individual to
punish a sinner--for had not Moses issued a command that
was virtually an invitation: "Put every man his sword by his
side . . ."? To this Aquinas replied that the Levites had in
fact acted at God's command: "Thus saith the Lord God of
Israel. . ." The slaughter was "properly" His act and not
their own. The second radical argument was that clerics might
legitimately slay evil-doers. This assumed that the Levites were
already priests, an assumption that Aquinas chose not to ques-tion. He argued instead that the Levites were ministers of the
Old Law which appointed corporalpenalties. They were not tobe comparedwith Christianpriests.
Aquinas thus offered an interpretationof Exodus 32 in its wayas curious as Augustine's: if the Bishop of Hippo ignored the
Levites, the medieval doctor ignored Moses. He not only failedto reproduceAugustine's discussion of Moses' motives; he did
not even mention Moses as a participant in the slaughter. Inhis version God and the Levites were the only actors. Aquinas
"AQUINAS, Summa Theologica, 2a, 2ae, Q. 40.17The following paragraph is based on an interpretation of Summa Theologica,
2a, 2ae, Q. 64, Articles 3 and 4.
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HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
was not willing to confront the attack upon the idol-worshippersas the act of a secular magistrate not because he would neces-
sarily have disapprovedof such an act; more likely because hesensed the danger of defending persecution with such a cita-
tion. It was far better to ascribe Moses's indiscriminate invi-
tation to Jehovah himself, since Jehovah, Aquinas felt, was un-
likely to issue another such. And this in effect denied the value
of the citation altogether. This particular incident in Israel's
history was a special case from which Christianshad nothing to
learn. God no longergave commandslike the one he presumably
gave (no direct command is mentioned in the text) to the Le-vites. The penalties of the Old Law had been superseded.
Aquinashad no desire, of course, to question the generalvalue
of Israelite history as a guide for his contemporaries. Indeed,he defended his preference for mixed governmentwith a careful
analysis of the Mosaic polity.l8 Like Augustine, however, his
argumentset in motion intellectual processes which he could not
arrest. Men who shared St. Thomas's obvious dislike for the
crusading spirit, for example, might well deny the legitimacy of
religiouspersecutionas well - crusadeand persecutionhad often
enough been described as aspects of the same war. The defense
of either by reference to Old Testament passages might then be
met by a simple extension of Aquinas'sown argumentas to rele-
vance. An interesting example of this extension can be found in
Hugo Grotius' De Jure Belli ac Pacis, a seventeenth-century
treatise restating and enormously elaborating the Thomist doc-trine of the just war. Grotius repeats in rather different but
recognizableform Aquinas' two argumentsagainst the relevance
of Exodus 32. First, he attributesthe severity of Mosaic punish-ment to "divine counsel." And he then dismissessuch counsel with
a fine show of agnostic trepidation: "no conclusive inference can
be drawn . . . its depths we cannot sound . . . we are liable
to run into error."19 Acts committed at the command of God
are no precedentsfor latter-dayChristians. The conclusion is notdifferentfromAquinas'and the method is only a moreradical ver-
sion of his own. Secondly, Grotius writes what sounds like a
28Summa Theologica, ia, 2ae, Q. 105, Article i.
19De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Book II, XX, xxxix.
10
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EXODUS 32 AND HOLY WAR
modernistparody of the medieval argumentabout the Old Law:
the zeal of private men to punish sinners and idolators, he sug-
gests, was justified in the period before "civil jurisdiction"wasestablished. "Primitive" law permitted such punishment,but it
is "veryunsafe"today.20
IV
For both Aquinas and Grotius, society and peace were the
natural conditions of mankind and the natural aims of all men.
God, perhaps, could act against nature (though Grotius did not
believe he ever did so) but men surely could not, or at any rate
only perverse men could- the terms of the argument are am-
biguous enough, but the intentions of the theorists are fairlyclear. They meant to require peaceful behavior from all men
and to restrict war to a defensive struggle against aggressionand
perversity waged by recognized championsof society and never
by private men or self-designated saints.For John Calvin, on the other hand, peace was the natural
conditiononly of regeneratemen. So long as mankindwas divided
into saints and worldlings, war was inevitable and continuous.21
Describing this struggle, urging the saints onward, Calvin and
his followers brought the theory of the holy war to its logicalconclusion. Their rejection of the moderation of Aquinasand his
school carried them further than Augustine had ever ventured.
The radicalism of their doctrine is apparent in the startlinglynew view they took of Exodus 32. Flatly contradictingAquinas,Calvin described the Levitical onslaughtprecisely as a precedent:the Levites foreshadowed the Protestant elect. They were a
special group of men to whom God had given special privilegesand commands; but they were also symbols of the coming gen-erations of holy warriors.
The key to the character of the Levites for Calvinwas not that
20 De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Book II, XX, ix and xiv.The imagery of warfare was frequently employed in CALVIN'Sermons to
describe the activity of the saints and the response of Satan and his worldlings;for some examples, see Commentaries upon the Prophet Daniel (London, I570),Sig. B2; Sermons on the Epistles of St. Paul to Timothy and Titus (London,I579), Sermon 9 on Timothy, p. ioo.
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HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
they killed idolators but that they killed brethren. He thus
stressed a feature of the biblical text carefully avoided by both
Augustine and Aquinas. "You shall show yourselves rightlyzealous of God's service," he told his Genevan audience, "in that
you kill your own brethren without sparing, so as in this case the
order of nature be put underfoot, to show that God is above
all . . . 22 The point was made even more clearly by John
Knox, in a brief comment upon the same text: "God's word
draweth his elect after it, against worldly appearance, against
natural affections and against civil statutes and constitutions." 23
Neither Calvin nor Knox made any mention of the time-honoreddistinction between private men and magistrates. That distinc-
tion had been largely superseded by the confrontation of saints
and worldlings-a supersession always implicit in the theory
of the holy war. Indeed, Knox's reference to civil statutes and
constitutions suggests that he was perfectly willing to set saints-
out-of-office against ungodly magistrates. He saw the Levites as
saintsserving only God,
and that without benefit of ordination.
Moses presumably served God also, in a higher but not in a
different capacity. Both the Levites and Moses were assimilated
to the new Protestant conception of the elect, and so neither
Calvin nor Knox shared the concern of Aquinas and Augustine
over which to emphasize.
The radicalism of Calvin's sermons is not at all evident in his
Institutes. It was only with Knox and then some of the English
Puritans that that radicalism was developed in anything like aconsistent fashion. Writing against the Anabaptists in the famous
chapter on civil government, Calvin merely reaffirmed Augus-
tine's view of the right of magistrates to wage war upon God's
enemies- and reaffirmed also the required version of Exodus 32
"Sermons on the Fifth Book of Moses (London, 1583), p. I203. In his Com-
mentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses (Edinburgh, 1854), Vol. III, 35Iff.,Calvin denies that there is anything cruel in the slaughter of brethren: "Moses
onlywished to condemn that absurd
regardto
humanity whereby judgesare often
blinded . . ." It should be said that the long discussion of Exodus 32 in the
Commentaries is not directly relevant here, since Calvin is not citing the passagein the course of an argument, but expounding it in detail. Citation depends, to
a degree, on previous exposition, but often the exigencies of argument will lead a
writer to use a particular passage in a way not yet canvassed by the expositors.
23JOHNKNOX, Works, ed. D. Laing (Edinburgh, 1846-48), Vol. III, 3IIf.
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EXODUS 32 AND HOLYWAR
with its exclusive emphasis upon the role of Moses. "How did
the meek and placid Moses," Calvin asked, "burn with such
cruelty, that, after having his hands imbrued in the blood of
his brethren, he continued to go through the camp till three
thousand were slain?" 24 There is, of course, no mention in the
text of Moses having killed anyone at the foot of Sinai, let alone
all three thousandof the idol-worshippers. Once again, the omis-
sion of the Levites is determined by the answer which Calvin
intends to his own question: Moses was engaged, by virtue of
his office, in the "infliction of public vengeance." Still, Calvin'sstress was not quite the same as Augustine's; he did not mention
"the people's welfare" and he was quite unconcerned with any
suggestion of Moses' secular authority. Instead, Moses "avengesthe affliction of the righteous at the command of God." God
alone is sovereign,and if in the Institutes he is imaginedto work
only throughmen whom he has first raised to public office, it is
not hard to imagine him choosing other instruments--or to
imagine other men claiming to be so chosen.
That claim was most dramatically put forwardduringthe sev-
enteenth-century English Revolution. Indeed, the English saints
expanded considerably on the ancient dispute over the meaningof Exodus 32 and developed a full-scale interpretation of the
escape from Egypt as a revolution parallel to their own, an in-
exhaustible source of godly precedents and examples.25In their
sermons and pamphlets, the Levitical onslaught was describedas a revolutionarypurge. But it was still a questionwhetherthat
purge should be conducted by magistrates or by private men.
"The divine policy and heavenly remedy to recover a common-
wealth and church . . . endangered,"wrote one Puritan minis-
ter, citing Exodus 32, "is that those that have authority under
God do totally abolish and extirpateall the cursedthings wherebyit was disturbed."26 But saints in and out of office
mightstill
2 The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book IV, XX, x (trans. JohnAllen).
2 See for example the remarkable sermon which JOHN OWENpreached justafter the execution of Charles I, Works, ed. W. H. Goold (Edinburgh, 1862),Vol. VIII, I27ff.
6SAMUEL AIRCLOTH,he Troublers Troubled (London, 1641), 24f.
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HARVARDTHEOLOGICAL EVIEW
claim that extraordinary authority. Alas, the tale of the goldencalf offered no clear evidence as to its precise recipients.
V
Three basic interpretationsof Exodus 32 were offeredby politi-cal theoristsand theologians n the course of more than a thousand
years of debate. St. Augustine imagined the slaughter of the
idol-worshippersas a public and benevolent act of persecutiondirected by Moses, a secular magistrate seen in the
guiseof a
Roman consul. St. Thomas Aquinas saw the same event as an
act of God (the Levites merely his agents), without significancefor the future. Calvin saw it as an example of zealous activity
by a band of saints free from earthly and natural law, instru-
ments of the divine will, but voluntary instruments. In these in-
terpretations the three men reveal themselves and the specialanxieties of their times: Augustine, struggling to justify perse-
cution, but also to establish limits upon it consistent with theexistence of a Christianempire; Aquinas, uneasy with crusading
fervor, refusing altogether to recognize the war of good men
against wicked men; Calvin, eager for battle and willing to set
the saints loose from secular control. All three of them were
forced to be biblical lawyers, but God's law in their hands was
as differentas men and ages could make it.
Differently as they might interpret that law, however, dismiss
it they could not. Only when the Bible had ceased to be an au-thoritative text could men free themselves from the need to de-
bate its precise meaning and to describe their own positions as
consistent with that meaning. Then the way was open for the
historical critics, and open also for a kind of judgment which
could never have been uttered by Augustine,Aquinas, or Calvin.
Thus John Aubrey reports the opinion of Thomas Hobbes: "I
have heard him inveigh much against the Crueltie of Moyses
for putting so many thousands to the Sword for Bowing to theGolden Calf." 27
27Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick (Ann Arbor, I962), I57. See also the
entry "Moise" in VOLTAIRE'SDictionnaire philosophique.
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