Part 2 of a throwback post from February 8, 2014
From the perspective of Luther’s Genesis Commentary, the idea that the Kingdom of God comes if we fix politics is all wrong. In his commentary on the primal narrative of human life before the Fall, Luther shows that God established first the Family and then the Church as the original and most authentic setting of human existence. They were created before the Fall into sin and therefore are not necessarily a response to the condition of human sin. Rather, they are a natural setting for human life on earth. These orders only become unworkable on their own after sin arrived on the scene. Therefore after the Flood, in Genesis 9 God promulgates the new law of retribution, thereby implying the establishment of the Order of the State, as Paul confirms in Romans 13. Hence, the State and its coercion are not meant as a means of fulfilling human life. It is, unlike the other Orders, something created in order to counteract human sin and therefore make up for the failures of the first two Orders. As a result, it cannot replace these other Orders.
This of course brings us back to the Wolf. Belfort, like many others in our society, did not belong to the Church and did not have much of a family life (the little he has, he systematically destroys). In terms of his behavior, he is able to do many, many things which are illegal, but — oddly enough — the government doesn’t care about most of them. When he is finally convicted, the prosecutors have no interest in his use of prostitutes or cocaine! Hence, the normal and natural settings for human life are barren for him. They do not function as either a medium of vocation, or as a means of moral formation. He has no ultimate hope in his life, and so he feels that Epicurean excess is the only reasonable goal of human existence. He has no sense of the law of God as taught by the natural law and summarized in the Decalogue. And, hence, the only thing left over to direct and restrain him is the State. Since the State is not omniscient and omnipresent, it cannot actually regulate his moral and spiritual life — even if that was its role — in a way that could force him to live a productive life. All it can do is come in and pick up the pieces. He is free to get away with whatever he can.
Within such a situation then, the State must either remain impotent in the face of a corrupt culture in which the Orders of the Church and Family are non-functional, or it must actually take over those functions and become more and more intrusive, totalizing, and, indeed, tyrannical. And this latter course more often than not happens. And so there comes about a kind of symbiotic effect. The more the Church and the Family deteriorate as Orders of Creation, the more the Order of the State takes over their functions. And the State must then feeds children and supports families because there are no families or fathers. The State teaches “virtue” (after a fashion) in public schools. And to many secularists the State becomes a kind of religion and now brings the kingdom. Nevertheless, it is likewise the case that as the State takes over these functions and becomes more and more totalizing, it also accelerates the deterioration of the Orders of the Family and the Church as well.