Social contract theory, originating primarily with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, is not only contrary to a biblical theology of the state, but also tells a story that is so patently absurd it is hard to believe it ever gained credence in the first place.
Social contractualists, in brief, assume that men, by nature, are isolated individuals existing in a state of war with one another. They then voluntarily enter into a social compact with each other, establishing the “state.” They consent to give up some of their individual liberties to enter into common life. Society follows the individual and is the product of individual decisions.
Biblically, however, the hostility that exists between men is not “natural” at all; rather, it comes in as a result of the fall. Moreover, the story as told by social contract theory makes human community peripheral to human life, as though we were by nature isolated atoms. They claim the individual precedes the social. It would be hard to imagine anything more obviously false. Human beings, from the very point of conception onwards, already exist in community! Community is not something added to human life as a tacked-on, optional extra; it is constitutive of human life. As John Zizoulas has so aptly put it, being is communion; that is, to be is to be in communion. God exists only in community as Father, Son, and Spirit, a unity in Trinity. Mankind is made the communal image of God. The inescapability of community is seen, furthermore, if we ask how these isolated individuals could enter into social compact with one another unless they already shared a common socialization so that they spoke the same language, employed the same customs or rituals, and so forth.
In short, the theories of Hobbes and Locke, so integral to modern Western democracies, simply don’t square with the way the world actually works. They require us to go against the grain of human life. Since the creation of Adam (the only man to ever exist in isolation from other humans, and even then only temporarily), society always has (at least) temporal priority over the individual. There are certain “givens” in human life that are simply not a matter of individual consent. The stories Hobbes and Locke tell, as the mythical foundations of their theories, are non-sense.
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