This book of 10 essays emerged from an October 2008 conference on political theology sponsored by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University. The essays are preceded by an Introduction by the editor entitled “Political Theology in a Plural Context,” and by a conversation on the topic among José Casanova, John Milbank, and Mark Lilla. It's a fine collection on an important and timely topic.
As with all such collections, there are as many different “takes” on the topic as there are writers. Rather than trying to summarize each essay, let me highlight a couple of themes that emerge. This will necessitate saying nothing about some of the essays.
One of the most prominent and pervasive themes is, how should the story be told of political theology in the modern and contemporary period. In his book, The Stillborn God, Mark Lilla argued that “now the long tradition of Christian political theology is forgotten, and with it the memory of the age-old human quest to bring the whole of human life under God's authority” (5). We in the West have been “separated from our own long theological tradition of political thought by a revolution in Western thinking that began roughly four centuries ago” (4). Lilla calls that revolution, as he understands it, “The Great Separation.”
Most of the writers in this collection take for granted the falsehood of Lilla's narrative; some of them argue explicitly against it. Patrick J. Deneen in his essay, “The Great Combination: Modern Political Thought and the Collapse of the Two Cities,” addresses Lilla's narrative head-on. Deneen first notes that Augustine sharply distinguished the City of God from the City of the World, and then argues that political theology, rather than disappearing in the modern world, has come in two distinct waves, the effect of each being to combine what Augustine separated.
The first wave, represented by Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and their kin, gave theological arguments for their conviction that human beings are incurably self-interested and preoccupied with material comfort, and are called to exert mastery over nature. Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and so on proposed a rights-based polity to limit the deleterious effects of self-interest, and a market-based economy to channel self-interest and the preoccupation with material comfort into the productive mastery of nature. They saw religion as indispensable to this new political economy. To quote Deneen: “They recognized that religion was a necessary feature of the natural-rights-based liberal polity, in particular, as a necessary support for solidarity, cohesion, and ultimately for social control and obedience. For thinkers in the first wave, religion was conceived as a fundamental civil institution that served the ends of the state, particularly as a means of governing the worst effects of self-interest and guaranteeing obedience to the terms of the social contract” (50).
The second wave, represented by Rousseau, Mill, Marx, Dewey, and their kin, were even more “ferocious” in their critique of traditional religion than was the first wave. Deneen argues, however, that it would be a mistake to infer that this second wave represented pure secularism. “These thinkers all, in one sense or another, replace traditional religious faith with a redefined progressive faith in which humankind is subject to a kind of transformation that makes possible our own condition of godliness. Rather than putting religion in the service of politics as envisioned by first-wave thinkers, second-wave theorists see politics as an avenue to a kind of new religious apotheosis, bringing into combination the Cities of Man and God” (56).
I find this a compelling interpretation of the modern developments. Nonetheless, there is a strange omission in Deneen's larger story. He closes his essay by declaring that we should reject the Great Combination of religion and politics that took place in the modern period and return to the Great Separation. He does not actually say that it is to Augustine's Great Separation that we should return; but clearly that is what he has in mind.
When Europe had become Christian by, say, the sixth century, Augustine's separation of humankind into the City of God and the City of the World was no longer possible. What replaced it was the two-rules doctrine, first formulated by Pope Gelasius I in 494, according to which there were not two distinct civitates but two distinct divine rules over the same body of people, one, the rule exercised by the Pope over spiritual matters, the other, the rule exercised by the Emperor over temporal matters. When one realizes that what Hobbes and Locke were bequeathed were not Augustine's two cities but the two-rule doctrine of Christendom, then their innovations look rather different. Those who espoused the two-rule doctrine almost invariably held that the government was called to support the church. Hobbes and Locke did not undo Augustine's Great Separation but reversed the two-rule doctrine: religion was now enlisted in support of the state rather than the state being called to support the church. Deneen's main point remains, however: political theology did not disappear in the modern era.
In his essay “The Future of Political Theology: From Crisis to Pluralism,” Robin Lovin picks up the narrative where Deneen drops it by giving a very helpful survey of Christian political theology in the 20th century. He notes that the dominant theme was now that theologians must reject “the legitimation of absolute power that theology provided at the beginning of the modern era” and must instead “proclaims that all human authority is limited and contingent, subject at any moment to dissolution by the reality of divine judgment” (182). This was, of course, what had to be declared in the face of Nazism and Stalinism. But it leaves us with no theological guidance for “ordinary, unexceptional, democratic politics.” Lovin quotes a wonderful passage from Reinhold Niebuhr: “Perhaps this theology is constructed too much for the great crises of history. It seems to have no guidance for a Christian statesman of our day. It can fight the devil if he shows both horns and both cloven feet. But it refuses to make discriminating judgments about good and evil if the devil shows only one horn or the half of a cloven foot” (185). What we need is not just a political theology for crisis times but a political theology for ordinary times. In the bulk of his essay Lovin sketches out the elements of such a political theology, as does Charles Mathewes in “Augustinian Christian Republican Citizenship.” (The other writers, for the most part, talk about political theology without themselves here offering any political theology.)
Let me much more briefly highlight a second theme that gets sounded in several of the essays. The basic question to which the collection is addressed is, how can we do political theology in a pluralistic age? David Novak, in “Doing Political Theology Today,” argues that we should do so by appealing to natural law. Jews, Christians, and perhaps Muslims have good grounds within their religious traditions, he says, for such an appeal; and “those without religious traditions can still participate in this theoretical discourse as equals due to their moral earnestness, only having to regard a divine grounding of a common morality as plausible, even if they cannot affirm it in good faith.” All the other writers in the collection who explicitly address the topic recommend dialogue among those who hold differing political theologies, rather than attempting to find some common set of general principles. Robin Lovin, in his essay, gives an insightful analysis of what such dialogue would look like, as does the editor in his essay, “Difference, Resemblance, Dialogue: Some Goals for Comparative Political Theology in a Plural Age.”
In conclusion, let me call attention to Jerome Copulsky's essay, “History and Essence: The Construction of a Modern Jewish Political Theology.” One often hears it said that liberal democracy is (or can and should be) neutral with respect to all the religions present in the citzenry. In his essay, Copulsky describes in detail the struggle that the leaders of European Jewry undertook in the 19th century to reshape Judaism so as to make it possible for the Jewish community to fit into the liberal democratic state. When that “shaping up” had taken place, it might indeed have looked as if the liberal democratic state was (or could and should be) neutral with respect to Judaism and all the other religions present in the citizenry; but that's because these religion had already all shaped up. The liberal democratic state is not neutral with respect to religions as they come. Copulsky's essay makes the point more powerfully, and in more detail, than any other that I know of.
