This Sunday the NY Times ran an adapted essay from a forthcoming book, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West, by Mark Lilla.  The article raises the importance of developing the skills necessary to interpret political theology today. These skills are deemed necessary not only because of the increasing influence of fundamentalist Islam upon Western politics, but because Western history itself is deeply invested in political theology.  Lilla traces the West's theological heritage through the middle ages to the beginning of modern politics in Hobbes and Rousseau up through the twentieth century where he develops a relationship between the political theology of the Weimar Republic in Germany and the First and Second World Wars.  I mention this article for two reasons. Firstly, because it focuses attention upon the need for theological refelction today, and secondly because it confirms that there is still much more to be said if Lilla's suggestions are to be taken seriously.

1. The Need for Theological Reflection Today 

  Lilla's position is that it is important for people to understand theology if they are to understand politics today, even if they believe the two should exist in some form of divide. Here he draws our attention to Hobbes' shift from divine to human politics, or the belief that we can and indeed must run our own affairs.  But he counter balances this view with Rousseau's view that human beings are inherently religious animals or that there is a deep seated need we feel to investigate the beyond.  It is in this sense however, that the American tradition stands out for Lilla insofar as the American context seems to hold the two together in a great divide.  Strong belief in secularism and the separation of church and state, alongside a vast existential sea of devout religiosity held together in a broad rubric of pluralism. As Lilla will argue in reference to the "miracle" of the American context,

For all the good Hobbes did in shifting our political focus from God to man, he left the impression that the challenge of political theology would vanish once the cycle of fear was broken and human beings established authority over their own affairs. We still make this assumption when speaking of the “social causes” of fundamentalism and political messianism, as if the amelioration of material conditions or the shifting of borders would automatically trigger a Great Separation. Nothing in our history or contemporary experience confirms this belief, yet somehow we can’t let it go. We have learned Hobbes’s lesson too well, and failed to heed Rousseau’s. And so we find ourselves in an intellectual bind when we encounter genuine political theology today: either we assume that modernization and secularization will eventually extinguish it, or we treat it as an incomprehensible existential threat, using familiar terms like fascism to describe it as best we can. Neither response takes us a step closer to understanding the world we now live in.

Lilla's point is that although it appears that Islamic states need to go through similar processes as our own history depicts, that doesn't change the fact that we are currently living in the aftermath of that history where politics and theology were worked out into the median relationship they now share in American and to some extent Western society as a whole.  For our part in this conversation, the continuation of political and religious controversy demands that we regain the theological nuances of our history and become accustomed to the logics which allow theology and politics to coexist in Western societies.  This would then allow Western peoples to more accurately, if not sympathetically, understand and engage what is happening in the Islamic world. As Lilla will conclude. "We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by divine revelation. All we have is our own lucidity, which we must train on a world where faith still inflames the minds of men."

The tone in Lilla's conclusion hwoever, raises a problem for me, and provides the reason why I want to reiterate my first point again.

2. The Need for Theological Reflection Today

How do we narrate our own history? How do we attribute lucidity to our own current political conditions? Lilla does a fair job of overviewing the issues and even insightfully points out the recent political theological inculcation in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  It is here that his book derives its name:

Liberal theology had begun in hope that the moral truths of biblical faith might be intellectually reconciled with, and not just accommodated to, the realities of modern political life. Yet the liberal deity turned out to be a stillborn God, unable to inspire genuine conviction among a younger generation seeking ultimate truth. For what did the new Protestantism offer the soul of one seeking union with his creator? It prescribed a catechism of moral commonplaces and historical optimism about bourgeois life, spiced with deep pessimism about the possibility of altering that life. It preached good citizenship and national pride, economic good sense and the proper length of a gentleman’s beard. But it was too ashamed to proclaim the message found on every page of the Gospels: that you must change your life. And what did the new Judaism bring to a young Jew seeking a connection with the traditional faith of his people? It taught him to appreciate the ethical message at the core of all biblical faith and passed over in genteel silence the fearsome God of the prophets, his covenant with the Jewish people and the demanding laws he gave them. Above all, it taught a young Jew that his first obligation was to seek common ground with Christianity and find acceptance in the one nation, Germany, whose highest cultural ideals matched those of Judaism, properly understood. To the decisive questions — “Why be a Christian?” and “Why be a Jew?” — liberal theology offered no answer at all.

Although this is an unsatisfactory depiction of theological liberalism at this time, there is also some truth to it.  Having said that, the broad brushstroke approach, although conducive to a newspaper article, conceals as much as it reveals. Lilla goes on to draw the connection, and rightly so, between this heritage of theological liberalism and the messianism  and apocalyptic theologies which responded to the First World War.  Here, Karl Barth gets a mention as one who stood in this tradition, but then stood against the Seond World War and spoke against Hitler whereas his contemporaries often did not.  But here, Lilla does not spend sufficient time delimiting the differences between Barth and his contemporaries.  The question is never posed, why was Barth any different from his contemporaries? 

On the one hand Lilla wants to encourage a theological sophistication for political theorists today.  But on the other, he tends to group theologians like Barth and Gogarten together theologically without spending the time to note why they differed in their response to Hitler.  It is for these reasons that Lilla is able to confirm Hobbes's law concerning the entirety of German political theology:

Messianic theology eventually breeds messianic politics. The idea of redemption is among the most powerful forces shaping human existence in all those societies touched by the biblical tradition. It has inspired people to endure suffering, overcome suffering and inflict suffering on others. It has offered hope and inspiration in times of darkness; it has also added to the darkness by arousing unrealistic expectations and justifying those who spill blood to satisfy them. All the biblical religions cultivate the idea of redemption, and all fear its power to inflame minds and deafen them to the voice of reason. In the writings of these Weimar figures, we encounter what those orthodox traditions always dreaded: the translation of religious notions of apocalypse and redemption into a justification of political messianism, now under frightening modern conditions. It was as if nothing had changed since the 17th century, when Thomas Hobbes first sat down to write his “Leviathan.”

Why not ask what the difference was between Barth and Gogarten?  Why paint the picture with such broad brushstrokes.  To say that nothing changed between Hobbes' context and Hitler's contravenes precisely what is great about Lilla's article.  On the one hand he wants us to invest in understanding our own political and theological heritage in the West so that we can better inform contemporary public policy.  On the other however, he does not go into sufficient detail to note how those like Barth in the past did precisely what he asks and navigated the relation between theology and politics in such a way that it directly influenced his ability to resist fascist messianism when everyone else did not. 

As Lilla argues, we must be absolutely vigilant against political theologies which justify violence and vagrant disregard for human life.  We must root out those theologies which turn out, in the end, to be a-theologies, that is political theories which glorify human beings in the place of God. This is chiefly seen in the fascist claim that the German race represented a kind of ubermensch, a superior race above others.  If we're honest, it is precisely these forms of a-theological ideologies which lie at the herat of so much of the twentieth century nationalisms which glorify one people over others.  That is precisely what separated Barth from his contemporaries.  He ruthlessly sought to abolish idolatry from his theology in all its forms.  He did this chiefly through his reflections on Jesus Christ which he approached with the vigor of the scholastics in the middle ages.  Jesus, the true superman, chose to serve, to suffer and die.  That is the model for politics and that is precisely why Barth saw Hitler for what he was. 

This is the key though.  Our theological sophistication has to reach that stage where we begin to note the difference between Barth and Gogarten. If Lilla's arguments are to be taken constructively, this is the goal that must be striven for.  We cannot pretend any longer that it is wise, nor possible, to abolish theological reflection from the political sphere.  Rather, we must continue to work out median relationships between the two, relationships, which as Lilla notes at one point follow Robert Frost's advice about good neighbors which share a common ground and history.  Our theological sophistication has to reach the point where we can not only see the parallels between political theology then and now, but also the ways in which the political theology of Barth is not the same as Hobbes and is clearly not the same being tossed around in today's context.

In the end, I think I am only calingl for even deeper investigation here. As Lilla rightly notes, the choices of our own history in the West between what he calls theological liberalism and messianism are not the only options. Far from it, there is a model which reforms from within and gives believing people credible options that make sense within the logics of their own traditions.  This, Lilla argues is well represented in the Protestant Reformation:

The complacent liberalism and revolutionary messianism we’ve encountered are not the only theological options. There is another kind of transformation possible in biblical faiths, and that is the renewal of traditional political theology from within. If liberalizers are apologists for religion at the court of modern life, renovators stand firmly within their faith and reinterpret political theology so believers can adapt without feeling themselves to be apostates. Luther and Calvin were renovators in this sense, not liberalizers. They called Christians back to the fundamentals of their faith, but in a way that made it easier, not harder, to enjoy the fruits of temporal existence. They found theological reasons to reject the ideal of celibacy, and its frequent violation by priests, and thus returned the clergy to ordinary family life. They then found theological reasons to reject otherworldly monasticism and the all-too-worldly imperialism of Rome, offering biblical reasons that Christians should be loyal citizens of the state they live in. And they did this, not by speaking the apologetic language of toleration and progress, but by rewriting the language of Christian political theology and demanding that Christians be faithful to it.

I would only add that it is not necessary to maintain the language of fundamentals in religious traditions, and also that it is important to maintain a sense of reform throughout the life of a religious tradition. The Protestant Reformation was never designed to be a past event, but rather an ongoing journey and this is as important for its ecclesial attitudes as it is for its civic ones. This call to a third way or another option to explore for religious traditions today could not be more relevant nor poignant.  It not only applies to our understanding of the Western past, but also it's future, for Christian traditions must continue to reform and adjust in relation to their context in a spirit of authenticity and honesty about what Christianity is about and why it is beneficial to civic life.  So too, we must hope that a battle does not begin between liberal and conservative Muslims, but rather, that the scholars and leaders in that tradition can continue to reflect upon the logics of peace and good tolerant governance amidst religious diversity in a way which is consistent with its own history.