God and Man
Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics is a superb book of intellectual history. His recently published essay The Politics of God is another tour de force of historically informed understanding, connecting the controversies of our time to the patterns of the past. (I came to the essay from this thoughtful post.)
What I particularly admired about The Reckless Mind is Lilla’s capacity to penetrate without preaching which he displays again in The Politics of God. Indeed, precisely because he does not wield his own sense of status as a badge, he is able to understand and explain. Hobbes’ fearful reaction to the Wars of Religion, Rousseau’s attempt to both exult and tame the religious impulse, the failure of liberal theology (particularly the failure of liberal theology) the continuing power of the Messianic impulse are all laid out in a way both penetrating and lucid.
The liberal God is a stillborn God unable to inspire younger generations, for the more a biblical faith is trimmed to fit the demands of the moment, the fewer reasons it gives believers for holding on to that faith in troubled times, when self-appointed guardians of theological purity offer more radical hope. Worse still, when such a faith is used to bestow theological sanctification on a single form of political life - even an attractive one like liberal democracy - the more it will be seen as collaborating with injustice when that political system fails. The dynamics of political theology seem to dictate that when liberalizing reformers try to conform to the present, they inspire a countervailing and far more passionate longing for redemption in the messianic future. Lilla is not comforting, except in the sense of greater understanding provides some inherent comfort.
Tod Lindberg’s essay-also an extract from a new book-on Jesus as a political thinker, What the Beatitudes Teach though of interest is not of the same order of intellectual brilliance. But it does serve to illustrate a couple of Lilla’s points. First, the power of religious references. Secondly, the power of American religious exceptionalism. Lindberg clearly is quite unapologetic about looking to the Sermon on the Mount for political lessons: something any European sophisticate would no doubt immediately curl their lip over. Yet the essay is written with a tone of civilised calm that presumes the politics of discussion. A nice example of Lilla’s “American miracle” of intense religious belief being dealt with in a constitutional order.
What I particularly admired about The Reckless Mind is Lilla’s capacity to penetrate without preaching which he displays again in The Politics of God. Indeed, precisely because he does not wield his own sense of status as a badge, he is able to understand and explain. Hobbes’ fearful reaction to the Wars of Religion, Rousseau’s attempt to both exult and tame the religious impulse, the failure of liberal theology (particularly the failure of liberal theology) the continuing power of the Messianic impulse are all laid out in a way both penetrating and lucid.
The liberal God is a stillborn God unable to inspire younger generations, for the more a biblical faith is trimmed to fit the demands of the moment, the fewer reasons it gives believers for holding on to that faith in troubled times, when self-appointed guardians of theological purity offer more radical hope. Worse still, when such a faith is used to bestow theological sanctification on a single form of political life - even an attractive one like liberal democracy - the more it will be seen as collaborating with injustice when that political system fails. The dynamics of political theology seem to dictate that when liberalizing reformers try to conform to the present, they inspire a countervailing and far more passionate longing for redemption in the messianic future. Lilla is not comforting, except in the sense of greater understanding provides some inherent comfort.
Tod Lindberg’s essay-also an extract from a new book-on Jesus as a political thinker, What the Beatitudes Teach though of interest is not of the same order of intellectual brilliance. But it does serve to illustrate a couple of Lilla’s points. First, the power of religious references. Secondly, the power of American religious exceptionalism. Lindberg clearly is quite unapologetic about looking to the Sermon on the Mount for political lessons: something any European sophisticate would no doubt immediately curl their lip over. Yet the essay is written with a tone of civilised calm that presumes the politics of discussion. A nice example of Lilla’s “American miracle” of intense religious belief being dealt with in a constitutional order.