Political Theologies

From time to time a writer cuts through confusing debates and polemics to expose the fundamental form of visions in conflict. This is a service that Daniel M. Bell, Jr. attempts to render with his essay “State and Civil Society” in a big book of thirty-five essays, The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, edited by Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh (Blackwell, 567 pages, $124.95). The book also includes outstanding essays by Jean Bethke Elshtain on St. Augustine, Bernd Wannenwetsch on the political significance of liturgy, Robert Jenson on eschatology and the hope for the human future, and an excellent introduction for American readers to the thought of the German theological philosopher Carl Schmitt, who it is said early in the last century first used the term “political theology” and employed it to devious ends during the Third Reich.

But it is to Daniel Bell’s suggestive—one might say provocative—argument that I will here attend. Bell is a Methodist who teaches at Lutheran Theology Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, and his subject is the “dominant” and “emergent” modes of political theology today. He locates the present writer and this magazine solidly in the dominant category, while his sympathies are strongly aligned with thinkers of the emergent mode such as Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, and Oliver O’Donovan. Both the dominant and emergent are modes of “political theology,” which is to say that they tell the Christian story (Bell calls it the Christian mythos) in a way that is inescapably related to the right ordering of human society. To cut to his conclusion, the dominant mode of political theology has led to “the political captivity of the Church” in service to the modern state, while the emergent mode posits the Church itself as the right ordering of human society. His steps, and missteps, toward that conclusion are instructive.

We must, Bell correctly insists, go back to a time before “state” and “civil society” assumed the modern forms that we tend to take for granted or view as inevitable. He claims that the dominant mode—whether in the form of political theology proper, Latin American liberation theology, or public theology (the last is where we come in)—assumes the givenness of the modern state and civil society. The emergent or “postmodern” mode of political theology, on the other hand, has a keener historical memory, knowing that in medieval Christendom “society was an organic whole, governed by two parallel and universal powers—the Pope and the Prince.” When “the state” appears in political discourse in the fourteenth century, it refers not to a bounded space ruled by princes rather than popes, “but rather to the state or condition of the temporal princes themselves.” In the modern era, “the state” refers to a centralized power with a monopoly on the use of coercive force within a defined territory. According to the conventional telling of the story, the modern state emerged from the “wars of religion” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “Horrified by the excesses of armed religious fervor, Europe developed a political order whereby religion would no longer have access to the weapons with which to work its woe. Henceforth, religion was construed as a private matter and the public, political realm was to be watched over by a sovereign and secular state charged with keeping the peace.”

A Public Church

That modern “settlement” was lucidly and very influentially defined by the German sociologist Max Weber. We inhabit, said Weber, various “life spheres,” each with its own laws and ethical functions, and such spheres, while distinct, interact in a complementary manner. “Weber noted that religion was principally about the task of furnishing ideals, whereas politics was fundamentally about the manipulation of means in order to attain not the ultimate end or ideal, but what was pragmatically possible.” Politics, Weber wrote, is about “the leadership, or the influencing of the leadership, of a political association, hence today, of a state.” The result is that politics is now about “statecraft,” the manipulation of state power. The dominant school of political theology is in basic agreement with Weber, Bell claims. The emergent school, on the other hand, points out that the wars of religion were not most importantly about religion. Catholics and Protestants frequently made alliances to fight other Catholics and Protestants. The phrase “wars of religion” is deeply prejudicial. The conflicts, writes Bell, “were in fact the birth pangs of the modern state as it struggled to break free of the remnants of the medieval order, as it strove to subsume all other social groupings under the sovereign authority.” “In particular, these conflicts were about the replacement of a public Church.” These are broad generalizations, which is to be expected in the kind of typology that Bell is attempting to construct. A problem begins to make its appearance in that I and some others whom he places in the “dominant” tradition have a very long record of opposing the monopolistic ambitions of the modern state and the privatizing of religion, and of adamantly insisting upon the public character of the Church.

Bell’s title is “State and Civil Society,” and the second is also crucial to his argument. We of the dominant school (allowing his term for the moment) are often great promoters of civil society as a force for, as Bell puts it, the “taming” of the Leviathan that is the state. We champion civil society—meaning the family, religious institutions, neighborhoods, and a host of voluntary associations—as a way of preserving spaces of freedom against the totalitarian impulses of the modern state. Peter Berger and I wrote of civil society in terms of “mediating institutions” in To Empower People (1976). The emergent school of political theology, writes Bell, sees these mediating institutions “in a decidedly less benign light.” Rather than being spaces of freedom, they are instruments of “discipline” in which people are trained to serve the modern state. Bell writes, “Through a vast array of disciplines, learned not at the hands of government officials and bureaucrats, but ‘voluntarily’ through the ministrations of experts, managers, and therapists, people ‘freely’ and gently and, for the most part, willingly find their place in the dominant mythos. As such an educative or disciplinary space, civil society is but another species of the power exerted by the state in its victory over the medieval public Church.” The placing of “voluntarily” and “freely” in quotes is telling. Readers of a certain age or literacy may recall Herbert Marcuse on the repressive tolerance of liberalism. In that view, parents who teach their children to be polite, work hard, and be civil to those with whom they disagree are, unwittingly, indoctrinating them into the mythos of the liberal state with its fine-tuned instruments of control.

Desacralized Politics

The political theology associated with the writings of Johann Baptist Metz, Jürgen Moltmann, and Dorothee Solle, beginning in the 1960s, “is forthrightly and enthusiastically a modern movement.” It assumes that the modern state should be the instrument of the changes required by justice, “while the Church’s political presence is reduced to that of a guardian of abstract values.” The idea that the Church should provide a concrete political program “is denounced as a pernicious form of ‘political religion’ from which modernity has rightly liberated us.” Likewise, Latin American liberation theologies “are adamant that there can be no return to the era of Christendom, when the Church directly wielded political power. . . . They, too, recognize the modern desacralization of politics as a victory in the march of freedom through history.” In short, they are good Weberians. As are those of us who espouse an alternative to political theology and liberation theology. “These theologians,” says Bell, “derive from Christianity a ‘public philosophy’ or ‘public theology’ capable of underwriting the moral consensus necessary to sustain the health and vitality of Western liberal society.” (Unlike, for instance, the Reformed theologian Max Stackhouse, whom Bell also criticizes, I have eschewed the term “public theology,” preferring “public philosophy,” believing that the former suggests a too easy move from revealed truth to partisan political application, and poses an unnecessary obstacle for self-consciously secular interlocutors. For much the same reason, and for the sake of the integrity of both theology and politics, I believe the phrase “political theology” should be used with caution.)

Thus, according to Bell, do we arrive at what he calls the political captivity of the Church. Herewith the indictment:

the perspective of the emergent tradition, the embrace of the modern mythos, with its account of politics as statecraft, by the dominant tradition is symptomatic of the political captivity of that tradition. An explanation of this charge begins with the politically reductionist nature of the dominant tradition. To suggest that the dominant tradition is politically reductionist is not to claim, as is frequently done, that political theology reduces faith to temporal, political matters and dismisses the transcendent-spiritual dimension of Christianity. Rather, the charge of political reductionism (ironically) pertains precisely to the ways the dominant tradition attempts to distance itself from the charge of reducing faith to politics. Whether it is Neuhaus’ eschatological prohibition of sanctifying any political order, Gutierrez’s condemnation of “politico-religious messianism,” or Metz’s and Moltmann’s abhorrence of “political religion,” the “general” or “indirect” role accorded the Church as a guardian of values reduces Christian political engagement to the options offered by the world, more specifically, by the regnant liberal order. This is to say, the dominant tradition conceives of Christian political engagement on the world’s terms . . . whether in its conservative or progressive modes.

In clear contrast to these Weberian theologians of politics as statecraft, Bell contends, is the emergent school of authentically Christian political theology. (Bell says that he does not use “emergent” to imply that they will at some point become dominant; he means only that they are emerging.) “The emergent finds the political correlate of the Christian mythos, not in the secular state and civil society, but in the Church. . . . Christian politics takes form in the distinct witness of the Church to Christ’s redemption of politics as the renewal of the friendship/communion of humanity in God.” The emergents, Bell argues, agree with Augustine’s City of God that human polities, being dominated by the lust for power, are but parodies of genuine community, that the true polity is the life of the Church centered in the eucharistic sacrifice of redemptive reconciliation. This does not mean a wholesale rejection of modernity. Oliver O’Donovan, for example, defends a form of early modernity in which statecraft serves the Church by enabling it to carry out its mission. Bell writes, “One should note that this is an instance, not of erecting the Church within the parameters of the modern mythos as the dominant tradition does, but of positioning the early modern state within the Christian mythos, with the result that social and political space is shared by the Church and a state for the sake of the Church’s mission.”

The aim of the emergent tradition, says Bell, “is not simply the replacement of a sovereign state with a hegemonic Church, but a political rendering of the claim that Christ is Lord.” To say that the Church is the exemplary form of human community “is first and foremost a claim that the meaning of all politics and every community flows from participation in Christ.” Rejecting the statecraft of the dominant tradition, the emergents favor “a distinctly theological politics founded on the conviction that God is active in history now bringing about a new age, the contours of which are discernible not in Western liberalism, democratic socialism, or the Pax Americana but in Christ, in the work of Christ’s Spirit as it gathers Christ’s body, the Church.” All the issues of ecclesiology, eschatology, and soteriology, writes Bell, can be summed up in one question: “What is the proper political correlate of the Christian mythos? Leviathan or the Body of Christ?”

Ecclesial Ambiguities

Daniel Bell’s vigorously asserted argument is a valuable contribution. I say that not because I agree with his typology of the “dominant” and “emergent” visions of political theology but because he so sharply depicts the alternatives that many believe to be on offer today. Stanley Hauerwas may not be, as Time magazine declares, America’s “best theologian,” but in seminaries and divinity schools, and more among Protestants than Catholics, he is perhaps the most influential. Hauerwas’ unremitting polemic against “liberalism” and all its works and all its pomps, including its practice in liberal democracy, has provided a generation of theology students with a way of thinking and feeling counterculturally that is respectable within the thoroughly liberal academy. His insistence upon the primacy of the community of the Church apparently does not require, for him or for others, actual membership in an ecclesial community that is in political tension or conflict with the culture of liberalism. Indeed, his countercultural posture is warmly celebrated by the culture he would presumably counter. (See Stephen H. Webb, “The Very American Stanley Hauerwas,” FT June/July 2002.)

To his credit, Hauerwas has sometimes acknowledged a certain “ambiguity” in his ecclesial placement. He speaks admiringly of the Mennonite tradition of his mentor John Howard Yoder, and also of certain communities of radical discipleship in Catholicism, but he remains personally associated with the liberal United Methodist Church while pursuing his eccentric and highly effective vocation as a theological freelancer within his primary community of engagement, the liberal academy. Hauerwas is aware of the seeming incongruity, if not incoherence, of being a tenured radical and prophet with prestige and pension plan secured by the liberal establishment against which he rails. The oddity of his position, it should be noted, does not detract from the contributions he has made to Christian ethics in areas such as medical care and the centrality of the virtues. Contra Daniel Bell, however, these contributions have not been in political theology. As is evident in exchanges with Hauerwas also in these pages, he insists upon a Christianly-mandated position of absolute pacifism while, at the same time, claiming a role as moral instructor in the exercise of what Bell calls “statecraft” when it comes to how the state should employ force. Despite these and other dissonances in his arguments, there is no doubt that Hauerwas is a champion of the “emergent” tradition described by Bell. (Remembering, as Bell specifies, that “emergent” does not mean that it will come to prevail.)

John Milbank’s project of “radical orthodoxy” has caught the imagination of some intellectuals with its pyrotechnic display of erudition and neologistic agility in smiting, hip and thigh, “objectivity,” “neutrality,” “rationality,” and other dragons in league with the Antichrist that is “modernity.” In Theology and Social Theory Milbank interestingly seeks to liberate the “master discourse” of theology from its sociological captivities. But one has to wonder whether he offers anything that is plausibly described as an alternative political theology. His explicitly political assertions are typically ad hoc judgments and rambling obiter dicta, usually in the mode of familiar leftisms. He draws, as many leftists do, on the aforementioned Carl Schmitt to explain why “American neo-Roman imperialism” needs an enemy and has therefore invented a war on terrorism to ward off challenges to its “nakedly capitalist” hegemony. To defend against challenges to U.S. imperialism, George W. Bush has chosen the “terrifying” expedient of declaring “for the first time perhaps since Hitler’s announcement of the Third Reich, a kind of state of perpetual emergency.” Guarding against extremism, Milbank reserves judgment on whether the U.S. had a hand in the September 11 attacks that became a convenient excuse for its desired war on terrorism.

Theocratic propensities, says Milbank, are not limited to Islam. “In many ways theocratic notions are specifically modern in their positivity and formality (as Carl Schmitt indicated). Bush in a crisis has appealed to the supposed divine destiny of America, and it is modern Judaism that has lapsed into a statist, Zionist form.” “At the very center of this strange and multiple conflict stands oil,” Milbank asserts. America’s long history of the “disguised sacralization of violence” goes back to the treatment of Native Americans and the “British loyalists” during the War of Independence. (As a Brit, Milbank seems to have a special sympathy for the loyalists.) “Cumulatively, this reveals the relatively genocidal tendency of specifically Republican imperialism . . . and it amounts to an atrocity almost on the level with the Holocaust and the Gulags.” The “relatively” and “almost” are, I suppose, intended to suggest nuance.

The thoughtful reader, when confronted by such dubious judgments, may think twice about investing much effort in decoding the elusive logic or theologic that produced them. The elements of possible service in “radical orthodoxy” must be patiently mined from a vast deposit of radical posturing. The yield for anything like a political theology will, I expect, be limited to nuggets of “counter-intuitive insights” in dissertations by doctoral students enamored of Chomskyesque enthusiasms displayed under the variegated banners of a postmodernism that is, according to Milbank, a radical critique of the postmodernisms in reaction to postmodernity. It is not that John Milbank does not have a positive vision of an alternative future. He writes:

Such a common vision would eschew all idolizations of formal power, whether in the case of individual “rights” or of absolute state sovereignty. Instead it would trust that human wisdom can intimate, imperfectly but truly, something of an eternal order of justice: the divine rapports of Malebranche and Cudworth. A shared overarching global polity would embody this intimation in continuously revisable structures dedicated to promoting the common good insofar as this can be agreed upon. It would also embody this imperfection through the maximum possible dispersal and deflection of human power.

Ah yes, Malebranche and Cudworth. Of course. It is, I suppose, a kind of United Nations redesigned by philosophers attuned to the seventeenth-century “occasionalism” of Nicolas Malebranche and the insights of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, to whom Ralph Waldo Emerson was indebted for his confidence in the infallibility of his intuition. Sin, Milbank suggests, is our failure to realize our wonderful powers in reconciled community. Were his vision adopted, writes Milbank, “perhaps then we would cease to sacrifice the substantively particular to the generally vacuous, ensuring that there was no need for the particular to incite in response the suicidal sacrifice of everything, forever.” Vacuous is a word that does leap to mind. The interesting thing relative to Daniel Bell’s argument, however, is that Milbank’s proposal is precisely an exercise in “statecraft.” Admittedly it is not serious statecraft, since it is unrelated to any existent or available structures of power with their attendant possibilities and responsibilities. That being noted, I am sure there is much to be said for a world order with the maximum possible dispersal and deflection of human power, especially when power is in the hands of bad guys. Milbank’s proposal, however, is not a very helpful contribution to political thought or practice, never mind to political theology. As for Bell’s idea of the Church as the “political correlate” of the Christian mythos, Milbank’s Church, unless it is in fact the fellowship of academic theologians, remains for the most part invisible. In Milbank’s The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture, the annoyingly unremitting rant against the most obvious visible candidate for the role of a sacramental “contrast community” that signals the world’s redemption, namely, the Catholic Church, seems to be mainly a product of deep-seated personal prejudice.

Facing Up to Disorder

In Bonds of Imperfection, Joan Lockwood O’Donovan (Oliver is her husband) has written incisively about similarities between Milbank and Erasmus. “He, like Erasmus, conceives the redemption of society in terms of communicating participation in the perfections of Jesus Christ who is the final exemplar of the good and the beautiful.” Each in ways pertinent to his times disdains the natural law tradition in its various forms; each fails to distinguish between the goods of human community and their disordered condition; and each neglects the providential structures of political authority with their laws and necessary recourse to coercion. Erasmus and Milbank are both high rhetoricians who suggest that the world will be saved by rhetoric, by what Milbank depicts as the divine-human “poesis” of the Word Incarnate. Joan O’Donovan concludes with the observation that Milbank is a more sophisticated philosopher than Erasmus, but his postmodernist efforts to liberate the christocentric “master discourse” from its captivity to modernity inclines him to “making of poetics yet another philosophical foundation for Christian pedagogy. Succumbing to this temptation would lend an ominous finality to any other theological and methodological weaknesses.” The other weaknesses are, as I have suggested, severe. All that having been said, however, one can appreciate why Milbank’s rhetorically debonair dismissal of every constraint of moral “realism,” combined with the apparent radicality of his ad hoc political and ecclesial judgments, makes an intoxicating brew for graduate students who have been recruited to the total war against the Antichrist that is modernity and its bastard offspring that is liberalism.

Daniel Bell’s third champion of the emergent tradition, Oliver O’Donovan, is of an entirely different order. His work, and especially his The Desire of the Nations, has received extended and respectful attention in these pages (see, for instance, Gilbert Meilaender’s review essay in FT November 1997). We were also pleased to have O’Donovan deliver our Erasmus Lecture of 1998. His is a bracingly bold and comprehensive proposal advanced with careful, even elegant, argumentation, inviting us to rethink the lordship of Christ in the historical form of what is routinely and mistakenly maligned as Christendom. While this is not the place to summarize O’Donovan’s project, the mandate of this journal and my own work are in strong sympathy with O’Donovan’s invitation to rethink Augustine’s two cities, based on two loves, for our time. The promise to Israel and the coming of the Kingdom in Jesus Christ are emphatically public claims, and the efforts of political modernity to relegate that claim to the sphere of the private and “religious” must be sharply challenged. Christian fidelity relentlessly contends against what has been called the naked public square. To this end, says O’Donovan, the state must be kept “humble” and “minimally coercive,” as befits the “desacralization of politics.” These and other arguments pressed by O’Donovan are consonant with the tradition of political liberalism that carefully distinguishes between state and society, with both under the lordship of Christ. Liberal democracy, like all politics, is prone to the temptations of self-aggrandizement, indeed of self-sacralization, which is idolatry. Against such temptations, and in order to propose a more excellent way, the Church faithfully contends, until that time when, in the words of St. Paul, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess the lordship of Jesus Christ, who is “the desire of the nations.”

The First Political Task

In 1981, I wrote the founding statement of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. That statement, “Christianity and Democracy,” has been often reprinted and its opening lines are responsive to the claims of Daniel Bell’s proposed typology of political theologies. The statement begins with this:

Jesus Christ is Lord. That is the first and final assertion Christians make about all of reality, including politics. Believers now assert by faith what one day will be manifest to the sight of all: every earthly sovereignty is subordinate to the sovereignty of Jesus Christ. The Church is the bearer of that claim. Because the Church is pledged to the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, it must maintain a critical distance from all the kingdoms of the world, whether actual or proposed. Christians betray their Lord if, in theory or practice, they equate the Kingdom of God with any political, social, or economic order of this passing time. At best, such orders permit the proclamation of the Gospel of the Kingdom and approximate, in small part, the freedom, peace, and justice for which we hope.

The statement then goes on to affirm that the first political task of the Church is to be the Church, and to suggest what that might mean for the right ordering of the saeculum, the politics of the present time. Although it was written during the Cold War and was in large part a defense of liberal democracy against the communist totalitarianism of the time, there is little in the argument of “Christianity and Democracy” that I would now change. Daniel Bell and others may view the statement as an exercise in “statecraft,” an instance of letting the world define the terms of politics, of subordinating the “master discourse” of the gospel to “the principalities and powers of the present time.” The same charge is made against the other two parties of what Bell calls the dominant tradition: the political theology of Metz, et al., and the liberationist theology of Gutierrez, et al. As unsympathetic as I am to the leftist and frequently Marxist presuppositions of those two parties, they have not, I think, abandoned the lordship of Christ or the priority of allegiance to the society that is the Church. What Bell condemns as engaging in “statecraft” is no more than accepting one’s placement in a particular moment of history and making a decision for political possibilities most approximately congruent with, or least in conflict with, the lordship of Christ. For the ministry of the Church, moreover, this is also a pastoral responsibility in providing support and guidance for her members who are, as is frequently the case, in positions of political responsibility. In making such decisions, one is ever aware that all politics, indeed all history, is encompassed in the certain but not always evident course of the coming of the Kingdom of God. The coming of the Kingdom is, in Robert Jenson’s fine phrase, “the story of the world.”

The final question, writes Bell, is: “What is the proper political correlate of the Christian mythos? Leviathan or the Body of Christ?” That is, I suggest, an unfortunate muddling of the matter. As St. Augustine understood, the Church is not a political correlate of the gospel but a distinct society that is integral to the gospel. The political correlate is the politics by which the Church is confronted in the course of her sojourn through history. As for Bell’s three champions of the emergent tradition, neither Stanley Hauerwas nor John Milbank has or envisions an empirical Church capable of constituting a polity in critical distinction from the polities of the world. Moreover, Hauerwas’ absolute pacifism precludes—his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding—his effective engagement in the moral deliberation about the use of coercion, which is an inescapable component of all earthly polities. Milbank’s political proposals, as distinct from his interesting theoretical and rhetorical contributions, are little more than a grab bag of prejudices, usually of a conventionally leftist sort. By way of sharpest contrast, and despite differences we may have in specific political or ecclesial judgments, Oliver O’Donovan is clearly in the tradition of Augustine, exploring in the midst of the turbulences of history the relationship between the City of God and the city of man most approximately faithful to the sovereignty of Christ, in confident anticipation of the time when that sovereignty is no longer disputed.

Daniel Bell means no compliment when he says that I represent the dominant tradition. The fact is, however, that the exercise of what he pejoratively calls statecraft—and what Stanley Hauerwas, in a nicely honed but fatuous phrase, derides as “doing ethics for Caesar”—is a difficult and distinctly minority enterprise. The liberal democracy that one would defend is so very unsatisfactory. But it is the least unsatisfactory of options on offer. Everything short of the Kingdom is so painfully unsatisfactory. In the eucharistic canon we pray, “Strengthen in faith and love your pilgrim Church on earth.” For those strengthened in faith and love, there is no alternative to that Church on pilgrimage, confusedly and ambiguously engaged with the polities of the saeculum, while, all along the way, celebrating the Real Presence of that city whose temple, according to Revelation 21, is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb, and through whose gates shall be brought the glory and the honor of the nations. That is the political theology entailed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. In Christian history and among Christian thinkers today, that theology is sometimes emergent, frequently obscured, but never securely dominant. Short of the Kingdom, there is and will be too much in the world that contradicts the story of the world. The truth of the story will be vindicated beyond doubt or dispute only in retrospect of the final fulfillment of the promise that it proclaims.