The Last Theocrats

In his controversial book, The Stillborn God , Mark Lilla suggests that nineteenth-century German liberalism attempted to raise political theology from the grave to which it had been consigned since Hobbes. Their political theology had little to recommend it. Charlotte Allen sums up in her Weekly Standard review: “The liberal experiment in equating one’s being a good Christian or Jew with being a productive citizen of secularized German society failed spectacularly in the trenches of World War I and the charnel house that was Europe during World War II . . . . Liberal religion could not resolve this conundrum: If that is all there is to Christianity or Judaism – no truth claims, no sovereign Lord – why bother professing either faith?”

Lilla describes liberalism in terms reminiscent of HR Niebuhr: “The God of the Old Testament moved mysteriously over the deep and called the nations to repentance; the liberal God shuffled methodically through human history, rearranging things as he went. The Jesus of the New Testament did not bring peace, but a sword; the liberal Jesus brought books and sheet music. The Christian Redeemer died on a cross; the liberal one survived as a good Burger reconciled to modern German life.”

According to Allen, Lilla’s argument is that “in resuscitating political theology, [liberals] opened a Pandora’s box out of which eventually flew all the evils of religious passion that Hobbes had identified and sought to suppress and that liberal Protestantism had deemed passe: messianic longings, eschatological violence, desire for immediate redemption, and so on.” In the face of massive counter-evidence (can you say Barth or Barman or Bonhoeffer?), Lilla claims that totalitarianism was a result of a backlash against liberalism and a “backsliding” into political theology.