Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Friday, July 9, 2021

Process Theology & Natural Theology: Resources and Information

I hope to keep adding to this subject in the months and years ahead but as a recap there are several recent articles I wrote as introductions to the physics areas of EM/QED. In those intros I speak to why process theology goes so well with today's scientific outlooks and how process philosophy is becoming a foundation for the new cosmologies, metaphysics, and even ethics of the world. I will leave these links here immediately below. In the remainder of this post will be found a link to the Center of Process Studies (above at the emblem), several books on the subject, and brief historical reviews of the church's several positions it has taken over the past centuries in the area of natural theology. Enjoy.

R.E. Slater
July 9, 2021
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Natural Theology from a Process Perspective
(recent introductions to scientific articles)

Friday, July 2, 2021

Thursday, July 1, 2021

Thursday, July 1, 2021


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Amazon Link

A Christian Natural Theology, Second Edition:
Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead

by John B. Cobb Jr. (Author)
Paperback – September 19, 2007

John B. Cobb, Jr., Ph.D. is Professor of Theology Emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, California, and Co-Director of the Center for Process Studies there. His many books currently in print include: Reclaiming the Church (1997); with Herman Daly, For the Common Good; Becoming a Thinking Christian (1993); Sustainability (1992); Can Christ Become Good News Again? (1991); ed. with Christopher Ives, The Emptying God: a Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation (1990); with Charles Birch, The Liberation of Life; and with David Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (1977). He is a retired minister in the United Methodist Church. His email address is cobbj@cgu.edu..

Published by Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1965. Used by permission. This book was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.

When the first edition of A Christian Natural Theology appeared in 1965, it was a groundbreaking work that incorporated Alfred North Whitehead's metaphysical philosophy as a framework for developing a Christian natural theology. The work was so significant it helped to launch process theology as a leading alternative to neo-orthodox theology and has since become a classic in the literature of process theology. This new edition by one of America's preeminent theologians is an essential work for all those interested in process theology.

SUMMARY
There is a need for a Christian natural theology. To John Cobb, the philosophy of Albert North Whitehead provides the best basis for one, and Dr. Cobb provides a such a systematic theology in this important book.

Preface
There is a place for a less rigorous and more personal explanation for the reopening of the work of natural theology and specifically for the appeal of Whitehead.

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Whitehead’s Philosophy
An introduction to Whitehead’s perspective and a clue as to the meaning of some of his essential terms.

Chapter 2: The Human Soul
A number of features of Whitehead’s doctrine of man that have bearing upon theological anthropology — the nature of humankind.

Chapter 3: Man as Responsible Being
A summary of the major features of the value theory as developed by Whitehead. Also reflections on the specifically ethical situation of man that goes beyond anything to be found in Whitehead.

Chapter 4: Whitehead’s Doctrine of God
The development of the thought about God in Whitehead. His methodology is discussed descriptively rather than critically.

Chapter 5: A Whiteheadian Doctrine of God
Systematic problems and developing solutions as raised by Whitehead are discussed, but with some points which lead to conclusions definitely not accepted by Whitehead.

Chapter 6: Religion
An attempt to understand religion in Whiteheadian terms along with how his own philosophy can account for types of religious experience not reflected upon by Whitehead himself. “Here too,” Cobb states, “to the best of my knowledge, I am breaking new ground.”

Chapter 7: The Theological Task
An attempt to explicate that understanding of theology and its problematic nature which underlies this whole book, and Cobb’s own understanding of the nature of philosophy and theology. The reader with strongly methodological interests may wish to turn to this chapter before he reads the first six.


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Amazon Link

The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology
(Oxford Handbooks) Reprint Edition

by Russell Re Manning (Author, Editor),
John Hedley Brooke (Contributor),
Fraser Watts (Contributor)

Contents

Introduction Russell Re Manning

Historical Perspectives on Natural Theology

Theological Perspectives On Natural Theology

Philosophical Perspectives on Natural Theology
Process thought refers to the mode of thinking rooted in the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000). Drawing heavily on Whitehead and Hartshorne, this chapter presents an account of process natural theology. The discussions cover the decline of natural theology's reputation in modern times; process theology in the broad sense; panexperientialism's avoidance of materialism's mind–body problems; sensationism's knowledge problems; how prehensive perception solves sensationism's knowledge problems; and process theology in the narrow sense.
David Ray Griffin is professor of philosophy of religion and theology, emeritus, at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, where he remains one of the co-directors of the Center for Process Studies. His thirty-two books include Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts (2000), Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (2001), Two Great Truths: A New Synthesis of Scientific Naturalism and Christian Faith (2004), Deep Religious Pluralism (ed., 2005), and Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy (2007).

Scientific Perspectives on Natural Theology

Perspectives on Natural Theology From the Arts

End Matter


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Transcripts of four Morse lectures given
at Union Theological seminary in 1964.

Charles Hartshorne was educated at Harvard University, where he coedited with Paul Weiss the first six volumes of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931--36) and became associated with Alfred North Whitehead. He has taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Emory University, and the University of Texas-Austin. Hartshorne is the undisputed leader in the development of process philosophy and theology since the death of Whitehead. A consummate metaphysician, Hartshorne has resurrected the ontological argument for the existence of God, reframing it in terms of contemporary modal logic. He has espoused a doctrine of panpsychism, according to which mind (with feeling) permeates all things, and has defended the compatibility of this doctrine with contemporary physics. A panentheist, Hartshorne has proposed a complex theory of God, which views divinity as a relative, processional kind of being, with an abstract eternal nature and a concrete nature subject to change and suffering. He has presented his process theology in his widely read book The Divine Relativity. In addition to his labors as teacher and philosophical author, Hartshorne is an avid birdwatcher and has written a prizewinning book, Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song.


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Amazon Link

Contemporary Arguments in Natural Theology
God and Rational Belief


In recent years there has been a bold revival in the field of natural theology, where “natural theology” can be understood as the attempt to demonstrate that God exists by way of reason, evidence, and argument without the appeal to divine revelation. Today's practitioners of natural theology have not only revived and recast all of the traditional arguments in the field, but, by drawing upon the findings of contemporary cosmology, chemistry, and biology, have also developed a range of fascinating new ones.

Contemporary Arguments in Natural Theology brings together eighteen experts working in the field today. Together, they practice natural theology from a wide range of perspectives, and show how the field of natural theology is practiced today with a degree of diversity and confidence not seen since the Middle Ages. Aimed primarily at advanced undergraduates and graduate students, the volume will also be of interest to researchers in philosophy, theology, biblical studies, and religious studies, as an indispensable resource on contemporary theistic proofs.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Colin Ruloff and Peter Horban

1. The Argument from Contingency, Joshua Rasmussen
2. The Kalam Cosmological Argument, Andrew Loke
3. The Fine-tuning Argument, Michael Rota
4. The Ontological Argument, Jason Megill
5. The Moral Argument, CS Evans and Trinity O'Neill
6. The Argument from Phenomenal Consciousness, JP Moreland
7. The Biochemical Argument, Michael Behe
8. The Argument from Information, Stephen Meyer
9. The Argument from Beauty, Brian Ribeiro
10. The Argument from Desire, William A. Lauringer
11. The Argument from Religious Experience, Kai-man Kwan
12. The Conceptualist Argument, Greg Welty
13. The Argument from Common Consent, Jonathan Matheson
14. The Argument from Mathematics, William Lane Craig
15. The Wager Argument, Joshua Golding
16. The Argument from the Meaning of Life, Stewart Goetz
17. The Argument from Ramified Natural Theology, Sandra Menssen and Thomas D. Sullivan



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Note: Because Alister McGrath approaches Natural Theology in a very conventional way, he consequently follows the traditional church approach steeped in Western philosophical modernism with all the cautions and care a classical theology might consider. I offer his authorial work as a good surmise of the evangelical church's position as a healthy comparison to the perspectives above, some of which utilize the Process philosophical approach via process theology and the postmodernistic quantum sciences. - re slater



Amazon Link


Re-Imagining Nature:
The Promise of a Christian Natural Theology
by Alister E. McGrath
Reimagining Nature is a new introduction to the fast developing area of natural theology, written by one of the world’s leading theologians. The text engages in serious theological dialogue whilst looking at how past developments might illuminate and inform theory and practice in the present.

This text sets out to explore what a properly Christian approach to natural theology might look like and how this relates to alternative interpretations of our experience of the natural world.

Alister McGrath is ideally placed to write the book as one of the world’s best known theologians and a chief proponent of natural theology.

This new work offers an account of the development of natural theology throughout history and informs of its likely contribution in the present.

This feeds in current debates about the relationship between science and religion, and religion and the humanities.

Engages in serious theological dialogue, primarily with Augustine, Aquinas, Barth and Brunner, and includes the work of natural scientists, philosophers of science, and poets.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alister McGrath is currently Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford; he was previously Professor of Theology and Education at King’s College, London. He is regarded as one of the world’s leading Protestant theologians and is the author of some of the world’s most widely used theological textbooks, including the bestselling Science and Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Christianity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), Christian Theology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), and The Christian Theology Reader, (5th edition, 2016). He is in constant demand as a speaker at conferences throughout the world, especially in Southeast Asia.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

1 Natural Theology: Questions of Definition and Scope 6
  • The Aim of This Work 8
  • A Brief Genealogy of Natural Theology 11
  • Natural Theology: Six Approaches 18
  • The Natural Theology Project: Thick and Thin Descriptions 22
  • In Defense of a “Christian” Natural Theology Project 25
  • The Christian Accommodation of Classic Natural Theology 35

2 Natural Theology and the Christian Imaginarium 41
  • Sensorium and Imaginarium: Christianity and the Re-Imagination of Nature 42
  • Modernity and the Suppression of the Imagination 47
  • Metanoia: Seeing Things as They Really Are 50
  • Imaginative Transformation: The Church as an Interpretive Community 55
  • Theoria: Imaginative Beholding and Rational Dissection 57
  • Nature as logikos: Reflections on the Doctrine of Creation 61
  • Metaphors of Beauty and Order: Harmony and the Dance 66

3 Text, Image, and Sign: On Framing the Natural World 69
  • Natural Theology as a Habitus 69
  • The Intellectual Challenge of the Ambiguity of the World 73
  • Nature as a Text: Natural Theology and the Book of Nature 78
  • Nature as Image: Natural Theology and Landscapes 87
  • Nature as a Sign: Natural Theology and Semiotics 93

4 Natural Theology: Contexts and Motivations 101
  • The Importance of Cultural Location for Natural Theology 101
  • A New Vocational Space: Natural Theology as a Religious Calling 105
  • The Wasteland: Natural Theology and the Recovery of a Lost Nature 107
  • Wonder and Mystery: Transcendent Experiences 110
  • Re-Enchantment: Sustaining a Sense of Wonder 113
  • The Rational Transparency of Nature and Faith 116
  • Connectedness: The Human Longing for Coherence 120
  • Meaning: Nature and Ultimate Questions 122
  • Natural Theology as a “Natural” Quest 124

5 Natural Theology: Some Concerns and Challenges 128
  • Natural Theology: Improper and Redundant? 128
  • Ontotheology? Natural Theology and Philosophical “First Principles” 133
  • David Hume: The Intellectual Inadequacy of a Deist Natural Theology 135
  • Charles Taylor: Natural Theology and the “Immanent Frame” 138
  • Barth and Brunner: The Debate which Discredited Natural Theology? 144
  • Fideism: Natural Theology as Self-Referential and Self-Justifying? 149

6 The Promise of a Christian Natural Theology 154
  • The Natural Sciences: Natural Theology and the Subversion of Scientism 156
  • The Affective Imagination: Natural Theology and the Spirituality of Nature 163
  • Boundaries and Trespass: Natural Theology and Systematic Theology 168
  • Apologetics: Natural Theology and Public Engagement 173

Conclusion 181

Bibliography 184

Index 240


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Image courtesy of Wellcome Library, London


[Precedents to Classical] Natural Theology


Natural Theology was an important school of thought during the 19th century. The term refers to the belief that God can be approached through observation of the natural world and the use of reason, rather than exclusively through faith in revealed religion.

Its classic statement was by the English Reverend William Paley, whose 1802 book was used at universities and colleges in Britain and the United States. Paley thought that the beauty and order of the world were proof that there was a single Designer behind all of life. It was Paley who used the image of the so-called "Watchmaker God". If we look at a watch, we perceive . . . that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, or placed after any other manner or in any other order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. . . . the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker – that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use.

Therefore, according to Paley, only an Intelligent Designer could have created the world of plants, animals, and people. Charles Darwin studied Paley’s book while a student at Cambridge University, as did students at Oxford, Edinburgh, Yale, and Amherst College. While Darwin was impressed with the argument, he was also troubled by it: Why would a loving God allow so much waste, pain, and cruelty in His designs? Why did so many young animals die, with only the stronger siblings surviving? Why were there so many seeds that never came to fruition?

The idea of Intelligent Design has come back into public discourse in the United States today, particularly in the context of public education.



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[Classical] Natural theology

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This article is about the branch of theology. For the 19th-century book by William Paley, see Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity.
Natural theology, once also termed physico-theology,[1] is a type of theology that provides arguments for the existence of God based on reason and ordinary experience of nature.[2]

This distinguishes it from revealed theology, which is based on scripture and/or religious experiences, also from transcendental theology, which is based on a priori reasoning. It is thus a type of philosophy, with the aim of explaining the nature of the gods, or of one supreme God. For monotheistic religions, this principally involves arguments about the attributes or non-attributes of God, and especially the existence of God, using arguments that do not involve recourse to supernatural revelation.[3][4]

The ideals of natural theology can be traced back to the Old Testament and Greek philosophy.[5] Early sources evident of these ideals come from Jeremiah and The Wisdom of Solomon (c. 50 BC)[5][6] and Plato's dialogue Timaeus (c. 360 BC).[7]

Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE) established a distinction between political theology (the social functions of religion), natural theology and mythical theology. His terminology became part of the Stoic tradition and then Christianity through Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas.

Ancient Greece

Besides Hesiod's Works and Days and Zarathushtra's GathasPlato gives the earliest surviving account of a natural theology. In the Timaeus, written c. 360 BCE, we read: "We must first investigate concerning [the whole Cosmos] that primary question which has to be investigated at the outset in every case, — namely, whether it has always existed, having no beginning or generation, or whether it has come into existence, having begun from some beginning."[7] In the Laws, in answer to the question as to what arguments justify faith in the gods, Plato affirms: "One is our dogma about the soul...the other is our dogma concerning the ordering of the motion of the stars".[8]

Ancient Rome

Varro (Marcus Terentius Varro) in his (lost) Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum (Antiquities of Human and Divine Things, 1st century BCE)[9] established a distinction between three kinds of theology: civil (political) (theologia civilis), natural (physical) (theologia naturalis) and mythical (theologia mythica). The theologians of civil theology are "the people", asking how the gods relate to daily life and the state (imperial cult). The theologians of natural theology are the philosophers, asking about the nature of the gods, and the theologians of mythical theology are the poets, crafting mythology.[10]

Middle ages

From the 8th century CE, the Mutazilite school of Islam, compelled to defend their principles against the orthodox Islam of their day, used philosophy for support, and were among the first to pursue a rational Islamic theology, termed Ilm-al-Kalam (scholastic theology). The teleological argument was later presented by the early Islamic philosophers Alkindus and Averroes, while Avicenna presented both the cosmological argument and the ontological argument in The Book of Healing (1027).[11]

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225 – 1274) presented several versions of the cosmological argument in his Summa Theologica, and of the teleological argument in his Summa contra Gentiles. He presented the ontological argument, but rejected it in favor of proofs that invoke cause and effect alone.[12][13] His quinque viae ("five ways") in those books attempted to demonstrate the existence of God in different ways, including (as way No. 5) the goal-directed actions seen in nature.[14]

Early modern onward

William Paley, publisher of Natural Theology

Raymond of Sabunde's (c. 1385–1436) Theologia Naturalis sive Liber Creaturarum, written 1434–1436, but published posthumously (1484), marks an important stage in the history of natural theology.

John Ray (1627–1705) also known as John Wray, was an English naturalist, sometimes referred to as the father of English natural history. He published important works on plantsanimals, and natural theology, with the objective "to illustrate the glory of God in the knowledge of the works of nature or creation".[15]

Title page of Natural Theology by William Paley

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) established another term for natural theology as theodicy, defined exactly as "the justification of God".[16] He viewed the science in a positive light as it supported his personal ethical belief system.[17]

William Derham (1657–1735) continued Ray's tradition of natural theology in two of his own works, Physico-Theology, published during 1713, and Astro-Theology, 1714. These later influenced the work of William Paley.[18]

In An Essay on the Principle of Population, published during 1798, Thomas Malthus ended with two chapters on natural theology and population. Malthus—a devout Christian—argued that revelation would "damp the soaring wings of intellect", and thus never let "the difficulties and doubts of parts of the scripture" interfere with his work.

William Paley, an important influence on Charles Darwin,[19] gave a well-known rendition of the teleological argument for God. During 1802 he published Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature.[20] In this he described the Watchmaker analogy, for which he is probably best known. However, his book, which was one of the most published books of the 19th and 20th century, presents a number of teleological and cosmological arguments for the existence of God. The book served as a template for many subsequent natural theologies during the 19th century.[21]

Professor of chemistry and natural history, Edward Hitchcock also studied and wrote on natural theology. He attempted to unify and reconcile science and religion, emphasizing geology. His major work of this type was The Religion of Geology and its Connected Sciences (1851).[22]

The Gifford Lectures were established by the will of Adam Lord Gifford to "promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term—in other words, the knowledge of God." The term natural theology as used by Gifford means theology supported by science and not dependent on the miraculous.[23]

William Lane Craig (1949-present) continues to show further interest in natural theology via his ongoing work at Houston Baptist University and Talbot School of Theology. Specifically, he explores through his work, exactly what natural theology has evolved into, in more modern terms.[24]

Bridgewater Treatises

Debates over the applicability of teleology to scientific questions continued during the nineteenth century, as Paley's argument about design conflicted with radical new theories on the transmutation of species. In order to support the scientific ideas of the time, which explored the natural world within Paley's framework of a divine designer, Francis Henry Egerton, 8th Earl of Bridgewater, a gentleman naturalist, commissioned eight Bridgewater Treatises upon his deathbed to explore "the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation."[25] They were published first during the years 1833 to 1840, and afterwards in Bohn's Scientific Library. The treatises are:

  1. The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Condition of Man, by Thomas Chalmers, D. D.
  2. On The Adaptation of External Nature to the Physical Condition of Man, by John Kidd, M. D.
  3. Astronomy and General Physics considered with reference to Natural Theology, by William Whewell, D. D.
  4. The hand, its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as evincing Design, by Sir Charles Bell.
  5. Animal and Vegetable Physiology considered with reference to Natural Theology, by Peter Mark Roget.
  6. Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, by William Buckland, D.D.
  7. On the History, Habits and Instincts of Animals, by William Kirby.
  8. Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Function of Digestion, considered with reference to Natural Theology, by William Prout, M.D.

In response to the claim in Whewell's treatise that "We may thus, with the greatest propriety, deny to the mechanical philosophers and mathematicians of recent times any authority with regard to their views of the administration of the universe", Charles Babbage published what he termed The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, A Fragment.[26] As his preface states, this volume was not part of that series, but rather his own considerations of the subject. He draws on his own work on calculating engines to consider God as a divine programmer setting complex laws as the basis of what we think of as miracles, rather than miraculously producing new species by creative whim. There was also a fragmentary supplement to this, published posthumously by Thomas Hill.[27]

The theology of the Bridgewater Treatises was often disputed, given that it assumed humans could have knowledge of God acquired by observation and reasoning without the aid of revealed knowledge.[28]

The works are of unequal merit; several of them were esteemed as apologetic literature, but they attracted considerable criticism. One notable critic of the Bridgewater Treatises was Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote Criticism.[29] Robert Knox, an Edinburgh surgeon and major advocate of radical morphology, referred to them as the "Bilgewater Treatises", to mock the "ultra-teleological school". Though memorable, this phrase overemphasizes the influence of teleology in the series, at the expense of the idealism of the likes of Kirby and Roget.[30]

Criticisms of natural theology

The ideals of natural theology did not come without criticism. Many opposed the idea of natural theology but some philosophers had larger influences on the population. The ideals became widely discredited under the influences of David HumeImmanuel KantSøren Kierkegaard, and Charles DarwinKarl Barth's Church Dogmatics also heavily opposed the entirety of natural theology.[31]

David Hume's Dialogue's Concerning Natural Religion played a major role in Hume's standpoint on natural theology. Hume's ideas heavily stem from the idea of natural belief.[32] It was stated that, "Hume's doctrine of natural belief allows that certain beliefs are justifiably held by all men without regard to the quality of the evidence which may be produced in their favour".[32] However, Hume's argument also stems from the design argument.[33] The design argument comes from people being labeled as morally good or evil.[33] Hume's argument claims that if we restrict ourselves to the idea of good and evil, that we must also assign this to the designer as well.[33] Hume states, "I will allow that pain or misery in man is compatible with infinite power and goodness in the Deity...A mere possible compatibility is not sufficient. You must prove these pure, unmixt, and uncontrollable attributes...".[33] Hume argues for the idea of a morally perfect deity and requires evidence for anything besides that.[33] Hume's arguments against natural theology had a wide influence on many philosophers.[34]

Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard both had similar ideals when it came to natural theology.[35] Kant's ideals focused more on the natural dialect of reason while Kierkegaard focused more heavily on the dialect of understanding.[35] Both men suggest that, "the natural dialect leads to the question of God".[35] Kant heavily argues for the idea that reason leads to the ideas of God as a regular principle.[35] Kierkegaard heavily argues that the idea of understanding will ultimately lead itself to becoming faith. [36]Both of these men argue that the idea of God cannot solely exist on the idea of reason, that the dialect and ideals will transcend into faith.[35]

Charles Darwin's criticism on the theory had a broader impact on scientists and commoners.[34] Darwin's theories showed that humans and animals developed through an evolutionary process. The idea of this argued that a chemical reaction was occurring, but, it had no influence from the idea of God.[34] However, Darwin's ideas did not erase the question of how the original ideas of matter came to be.[34]

Karl Barth opposed the entirety of natural theology. Barth argued that "by starting from such experience, rather that from the gracious revelation through Jesus Christ, we produce a concept of God that is the projection of the highest we know, a construct of human thinking, divorced from salvation history".[31] Barth argues that God is restricted by the construct of human thinking if He is divorced from salvation. [37] Barth also acknowledges that God is knowledgeable because of His grace. Barth's argument stems from the idea of faith rather than reason.[37]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Physicotheology | Encyclopedia.com"www.encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 9 October 2020.
  2. ^ Chignell, Andrew; Pereboom, Derk (2020), "Natural Theology and Natural Religion", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 9 October 2020
  3. ^ Wahlberg, Mats (2020), "Divine Revelation", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 9 October 2020
  4. ^ "Natural Theology | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy". Retrieved 9 October 2020.
  5. Jump up to:a b Swinburne, Richard (2007). "THE REVIVAL OF NATURAL THEOLOGY". Archivio di Filosofia75: 303–322 – via JSTOR.
  6. ^ Jennifer Mary Dines (8 June 2004). The Septuagint. A&C Black. p. 19. ISBN 978-0-567-08464-4usually assigned to the late first century BCE
  7. Jump up to:a b Plato, Timaeus
  8. ^ Plato, Laws
  9. ^ "Marcus Terentius Varro | Roman author"Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 4 January2019.
  10. ^ "Charles Darwin: Evolutionary Theory, Past and Present" (PDF)earth.northwestern.edu. Archived from the original (PDF) on 13 June 2010.
  11. ^ Abrahamov, Binyāmîn (1990). "Introduction". In Abrahamov, Binyāmîn (ed.). Kitāb al-Dalīl al-Kabīr. Brill. ISBN 9004089853.
  12. ^ Hedley Brooke, John. Science and Religion. 1991.
  13. ^ "DOES THE EMPIRICAL NATURE OF SCIENCE CONTRADICT THE REVELATORY NATURE OF FAITH? - Edge.org"edge.org.
  14. ^ "Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways (Part 2): Contingency, Goodness, Design"thatreligiousstudieswebsite.com.
  15. ^ Armstrong, Patrick (2000). The English Parson-Naturalist. Gracewing. p. 46. ISBN 0-85244-516-4.
  16. ^ "Principles of Natural Theology 2"maritain.nd.edu. Retrieved 9 October 2020.
  17. ^ Youpa, Andrew (2016), "Leibniz's Ethics", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 9 October 2020
  18. ^ Weber, AS., Nineteenth-Century Science: An Anthology, Broadview Press, 2000, p. 18.
  19. ^ Wyhe, John van (27 May 2014). Charles Darwin in Cambridge: The Most Joyful Years. World Scientific. pp. 90–92. ISBN 9789814583992.
  20. ^ Paley, William (2006). Natural Theology, Matthew Daniel Eddy and David M. Knight (Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  21. ^ Eddy, Matthew Daniel (2013). "Nineteenth Century Natural Theology"The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology.
  22. ^ Hitchcock, Edward. "Making of America Books: The religion of geology and its connected sciences". University of Michigan. Retrieved 8 August 2009.[page needed]
  23. ^ See Gifford Lectures online database accessed 15 October 2010.
  24. ^ Craig, William Lane; Moreland, J. P., eds. (17 April 2009). The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theologydoi:10.1002/9781444308334ISBN 9781405176576.
  25. ^ Robson, John M. (1990). "The Fiat and Finger of God: The Bridgewater Treatises". In Helmstadter, Richard J.; Lightman, Bernard V. (eds.). Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Belief. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-1602-4.
  26. ^ Babbage, Charles (24 October 2018). "The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. A Fragment". John Murray – via Google Books.
  27. ^ Hill, Thomas; Charles Babbage (1874). Geometry and faith. GP Putnam.
  28. ^ Darwin Online: The Bridgewater Treatises. Retrieved on 29 April 2014.
  29. ^ CriticismEdgar Allan Poe, (1850)
  30. ^ Alexander, Denis; Numbers, Ronald L. (2010). Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 107. ISBN 978-0-226-60841-9.
  31. Jump up to:a b Sherry, Patrick (2003). "The Religious Roots of Natural Theology". New Blackfriars84(988): 301–307. doi:10.1111/j.1741-2005.2003.tb06302.x – via JSTOR.
  32. Jump up to:a b Gaskin, J.C.A. (July 1974). "God, Hume and Natural Belief"Philosophy49 (189): 281–294. doi:10.1017/S0031819100048233JSTOR 3750118 – via JSTOR.
  33. Jump up to:a b c d e Bradley, M.C. (September 2007). "Hume's Chief Objection to Natural Theology". Religious Studies43 (3): 249–270. doi:10.1017/S0034412507008992 – via JSTOR.
  34. Jump up to:a b c d Swinburne, Richard (2007). "The Revival of Natural Theology". Archivio di Filosofia75: 303–322 – via JSTOR.
  35. Jump up to:a b c d e Fremstedal, Roe (March 2013). "The Moral Argument for the Existence of God and Immorality: Kierkegaard and Kant". The Journal of Religious Ethics41: 50–78. doi:10.1111/jore.12004 – via JSTOR.
  36. ^ Pourmohammadi, Na'imeh (2013). "KIERKEGAARD AND THE ASH'ARITES ON REASON AND THEOLOGY". Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica105: 591–609 – via JSTOR.
  37. Jump up to:a b Matthews, Gareth (30 January 1964). "Theology and Natural Theology"The Journal of Philosophy61 (3): 99–108. doi:10.2307/2023755JSTOR 2023755 – via JSTOR.

Further reading

External links

The Bridgewater Treatises

  1. The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Condition of Man, by Thomas Chalmers, D. D.
  2. On The Adaptation of External Nature to the Physical Condition of Man, by John Kidd, M. D.
  3. Astronomy and General Physics considered with reference to Natural Theology, by William Whewell, D. D.
  4. The hand, its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as evincing Design, by Sir Charles Bell.
  5. Animal and Vegetable Physiology, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology Animal and Vegetable Physiology considered with reference to Natural Theology, by Peter Mark Roget.
  6. Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, by William Buckland, D.D.
  7. The Habits and Instincts of Animals with reference to Natural TheologyVol. 2, by William Kirby.
  8. Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Function of Digestion, considered with reference to Natural Theology, by William Prout, M.D.


Wednesday, July 7, 2021

How to be a Good Samaritan


parable of the good samaritan

5 Ways Christians Can Apply the Parable
of the Good Samaritan Today

by Meg BucherWriter and Author
January 22, 2020

“‘Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ The expert in the law replied, ‘The one who had mercy on him.’ Jesus told him, ‘Go and do likewise.’” Luke 10:36-37

It’s easy to assume no one in modern society would pass by someone ailing on the side of the road. But we can all recall a time when we witnessed someone pulled off to the side of the freeway … alone. We so often don’t pull over to help. Sometimes, out of a healthy fear of very real and opportunistic evil in the world. Other times, we choose not to put ourselves in danger on account of another accord. Further still, we are all consumed by the amount of time we have in each of our days. The story of the Good Samaritan reminds us to take time to notice, and inconvenience ourselves to stop and sacrifice our precious minutes and resources to love our neighbor the way we’re called to as Christians. God has purposed us to love one another. Let's take a look at the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Who Is the Good Samaritan in the Bible? And What
Happens in the Parable of the Good Samaritan?

"But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’” Luke 10:33-35

The Good Samaritan is a character in one of Jesus’ New Testament Parables. When questioned by a Jewish lawyer who he should consider a neighbor, Jesus picked a Samaritan to be the heroine of the story. This is significant because Jews hated Samaritans. The NIVSB confirms, “Jews viewed Samaritans as half-breeds, both physically and spiritually. Samaritans and Jews practiced open hostility, but Jesus asserted that love knows no national boundaries.”

As Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well, he said, “You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.” (John 4:22) The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible says “Samaritans believed in the one God of Israel and claimed to be true heirs of his promises …(they) rejected the history of Israel after Joshua, and changed the Ten Commandments to include the requirement to worship on Mount Gerizim …” which the Judeans (Jewish) destroyed. The Samaritans believed in God but didn’t fully understand and know Him. Jesus rebuked them for what they got wrong, but all the more powerful when we consider the love the Samaritan man showed versus that of the priest and Levite who fully understood God and could call themselves God’s chosen people.

Why Did Jesus Tell the Parable of
the Good Samaritan?
“On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher’, he asked, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’” Luke 10:25
Jesus taught in parables and communicated in a way they understood. People like the lawyer questioning Jesus were akin to answering inclinations with questions. Thus, Jesus replied to his inquiry with, “‘What is written in the Law?’ he replied. ‘How do you read it?’ Luke 10:26 His concern was for their souls, not in arrogantly winning an argument He already held the heavenly victory too. His compassion for those who questioned Him is possibly one of His most remarkable characteristics. He had the patience to honor their curiosity, even when deviously tried to trap or trick Him. “And who is my neighbor?” Luke 10:29

The priest and the Levite passed by the suffering man on the other side. Significant, because Jesus illustrated living a legalistic life and following religious rules is nothing if we purposefully pass by a hurting soul. Love is leveling. Anyone can choose to help someone. Jesus shattered their perception of class and division by illustrating that love is love. We aren’t called only to love other Christians or others like us. We are called to love … period.

How Can Christians Apply the Parable
of the Good Samaritan Today?

Here are 5 ways Christians can use the parable of the Good Samaritan for inspiration today.

1. Be Noticers

“We live in a fast-paced world where it is easy to overlook the needs of others,” wrote Courtney Whiting, "But if we learn from this parable, we will be careful to be aware of those who are around us.” We can take notice of the people God places in our lives, both those who encourage and help us and those who need our help and encouragement. “The neighbor we’re called to love is often not the one we choose but one God chooses for us,” writes Jon Bloom “In fact, this neighbor is often not one we would have chosen had not God done the choosing.” Scripture says the man on the side of the road appeared dead, a condition that would make a religious authority ritually unclean (Leviticus 21:1-3). The priest in the parable let his holiness hold him back from helping. “He didn’t want to be stained by the stuff of life,” writes Pastor Rick Warren, “When we live a lifestyle of avoidance, we try to keep all our relationships superficial. If we can keep everyone at arm’s length, we can pretend we don’t see their pain and their needs. If we don’t get involved, we can avoid getting hurt or inconvenienced.” 

2. Prayerfully Prepare for these Moments

“Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to act. Do not say to your neighbor, ‘Come back tomorrow and I’ll give it to you-‘ when you already have it with you.” Proverbs 3:27-28

A disciplined life of prayer will allow to see people from God’s perspective and fight any fear holding us back from taking immediate action. “Pray for people,” wrote Anne Dahlhauser in “10 Ways to Love Your Neighbor," “Ask God for love for your neighbors.” When we pray for eyes open to see people in need, God is faithful to reveal them. When we do take notice of someone in need, it’s not just our action that needs to be immediate in aid, but our prayer. It's only humanly possible to help someone to a certain extent, so we need to cut God into the moment through prayer. Vaneetha Rendal Riser reflects in her article, “How to Pray When Life Falls Apart,” “I need to remember his limitless power when my situation looks insurmountable.”

3. Don’t Hesitate

“In Christ we are given a right standing before God (justification), and we are propelled in love for God and others by the new power of his Spirit in us (sanctification),” writes Jonathan Parnell, "This affects the way we see those around us.” Instead of weighing our options and wondering if we have time to stop and help, trust God to stretch minutes when we are convicted to help. The Samaritan man wasn’t prepared with a medical kit in case he crossed paths with someone who needed bandaging. He gave of what he had, choosing to invest in the struggling stranger. “We may quote scripture and recite platitudes on love and God, but unless we are willing to get involved in the lives of others, we are only blowing smoke,” wrote Joe Plemon, “But he [the Good Samaritan] didn’t. As the scriptures say, he had compassion …and he acted on it.” Given the man was robbed, the Samaritan probably put himself in danger of meeting the same fate. “Love is something you do,” writes Pastor Rick Warren, “Love doesn’t just say, ‘I’m sorry for this guy. Isn’t it a shame? Isn’t that too bad?’ Love seizes the moment.”

4. Reflection and Gratitude

Resist the cultural urge to frame those struggling as soft or weak. Suffering from the consequence of their own decisions doesn’t afford us a license to love them any less. We’ve all made bad decisions, suffered through our own consequences, or been hurt at the hands of another. Let gratitude for the people God had in place to pull us through fuel our love for them now. Remembering keeps us humble, reminds us to be grateful, and spurs us to pass it on. Instead of convincing ourselves we don’t have the time or the means to help, focus prayerfully on allowing God to show us how He wants us to love those suffering around us. John Bloom wrote, “if our restlessness is due to the disillusionment of having to deal with difficult, different people and defective programs, then perhaps the change we need is not in the church community but in our willingness to love our neighbors, the ones God has given us to love.”

5. Generosity

“It is a sin to despise one’s neighbor, but blessed is the one who is kind to the needy.” Proverbs 14:21

Christians are called to live generous lives, both in meeting the physical needs of others and in our outpouring of compassion for our neighbors. The Samaritan man gave what he had. We are all too often led by a cynical mindset of short supply. However, God promises the more we share the more we have. Proverbs 14:31 says, “Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.” Benching worry to care for others first models trust in God. He asks us to love our neighbor as ourselves and is the great Provider we can trust in to make it happen. Proverbs 28:27 assures us, “Those who give to the poor will lack nothing, but those who close their eyes to them receive many curses.” The goal is not to get something in return for helping one another, but trusting God enough to let go of what we have in order to do so, being a good steward of what He’s provided us with.

10 Bible Verses About Loving Our Neighbors
“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the enters of the others.” Philippians 2:3-4

“Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble.” 1 Peter 3:8

“Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body.” Ephesians 4:25

“Do not say to your neighbor, ‘Come back tomorrow and I’ll give it to you’- when you already have it with you. Do not plot harm against your neighbor, who lives trustfully near you.” Proverbs 3:28-29

“Each of us should please our neighbors for their good, to build them up.” Romans 15:2

“The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:31

“honor your father and mother,’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’” Matthew 19:19

“For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” Galatians 5:14

“My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” John 15:12

“Jesus replied, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:37-40

A Prayer to Love Others
Jesus, Not only did you come down to earth and live among us, but you choose to communicate on a level we can understand. Thank you for parables and stories we can apply to our daily lives, in order to understand a mere fraction of Your glory. We are humbled by your forgiveness and grace for the times we do indeed walk clear around those who need help. Convict us to stay alert, in prayer, and ready to love those You place in our paths. 

In Your Name, Amen.

Further Reading



Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons, Jan Wijnants [Public domain]

Meg, freelance writer and blogger at Sunny&80, is the author of “Friends with Everyone, Friendship within the Love of Christ,” and “Surface, Unlocking the Gift of Sensitivity,” She writes about everyday life within the love of Christ. Meg earned a Marketing/PR degree from Ashland University but stepped out of the business world to stay at home and raise her two daughters, which led her to pursue her passion to write. She has led a Bible Study for Women and serves as a Youth Ministry leader in her community. Meg, a Cleveland native and lifelong Browns fan, lives by the shore of Lake Erie in Northern Ohio with her husband, two daughters, and golden doodle.


The Church and Religious Politics From the Middle Ages to The Modern Age


Milan Cathedral, Milan, Italy (1998) | Credit: Thomas Struth


THE POLITICS OF GOD

by Mark Lilla
Aug. 19, 2007


I. “The Will of God Will Prevail”

The twilight of the idols has been postponed. For more than two centuries, from the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity — these were the questions that divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.

An example: In May of last year, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran sent an open letter to President George W. Bush that was translated and published in newspapers around the world. Its theme was contemporary politics and its language that of divine revelation. After rehearsing a litany of grievances against American foreign policies, real and imagined, Ahmadinejad wrote, “If Prophet Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael, Joseph or Jesus Christ (peace be upon him) were with us today, how would they have judged such behavior?” This was not a rhetorical question. “I have been told that Your Excellency follows the teachings of Jesus (peace be upon him) and believes in the divine promise of the rule of the righteous on Earth,” Ahmadinejad continued, reminding his fellow believer that “according to divine verses, we have all been called upon to worship one God and follow the teachings of divine Prophets.” There follows a kind of altar call, in which the American president is invited to bring his actions into line with these verses. And then comes a threatening prophecy: “Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. . . . Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of God will prevail over all things.”

This is the language of political theology, and for millennia it was the only tongue human beings had for expressing their thoughts about political life. It is primordial, but also contemporary: countless millions still pursue the age-old quest to bring the whole of human life under God’s authority, and they have their reasons. To understand them we need only interpret the language of political theology — yet that is what we find hardest to do. Reading a letter like Ahmadinejad’s, we fall mute, like explorers coming upon an ancient inscription written in hieroglyphics.

The problem is ours, not his. A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism. This assumption shapes the way we see political theology, especially in its Islamic form — as an atavism requiring psychological or sociological analysis but not serious intellectual engagement. Islamists, even if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more. We live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe those on the opposite bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. We all face the same questions of political existence, yet their way of answering them has become alien to us. On one shore, political institutions are conceived in terms of divine authority and spiritual redemption; on the other they are not. And that, as Robert Frost might have put it, makes all the difference.

Understanding this difference is the most urgent intellectual and political task of the present time. But where to begin? The case of contemporary Islam is on everyone’s mind, yet is so suffused with anger and ignorance as to be paralyzing. All we hear are alien sounds, motivating unspeakable acts. If we ever hope to crack the grammar and syntax of political theology, it seems we will have to begin with ourselves. The history of political theology in the West is an instructive story, and it did not end with the birth of modern science, or the Enlightenment, or the American and French Revolutions, or any other definitive historical moment. Political theology was a presence in Western intellectual life well into the 20th century, by which time it had shed the mind-set of the Middle Ages and found modern reasons for seeking political inspiration in the Bible. At first, this modern political theology expressed a seemingly enlightened outlook and was welcomed by those who wished liberal democracy well. But in the aftermath of the First World War it took an apocalyptic turn, and “new men” eager to embrace the future began generating theological justifications for the most repugnant — and godless — ideologies of the age, Nazism and Communism.

It is an unnerving tale, one that raises profound questions about the fragility of our modern outlook. Even the most stable and successful democracies, with the most high-minded and civilized believers, have proved vulnerable to political messianism and its theological justification. If we can understand how that was possible in the advanced West, if we can hear political theology speaking in a more recognizable tongue, represented by people in familiar dress with familiar names, perhaps then we can remind ourselves how the world looks from its perspective. This would be a small step toward measuring the challenge we face and deciding how to respond.

II. The Great Separation

Why is there political theology? The question echoes throughout the history of Western thought, beginning in Greek and Roman antiquity and continuing down to our day. Many theories have been proposed, especially by those suspicious of the religious impulse. Yet few recognize the rationality of political theology or enter into its logic. Theology is, after all, a set of reasons people give themselves for the way things are and the way they ought to be. So let us try to imagine how those reasons might involve God and have implications for politics.

Imagine human beings who first become aware of themselves in a world not of their own making. Their world has unknown origins and behaves in a regular fashion, so they wonder why that is. They know that the things they themselves fashion behave in a predictable manner because they conceive and construct them with some end in mind. They stretch the bow, the arrow flies; that is why they were made. So, by analogy, it is not difficult for them to assume that the cosmic order was constructed for a purpose, reflecting its maker’s will. By following this analogy, they begin to have ideas about that maker, about his intentions and therefore about his personality.

In taking these few short steps, the human mind finds itself confronted with a picture, a theological image in which God, man and world form a divine nexus. Believers have reasons for thinking that they live in this nexus, just as they have reasons for assuming that it offers guidance for political life. But how that guidance is to be understood, and whether believers think it is authoritative, will depend on how they imagine God. If God is thought to be passive, a silent force like the sky, nothing in particular may follow. He is a hypothesis we can do without. But if we take seriously the thought that God is a person with intentions, and that the cosmic order is a result of those intentions, then a great deal can follow. The intentions of such a God reveal something man cannot fully know on his own. This revelation then becomes the source of his authority, over nature and over us, and we have no choice but to obey him and see that his plans are carried out on earth. That is where political theology comes in.

One powerful attraction of political theology, in any form, is its comprehensiveness. It offers a way of thinking about the conduct of human affairs and connects those thoughts to loftier ones about the existence of God, the structure of the cosmos, the nature of the soul, the origin of all things and the end of time. For more than a millennium, the West took inspiration from the Christian image of a triune God ruling over a created cosmos and guiding men by means of revelation, inner conviction and the natural order. It was a magnificent picture that allowed a magnificent and powerful civilization to flower. But the picture was always difficult to translate theologically into political form: God the Father had given commandments; a Redeemer arrived, reinterpreting them, then departed; and now the Holy Spirit remained as a ghostly divine presence. It was not at all clear what political lessons were to be drawn from all this. Were Christians supposed to withdraw from a corrupted world that was abandoned by the Redeemer? Were they called upon to rule the earthly city with both church and state, inspired by the Holy Spirit? Or were they expected to build a New Jerusalem that would hasten the Messiah’s return?

Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians argued over these questions. The City of Man was set against the City of God, public citizenship against private piety, the divine right of kings against the right of resistance, church authority against radical antinomianism, canon law against mystical insight, inquisitor against martyr, secular sword against ecclesiastical miter, prince against emperor, emperor against pope, pope against church councils. In the late Middle Ages, the sense of crisis was palpable, and even the Roman Church recognized that reforms were in order. But by the 16th century, thanks to Martin Luther and John Calvin, there was no unified Christendom to reform, just a variety of churches and sects, most allied with absolute secular rulers eager to assert their independence. In the Wars of Religion that followed, doctrinal differences fueled political ambitions and vice versa, in a deadly, vicious cycle that lasted a century and a half. Christians addled by apocalyptic dreams hunted and killed Christians with a maniacal fury they had once reserved for Muslims, Jews and heretics. It was madness.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes tried to find a way out of this labyrinth. Traditionally, political theology had interpreted a set of revealed divine commands and applied them to social life. In his great treatise “Leviathan” (1651), Hobbes simply ignored the substance of those commands and talked instead about how and why human beings believed God revealed them. He did the most revolutionary thing a thinker can ever do — he changed the subject, from God and his commands to man and his beliefs. If we do that, Hobbes reasoned, we can begin to understand why religious convictions so often lead to political conflicts and then perhaps find a way to contain the potential for violence.

The contemporary crisis in Western Christendom created an audience for Hobbes and his ideas. In the midst of religious war, his view that the human mind was too weak and beset by passions to have any reliable knowledge of the divine seemed common-sensical. It also made sense to assume that when man speaks about God he is really referring to his own experience, which is all he knows. And what most characterizes his experience? According to Hobbes, fear. Man’s natural state is to be overwhelmed with anxiety, “his heart all the day long gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other calamity.” He “has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep.” It is no wonder that human beings fashion idols to protect themselves from what they most fear, attributing divine powers even, as Hobbes wrote, to “men, women, a bird, a crocodile, a calf, a dog, a snake, an onion, a leek.” Pitiful, but understandable.

And the debilitating dynamics of belief don’t end there. For once we imagine an all-powerful God to protect us, chances are we’ll begin to fear him too. What if he gets angry? How can we appease him? Hobbes reasoned that these new religious fears were what created a market for priests and prophets claiming to understand God’s obscure demands. It was a raucous market in Hobbes’s time, with stalls for Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Quakers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy Men and countless others, each with his own path to salvation and blueprint for Christian society. They disagreed with one another, and because their very souls were at stake, they fought. Which led to wars; which led to more fear; which made people more religious; which. . . .

Fresh from the Wars of Religion, Hobbes’s readers knew all about fear. Their lives had become, as he put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And when he announced that a new political philosophy could release them from fear, they listened. Hobbes planted a seed, a thought that it might be possible to build legitimate political institutions without grounding them on divine revelation. He knew it was impossible to refute belief in divine revelation; the most one can hope to do is cast suspicion on prophets claiming to speak about politics in God’s name. The new political thinking would no longer concern itself with God’s politics; it would concentrate on men as believers in God and try to keep them from harming one another. It would set its sights lower than Christian political theology had, but secure what mattered most, which was peace.


Chiesa dei Frari, Venice, 1995 | Credit: Thomas Struth


Hobbes was neither a liberal nor a democrat. He thought that consolidating power in the hands of one man was the only way to relieve citizens of their mutual fears. But over the next few centuries, Western thinkers like John Locke, who adopted his approach, began to imagine a new kind of political order in which power would be limited, divided and widely shared; in which those in power at one moment would relinquish it peacefully at another, without fear of retribution; in which public law would govern relations among citizens and institutions; in which many different religions would be allowed to flourish, free from state interference; and in which individuals would have inalienable rights to protect them from government and their fellows. This liberal-democratic order is the only one we in the West recognize as legitimate today, and we owe it primarily to Hobbes. In order to escape the destructive passions of messianic faith, political theology centered on God was replaced by political philosophy centered on man. This was the Great Separation.

III. The Inner Light

It is a familiar story, and seems to conclude with a happy ending. But in truth the Great Separation was never a fait accompli, even in Western Europe, where it was first conceived. Old-style Christian political theology had an afterlife in the West, and only after the Second World War did it cease to be a political force. In the 19th and early 20th centuries a different challenge to the Great Separation arose from another quarter. It came from a wholly new kind of political theology heavily indebted to philosophy and styling itself both modern and liberal. I am speaking of the “liberal theology” movement that arose in Germany not long after the French Revolution, first among Protestant theologians, then among Jewish reformers. These thinkers, who abhorred theocracy, also rebelled against Hobbes’s vision, favoring instead a political future in which religion — properly chastened and intellectually reformed — would play an absolutely central role.

And the questions they posed were good ones. While granting that ignorance and fear had bred pointless wars among Christian sects and nations, they asked: Were those the only reasons that, for a millennium and a half, an entire civilization had looked to Jesus Christ as its savior? Or that suffering Jews of the Diaspora remained loyal to the Torah? Could ignorance and fear explain the beauty of Christian liturgical music or the sublimity of the Gothic cathedrals? Could they explain why all other civilizations, past and present, founded their political institutions in accordance with the divine nexus of God, man and world? Surely there was more to religious man than was dreamed of in Hobbes’s philosophy.

That certainly was the view of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who did more than anyone to develop an alternative to Hobbes. Rousseau wrote no treatise on religion, which was probably a wise thing, since when he inserted a few pages on religious themes into his masterpiece, “Émile” (1762), it caused the book to be burned and Rousseau to spend the rest of his life on the run. This short section of “Émile,” which he called “The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” has so deeply shaped contemporary views of religion that it takes some effort to understand why Rousseau was persecuted for writing it. It is the most beautiful and convincing defense of man’s religious instincts ever to flow from a modern pen — and that, apparently, was the problem. Rousseau spoke of religion in terms of human needs, not divine truths, and had his Savoyard vicar declare, “I believe all particular religions are good when one serves God usefully in them.” For that, he was hounded by pious Christians.

Rousseau had a Hobbes problem, too: he shared the Englishman’s criticisms of theocracy, fanaticism and the clergy, but he was a friend of religion. While Hobbes beat the drums of ignorance and fear, Rousseau sang the praises of conscience, of charity, of fellow feeling, of virtue, of pious wonder in the face of God’s creation. Human beings, he thought, have a natural goodness they express in their religion. That is the theme of the “Profession of Faith,” which tells the parable of a young vicar who loses his faith and then his moral compass once confronted with the hypocrisy of his co-religionists. He is able to restore his equilibrium only when he finds a new kind of faith in God by looking within, to his own “inner light” (lumière intérieure). The point of Rousseau’s story is less to display the crimes of organized churches than to show that man yearns for religion because he is fundamentally a moral creature. There is much we cannot know about God, and for centuries the pretense of having understood him caused much damage to Christendom. But, for Rousseau, we need to believe something about him if we are to orient ourselves in the world.

Among modern thinkers, Rousseau was the first to declare that there is no shame in saying that faith in God is humanly necessary. Religion has its roots in needs that are rational and moral, even noble; once we see that, we can start satisfying them rationally, morally and nobly. In the abstract, this thought did not contradict the principles of the Great Separation, which gave reasons for protecting the private exercise of religion. But it did raise doubts about whether the new political thinking could really do without reference to the nexus of God, man and world. If Rousseau was right about our moral needs, a rigid separation between political and theological principles might not be psychologically sustainable. When a question is important, we want an answer to it: as the Savoyard vicar remarks, “The mind decides in one way or another, despite itself, and prefers being mistaken to believing in nothing.” Rousseau had grave doubts about whether human beings could be happy or good if they did not understand how their actions related to something higher. Religion is simply too entwined with our moral experience ever to be disentangled from it, and morality is inseparable from politics.

IV. Rousseau’s Children

By the early 19th century, two schools of thought about religion and politics had grown up in the West. Let us call them the children of Hobbes and the children of Rousseau. For the children of Hobbes, a decent political life could not be realized by Christian political theology, which bred violence and stifled human development. The only way to control the passions flowing from religion to politics, and back again, was to detach political life from them completely. This had to happen within Western institutions, but first it had to happen within Western minds. A reorientation would have to take place, turning human attention away from the eternal and transcendent, toward the here and now. The old habit of looking to God for political guidance would have to be broken, and new habits developed. For Hobbes, the first step toward achieving that end was to get people thinking about — and suspicious about — the sources of faith.

Though there was great reluctance to adopt Hobbes’s most radical views on religion, in the English-speaking world the intellectual principles of the Great Separation began to take hold in the 18th century. Debate would continue over where exactly to place the line between religious and political institutions, but arguments about the legitimacy of theocracy petered out in all but the most forsaken corners of the public square. There was no longer serious controversy about the relation between the political order and the divine nexus; it ceased to be a question. No one in modern Britain or the United States argued for a bicameral legislature on the basis of divine revelation.

The children of Rousseau followed a different line of argument. Medieval political theology was not salvageable, but neither could human beings ignore questions of eternity and transcendence when thinking about the good life. When we speculate about God, man and world in the correct way, we express our noblest moral sentiments; without such reflection we despair and eventually harm ourselves and others. That is the lesson of the Savoyard vicar.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the Terror and Napoleon’s conquests, Rousseau’s children found a receptive audience in continental Europe. The recent wars had had nothing to do with political theology or religious fanaticism of the old variety; if anything, people reasoned, it was the radical atheism of the French Enlightenment that turned men into beasts and bred a new species of political fanatic. Germans were especially drawn to this view, and a wave of romanticism brought with it great nostalgia for the religious “world we have lost.” It even touched sober philosophers like Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. Kant adored “Émile” and went somewhat further than Rousseau had, not only accepting the moral need for rational faith but arguing that Christianity, properly reformed, would represent the “true universal Church” and embody the very “idea” of religion. Hegel went further still, attributing to religion an almost vitalistic power to forge the social bond and encourage sacrifice for the public good. Religion, and religion alone, is the original source of a people’s shared spirit, which Hegel called its Volksgeist.

These ideas had an enormous impact on German religious thought in the 19th century, and through it on Protestantism and Judaism throughout the West. This was the century of “liberal theology,” a term that requires explanation. In modern Britain and the United States, it was assumed that the intellectual, and then institutional, separation of Christianity and modern politics had been mutually beneficial — that the modern state had benefited by being absolved from pronouncing on doctrinal matters, and that Christianity had benefited by being freed from state interference. No such consensus existed in Germany, where the assumption was that religion needed to be publicly encouraged, not reined in, if it was to contribute to society. It would have to be rationally reformed, of course: the Bible would have to be interpreted in light of recent historical findings, belief in miracles abandoned, the clergy educated along modern lines and doctrine adapted to a softer age. But once these reforms were in place, enlightened politics and enlightened religion would join hands.

Protestant liberal theologians soon began to dream of a third way between Christian orthodoxy and the Great Separation. They had unshaken faith in the moral core of Christianity, however distorted it may have been by the forces of history, and unshaken faith in the cultural and political progress that Christianity had brought to the world. Christianity had given birth to the values of individuality, moral universalism, reason and progress on which German life was now based. There could be no contradiction between religion and state, or even tension. The modern state had only to give Protestantism its due in public life, and Protestant theology would reciprocate by recognizing its political responsibilities. If both parties met their obligations, then, as the philosopher F. W. J. Schelling put it, “the destiny of Christianity will be decided in Germany.”

Among Jewish liberal thinkers, there was a different sort of hope, that of acceptance as equal citizens. After the French Revolution, a fitful process of Jewish emancipation began in Europe, and German Jews were more quickly integrated into modern cultural life than in any other European country — a fateful development. For it was precisely at this moment that German Protestants were becoming convinced that reformed Christianity represented their national Volksgeist. While the liberal Jewish thinkers were attracted to modern enlightened faith, they were also driven by the apologetic need to justify Judaism’s contribution to German society. They could not appeal to the principles of the Great Separation and simply demand to be left alone. They had to argue that Judaism and Protestantism were two forms of the same rational moral faith, and that they could share a political theology. As the Jewish philosopher and liberal reformer Hermann Cohen once put it, “In all intellectual questions of religion we think and feel ourselves in a Protestant spirit.”

V. Courting the Apocalypse

This was the house that liberal theology built, and throughout the 19th century it looked secure. It wasn’t, and for reasons worth pondering. 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.

By the turn of the 20th century, the liberal house was tottering, and after the First World War it collapsed. It was not just the barbarity of trench warfare, the senseless slaughter, the sight of burned-out towns and maimed soldiers that made a theology extolling “modern civilization” contemptible. It was that so many liberal theologians had hastened the insane rush to war, confident that God’s hand was guiding history. In August 1914, Adolf von Harnack, the most respected liberal Protestant scholar of the age, helped Kaiser Wilhelm II draft an address to the nation laying out German military aims. Others signed an infamous pro-war petition defending the sacredness of German militarism. Astonishingly, even Hermann Cohen joined the chorus, writing an open letter to American Jews asking for support, on the grounds that “next to his fatherland, every Western Jew must recognize, revere and love Germany as the motherland of his modern religiosity.” Young Protestant and Jewish thinkers were outraged when they saw what their revered teachers had done, and they began to look elsewhere.

But they did not turn to Hobbes, or to Rousseau. They craved a more robust faith, based on a new revelation that would shake the foundations of the whole modern order. It was a thirst for redemption. Ever since the liberal theologians had revived the idea of biblical politics, the stage had been set for just this sort of development. When faith in redemption through bourgeois propriety and cultural accommodation withered after the Great War, the most daring thinkers of the day transformed it into hope for a messianic apocalypse — one that would again place the Jewish people, or the individual Christian believer, or the German nation, or the world proletariat in direct relation with the divine.


Notre-Dame, Paris, 2000 | Credit: Thomas Struth


Young Weimar Jews were particularly drawn to these messianic currents through the writings of Martin Buber, who later became a proponent of interfaith understanding but as a young Zionist promoted a crude chauvinistic nationalism. In an early essay he called for a “Masada of the spirit” and proclaimed: “If I had to choose for my people between a comfortable, unproductive happiness . . . and a beautiful death in a final effort at life, I would have to choose the latter. For this final effort would create something divine, if only for a moment, but the other something all too human.” Language like this, with strong and discomforting contemporary echoes for us, drew deeply from the well of biblical messianism. Yet Buber was an amateur compared with the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, who used the Bible to extol the utopia then under construction in the Soviet Union. Though an atheist Jew, Bloch saw a connection between messianic hope and revolutionary violence, which he admired from a distance. He celebrated Thomas Müntzer, the 16th-century Protestant pastor who led bloody peasant uprisings and was eventually beheaded; he also praised the brutal Soviet leaders, famously declaring “ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem” — wherever Lenin is, there is Jerusalem.

But it was among young Weimar Protestants that the new messianic spirit proved most consequential. They were led by the greatest theologian of the day, Karl Barth, who wanted to restore the drama of religious decision to Christianity and rejected any accommodation of the Gospel to modern sensibilities. When Hitler came to power, Barth acquitted himself well, leading resistance against the Nazi takeover of the Protestant churches before he was forced into exile in 1935. But others, who employed the same messianic rhetoric Barth did, chose the Nazis instead. A notorious example was Emanuel Hirsch, a respected Lutheran theologian and translator of Kierkegaard, who welcomed the Nazi seizure of power for bringing Germany into “the circle of the white ruling peoples, to which God has entrusted the responsibility for the history of humanity.” Another was Friedrich Gogarten, one of Barth’s closest collaborators, who sided with the Nazis in the summer of 1933 (a decision he later regretted). In the 1920s, Gogarten rejoiced at the collapse of bourgeois Europe, declaring that “we are glad for the decline, since no one enjoys living among corpses,” and called for a new religion that “attacks culture as culture . . . that attacks the whole world.” When the brownshirts began marching and torching books, he got his wish. After Hitler completed his takeover, Gogarten wrote that “precisely because we are today once again under the total claim of the state, it is again possible, humanly speaking, to proclaim the Christ of the Bible and his reign over us.”

All of which served to confirm Hobbes’s iron law: 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.”

VI. Miracles

The revival of political theology in the modern West is a humbling story. It reminds us that this way of thinking is not the preserve of any one culture or religion, nor does it belong solely to the past. It is an age-old habit of mind that can be reacquired by anyone who begins looking to the divine nexus of God, man and world to reveal the legitimate political order. This story also reminds us how political theology can be adapted to circumstances and reassert itself, even in the face of seemingly irresistible forces like modernization, secularization and democratization. Rousseau was on to something: we seem to be theotropic creatures, yearning to connect our mundane lives, in some way, to the beyond. That urge can be suppressed, new habits learned, but the challenge of political theology will never fully disappear so long as the urge to connect survives.

So we are heirs to the Great Separation only if we wish to be, if we make a conscious effort to separate basic principles of political legitimacy from divine revelation. Yet more is required still. Since the challenge of political theology is enduring, we need to remain aware of its logic and the threat it poses. This means vigilance, but even more it means self-awareness. We must never forget that there was nothing historically inevitable about our Great Separation, that it was and remains an experiment. In Europe, the political ambiguities of one religion, Christianity, happened to set off a political crisis that might have been avoided but wasn’t, triggering the Wars of Religion; the resulting carnage made European thinkers more receptive to Hobbes’s heretical ideas about religious psychology and the political implications he drew from them; and over time those political ideas were liberalized. Even then, it was only after the Second World War that the principles of modern liberal democracy became fully rooted in continental Europe.

As for the American experience, it is utterly exceptional: there is no other fully developed industrial society with a population so committed to its faiths (and such exotic ones), while being equally committed to the Great Separation. Our political rhetoric, which owes much to the Protestant sectarians of the 17th century, vibrates with messianic energy, and it is only thanks to a strong constitutional structure and various lucky breaks that political theology has never seriously challenged the basic legitimacy of our institutions. Americans have potentially explosive religious differences over abortion, prayer in schools, censorship, euthanasia, biological research and countless other issues, yet they generally settle them within the bounds of the Constitution. It’s a miracle.

And miracles can’t be willed. 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.

It is a world in which millions of people, particularly in the Muslim orbit, believe that God has revealed a law governing the whole of human affairs. This belief shapes the politics of important Muslim nations, and it also shapes the attitudes of vast numbers of believers who find themselves living in Western countries — and non-Western democracies like Turkey and Indonesia — founded on the alien principles of the Great Separation. These are the most significant points of friction, internationally and domestically. And we cannot really address them if we do not first recognize the intellectual chasm between us: although it is possible to translate Ahmadinejad’s letter to Bush from Farsi into English, its intellectual assumptions cannot be translated into those of the Great Separation. We can try to learn his language in order to create sensible policies, but agreement on basic principles won’t be possible. And we must learn to live with that.

Similarly, we must somehow find a way to accept the fact that, given the immigration policies Western nations have pursued over the last half-century, they now are hosts to millions of Muslims who have great difficulty fitting into societies that do not recognize any political claims based on their divine revelation. Like Orthodox Jewish law, the Muslim Shariah is meant to cover the whole of life, not some arbitrarily demarcated private sphere, and its legal system has few theological resources for establishing the independence of politics from detailed divine commands. It is an unfortunate situation, but we have made our bed, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Accommodation and mutual respect can help, as can clear rules governing areas of tension, like the status of women, parents’ rights over their children, speech offensive to religious sensibilities, speech inciting violence, standards of dress in public institutions and the like. Western countries have adopted different strategies for coping, some forbidding religious symbols like the head scarf in schools, others permitting them. But we need to recognize that coping is the order of the day, not defending high principle, and that our expectations should remain low. So long as a sizable population believes in the truth of a comprehensive political theology, its full reconciliation with modern liberal democracy cannot be expected.

VII. The Opposite Shore

This is not welcome news. For more than two centuries, promoters of modernization have taken it for granted that science, technology, urbanization and education would eventually “disenchant” the charmed world of believers, and that with time people would either abandon their traditional faiths or transform them in politically anodyne ways. They point to continental Europe, where belief in God has been in steady decline over the last 50 years, and suggest that, with time, Muslims everywhere will undergo a similar transformation. Those predictions may eventually prove right. But Europe’s rapid secularization is historically unique and, as we have just seen, relatively recent. Political theology is highly adaptive and can present to even educated minds a more compelling vision of the future than the prospect of secular modernity. It takes as little for a highly trained medical doctor to fashion a car bomb today as it took for advanced thinkers to fashion biblically inspired justifications of fascist and communist totalitarianism in Weimar Germany. When the urge to connect is strong, passions are high and fantasies are vivid, the trinkets of our modern lives are impotent amulets against political intoxication.

Realizing this, a number of Muslim thinkers around the world have taken to promoting a “liberal” Islam. What they mean is an Islam more adapted to the demands of modern life, kinder in its treatment of women and children, more tolerant of other faiths, more open to dissent. These are brave people who have often suffered for their efforts, in prison or exile, as did their predecessors in the 19th century, of which there were many. But now as then, their efforts have been swept away by deeper theological currents they cannot master and perhaps do not even understand. The history of Protestant and Jewish liberal theology reveals the problem: 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. That is what happened in Weimar Germany and is happening again in contemporary Islam.

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.

Today, a few voices are calling for just this kind of renewal of Islamic political theology. Some, like Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, challenge the authority of today’s puritans, who make categorical judgments based on a literal reading of scattered Koranic verses. In Abou El Fadl’s view, traditional Islamic law can still be applied to present-day situations because it brings a subtle interpretation of the whole text to bear on particular problems in varied circumstances. Others, like the Swiss-born cleric and professor Tariq Ramadan, are public figures whose writings show Western Muslims that their political theology, properly interpreted, offers guidance for living with confidence in their faith and gaining acceptance in what he calls an alien “abode.” To read their works is to be reminded what a risky venture renewal is. It can invite believers to participate more fully and wisely in the political present, as the Protestant Reformation eventually did; it can also foster dreams of returning to a more primitive faith, through violence if necessary, as happened in the Wars of Religion.

Perhaps for this reason, Abou El Fadl and especially Ramadan have become objects of intense and sometimes harsh scrutiny by Western intellectuals. We prefer speaking with the Islamic liberalizers because they share our language: they accept the intellectual presuppositions of the Great Separation and simply want maximum room given for religious and cultural expression. They do not practice political theology. But the prospects of enduring political change through renewal are probably much greater than through liberalization. By speaking from within the community of the faithful, renovators give believers compelling theological reasons for accepting new ways as authentic reinterpretations of the faith. Figures like Abou El Fadl and Ramadan speak a strange tongue, even when promoting changes we find worthy; their reasons are not our reasons. But if we cannot expect mass conversion to the principles of the Great Separation — and we cannot — we had better learn to welcome transformations in Muslim political theology that ease coexistence. The best should not be the enemy of the good.

In the end, though, what happens on the opposite shore will not be up to us. We have little reason to expect societies in the grip of a powerful political theology to follow our unusual path, which was opened up by a unique crisis within Christian civilization. This does not mean that those societies necessarily lack the wherewithal to create a decent and workable political order; it does mean that they will have to find the theological resources within their own traditions to make it happen.

Our challenge is different. We have made a choice that is at once simpler and harder: we have chosen to limit our politics to protecting individuals from the worst harms they can inflict on one another, to securing fundamental liberties and providing for their basic welfare, while leaving their spiritual destinies in their own hands. We have wagered that it is wiser to beware the forces unleashed by the Bible’s messianic promise than to try exploiting them for the public good. 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.
Mark Lilla is professor of the humanities at Columbia University. This essay is adapted from his book “The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West,” which will be published next month.