In structure and in rhetoric, Tillich’s triad of love, power, and justice has a trinitarian aspect to it. Love is the desire of alienated beings toward ontological union; power is the capacity for overcoming this alienation despite internal and external negations; the unity of love and power is actualized in justice as it gives concrete form to various “encounters of being with being.” These interpenetrating principles refer to “being itself,” and thus “precede everything that is.” But this ontological trinity must be made immanent as well: “Love, power, and justice are one in the divine ground, and shall become one in human existence.”

Tillich is able to transition from philosophical to theological metaphor will impressive fluidity. His allusions to Hegel are revealing. His agapic love looks much like the in-breaking of a certain kind of Geist on the world, not in opposition to eros, justice, or power, but rather drawing them away from the alienation of non-being toward the reunion with being-itself. This occurs on personal, social, and religious levels. Existence itself must be affirmed in all its creative capacity. The implications for Tillich’s doctrine of creation are sometimes startling, as when he exclaims: “Libido is good in itself!” These desires must not be closed off; so long as libido is united to eros and philia, an agapic love will transform desire into “the divine unity of love, power, and justice.”

Setting aside the fraught issues of Tillichian sexual desire, I want to pose a couple questions to this ontological rendering of love and law, one sparked by Nygren and the other by Barth.

On first reading of Love, Power, and Justice, it’s difficult to see how Tillich and Nygren could share the same Lutheran heritage. Yet, while Tillich remains far afield of Nygren’s oppositional view of eros and agape, I wondered whether – in a very roundabout way – Tillich’s notion of “creative justice” has been so thoroughly re-designed that it functions very much like agape. Paul Ramsey notes the monistic tendencies in Tillich, particularly in the way that he divests justice of specific normative content. In the same way, Tillich’s natural law initially appears in a rather conventional guise: its theonomous character is based in the law given by God in accordance with God’s own being. And yet, “in the moment in which these principles are used for concrete decisions they become indefinite, changing, relative,” such that the natural law cannot “answer the questions of justice.” Even the Golden Rule falls short of providing paradigmatic content.

Does this reveal an antipathy toward law as such? One might imagine a different sort of Hegelian emphasizing the way that specific social practices embody the value-commitments of a community toward power relations, individual rights, etc. But Tillich’s appeal to creative justice in personal encounter lacks the specificity I would have hoped for. While he appealingly argues that the created order reflects the basic unity of love and justice of the divine order, I suspect that he has too quickly dispensed with the function of law, both pedagogically and normatively.

If Tillich wants to keep the door of ontological ascent open, he will need a different key. I think Barth may offer a solution (despite his own brand of “monism”).

It’s amusing to consider that both Karl Barth and Paul Tillich have sometimes shared the “neo-orthodox” label. Yet, in some obvious respects, Tillich appears motivated by many of the same philosophical factors as his colleague from Basel. Perhaps most foundationally, they share the perception that certain late modern philosophies overreached in their pursuit for a wholly naturalized ethic – a pursuit which can only end in ontological alienation. Still, the differences remain. Tillich’s unity of love and justice is ultimately related to the way that agape elevates the “natural” aspects of love, and the way that “Spiritual power” operates to “change reality by attaining levels of being which are ordinarily hidden.” If we wanted to transpose this into a Christological key, as Tillich himself often does, then we might find a hint of Apollinarianism at work here.

Barth, however, remains deeply mistrustful of this kind of ontology of union, as if some higher nature could be infused into our human capacities to make us more than human. Here, while Tillich will want to use the incarnation  as a “symbol” for the overcoming of human alienation, Barth would reply that the enhypostasis of the man Jesus was utterly unique. Thus, if there is to be some form of human ascent (itself a debatable point among Barth scholarship), it will not involve any aufheben of human nature. Here, an Alexandrian-Reformed Christology comes to his aid. While Barth does allow for “certain analogies to the relationship between God and man,” the emphasis is on the “relationship,” namely, the covenantal relationship.

I think it’s crucial to see that for Barth the divine and the human relationship cannot be defined outside Christ – literally and historically – since apart from Him they exist “in a sharp distinction and even antithesis.” This is why he prefers to emphasize the person of the hypostatic union, rather than what he sees as the Lutheran emphasis on the “communio naturarum and its consequences.” For the Reformed, there is no direct communio of natures (or essences, in Barth’s terms), but an indirect communio in the person of Christ. This allows Barth of focus on the “two-sided” participation in Christ. But also, the mutual participation – which is true and genuine – does not make the human and divine interchangeable.

Practically speaking, how might this matter? While Barth may have other ethical hang-ups, on this matter I read him as having rather more respect for the integrity of the natural order – and surprisingly so! Human persons are confronted by the divine interpellation to be properly human, that is, to respond to the reality of the divine covenant in creation. A covenant possesses both personal and ethical aspects (although Barth himself can be inconsistent on the latter). It establishes a relationship and demands faithful action. Tillich appears to grasp the importance of the personal in ethics (as was common among mid-20^th century theologians), but he seems to fall short of providing a substantive account of the latter.

Unless God had made man fallable, there had been no praise of his works or virtue; for he could neither have willed nor choosed but of necessity have been good. Yea, what if man ought altogether to be made fallable? For so did the counsel of God require him to be.

But why this requirement of the divine counsel? God is the Good in a way of which humans can only be analogues. But it is also in God’s nature to be “bountiful and liberal [and] just” to God’s creatures. In this sense, the condition of human “fallability” is also the condition by which God enters into a loving relationship with humanity. “He had bestowed innumerable benefits upon Adam: there lacked nothing therefore but to give him an occasion to declare and show his thankfulness and obedience to his good God and benefactor; which occasion he offered him by the making of that law.” This law then is constituted by the terms the relationship between Adam and God. The law itself was good: “God ordained not that law to be a stumbling-block in Adam’s way, but rather to be a staff to stay him from falling.” By giving Adam the law, God had provided a means for instruction in virtue, the end of which was perfect felicity and life. The command not to eat of the tree of good and evil was therefore “a sacrament or sign” of the good provision of God.

Of course, Bullinger will go on to use rather strong language of how the fall “destroyed” the image of God in humanity. That’s the rub. How much of the relationship remains after sin? Here, I think the tradition speaks with more than one voice.

So first, assuming a Yoderian or Hauerwasian perspective: O’Donovan seems rather confident that the perfect created order is “always there but never fully expressed.” Drawing on Barth, O’Donovan stresses the cosmic scope of salvation and the concrete political ramifications of God’s covenant with not only the church, but the world, as providentially ordered. O’Donovan may not have a modern belief in historical progress, but he does have a correlate view of divine providence. There seem to be two possible objections here from Yoder’s and/or Hauerwas’ perspective. One: Isn’t O’Donovan triumphalistic? Doesn’t he presuppose that the ultimate resurrection and judgment of all things has already happened? Wouldn’t it be more faithful to the testimony of scripture to say that the resurrection serves not as the basic foundation of Christian life, but as the hope and explanation of a Christian life which is still in exile? The second objection might be: Has O’Donovan left behind his Augustinianism in key passages when he includes the political order itself as an object of redemption? In other words, by making the political order a historical rather than a natural or creational institution, does O’Donovan want to have his redemptive cake and eat it, too?

Second, coming from a more Reformed point of view: O’Donovan speaks of how the inauguration of the Christian church (an evangelical polis) effects a re-authorization of governmental authority in. As of some determinate moment in the first century, the government’s right to possession is removed; only provisional judgment remains. But here a Reformed theorist (like Nicholas Wolterstorff) might want to press back on O’Donovan’s ecclesiology. O’Donovan believes that the inauguration of the church in the first century bears specifically historical significance for the state. In this sense, both the eccelesial community and the civil community are mutually historical political institutions, and therefore uniquely determined by the workings of divine providence after the Fall in a way that natural institutions like the family and the economic market are not. Because the political orders of church and state are providential orders, not created ones, they stand as testaments to the redeeming work of God, and therefore take on radically new identities after the Christ-event.

What does this all mean, exactly? I take it that, for O’Donovan, the primacy of divine authorization in the church and state means that one’s identity in the church (via baptism) can stand over against other, pre-existing historical identities (such as national identity or some other social relation). In one sense, this diminishes the state significantly, since it bears an eschatological judgment that natural communities like the family bear less directly. But on the other hand, O’Donovan also expects the state to represent and recognize divine authority in a rather radical way. Since the state is not a natural institution, it seems to bear the stamp of the supernatural. In this sense, the state is more like the church than any natural institution. Both the church and state stand apart from the natural order.

What does this mean, in more practical terms? I think one primary impact comes in how individuals identify with various communities, and profess various allegiances. At times, O’Donovan implies that one’s baptismal membership in the church requires the surrender of those other social memberships and commitments; at other times, he uses more “moderate” language of subordination and re-authorization. In all cases, though, we see a single divine authorization standing over against our political actions, institutions, and identities rather than working within our common loves, communities, and allegiances. One question here is whether O’Donovan sometimes falls back into a kind of political supersessionism in which the historical appearance of the evangelical community supersedes all the social and political communities that preceded it. Considering the main thrust of his project, this would be a surprising, counter-intuitive turn for O’Donovan to make. At stake, we might say, is whether Gospel is the fulfillment of the Law, or rather its replacement.

Before getting to those questions, however, just a quick summary of the contours of the project. First, in Desire O’Donovan aims to resuscitate and reformulate concepts which many late-modern liberals have left for dead. Among these unpopular ideas: authority, command, obedience, and (allegedly) Christendom. As O’Donovan tells the story, it’s not simply that modern liberalism has a bunch of theopolitical skeletons in the closet (as Carl Schmitt once suggested), but rather that late modernity is more like the protagonist in the movie The Sixth Sense – it is an unwitting ghost who has failed to realize its own very limited purpose and time left on the earth. Modernity has not recognized its own origins and its own limited theological charter. Modernity has a fatal case of theopolitical amnesia, and it needs a doxological awakening.

O’Donovan’s project, then, aims at a recovery of “political theology,” which is itself a concept fallen on hard times – thanks in no small part to Schmitt. But OD’s presentation of political theology attempts to break out of the compartmentalized box in which modernity has placed the debate over “religion and politics,” and “church and state.” Political theology is, after all, a term which strikes fear into the hearts of warm-blooded liberals across the Western hemisphere. O’Donovan notes that modernity’s suspicion of political theology is double-sided, often shared by believer and non-believer alike. On one hand, there is the fear that political freedom and individual conscience are endangered when religious commitments and authorities which claim to possess divine revelation are permitted into the political sphere. On the other hand, many Christians worry that theology itself will be tainted by political life, seduced by the coercive power of the state. O’Donovan counters these fears by offering a kind of theopolitical therapy, drawing on the resources of the patristic, medieval, and early modern Christian tradition to think anew about the late-modern predicament. In this preceding tradition, we re-encounter the notion that theology is necessarily political; its political witness is the expression of its evangelical character. In fact, if we scratch beneath the surface of voluntarist, individualist modernity, we may still find some vestiges of the older political order – an order which relies on structures of command, obedience, and authority which have a theological content and history. Not only does O’Donovan want to restore these concepts, he also wants to confront them with the eschatological reality of Christ and Christ’s political Kingdom.

Over the past fifteen or so years, Desire of the Nations has acquired some infamy for its apparent defense of Christendom. That debate is interesting enough, but I want to pass on that for now. Instead, I want to imagine two possible objections, one from an Anabaptist position, one from a Reformed position. I’m turn to these tomorrow.

[*] Thanks to an excellent seminar run by Eric Gregory.

Gorski helpful recasts and smooths out the rougher edges of Walzer’s thesis, pointing out the many other sociological and demographic factors (e.g. the inciting force of monarchical opposition and pre-existing nationalism) that fed into the revolutionary spirit. At the same time, he argues that we should not lose sight of Walzer’s basic insight:

The rise of Calvinism did not always culminate in the outbreak of revolution…. Still, a connexion existed; all the successful revolutions of the early modern era, from the Dutch Revolt through the English Civil War, were inspired at least partly by Calvinism…. If there is a fault in Walzer’s analysis, it lies mainly in exaggerating the significance of the clergy in this process, for the threads that bound together the causes of Calvinism and revolution were spun not only by ministers by lawyers, merchants, and even the occasional artisan, and the tension in this thread that made it possible to stitch the pieces of the old order into something genuinely new came less from the pens of militant clerics than from the hammers of popular iconoclasts and the swords of uncompromising gentry. It was these persons, as much as the ministers, who pushed religious opposition over the brink of violent revolution. In a word, revolutionary Calvinism had not one “carrier” but many….

In many ways it was the Calvinists and their allies who first invented revolution — its “personality,” its tropes, and its utopias. If Calvinism placed the modern subject within an “iron cage,” as Weber said, it also supplied the tools for springing the locks.

[*] Thanks to Temple University Press for the review copy.

For this reason God willed to train and teach men not by angels, but by men. For the same reason God distributed his gifts unevenly among men. He did not give all things to one person, but some to one and some to others, so that you have need for my gifts, and I for yours. And so was born, as it were, the need for communicating necessary and useful things, which communication was not possible except in social and political life. God therefore willed that each need the service and aid of others in order that friendship would bind all together, and no one would consider another to be valueless. For if each did not need the aid of others, what would society be? What would reverence and order be? What would reason and humanity be? Every one therefore needs the experience and contributions of others, and no one lives to himself alone.

Thus the needs of body and soul, and the seeds of virtue implanted in our souls, drew dispersed men together into one place….

Even so, Althusius’ liberality has its limits. Catholics, atheists, and practicing Jews were not allowed freedom to worship, although he argues that the civil magistrate has no jurisdiction to prosecute the “thoughts of men ” (XXVIII.64). In other words, since external piety has significance for the civic order, it would threaten the “symbiosis” of Althusius’ ideal regnum . Yet the inner conscience stands outside the magistrate’s domain, and such matters are best left to the spiritual discernment and persuasion of ministers. (This formulation is not that far off from the earliest stages of John Locke’s theory several decades later.)

While reading Althusius again, I noticed his sometimes tedious proclivity for systemic bifurcations and classification (he is one of those wonderfully rare Ramist Aristotelians after all). But what struck me as even more interesting was the cohesion of his socio-political vision, and the resonance with later Puritan adaptations of his utopian project. Despite his illiberal views on those of other religions, those individuals remain at the periphery of his concerns. As a result, he offers a strikingly unified federalism where the prospects for a common summum bonum seem quite attainable (cf. Bucer’s De Regno Christi). The civil covenant acts as an analogue to God’s redemptive covenant with humanity, even though it is (usually) not identified with salvific content. Similarly, Althusius’ concept of jus gentium is a civil analogue, but not a reification, of natural law (X.8). As such, it doesn’t seem to fit neatly into a system of action-guiding principles.

Still, even the most sympathetic read of the Politica has to account for the problematic seeds which sprout in later forms of Protestant federalism. It’s interesting to consider how Althusius’ Puritan heirs responded when faced with a more pluralistic (though still covenanted!) society. Then, it was not the language of external piety that was muted, but rather the language of civic friendship.

Perry points out that most interactions with Johannine liberalism take John Rawls’ contractarianism to be the only real option, while ignoring John Locke’s original consideration of religious and civic loyalties. While Locke does eventually arrive at a kind of jurisdictional neutrality (one that Rawls inherits), he first has to employ theological arguments to convince Christians that civic toleration is part and parcel of their own religion. Simply, in order to be truly loyal to one’s Christian faith, one must also tolerate those with divergent religious beliefs. In other words, before Locke can arrive at a more “Rawlsian” notion of abstract freedom and neutrality, he first has to take the sincere beliefs of pious individuals seriously. Interestingly, Perry is somewhat agnostic about whether he believes Locke’s theological appeal to believers is itself sincere or merely a shrewd and necessary rhetorical move. While a more cynical reader might want to dismiss Locke’s theological argument on contextual grounds, Perry doesn’t let us get off so easily. After all, we can’t easily dismiss Locke’s discussion of religious loyalty when so many contemporary liberal and republican theorists are reintroducing the same topic in recent years. Language of loyalty, discursive commitments, and even public faith are back in vogue. Perry’s interpretation of Locke gives us a nice justification for this move from the father of modern liberalism himself.

In his final chapters, Perry turns to some of the key contemporary advocates and critics of the Lockean tradition. While many political debates are still limited by their Rawlsian assumptions, Perry highlights three alternate projects which take the problem of rival loyalties to heart: first, the neo-conservative republicanism of Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak; second, the ordered pluralism of neo-Calvinists Nicholas Wolterstorff and John Witte; and third, Martha Nussbaum’s turn to individual conscience. These variants all work from within the liberal tradition, even as they attempt to steer clear of the usual Rawlsian pratfalls.

Perry’s summary critique of the neo-Calvinists is particularly interesting. He notes that both Wolterstorff and Witte have turned to Abraham Kuyper as an exemplar for Christian liberals. Their brand of Kuyperianism accepts liberal polity while questioning the basis of liberal theory. In other words, “we must live together,” but Christians need not think that liberal theory provides a sufficient account of the good (ultimate or proximate). Locke comes up short on this point since he falls back too readily on his libertarian definition of freedom. By contrast, Kuyperians  “see Locke’s rights as areas of immunity that prescribe duties only of restraint. This is insufficient, for a healthy civil society depends upon a broader set of duties.” Kuyper sides with Locke in rejecting a universally-knowable summum bonum but also wants to retain divine-human relationality and the covenantal structure of civil society.

In many respects, Perry argues, the Kuyperian alternative could find resources for this covenantal turn in Lockean liberalism itself. However, Kuyperians like John Witte have chosen a different course, arguing that Johannine liberalism can be (and has been) amended by the American Puritan notion of liberty. The conceptual history of American liberty and religious freedom does yeoman’s work for this Kuyperian liberalism, but Perry finds the historical interpretation to be a bit weak (here, he might’ve drawn on Mark Noll’s work for even more evidence). In the end, the historical turn to American liberty strikes Perry as a little too self-congratulatory, a little too prone to instrumentalizing religion in civil society.

At times, I wondered whether Perry’s argument would have benefitted from either a little more or a little less attention to the historical details. I do think the interaction with Witte’s history of Puritan liberty is worthwhile, but I wasn’t entirely sure how Perry’s historical critique connected to his more theoretical interaction with Wolterstorff. On my initial reading, I thought that one possible way to bridge that gap was hinted at in the very beginning of the book. In his introduction, Perry suggested that the knotted crisis of authority that Rawlsian liberalism has left us with might be best disentangled by a form of political casuistry. There is no easy way out, no universal theory we ought to invoke. Rather, Perry is “inclined to think that ‘improvised’ responses to concrete cases – that is, something like casuistry – will work better than we suspect” (p. 8). Perry later suggests in his conclusion that we may need to reach outside the Johannine tradition for these casuistic sources – turning to figures like Augustine, Leo Strauss, or Hauerwas.

This was all extremely thought-provoking, and I’m certain I’ll return to Perry’s concluding remarks many times. The tentativeness of his remarks still left me with a few questions.

1)      If we need to reach outside the Johannine tradition to ease the tensions of religious and civic loyalty, was Kuyper’s diagnosis of American liberalism exactly right? And if they can improve their historiography, are the neo-Calvinists on the right track? Or is Kuyperianism too reliant on theistic assumptions to work in a radically pluralistic society?

2)      What precisely is the “casuistry” that Perry finds so promising? In another setting, would he identify himself as a kind of Protestant Thomist – one who isn’t looking for a theopolitical version of a rational choice theory of action?

3)      While Perry seems to find Witte’s interpretation of the Puritan “covenant” problematic, he also hints intriguingly at a promising strand of Lockean federalism. If this is a viable alternative, how might contemporary political theology and theory re-appropriate this covenantal idiom?