This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 29 Sep 2007, by Larry Keiler.
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29 Sep 07
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As long as we refuse to acknowledge the madness of the religious wars and persecutions of the 16th century, he argues, we remain in danger of loosening our grip on "the Great Separation" (of church and state) that resulted from it. By not understanding how easily any politics infused with any religion can drift in the direction of fanaticism and terror, we put ourselves at risk of drifting that way ourselves.
If we think the West is way beyond lapsing into that kind of insanity, Lilla (a professor of the humanities at Columbia University and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books) begs to differ. "Intellectual complacency," he writes, "nursed by an implicit faith in the inevitability of secularization, has blinded us to the persistence of political theology and its manifest power to shape human life at any moment." Political theology, what Lilla defines as "discourse about political authority based on a revealed divine nexus," takes its beliefs about how society should be run and how power should be distributed from what it considers to be the word of God -- the divine truth revealed to man through scripture.
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Once someone decides that they believe in a deity with purposes and intentions, it's a short step to the idea that such a god would have definite ideas about how human societies should be run.
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. Because, through the Trinity, the Christian God has multiple, incompatible relationships to the world he created, it's been difficult for Christians to get a clear fix on how they should feel about that world (and its political institutions), too.
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According to Lilla, while this theology covers all the divine bases, it results in an unclear stance on the part of God toward his creation. Some Christians believe the world is essentially good and man should glorify God by making it better, by participating in government and other activities. Others regard the material universe as inherently fallen and corrupt and advocate withdrawing from worldly concerns and relying solely on God's grace for salvation. Or, conversely, if their instincts are apocalyptic rather than ascetic, this same school might urge doing whatever is necessary to achieve a kind of divine insurgency that will precipitate the complete transformation of the fallen world into the Kingdom of God.
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