Political Theology

Political Theology January 11, 2005

Richard Neuhaus has his gleeful fun attacking John Milbank in the November 2004 issue of First Things . I don’t think he’s entirely fair to Milbank’s political thought, and his charge that Milbank’s attack on the Catholic Church is an “annoyingly unremitting rant” that is “mainly a product of deep-seated personal prejudice” verges close to the borderlands of rant itself (though, to be sure, a refreshingly remitting one). Neuhaus scores some points in pointing to the invisibility of Milbank’s church (the “path of peaceful flight” that ends Theology and Social Theory ), and I agree with Neuhaus that Milbank’s policy recommendations are, for all the radicalism of his theology and rhetoric, fairly recognizable leftisms. And he notes the irony that Hauerwas does not feel the need to be a member of “an ecclesial community that is in political tension or conflict with the culture of liberalism.” (Neuhaus claims that Hauerwas “remains personally associated with the liberal United Methodist Church.” I’m fairly certain that Hauerwas is an Episcopalian now, though that hardly dents Neuhaus’s point.)

Still, I wonder if Neuhaus has understood, or even attempted to understand, what the “emergent political theologians” are up to. He cites Daniel Bell’s question, “What is the proper political correlate of the Christian mythos ? Leviathan or the Body of Christ?” and answers that Bell’s question is “an unfortunate muddling of the matter.” Neuhaus adds, “As St. Augustine understood, the Church is not a political correlate of the gospel but a distinct society that is integral to the gospel. The political correlate is the politics by which the Church is confronted in the course of her sojourn through history.” But the whole point of Hauerwasian political theology, I would have thought, is precisely that the church is a “distinct society that is integral to the gospel.” That is what Hauerwas means when he claims that the church is the political correlate of the gospel (unless I’m in the grip of a massive misinterpretation myself). Neuhaus appears to be implying that the politics of the world, secular politics, are the only politics around, and if that’s the case this does indeed strike me as an unfortunately subordination of the “master discourse” of the gospel to the “principalities and powers of the present time.” (Neuhaus cites this language within scornful quotation marks.) None of this, however, necessitates a leftist agenda.

I wonder if Hauerwas would seriously disagree with Neuhaus’s final summary: “For those strengthened in faith and love, there is no alternative to that Church on pilgrimage, confusedly and ambiguously engaged with the politics of the saeculum , while, all along the way, celebrating the Real Presence of that city whose temple, according to Revelation 21, is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb, and through whose gates shall be brought the glory and honor of the nations. That is the political theology entailed by the gospel of Jesus Christ.” And I wonder of Neuhaus seriously believes Hauerwas would disagree.


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