is a quite recent creature, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than two hundred years ago: but he has grown old so quickly that it has been only too easy to imagine that he had been waiting for thousands of years in the darkness for that moment of illumination in which he would finally be known.

“Man,” on this picture, is not only a new idea, a new creation, but also a fleeting one: his time is past. He’s quickly grown old and is already fading away, like the grass. “Strangely enough,” Foucault mused, “man—the study of whom is supposed by the naïve to be the oldest investigation since Socrates—is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things.” He is “only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge” who “will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.”

Foucault’s flippant requiem for “man” reflects a midcentury antihumanism in European thought, which, in the wake of two World Wars in the heart of Europe, had become suspicious of the “anthropotheism” of humanism wherein “Man” replaced the God who had died. And it is this story that is told so brilliantly by Stefanos Geroulanos in An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. For these antihumanists, humanistic atheism had never really gotten over its theological tendencies; so the result of the death of God was the divinization of Man. But having witnessed the atrocities committed in the name of such anthropocentrism, midcentury theorists sought to displace humanism. Antihumanism, in a strange sense, was out to protect humanity. (See, for example, Geroulanos’s discussion of Emmanuel Levinas, pp. 194-205.) But the effect was to downplay or even diminish the role and agency of “the subject,” emphasizing the impersonal systems, forces, and structures that conditioned human behavior. Thus, structuralism can be seen as “the single most influential inheritor of this early antihumanism,” later influencing a more naturalistic understanding of the human species and pressing a certain “biologization” of human action as understood in the social sciences.

I have greatly profited from Geroulanos’s careful account, though my work focuses on the later developments in French thought broached in his conclusion (can we hope for a sequel?). I can now see behind Foucault and Derrida a background milieu that I had previously failed to appreciate. Indeed, it’s striking how differently Geroulanos’s frame illuminates French thought into the ’60s and ’70s—like casting black light over a previously familiar room, disclosing all sorts of hitherto invisible features. While Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” is an essential part of the canon in twentieth-century continental philosophy, Geroulanos’s historical work makes me think we’ve underestimated how central these concerns are for understanding later twentieth-century debates.

But as a philosophical theologian with a deep interest in philosophical anthropology, I found myself struck by another theme: what might seem a surprising camaraderie between this atheism and a stream of Christian theology. Indeed, one could argue that both this atheism and a strain of twentieth-century theology share the same antihumanism. Such an antihumanism, of sorts, can already be heard in Barth’s fulminations against liberal Protestantism in his early commentary on Romans. In this respect, there might be room for a little more nuance in Geroulanos’s discussion of “Catholic humanism.” While it’s certainly true, for instance, that Henri de Lubac (in an odd echo of Sartre) claimed that “Christianity is a humanism,” I do wonder whether Geroulanos too quickly elides de Lubac to the project of Jacques Maritain—whose Catholic humanism did tend toward a conception of the human that generated an emphasis on human rights. But in this respect, one should note that Maritain accorded much greater weight and autonomy to “the natural”—and hence to “the human”—than de Lubac. In other words, I think the mid-century debates in Catholic theology about the relation and distinction between the so-called “natural” and “supernatural” are directly relevant to the status of “the human” in humanism. And given that there were important differences between de Lubac and Maritain on these matters, we should be careful not to assume that there is one “Catholic humanism.”

Here again, I think there is a trajectory of a kind of antihumanist theism—or better, Christian theology—which runs from Barth, through Hans Urs von Balthasar, up to the Catholic thinker Jean-Luc Marion, and which shares many concerns with the atheism that Geroulanos documents. Appropriating the critique of ontotheology for theological reasons, Marion’s Idol and Distance (published in French in 1977) celebrated the Nietzschean death of god as an idol well lost. This sensibility was further developed in God Without Being (1982), which articulated a theological critique of theism, drawing explicitly on the later Heidegger, including the important “Letter on Humanism,” which plays such a crucial role in Geroulanos’ account. But I think one can also find a correlate critique of what we might call (rather clunkily) “ontoanthropology” in Marion’s work on “the subject,” particularly in his essay “The Final Appeal of the Subject” (though one can find similar themes developed in Being Given). In a way not unlike the “negative anthropology” discussed by Geroulanos, Marion is critical of the “autarchy” of the subject and sketches a philosophical anthropology, in the spirit of Levinas, that decenters the human—as one who is claimed rather than makes claims. The human is marked by a dispossession that cannot be reified.

So, one could identify a theological strain that, precisely for theological reasons, is antihumanist while also embracing the critique of ontotheology. In other words, this is not just a reversion to a pre-humanistic theism, a retreat from Man back to God. This is a strain of theological thought marked by both a negative theology and a negative anthropology. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that such a theological sensibility is also critical of “rights talk” in just the way the French antihumanist atheists were. (We’ve had some discussion about this at the Immanent Frame before.) Thus, it should be no surprise, also, that both this antihumanist atheism and the theological sensibility I’ve noted share a critique of liberalism.

I don’t pretend to have made a case here; nor do I mean to oversimplify and ignore the obvious differences between an antihumanist atheism and an antihumanist theology.  These are just notes toward a more proper argument and analysis—sparks sent up while reading Geroulanos’s comprehensive, careful, and provocative history, which got me thinking about an atheism that even a (certain kind of) theologian could love.

Nicholas Wolterstorff’s calm, careful, humble response to my posts might make me look like an overly pugilistic polemicist.  But I think he’s just from a different school of pugilism.  (As a Canadian and long-time hockey player, I think pugilism is a great way to spend a Friday night, with beers afterward.) Wolterstorff is a careful student of the “bob and weave” school of philosophical polemics, turning ill-advised haymakers into merely glancing blows. I, on the other hand, tend to be a student of the George Foreman school of philosophical polemics (and frequent user of his grills to boot!): I’m easily sucked in by rope-a-dopes.  Why stop now?

While much of Wolterstorff’s response amounts to bob-and-weave, his reply helps to clarify some points.  But on other points, it feels like Wolterstorff has a slick cornerman who has applied copious amounts of Vaseline to help criticisms slip off his argument, deflecting them elsewhere.  In Foreman-like form, let me continue to flail on just two points.

First, with respect to my charge of a covert “individualism”: Wolterstorff hears this as if I was charging him with solipsism.  Thus, he makes the charge seem ludicrous by rightly pointing out that, in his account, rights are a “species of normative social relationships,” indeed, that “sociality is of the essence of rights.”  In short, an utterly lone entity would not bear any rights precisely because rights are a social property.  But the charge of “individualism” is not synonymous with solipsism.  What’s at issue is not whether rights are social, but how.  Or, perhaps less clumsily, my concern is not that Wolterstorff lacks a robust sense of sociality but rather that rights talk assumes a kind of sociality that is problematic.  At stake here, we might say, is the shape of his “social ontology.”

So the operative term in my critique is not just “individualism,” but the qualifier, “atomistic.”  The social ontology of rights talk generally assumes that, at bottom, the kind of relation between social entities is conflictual or competitive.  In short, if rights are taken to be the basic building block in our account of justice, Hobbes will never be far off.  I find this fundamentally conflictual or agonistic ontology to be implicit in the very way that Wolterstorff defines rights: X bears a right “against” Y.  Now, Wolterstorff might think it an over-reading to hear this “against” as anything other than a semantic formulation.  But many of the right order theorists he criticizes think there’s more at stake than that.  Such a semantic formulation bubbles up from the social ontology that rights talk assumes.  (And, incidentally, though I won’t further insist on these terms, I think this is what’s at stake in debates between individualists and communitarians.  An “individualist” is not guilty of solipsism, but of construing intersubjective relations as derivative, secondary, or artificial [and usually conflictual], whereas communitarians begin from an “organic” picture of intersubjective relations that doesn’t see conflict or competition as basic to these relations.  I continue to find John Ruskin and William Morris to be eloquent on these matters.)

This difference at the level of social ontology might explain why Wolterstorff and right order theorists sometimes seem to be talking past one another. I think Wolterstorff is correct that “right order” theories generally tell a declining narrative about the emergence of inherent-rights-talk.  But I think he misdiagnoses what concerns them about this.  It’s not just that rights are guilty by association with things like individualism and secularism; rather, right order theorists who are wary of making rights talk fundamental are concerned about the matrix of commitments that undergird such a picture of justice, viz., a Hobbesian construal of intersubjectivity which sees human relationships as, at bottom (or “naturally,” in Hobbes’ language), competitive and conflictual.  Thus rights-talk is consistently accompanied by “against-ness” (see Justice, pp. 7, 54, 94, 108, 176, and passim).

So it is true that the “disagreement between right order theorists and inherent rights theorists has to do with the deep structure of the moral order.”  But the right order theorist also thinks there’s an even deeper disagreement at the level of what I’m calling “social ontology.”  I don’t think you can make inherent rights the fulcrum of your account of justice without buying into a social ontology that makes “against-ness” essential to sociality.  (There are theological issues in the ballpark here, too, but I’ll bracket those here.  We should also attend to the core issues concerning the shape of the “normative context” for rights.  But that requires a level of technical, philosophical precision that I think is best pursued elsewhere.)

Second, with respect to Wolterstorff’s (lack of) direct engagement with MacIntyre and Hauerwas: Wolterstorff contends that he does not charge MacIntyre and Hauerwas with “hostility to justice and rights.”  Further, he “does not charge MacIntyre with hostility to justice,” nor does he charge Hauerwas with hostility to justice.  In terms of explicit criticisms, this is clearly the case.  But I invite other readers of the book to judge whether or not my suspicions are misplaced.  I’m not ready to relinquish my claims in this regard.  (I might note that a forthcoming review of the book by Daniel Bell in Pro Ecclesia will articulate similar concerns.)

It’s on this point that I think Wolterstorff’s bob-and-weave is most evident.  Let me note two bobs and a weave:

(a) Wolterstorff’s response claims that MacIntyre and Hauerwas were not his targets when he articulates concern about those who exhibit “hostility to justice and rights.”  Then who are the targets of this criticism?  Sometimes it feels as if Justice is battling some phantom menace.  Furthermore, if the upshot of the book is that, ultimately, only inherent rights can properly secure justice, and if MacIntyre and Hauerwas reject inherent rights (as they clearly do), then wouldn’t it follow that they don’t adequately or properly affirm justice?  Or let me put this another way: doesn’t Wolterstorff really think, at the end of the day, that right order theories of justice are unjust?

(b) I think Wolterstorff is being coy about the invocation of Hauerwas in the Nygren chapter.  If he doesn’t think there’s some connection between Hauerwas and Nygren—or at least some connection between Hauerwas and the errors of “agapism”—then why does the chapter open with this brief cameo by Hauerwas?  I’m not the one making the connection between Nygren and Hauerwas; it’s Wolterstorff’s opening of the chapter that seems to be making some connection.  So the burden is not on me to show that Hauerwas has significant things to say about love and justice; the burden is on Wolterstorff to explain why Hauerwas even appears in this chapter.  (There’s the additional issue of why one would be engaging Nygren now, since I can’t think of anyone signing up for his dichotomous paradigm. But again, I think Wolterstorff suspects some connections here that he doesn’t make explicit.)

(c) Finally, Wolterstorff extends an invitation: “If some present-day eudaimonist, MacIntyre included, has developed a version of eudaimonism that provides the conceptual resources for an account of justice as inherent rights, I invite Smith to point me toward that.”  No thank you, is my reply.  This generous invitation is covertly colonizing; it misses my point and MacIntyre’s disagreement.  I’m not at all suggesting that MacIntyre can, as a eudaimonist, provide the conceptual resources for justice as inherent rights.  The point is that he doesn’t want to.  For reasons, I think, not unlike the “social ontology” argument above, MacIntyre, Hauerwas, Milbank, and others refuse to see inherent rights as the basic building blocks of justice.  So I’m not disagreeing that MacIntyre is rightly associated with eudaimonism; nor am I disagreeing that eudaimonism cannot generate the conceptual resources for a theory of justice as inherent rights.  Rather, I’m arguing that the eudaimonist doesn’t want to frame justice in terms of rights.  So to fault the eudaimonist for not being able to generate an account of justice as inherent rights is not even a glancing blow; it misses MacIntyre altogether.

Wolterstorff’s way of framing the debate has loaded the deck in such a way that one has to play with “rights” cards.  At that point, the MacIntyrean eudaimonist will just refuse to play.  He won’t feel defeated (as Wolterstorff would interpret it) because he sees Wolterstorff as playing an entirely different game.

Alas, the bell.

I would suggest that we can see a kind of Reformed version of this project—a sort of “Whig Calvinism”—in the recent work of John Witte, Jr. and Nicholas Wolterstorff.  In particular, while much more needs to be said about Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Justice—including some properly philosophical engagements we’ll save for elsewhere—I’ll close my contribution to this symposium with some broad brush strokes by suggesting that Wolterstorff’s project can be seen as a powerful, persuasive version of a Whig Calvinism, which, instead of ending up with a neoconservativism, ends up with a theistic liberalism.  And I am interested in the way and extent to which this represents a contemporary articulation and extension of the Kuyperian project.  More specifically, I’m interested in how Wolterstorff’s Kuyperian “sensibility” manifests itself in his basic whiggish evaluation of liberal democracy (akin to Kuyper’s rather rosy, nineteenth-century affirmations of “progress”).  To what extent does this represent an assimilation of Reformed Protestantism to the paradigms of liberalism?  Or—to take Witte’s point—to what extent is the Reformed tradition actually a cause in the emergence of liberalism?  Witte and Wolterstorff offer powerful, erudite narratives that argue for just such a causal continuity.  But I think there’s room for disagreement and for the articulation of an alternative story.  If the Reformation was something like an Augustinian renewal movement within the church catholic, one has to wonder, for instance, how a thick, Augustinian understanding of freedom could be reconciled with the thinned-out, libertarian freedom of modernity.

Wolterstorff is out to tell the causal version of this story: the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures teach inherent rights, the church affirmed inherent rights, the Reformation recovered and expanded inherent rights, and modern liberal democracy universalized inherent rights (and stands in danger of losing a ground for them if it persists in its secularizing ways).  But with just a smidgen of a hermeneutics of suspicion, this story could be told quite differently—namely, that a late modern Calvinist, who has bought into a liberal model of justice as inherent rights, is now (surprise, surprise!) finding just such a model of justice in a selective, tilted reading of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures—and that insofar at the Reformation plays a role in giving rise to this paradigm, it’s to blame, not praise.  (I don’t claim to have sufficiently marshaled the resources to actually pull off such an alternative account.  I only want to sketch what it might look like.)

In fact, I think we can locate this tension and these alternatives right in Wolterstorff’s corpus.  A full evaluation of Justice will have to read it against Until Justice and Peace Embrace.  And I would suggest that there is some tension between Wolterstorff’s vision of justice in Until Justice and Peace Embrace and Justice.  Indeed, one might even argue that his earlier model is a kind of “right order” theory of justice, and that his migration (in Justice) to inherent rights represents a shift in his thought.

On this score, it seems to me that Wolterstorff leaves us to read between the lines.  The best I’ve been able to come up with is this: it seems that he is skittish about right order theories (and by implication, eudaimonism) because they work with communitarian assumptions—and it seems that he is worried that communitarian frameworks tend to run roughshod over what individuals demand/require.  In this respect, I think Wolterstorff is inattentive to the extent to which he has absorbed the atomistic individualism of modern liberalism (and then read something like it back into the Scriptures). This is just another way of saying that I think Wolterstorff—in good Kuyperian fashion—has unwittingly been assimilated to regnant paradigms in liberal political thought and is now “baptizing” them with a theological story.  In short, I think Wolterstorff’s most fundamental (and thus un-interrogated) assumptions demonstrate just how the Kuyperian vision can so easily slide toward cultural assimilation.  But these are just suspicions—concerns about a “vibe” in his project.

I think this passion—and this perception of the lack of concern for justice—is a significant part of the background to Justice: Rights and Wrongs.  And reading as charitably as I can, I think this passion—and the perception that arises from it—must be what explains some puzzling aspects of Wolterstorff’s book.  In particular, I note a couple of troublesome moves and habits in this project.

First, Wolterstorff (not unlike Jeff Stout) sometimes assumes that commitment to liberal democracy is the only way to care about justice; so a critique or rejection of the paradigms of liberal democracy or rights-talk is seen as a lack of concern for justice per se.  Thus when he sketches the influential narrative of MacIntyre and Hauerwas, he narrates it as “a hostility to justice and rights”—taking it to be the case that an opposition to rights talk is equivalent to an opposition to justice per se.  That seems clearly false to me (to adopt a Wolterstorffian locution!) unless one sets up the matter in a way that simply begs the question.  Or, to put this otherwise, Wolterstorff seems to assume that a rejection of “rights talk” must therefore be allied to some affirmation of the status quo.  Thus he tends to read MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and others—who are critical of rights talk—as if they are therefore apologists for the status quo (which is, we’d all admit, unjust).  But again, this clearly doesn’t follow.

In addition to somewhat begging the question, Wolterstorff I fear is targeting straw men. As noted in my first post, he is countering what he perceives to be a “hostility to justice and rights” in contemporary theological and philosophical quarters (Hauerwas, MacIntyre), as well as (I think) what he perceives to be a more broadly Christian aloofness with respect to issues of justice, particularly justice demanded by inherent rights.

This hostility to “justice and rights,” on Wolterstorff’s account, is rooted in and motivated by two (related) things: (1) a conception of justice as right order and (2) a narrative regarding the origin and emergence of “inherent rights,” which ties it to modern possessive individualism and Enlightenment conceptions of the polis. So he sets out to contest the narrative and the right order theories behind it.  Part I was thought to dispense with the narrative; Part II turns to the theoretical insufficiencies of right order theories of justice—which culminates in his critique of eudaimonism (which would require more careful, technical engagement than we can undertake here—I hope to do so elsewhere).

But why the fixation on “eudaimonism”?  I think we can make sense of his move in this way: eudaimonism is taken to be something like the general ethos of right order theories.  Therefore, pointing out the antithesis between eudaimonism and justice as rights is Wolterstorff’s way of pointing out what’s wrong with right order theories of justice.  But here again, I think there are two significant problems:

(1) This would make Part II an extended case of begging the question.  What motivates the project of Part II is Wolterstorff’s (correct) claim that “there is no theory of rights to be found in ancient ethical theory” coupled with his judgment that this “was no accident. The ancients conducted all their ethical theorizing within the framework of eudaimonism.  A theory of rights, so I contend, cannot be developed within that framework.” OK, maybe: but I don’t think that constitutes a critique.  It simply stipulates a conditional requirement: if one is going to develop a theory of justice as inherent rights, then eudaimonism is either inadequate to such a theory or, more strongly, incompatible.  But Wolterstorff does not provide sufficient warrant for the antecedent.  Instead, he assumes it in his critique.

(2) More significantly, Wolsterstorff exhibits a sly habit of substituting guilt-by-association for real, head-on arguments.  For instance (and most glaringly), chapter four opens with a brief alarmist reference to Hauerwas’s claim that “justice is a bad idea for Christians” and then mounts a devastating (and just) critique of Anders Nygren.  But what, exactly, does Hauerwas have to do with Nygren? It seems clear that in Wolterstorff’s mind, Hauerwas is offering us a warmed-over Nygrenism.  So he takes it that his critique of Nygren thus also dispatches with Hauerwas.  But Wolterstorff is very much mistaken in this regard; a critique of Nygren doesn’t even touch Hauerwas and is no substitute for a head-on engagement with Hauerwas.  (At least Stout actually reads Hauerwas and takes him seriously on his own terms.)  Wolterstorff seems to read Hauerwas as if he were a pietistic evangelical only concerned with “souls” and thus unconcerned with “justice.”  Thus Wolterstorff wryly (smugly?) notes that he does “not discern the ‘enthusiasm for justice and rights’ among contemporary Christians that Hauerwas claims to notice.”  But that is a caricature that fails to appreciate where Hauerwas makes such inflammatory claims.  Wolterstorff mistakenly allies Hauerwas to Nygren because he misplaces Hauerwas: Stanley’s target is liberal Methodists who confuse the Gospel with whatever currently constitutes the platform of the Democratic party, whereas Wolterstorff is reacting, I think, to the a-political quietism of evangelicals and/or the selective “law and order” focus of the Religious Right.

I think one sees a similar move going on in Part II: the multi-chapter critique of eudaimonism—which really boils down to a critique of Stoicism—is prefaced with a brief but significant reference to MacIntyre: “There are important contemporary eudaimonists; Alasdair MacIntyre comes to mind.” Wolterstorff then goes on to say that since all “contemporary” eudaimonists acknowledge their debts to ancient eudaimonism, Wolterstorff will just focus on ancient eudaimonism.  Again, we get a guilt-by-association dispatching rather than a head-on engagement: Wolterstorff takes it that his critique of Stoicism (and more cursorily, Peripatetic eudaimonism) just constitutes a critique of MacIntyre.  But again, I think Wolterstorff’s chosen targets don’t hit his intended targets.

Thus his latest book, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, is something of a magnum opus on these matters.  There are layers and layers of themes and issues that could be discussed, but much of that will have to be saved for other (more scholarly) contexts; I offer some bloggish thoughts as catalysts for conversation.  These certainly don’t represent my “final word” on these matters—more like my first fumblings, highlighting just a few themes over several posts.

We should first appreciate Wolterstorff’s project as indicated by the structure of the book.  Let me sketch a bit of a map. Wolterstorff first seeks to dispatch with a narrative about rights that he deems particularly influential.  The chain of the argument seems to go something like this:

(1)   There is an influential narrative (articulated by MacIntyre, O’Donovan, and others), which construes “rights talk” as basically antithetical to Christian faith and which has, as a result, generated “hostility to justice and rights.”

(2)   This narrative is critical of rights talk on at least three counts:

(a)    Rights talk is a distinctly modern emergence that is incongruent with a biblical vision;

(b)   Rights talk is allied with possessive individualism;

(c)    Rights talk is tethered to assumptions of neutrality and thus inextricably linked to secularism.

This influential version of the story is Wolterstorff’s foil and target.  In response, Wolterstorff’s strategy is to:

(1)   Show that rights talk is not a modern emergence but can in fact be found implicit in antiquity and, more importantly, in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures—and more specifically, that the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures offer an implicit notion of inherent natural rights.  This is the focus of Part I.

(2)   Show that “justice” must be understood not only as “right order” (the theory of justice he attributes to MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and O’Donovan), but in terms of (not only “natural” but) inherent natural rights.  This is the project of Parts II and III of the book.

But I expect that The Immanent Frame’s readers will be most intrigued by the third aspect of the book’s project, which emerges at the end: Wolterstorff’s claim that “inherent” human rights require theistic grounding.

So let’s start from the end.  Now, it seems to me that what worries Wolterstorff about “right order” theories of justice (i.e., communitarian accounts) is that they leave justice at the whim of a particular story, a particular community, and thus leave the wronged without recourse, without a basis for appeal.  If rights are going to “work”—that is, if they are going to provide an extra-story and supra-community criterion for naming wrongs—then the worth of the human person needs to be grounded in some feature or property that is not conditioned by a particular story and which is a feature of all human beings. A conception of “right order” can’t work because it lacks “generality;” it will be story-relative.  Conversely, something like “rational capacities” (a la Kant) won’t work because not all human beings exhibit such. At this juncture, Wolterstorff sees the “image of God” coupled with a sense of God’s love for each human being as the only viable way forward, even though this seems to make him uncomfortable.

There’s much to be said about this move in his argument.  However, I would like to address this at a macro-level that comes up later.  Wolterstorff has pointed out the inadequacy of a “secular” grounding of worth/rights and hence pressed the necessity of grounding rights in the image of God and God’s love for creatures.  But this raises what he describes as an “unsettling question”: “Suppose the secularization thesis is true.” That is, suppose that modernization leads to secularization.  If it is the case that the “subculture” of rights actually owes its genesis to religious and specifically biblical sources, and if secularization erodes the plausibility of those sources, “What must we then expect to happen to that subculture” of rights?  He later answers his own question: “If this framework erodes, I think we must expect that our moral subculture of rights will also eventually erode and that we will slide back into our tribalisms.”

Wolterstorff closes by simply asserting, “I do not believe the thesis.”  But it’s not clear to me just what he thinks the “secularization thesis” refers to. And he’s certainly not alone in not believing the thesis.  But it’s not clear what he means to assert by saying he doesn’t believe the thesis.

Does he mean that he doesn’t think modernization entails secularization? Well, then he has nothing to worry about; “religion”—even theism—seems alive and well in the late modern world.

Or does he mean that he rejects secularism? That would make sense given his Reformed epistemology; indeed, he’s articulated this already in Audi & Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square and in his critiques of Rorty (in the Journal of Religious Ethics). But even a “secular” philosopher like Jeff Stout will agree with him about the unwarranted nature of secularism. That doesn’t mean that Stout believes humans are created in the image of God and loved by God equally and permanently. Indeed, I think one of the things that Wolterstorff finds “unsettling” about his conclusion is that it means that his friend Stout’s project is inadequate.

So does he mean, as I suspect, that we need to shore up the “framework” that undergirds the notion of the image of God? And if so, just what could that mean? That we need to expand the number of people who begin from that story? Does he mean we need enough convincing theorists to accept the story? Does he think that the “framework” requires a critical mass of people who believe that humans are created in the image of God? Is there a sort of covert Christendom project at work here? I honestly don’t know.

The recent unveiling of “An Evangelical Manifesto” was an occasion for me to once again express reservations about theological definitions of the term “evangelical” (see here). I have two worries about these normative, theological definitions. First, such theological definitions have a sort of centripetal force about them: they often feel like a conceptual circling of the wagons, intended to de-fine a group by marking off its differences from other groups—and usually from other Christians. In my experience, this almost always ends up being an anti-Catholic move, a repristination of the Protestant Reformation. Now, I don’t mean to say that such theological definitions of evangelicalism are shaped by a rabid anti-Roman Catholicism (though we academics who make claims about a “generous evangelicalism” would do well to attend a few prophecy conferences in order to be reminded of the still-rabid anti-Romanism dispensed by dispensationalist radio preachers and embedded in all those charts hung up in church basements). We have seen a flourishing dialogue between Catholics and evangelicals over the past decade, to the extent that Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom could jointly ask, “Is the Reformation Over?” But the very project of defining and continuing to define “evangelical” should be an indicator that the answer to their question is still, “No.” Theological definitions of evangelicalism assume that there is something about being “evangelical” that is different from being “Catholic,” an older, more ecumenical label that was meant to indicate a commitment to a certain core orthodoxy (as when St. Augustine the preacher would admonish his congregation, “Remember, you are Catholic…”).

This first concern about theological definitions of evangelicalism points to a second: if such definitions are sometimes too narrow, they can also be too broad. For instance, if someone suggests a theological definition of “evangelical” which actually could include Roman Catholics, then one has to wonder just what work the term “evangelical” really does. This tension came to a head when Joshua Hochschild, a convert to Rome, could not remain employed by Wheaton College because the college’s “evangelical” statement of faith was taken to de facto exclude Roman Catholics, despite Hochschild’s assertion that a Catholic could affirm the statement’s primacy of Scripture. If “evangelicals” can be Roman Catholic, we have to wonder why the historic term “Catholic” couldn’t do the same definitional work. So attempts to broaden “evangelical” to include Roman Catholics fail for this reason.

But there is another kind of vague breadth in recent theological definitions of “evangelicalism” that concerns me—namely, the demographic sleight of hand that enfolds Pentecostals, charismatics, and the explosion of “world Christianity” under the label “evangelical.” I worry that there is a covert conceptual colonialism at work here, which lumps vibrant expressions of faith in other parts of the world together with the revivalism behind North American and British evangelicalism. This is painting with a very broad theological brush indeed; worse still, it paints over important differences in practice and implicit theology that serve as more significant identity markers in Christian expressions like Nigerian Pentecostalism. Theological definitions of evangelicalism are, we might say, poorly calibrated: they see certain theological similarities and conclude that we’re seeing the same phenomenon. But I’m suggesting that this is a poor theoretical filter; or rather, we might say that it is a poor theoretical net. Designed to catch “evangelical” fish, it assumes that any fish that get through must be evangelicals. But I would suggest that what “defines” global Pentecostalism is a set of practices—and a tacit theology within them—which is quite different from the Euro-American “evangelical” paradigm.

For these reasons and others, I find myself both skeptical and suspicious of theological definitions of evangelicalism. Such definitions have a normativity about them, which assumes that the doctrinal markers of evangelical Protestantism—marking it off from other Christian traditions—are something worth celebrating and preserving. I think such distinctions and divisions are lamentable. In our secular (or post-secular) culture, we’d do better to encourage all Christians to see themselves as “Catholic” rather than continue to assert a sub-Christian identity.

But does that mean that evangelicalism is left as a free-floating signifier, an empty term that tells us nothing? I don’t think so. Rather, I think it leaves us with something like a sociological definition of evangelicalism. On such an account, what defines “evangelicalism” is not some sort of direct link to the essence of the Gospel (behind most theological definitions of evangelicalism is some sense that “we” are the real Christians), but rather an appreciation that evangelicalism represents a contingent style, a sort of accent within Christendom. It is not simply a “recovery” of the so-called essence of the Gospel and the New Testament church. It is a style that has a history and genealogy that is contingent, particular, and geographically situated. It is a distinctly modern, post-Reformation configuration of Christian discipleship that engendered practices and institutions which closely mirrored the development of what Charles Taylor describes as “the modern social imaginary”—a focus on individual salvation, a valorization of the autonomy of the local congregation, an entrepreneurial spirit that fueled ambitious programs of church and parachurch expansion, a kind of Christian materialism that generated its own markets, and other distinctive features.

What I mean to suggest is that “evangelicalism” is defined by a contingent constellation of practices and institutions that elude theological formulation or definition. This is why I think a sociological definition of evangelicalism is the only viable option. Admittedly, this approach can seem a little fuzzy, on the order of “it takes one to know one.” But here again, Taylor might help us to get a handle on why this is the case: if evangelicalism is not a theology but an imaginary, then that means what “defines” it can never be adequately articulated or expressed in theological formulae. Instead, “evangelicalism” would be a sort of ethos, a sensibility, a contingent set of practices and institutions within which one lives and moves and has her being. “Evangelical” is an identity forged at a level more visceral than doctrinal.

It is in this sociological sense that I own up to being an evangelical, despite all my theological reservations. I still pick up Christianity Today before I pick up the Christian Century or First Things. I get the jokes, jabs, and sly references in the orbit of conservative Protestantism. I’ve taken friends to a Billy Graham crusade and still revere Nonconformist saints like Jim Elliot and Corrie ten Boom. I know the words to Michael W. Smith’s “Friends are Friends Forever” (sung when departing every Bible camp), as well as all the words to Keith Green’s anthems. I still understand the inner workings and issues of evangelicalism better than the labyrinthine machinations of American liberalism or Catholicism. I still feel at home in evangelical circles—if you understand being “at home” like coming back to a small town Thanksgiving dinner, with all its charm and awkwardness, all its arguments and hugs.

For theological reasons, I think even we who self-identify as evangelicals ought to embrace the contingency and historicity of a sociological definition. But even such sociological definitions will need to be better calibrated to the on-the-ground shape of lived religion in evangelicalism. Social scientists observing evangelicalism will want to avoid the red herrings of theological definitions without ignoring the implicit theology—the social imaginary—that is “carried” in the habits and practices of evangelicals. For that reason, I do think there is a sense in which “it takes one to know one;” if evangelicals can put aside their inclination toward theological definitions, they might become critical partners for a more nuanced sociological definition of evangelicalism.

It is also a handsome book, just the sort of thing one expects from Knopf: stout and meaty in a 5×8 format with a textured dust-jacket and creamy pages—a pleasure to hold and (I have to confess) caress. Only deckled pages would have been an improvement. Such lovely materiality deserves praise.

But back to the first claim: What makes the book stunning is the fact that Lilla, if you’ll forgive the semiotic jargon, is a helluva story teller. Let’s not underestimate his achievement. The Stillborn God is so lucid that it lulls you into thinking you actually understand Kant and Hegel. Giants in German theology like Schleiermacher and Troeltsch are adroitly encapsulated in a few pages, and relatively minor figures like Gogarten or Cohen stride onto the stage as such fulsome characters in the story that one is compelled by their amplified presence. Lilla uniquely weds the analytic skill of an expositor with the story-telling skills of a dramatist. This is as close as Hegel is ever going to get to “creative non-fiction.”

Lilla’s erudition informs a sweeping narrative from late medieval Christendom up to the outbreak of World War II. But it is a tale with a curious narrative arc: the hero emerges early, but the remainder of the story tracks all the ways he is forgotten by later dramatis personae—such that only the narrator (Lilla) seems to honor his memory. The story goes something like this:

We begin with a crisis, the so-called “wars of religion”: awash in the fervor and passion of religious faith, the early modern west finds itself spiraling into the chaotic violence of religious wars which are the result of a toxic mix of theology and politics that Lilla simply describes as “political theology.” Into this milieu of religio-political violence strides our hero, Thomas Hobbes, engineer of the “Great Separation” that sequestered theology (with its claims to divine revelation) from having any role or authority in matters of “politics” (which was to be conducted on the basis of public reason available to and agreed upon by all). Thus was “modern political philosophy” born as the antidote to “political theology.” Hobbes and political philosophy liberated “us” (sic) from the “Kingdom of Darkness” (a phrase that gets repeated just often enough that it takes on a kind of Michael-Moore-ish quality, I’m afraid).

To this point, up to Locke’s liberalization of Hobbes, Lilla’s story is not especially unique. It’s a classic example of what Charles Taylor would call a “subtraction” story of modernity. But things get interesting when Lilla continues to consider the fate of this Great Separation after Hobbes. From this point the story becomes a jeremiad, lamenting the ways that Hobbes’ heirs (Rousseau, Kant, Hegel) rolled back the accomplishments of the father of “modern political philosophy,” giving just enough ground to religion and theology that political theology would once again rear its ugly head right here in the “enlightened” West. Rousseau and Kant both re-admit (an albeit scaled-down, “rational”) religion back into public political discussion. Something about human nature and human morality pressed them to give a continuing though chastened role to religion for even “modern” man. But keeping the door open just a tiny bit was fateful: what began as a toe in the door ends up as the elephant in the room. Thus Lilla plays Samuel to Rousseau and Kant’s Saul: “What’s this bleating of sheep I hear?” Why have you not vanquished every vestige of political theology? Making room for even a “modern” political theology as purveyed by the liberal theology of Schleiermacher or Cohen gives rise to a Frankenstein-ish monster that comes back to haunt “the West” in the form of “German Christianity” (indeed, the book might have been better subtitled Religion, Politics, and Modern Germany).

Admittedly, one of the places where Lilla’s story-telling goes off the rails is his account of twentieth-century German theology, and Barth in particular, upon whom he lays the blame for Nazism. Only someone as deft as Lilla could make such a claim seem even remotely plausible, but at the end of the day it remains a ludicrous charge. But I’ll leave it to the Princeton police to protect Barth.

The lesson Lilla draws from this morality tale is that the “God” that would have issued from the Great Liberal Separation was a “stillborn God”—a superfluous deity easily lopped off by Occam’s razor. After all, just what work does such a god do? What does such a non-interventionist, deistic, distant bestower of human autonomy add to the universe? Why bother? “To the decisive questions—‘Why be a Christian?’ ‘Why be a Jew?’—liberal theology offered no answer at all.” Most people need more than that.

It is perhaps the pronouns that are most telling in The Stillborn God. Throughout the book I found myself wondering: Just who is this for? What’s the point? Why is this story important? For whom? This is hinted at in the opening but clarified in a final coda: the story is intended as a cautionary tale for “us.” “The rebirth of political theology is a humbling story,” Lilla concludes, “or ought to be” for those of us with the intellectual will and fortitude to choose to be “heirs to the Great Separation.”

At this point Lilla turns aside to the small cadre of the Enlightened who see the story for what it is: “Those of us who have accepted the heritage of the Great Separation must do so soberly. Time and again we must remind ourselves that we are living an experiment, that we are the exceptions.” Wavering between insider code and an invitation to join this inner circle of the exceptional, Lilla ends with a manifesto of inverse gnosticism: “We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by the light of revelation. If our experiment is to work, we must rely on our own lucidity.” “We” turns out to be the sect of modern-day Essenes living on the upper West Side, who have vowed to abstain from the illusions of the masses and consigned themselves to the cold, hard desert “reality” disclosed by reason. Lilla and his exceptionalist monastic brotherhood of enlightened “us” have girded their loins in order to make their way in the world without the comforts of faith and revelation (I’m guessing one would bump into Hitchens and Harris in the same rationalist desert after all).

Where does that leave the rest of us—the us not included in Lilla’s enlightened “us?” I, for one, am not persuaded to drop my nets and follow Hobbes.

A first core problem of the book is the very beginning of the story: it buys into the simplistic myth of religious violence and secular peace, resting on the unsubstantiated empirical claim that “religion” (whatever that is) breeds violence whereas institutions of liberal democracy foster peace (current world conflicts in the name of “democracy” not withstanding). Thus Lilla repeats the liberal alarm about religion’s “passion” and “fervor” as the incubator of violence—passions to be curbed by the machinations of Leviathan and, later, the liberal democratic state. But this is a distinction that is untenable for anyone who has ever attended a professional sports event in the United States. It sounds as if Lilla has never witnessed the fervor and passion incited at the opening of a NASCAR race when the dancing colors of the flag are mingled with the iconography of a military fly-over. The opening prayer certainly doesn’t excite the same passions!

In short, the myth of distinctly religious violence and liberal peace is untenable. As the work of William Cavanaugh has demonstrated, the so-called “wars of religion” were primarily about statecraft, and “religion” was an invention of the politiques behind the modern state. While we might not expect Lilla to be a theologian, he is culpably responsible for his ignorance of Cavanaugh’s trenchant challenge to the tired, liberal story about the “wars of religion.” If that story is placed in doubt, then the liberal state is not the savior it pretends to be. Leviathan is more perpetrator than liberator. And Lilla can’t simply plead that he’s “doing history;” what’s at stake is his historiography.

A second core problem is a related distinction between “political theology” and “modern political philosophy.” While he never quite clarifies the nature of the distinction, political theology is seen to be problematic because it appeals to revelation, whereas political philosophy subscribes to a kind of epistemological asceticism that resigns itself to the human all too human. Modern political philosophy is thus more “realistic,” according to Lilla, and in this sense has a leg up on the illusions or dishonesty of political theology.

But this, too, is an untenable distinction. This is not a tension between faith and reason, theology and the secular. It is always already a tension between two faiths, between competing theologies, between rival stories about the world—neither of which can be “proved” but both of which are affirmed by faith. While I think Lilla has conveniently (and irresponsibly) ignored scholarship along these lines (as articulated in the work of John Milbank, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Jeffrey Stout), in fact his own account admits the point. As he observes, Hobbes is not without faith: “On the very first page of his work Hobbes makes an implicit profession of faith: that to understand religion and politics, we need not understand anything about God; we need only understand man as we find him, a body alone in the world.” Not all theologies require appeal to revelation; theologies bubble up from the fundamental, faith-based stories we tell about the world. In this respect, modern political philosophy is always already a political theology. Leviathan is not without its priests and prophets. Lilla’s story about liberation from theology is informed by an alternative theology. That fact calls into question his entire project.