Ma - Toward a Theology of the Common Good and Christian Democratic Engagement

2019·1.1 MB·English

by  Yi Shen Ma

Toward a Theology of the Common Good and Christian Democratic Engagement

Yi Shen Ma
Claremont School of Theology

A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of
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Doctor of Philosophy 2019
Abstract
The aim of this thesis is twofold. First, it seeks to show Christians that the Christian
political imagination provides good resources to reimagine a politics of the common good
beyond the limitations of models of liberal politics that eschews theological questions about the
ultimate good. Second, it contends that the integrity of Christians life hinges on active
engagement in political life for the welfare of the vulnerable and marginalized in society. The
central organizing idea is that a Christian account of the political can sustain a politics of
liberation as well as the highest values of liberal democracy without compromising Christian
particularity.
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Table of Contents
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………5
Chapter One: The Theological Core of Politics..…………………………………………...22
I. David Hollenbach against Liberal Individualism………………………………...24
II. Mary M. Keys on the Limits of Liberal Community……………………………30
III. Stanley Hauerwas’ on Liberalism’s Fear of Death……………………………..36
IV. Nature of the Nation-State according to William T. Cavanaugh………………39
V. The Persistence of the Sacred: Paul W. Kahn’s Political Phenomenology……..41
VI. The Nation-State as the Highest End…………………………………………..53
VII. Sacrifice, Security, and Constantinian Control……………………………….58
VIII. Liberal Constantinianism and the Problem of Democratic Virtues………….61
IX. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..64
Chapter Two: The Limits of Radical Democracy………………………………………….66
I. William Connolly’s Critique of the Logic of Identity…………………………...69
II. Connolly’s Critique of Identitarian Politics…………………………………….72
III. Connolly’s Ethos of Public Engagement………………………………………76
IV. Connolly’s Ontology and Ethics……………………………………………….81
V. The Limits of Connolly’s Radical Democratic Politics………………………...85
VI. Romand Coles’ Critique of Political Teleology……………………………….93
VII. Coles on the Value of Tradition………………………………………………98
VIII. Coles on Yoder’s Vulnerable Christian Faith………………………………100
IX. Coles’ Ethic of Nepantilist Generosity……………………………………….103
X. Coles’ Ethic of Life……………………………………………………………106
XI. The Limits of Coles’ Generosity……………………………………………...109
XII. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………115
Chapter Three: Towards a Theological Theory of the Common Good…………………...117
I. Individuality, Personality, and the Common Good…………………………….118
II. The Problem of Maritain’s Dualistic Soteriology……………………………...125
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III. Toward a Trinitarian Theological Theory of the Common Good……………..132
IV. Politics, Metaphysics, and Theology…………………………………………..143
V. Church and Society……………………………………………………………..147
VI. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..150
Chapter Four: Liberating the Theology of the Common Good……………………………152
I. On Hauerwas’ Attempt to Keep Social Ethics Theological……………………..154
II. Liberation Theology Reconsidered……………………………………………..165
III. Liberating Theology of the Common Good…………………………………...177
IV. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..184
Chapter Five: The Common Good and Liberalism………………………………………..187
I. John Dewey: The emergence of the public……………………………………...189
II. Oliver O’Donovan: Judgment as the Defense of the Common Good………….194
III. Justice as Empowerment: The Common good and Care Ethics……………….206
IV. The Common Good and Human Capabilities………………………………….217
V. Can Christians be Liberal?...................................................................................223
VI. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..227
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………229
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….235
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Introduction
The aim of this thesis is twofold. First, it seeks to show Christians that a Christian
political imagination provides good resources to reimagine a politics of the common good
beyond the limitations of models of liberal politics that eschews theological questions about the
ultimate good. Second, it contends that the integrity of Christians life hinges on active
engagement in political life for the welfare of the vulnerable and marginalized in society. The
central organizing idea is that a Christian account of the political can sustain a politics of
liberation as well as the highest values of liberal democracy without compromising Christian
particularity.1
To this end, this dissertation engages in what is commonly called political theology.
However, political theology is a highly ambiguous field of inquiry. There are many approaches
to doing political theology and scholars who defend rival methodologies are becoming
increasingly polarized. For instance, one classic method of political theology is the liberationist
approach most comprehensively outlined in Clodovis Boff’s monumental Theology and Praxis
and summarized in José Míguez Bonino’s Toward a Christian Political Ethics.2
This method seeks to bring theology and social theory together as relatively autonomous
fields of scientific inquiry. In order to bridge the two fields, liberationist political theologians
must create a mediating theory that explains how theology should be related to the datum of
socio-political analysis. For Boff, there is no obvious way to move from doctrines, theology, and

1 While this dissertation is apologetic in tone in that it seeks to justify a Christian position
against several contending ones, it is primarily aimed at a Christian audience and not meant to
show that Christianity is superior to other religious traditions or philosophies.
2 Clodovis Boff, Theology and Praxis, trans. Robert R. Barr (Eugene, OR: Wipf and
Stock Publishers, 1981); José Míguez Bonino, Toward a Christian Political Ethics (London:
Fortress Press, 1983).
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tradition to social praxis. Before one can theologize about politics, one must have some
understanding of what is going on in the political realm—how it is organized conceptually,
legally, and institutionally. Theologians who employ this methodology are often accused by
others who defend a rival methodology of neglecting, as Paul Tillich argues in Theology of
Culture, that the social is already theological, and theology is already social.3
To defend their accusation, critics of liberation theology are tempted to mine the
liberationist literature to find instances where liberationists claim that any attempt to derive
social praxis directly from theology and ecclesial practices is said to violate the integrity of the
social sciences.4 This claim is then taken to mean that theology and the church are subordinated
to the metaphysical assumptions of modern sciences and the Enlightenment.5 To develop this
line of argument against liberation theology, this group of theologians cites the relative absence
of ecclesiology in liberation theology as evidence that liberationists do not believe that the
church has anything meaningful and practical to contribute to politics. At best, theology serves
merely as a prop for whatever political ideology—such as Marxism—that liberationists already
happen to espouse.
Stanley Hauerwas, William T. Cavanaugh, Robert W. Jenson, John Milbank, and recently
Stephen D. Long are often associated with this alternative school of political theology. Following

3 Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 42.
4 Boff, Theology and Praxis, 26–27.
5 Although it is not always clear which Enlightenment assumptions are to be rejected,
since the Enlightenment is not a monolithic intellectual movement. See Stanley Hauerwas, “The
Politics of Justice: Why Justice Is a Bad Idea for Christians,” in After Christendom: How the
Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Are Bad Ideas (Nashville, TN:
Abingdon Press, 1991), 50–61; D. Stephen Long, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market
(New York: Routledge, 2000), 111–42; John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 2nd ed.
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2006), 206–56.
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Tillich, Jenson calls this approach the “theology of culture.”6 These figures are often associated
with the postliberal school of Christian theology. Postliberal theologians of culture are reluctant
to affirm that there are autonomous realms of human life called “culture” and “economics” that
can be separated from the rest, such as politics and religion. Rather, the word “culture” in
“theology of culture” refers to a coherent system of human behavior constituted by mutually
determining signs and social practices.7 This approach assumes human social activities are
always teleologically guided by assumptions about the ultimate good or the “last end.”
Therefore, existing cultures always already embody a particular theological or metaphysical
narrative, whether the culture is self-conscious about this fact or not. As a result, it is impossible
for a culture or a particular model of social life to remain neutral vis-à-vis theology and
metaphysics. The task of a postliberal theologian of culture is to prepare the church to speak the
gospel in its time and place by uncovering the “ultimate concern” or theological narrative
undergirding social practices of the larger society outside the church.8
In other words, this approach assumes that culture is intrinsically theological and that
every social practice embodies a certain theological narrative. Milbank’s monumental Theology
and Social Theory is one of many recent publications defending this position. For instance, the
economic theory and practices of a given social order, Milbank points out, are always based on
certain contingent assumptions about the source of economic value and conventional norms of
exchange. These assumptions are themselves grounded in a metanarrative that delineates the

6 See Tillich, Theology of Culture; Robert W. Jenson, “Christ as Culture 1: Christ as
Polity,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 5, no. 3 (November 2003): 323–29.
7 Jenson, “Christ as Culture 1: Christ as Polity,” 199.
8 Tillich, Theology of Culture, 42; Robert W. Jenson, “Christ as Culture 3: Christ as
Drama,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 6, no. 2 (April 2004): 199.
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final (moral) end of economic life.9 Economics is, in other words, as much a religious ritual as
politics. Theologians who employ this method of political theology, therefore, do not treat
secular social or cultural theories as either autonomous disciplines needing some form of
theological mediation or immune to theological criticism. Rather, they assume theology already
has a particular normative understanding of the social and a particular social praxis, embodied by
the church and its rituals, and so can critically engage these disciplines on its own terms.10 Thus,
social practices are not to be judged primarily by secular social theories, but by the theological
narrative undergirding them.
This dissertation presupposes that both schools have something important to contribute to
political theology and that the increasing polarization between them is for the most part
unjustified. While it is true that many theologians in the liberationist tradition are not as
ecclesiocentric as their colleagues in the theology of culture, the church, and Christian
theological commitments do not by any means play only a subordinate role in political praxis for
liberation theologians. Furthermore, the apparent subordinate role that church life plays in
liberationist political imagination, even if true, is not logically necessitated by the liberationist
methodology. Bonino, for instance, repeatedly cautions those who would build a Christian
political ethics on the basis of secular theory and praxis alone. Bonino is adamant that secular
political praxis and social theory still need to be properly critiqued and incorporated by a
thoroughly Christian theological framework and church practices:
A purely secular social theory cannot, for Christians, take the place of a theological ethics
of politics, because it cannot account for the peculiar perspective of faith. The result is
that Christians committed to the political struggle lack an adequate understanding of what

9 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 192–98.
10 Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 99–102.
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they are doing, an understanding that could make sense for their faith … and their praxis
is neither illumined nor qualified by their faith.11

Juan Luis Segundo and Boff both affirm Bonino’s basic attitude.12 It was, therefore, never Latin
American liberation theology’s intention to displace or replace Christian faith with secular
theories. Rather, in advocating for the relative autonomy of social theory from theology,
liberation theology is reminding theologians that Christian faith is always incarnated in a
particular historical and social context that should weigh in on any attempt to do theology. A
theologian simply cannot deduce the social context she inhabits from church doctrines and
rituals.
In addition, the work of Milbank, Hauerwas, Cavanaugh, and Long are not devoid of
socio-analytical mediation or even a critical appreciation of secular social theories. In Theology
and Social Theory Milbank engages with Marx, Hegel, and other classical political economists at
length in both a critical and qualified appreciative manner. His engagement with secular social
theory then colors and informs his criticism of capitalism as well as liberal societies from the
theological perspective. Cavanaugh’s critical perspective on the nation-state depends on, to a
large extent, his rigorous and thorough study of the history of the modern nation-state and
engagement with secular political thinkers. This dependence does not entail that critical history
and secular theory dictate Cavanaugh’s theological task. Rather, history and secular theory
prepares the political context of the nation-state for theological criticism and analysis. There is
an important difference between learning from secular theories’ insights and observations and
conceding to their metaphysical underpinnings. In their harsh criticism of liberation theology,

11 Bonino, Toward a Christian Political Ethics, 48–49.
12 Juan Luis Segundo, A Community Called Church, trans. John Drury, vol. I, A
Theology for the Artisans of a New Humanity (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1980),
63–77; Boff, Theology and Praxis, 24–34.
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theologians of culture often neglect to see that they often make use of the very same
methodology themselves.
Still, there are real theological disagreements between theologians in each
methodological camp. This is, however, to be expected: no two theologians agree on every
theological issue. But their disagreements do not arise from the methodology, but from theology.
Theologically, the contemporary theologians of culture are more indebted to the theology of the
patristic and medieval traditions, while liberation theologians tend to distance themselves from
the scholastic tradition for, among others, historical and contextual reasons. For instance, from
the standpoint of Latin American liberation theologians, the Magisterium of the Catholic Church
and its official form of Thomist personalism failed to grasp the seriousness of sinful social
structures and how they corrode and undermine not only the material lives of the marginalized
but also the very core of Christian spirituality.13 The institutional church, for them, was still
largely unaware that the social fault lines—whether it be class, gender, and race—cut through the
heart of the ecclesial community and of the Catholic faith. In their theological reflections, they
sought to remind Christians that the spiritual wellbeing of an individual Christian is not separable
from the social structures within which she is situated.
Theologians of culture also have something important to teach us. At a time when the
social implications of the Christian gospel are taken for granted, there is a real danger to reduce
the Christian gospel to a tool of political organization and agitation. The rise of both the
fundamentalist right and mainline Christians’ theological apathy in the United States threatens
the integrity of Christian political witness. Therefore, the fear of Milbank, Cavanaugh,

13 Anselm Kyongsuk Min, Dialectic of Salvation (New York: State University of New
York Press, 1989), 139–55.