Cheerful Charlie

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/bo...pagewanted=all

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Lilla offers a cogent explanation for why Christian Europe got to the Enlightenment first. It doesn’t follow that the Enlightenment’s solution to the political problems religion universally poses is not a thing to be universally recommended. Nor does it follow that particular historical contingencies are a necessary feature of the solution. One can read Lilla’s story and draw precisely the opposite normative conclusions from the ones he asks us to draw: that the West’s experimental testing and retesting of political theology, trying to see if there is any safe way of mixing politics and religion, has delivered an answer from which all may learn. Separating church and state works; mixing them tends toward disaster.
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CC

Stumpjumper

Interesting but I definitely don't follow this reasoning:

What he's calling (or at least the reviewer) liberal theology, and especially labeling it as a post-Hegelian movement, is Christian existentialism.

This is clearly an existentialist position: "man attains happiness by freely developing his capacities".

It could indeed pave the way for political theology but not fascism or Naziism.

I would say existentialist philosophy wedded with political theology may lead to liberation theology which could be considered socialistic and maybe even, economically, communist.

To say it leads to totalitarianism, though, is way, way off the mark. Totalitarianism is diametrically opposed to liberation theology and the perspective that man should freely develop his capacities :huh:

lpetrich

There may be less theological and more political reasons that church-state separation developed in western Europe, as Bertrand Russell had suggested in his History of Western Philosophy.

The Western Church had maintained some independence from secular rulers, and had even gotten into power struggles with some of them, like some Holy Roman Emperors. Theologians would argue at length that the powers of monarchs ought to be restricted, and their writings survived those power struggles, to become cited by later opponents of absolute monarchy. This annoyed such supporters of the Divine Right of Kings as Robert Filmer.

The Reformation, with its Wars of Religion, further fragmented the Church in northern Europe, which became largely Protestant; and Protestantism itself split up into lots of separate churches instead of producing a single Protestant Church.

The Eastern Church, however, underwent no such process, being closely associated with the Byzantine Emperor and his regime. Russia's leaders continued that tradition, with the Russian Orthodox Church being closely associated with the Tsarist regime. When the Bolsheviks took over, they took aim at the Church as the ideological support of the Tsars, and the Communist Party more-or-less took the place of the Church.