Reinventing Liberal Christianity.

Martinez, Julio L.

Reinventing Liberal Christianity. By Theo Hobson. Grand Rapids, Ml: Eerdmans, 2013. Pp. viii + 322. $30.

Hobson's book offers a significant attempt to rejuvenate a liberal Christianity that affirms the deep affinity between the gospel and political and cultural freedom (i.e., the liberal state). Hobson examines with clarity and conviction the theological and philosophical roots that led to imagining and creating the liberal state in the mid-17th century, distinct from the intentions of the radical reformers (chiefly Anabaptists). H. is a British theologian who, at the beginning of this volume, distinguishes between the "good" tradition of liberal Christianity (or liberal Protestantism) and its "bad" counterpart, where Christianity presents itself as an essential rational worldview that loses the very concept of revelation, as well the importance of religious and cultic practice where "God's authority is acknowledged and the story of his salvation is told and performed" (111). Without this "core" of Christian faith, liberal Protestantism lacked the inner resources to resist a secularizing mutation. In an interesting manner, H. describes the development that goes from the Christian rationalism of Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe (a religious style that marginalizes sacramentalism as the troublemaking part of religion [132]) to Deism as an alternative form of faith in divine reason and "a profound disaster to Protestant theology" (142). Deism, with its "sacraphobia," was bom at the beginning of the Enlightenment. It was able to survive Romanticism without replacing the Enlightenment, becoming its dialogue partner, as Charles Taylor pointed out. Chapter 5, where H. analyzes the rhetoric of the Christian deist influence used by the first US presidents and probes the meaning of American disestablishment, is well worth reading.

After decades of study on the relations between liberalism and Catholicism, I can say that this book has turned out to be challenging and even provocative to me. I would invite H. to learn more about the Catholic tradition through, for instance, the great figure of John Courtney Murray and his impressive historical review of the roots and foundations of religious freedom and the suitable relation--separation and cooperation--between church and state. Murray's writings would clarify some of H.'s statements.

Julio L. Martinez, S.J.

Universidad Pontificia Comillas, Madrid

DOI: 10.1177/0040563914538732