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