Politics from Parables
by Jason Boffetti - September 24, 2007
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
The Political Teachings of Jesus
Tod Lindberg, HarperCollins, 260 pages, $25.95
Notorious atheists like Christopher Hitchens try to convince us that the world would be a more humane place if we could give up on the idea of God, but Tod Lindberg provides a cogent argument in The Political Teachings of Jesus that the modern world's most cherished liberal values – religious tolerance, equality, freedom, and democracy – ultimately depend on the global spread of the teachings of Jesus.
Lindberg, a research associate at the Hoover Institute and editor of Policy Review, is hardly the first to attempt such a reading of history, but he has succeeded in writing one of the most extensive explorations of that thesis by drawing comprehensively on the words of Christ in the Gospels.
Minimally, Lindberg should be applauded for the sheer audacity of looking to Jesus Christ as a source for liberal political theory. And yet he accomplishes this thorny task with dust-jacket praise from both the Catholic political left (E. J. Dionne) and right (Michael Novak).
There is much to praise about the book. Lindberg's biblical analysis is refreshing and approachable; he does not engage in higher criticism or textual skepticism. Instead, he takes the Gospels at face value, treating them as accurate recollections by the men who knew and heard Jesus directly. A less confident writer would have felt the need to go toe-to-toe with professional biblical exegetes, but Lindberg offers straightforward and largely incontestable interpretations of Jesus' words in light of political questions.
At its best, the book can be read as a political devotional, a this-worldly supplement to one's weekly spiritual reading. At worst, however, Christianity's critics will conclude from the book that they can appropriate Jesus' political and moral teachings and leave aside His religious message as so much dross.
Although Lindberg assiduously seeks to avoid repeating the mistake of social gospel Christianity, which reinterpreted and replaced Jesus' message of individual salvation in the Gospels with a merely social and political one, at times he seems to fall into the same trap simply by having left the "other-worldly" out of his discussion.
Lindberg's reason for doing this is strategic. He explains at the beginning of the book that in order to reach the broadest possible audience for his thesis, he will treat only the political and social implications of the teachings of Jesus (what he calls throughout the book the "Jesusian" teachings), setting to one side the religious teachings (what he calls the "Christian" teachings) that deal with salvation, the soul, and divine judgment.
