Nationhood, Providence, and Witness: Israel in Protestant Theology and Social Theory

Preface

The question of the recognition of nations as such, whether or not they have states of their own, is one that has been important in the modern era, and which is associated with forms of nationalism. As such it has been understood to belong to a variety of general theories of political ethics. Rarely has the challenge of recognition been considered within the challenge of the recognition of the modern State of Israel, and of the Jews as a distinct national group. Naturally, there are chronological reasons for this—the State of Israel was founded in 194 8 , so for most of its history Christian theologians and ethicists could not have considered recognition of nations as part of the set of arguments that arise when considering the State of Israel. It is well-known that many Christian discourses on nationalism have been indebted hermeneutically to re-readings and reinterpretations of the history of Israel in the Old Testament. Such discourses at their best tend to mix aspects of what we would now call liberation theologies with more traditional, deontological ethics and prophetic discourses warning the people of divine judgment, while encouraging them to accept divine grace and mercy for corporate national sins. This mixture has appealed especially to nations that have been subordinated and rendered stateless by other, imperialistic nations. The pairing of Israel and Babylon has been reconfigured across world history many times. In theological terms, it is highly significant that it was Israel that was the chosen nation, a small nation, and one that did not even begin with a state of its own, but issued from a Sumerian commanded to become a nomadic wanderer, at least for a season. Christian theologians and ethicists have often found it difficult to balance these different aspects of biblical discourse on the nation of Israel and, in practice, many have been deeply suspicious of what the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor calls the politics of recognition. There is all too often an underlying sense that if Christians who are concerned for a subordinated nation demand proper recognition as nations—challenging the self-designation of the state to which they belong as a nation-state—that the bonds of trust within that state will break down, and serious conflict will escalate to unmanageable proportions. The parallels between the cry for recognition by members of subordinate nations and the struggle for recognition in a direct, state formation, as with the history of Israel, is one that often gets neglected by modern English-speaking theologians and ethicists these days. Undoubtedly this is because debates about the State of Israel tend to be stuck around debates about US foreign policy and Israel’s relation to the Palestinians. This book is partly an attempt to get beyond this perspective by confronting readers with the necessity of recognition of Israel as part of the Christian necessity for recognition of all nations. It does so by pulling the rug from beneath the debates about the USA to look at the British, and therefore European, origins of imperialist discourses on nationhood that tend to put a Gentile imperial nation in the place of Israel in world history. Britain is a very good case to look at for two reasons. First, Britain’s was the last empire to rule the Holy Land before 1948 . This contrasts with the fact that the USA has never actually governed the Holy Land as part of a territorial empire. Second, the British Empire was the largest empire in world history, and it is precisely at the time of its withdrawal from British Mandate Palestine that it started to disintegrate. Most historians ignore this, because they don’t think in Christian terms about the Holy Land being at the center of the world map. The important question then is, when did the British Empire start? I deconstruct this question by looking to its core—English imperialism within the British isles. This leads me back to the English conquest of Wales, which is the nation into which I was born. Thus I inhabit a (partial) perspective within the argument I unfold, looking to the universal horizon provided by the existence of the State of Israel as part of divine providence. This kind of exercise is an important one for the very integrity of Christian theology and ethics precisely because of its very nature; it is best conducted when carried out by as many people from as many countries as possible. It could just as well be conducted by someone uncovering the history of discourses around Ireland, Scotland, Native Americans, or African slaves and their descendants, especially in the West. These connections have, from time to time, been made by historians and cultural theorists, but theologians and ethicists, especially in state institutions, have not really made them.

That said, this book did not only start as a project about the interrelationship of recognition of nations and providence. The questions that ultimately led me to write it were also linked to missiology. There is a popular genre of Christian missionary preaching that tells its audience the reason for the incarnation as follows: God created the world, then human beings turned away from him. Therefore, God formed a people, a nation—Israel—so that they might be faithful to him and be an example of righteousness to the rest of the world. They failed in this task, so God sent his Son to become a man and redeem human beings from their sinful and failure-prone tendencies. This story is told in various ways that are problematic. The problem that came to interest me was that it seemed to imply God formed a nation only to permanently discard it when its people did not live up to his standards. In came the church instead. Preachers who make this argument for the incarnation rarely give evidence of realizing that the very same logic they use to argue that God has discarded the nation of Israel for good could be used to justify discarding the Christian church for good, because it too has such a checkered history. I also began to notice how this kind of preaching effectively means that nations are not taken seriously as part of the divine plan for world history. This struck me as very odd because in the Bible, God is said to have placed people in nations since the time of the sons of Noah. On the ethical side, one worries that the story gave excuses for privatizing the scope of Christian ethics; for limiting it to the church and individuals’ lives. The point, it seems, was to be saved out of the life-world of nations. Contemporary popular discussions in the West of how Christian should relate to life outside the church never get to this point. They talk about all kinds of other issues—culture, the workplace, etc.—and break down the issues by ethical topic or sphere of life, but never according recognition of the largest population unit permitted in the Bible apart from the church, namely nationhood. Something somewhere has gone very wrong with modern Western Christian ethics, at least in the English-speaking world. Perhaps this is the effect of its being written in English, the language of modern political and cultural imperialism. It is most certainly the effect of decades of chanting the mantra we dislike nationalism, and of projecting all things to do with nationalism dishonestly onto Nazi Germany, while invoking Karl Barth’s work for the confessing church in the process. Most theologians and ethicists who think like this—and there are a lot of them around—are not familiar enough with Barth’s writing on nationhood. I have covered that in depth in another book—Nations and Nationalism in the Theology of Karl Barth (Oxford University Press, 2013). In the present book, I shall be embarking upon a more adventurous constructive project, albeit one that proceeds via comparative analysis of select theologians and social theorists dealing with both the State of Israel and with Wales and England in relation to Britain. Of course, some readers won’t like it. One-nationism dies hard in Britain, especially in troubled times. There are many reasons for this tendency, which I don’t explore in this book for reasons of space, as well as because it would take me into the territories of law and constitution, which, while important, wouldn’t essentially undo my argument. My hope is that readers may have enough patience with my writing—which, I realize, proceeds down rather intricately woven paths of analytic criticism of several thinkers—to agree that the challenges of recognition lie deeply embedded in broader debates handled in the book. Indeed, recognition is a universal issue, and has become very important in the world post-1948 with the formation of the United Nations, the decline of colonialism, the surge in the number of independent states, anti-racist campaigns, the rise of indigenous people’s movements and movements for national and ethnic minorities and linguistic rights. Recognition is in reality a basic requirement of Christian theology and ethics, but many in these disciplines and fields behave as if this were not the case. I live for the day when nobody will be able to be taken seriously, let alone imagine that they could be uttering theological wisdom, when they try to tell me Wales is not a nation. Until then, what needs to be said is that such refusal of recognition fundamentally goes against the grain of the biblical witness and good missiology and Christian ethics. It will ensure that those who speak in this manner will have no capacity for being taken seriously by any other peoples or stateless minority nations that have endured imperialism and colonialism down the centuries.

Acknowledgments

Bringing this book into being has been a labor stretching over nearly four years of research and writing on my part, though having roots going further back. I held a postdoctoral research fellowship in the subject area of theology and ethics in the School of Divinity, Edinburgh University, between September 2008 and September 2011 , funded by the British Academy. This book is the completion of the research and writing project for which I had successfully gained this funding, and so I must express my gratitude to the British Academy for awarding me funding, for all my colleagues in the School of Divinity for their support and encouragement over that time. In particular, thanks are due to Professor John McDowell and Professor David Fergusson for being, successively, my academic mentors during that time, to Professor Larry Hurtado and Professor Stewart Jay Brown as successive heads of school for being supportive line managers, and Professor Jolyon Mitchell for suggesting that I apply for research funding in the first place. The support and library staff of the School of Divinity were unfailingly helpful with the practicalities of the project. Regarding the contents of the book, most of chapters 2 and 5 have previously appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals, though the material has been lightly reworked and supplemented here. I thank Ruth Langer, editor of Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations , for permission to reproduce the material from the article in chapter 2 . I also thank Patrick Madigan , editor of the Heythrop Journal , for permission to reproduce the material from the article in chapter 5 . I must also extend my gratitude to the anonymous peer reviewers who gave constructive criticism on these pieces. Regarding questions ranging across the book’s subject-matter, whether personally, by email, or at conferences where I presented papers discussing work in progress, I am grateful to conversations and exchanges with David Fergusson, Guido De Graaff, Richard Harvey, Mark Kinzer, Dave Leal, John McDowell, Sophia Magallanes, Esther D. Reed, Stephen Spector, Ruth Tolstoy, David W. Torrance, James Walters, Stephen H. Webb, Berndt Wannenwetsch.

I must also extend my gratitude to Robin Parry, my editor at Cascade Books, for his enthusiasm and support for this project from the beginning, and to all the staff at Cascade for handling the production process. Last, but not least, I must thank my parents for their unfailing support throughout this project. It should go without saying that any errors, omissions, or infelicities outstanding in the text are due to me.

Abbreviations

ASCE Annual of the Society for Christian Ethics

BJS British Journal of Sociology

CC Christian Century

CD Church Dogmatics. Karl Barth. Translated by G. T. Thomson et al. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936–1977.

HGS Holocaust and Genocide Studies

JAAR Journal of the American Academy of Religion

JAS Journal of American Studies

JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History

JES Journal of Ecumenical Studies

JIH Journal of Israeli History

JLR Journal of Law and Religion

JMH Journal of Medieval History

JRE Journal of Religious Ethics

MES Middle Eastern Studies

MQR Mennonite Quarterly Review

NN Nations and Nationalism

PT Political Theology

RHR Revue de l’histoire des religions

RRT Reviews in Religion and Theology

SCE Studies in Christian Ethics

SJT Scottish Journal of Theology

SZ Studies in Zionism

TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

WACR Women: A Cultural Review

Introduction

Nationhood and nations lie at the very heart of the biblical metanarrative that forms the framework for Christian theology, with the one nation of Israel represented as chosen by God to further his purpose of redemption for the whole world. At the same time, the biblical canon gives us a view of history that denies the division of the world into nations in the beginning and in its consummation. Nations belong to the time in between. Here surely lies one of the reasons why the topic of nationhood has proven so difficult for theologians. Recognition of nations is an issue that has attracted both positive support and vicious attacks in the modern period. At the heart of this book is a subtle distinction between nation and state . This distinction lies at the heart of serious discussion of nationhood and nationalism. This book is neither simply for nor against something called nationalism. The reason why is very straightforward—there is no one single type of nationalism. It has proven extremely difficult to produce an overarching theory of nationalism, as the liveliness of the field of nationalism studies shows. Many theologians, unfortunately, seem slow to acknowledge this reality, preferring to hide behind generalizations against nationalism. The second reason why it isn’t possible simply to be for or against nationalism is that the discourse surrounding the term has moved in the twentieth century, especially since the Second World War, from being about independence to being about recognition. Of course, this is painting matters with a very broad brush indeed. Acknowledging this move on my part does not mean advocating ignoring the political realities. Since the formation of the United Nations and the process of the dismantling of the European empires across the world, more sovereign states (nation-states) have come into being than at any other time in history. The scholar of nationalism Walker Connor has surveyed the global data and concluded, wisely, that no more than 10 percent of all states in the world can be classified as true nation-states (i.e., states where the overwhelming majority of the population comes from one nation). ¹ It is this empirical reality—that most states encompass more than one group that could be historically conceived as nations—that has forced scholars and social and political theorists to face the reality that the idea of the nation-state is a modern myth insofar as it attempts to convey a cultural, linguistic, and ethnic homogeneity represented by the state’s official name.

If we turn from the empirical realities to Scripture, we also soon discover a dazzlingly complex array of perspectives, and the history of Christianity furnishes plenty of examples of how these have been worked out. It would be easy for the theologian who is not one-sidedly hostile to nationalism to move simply to read the biblical prophets and eschatological texts as being anti-imperial, given that Babylon is the empire constantly opposed to the nation of Israel from Genesis (as Babel) to Revelation. Much historic Protestant exegesis stayed within this mold by recasting Babylon as the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire, later therefore as the Napoleonic project. The late modern example of this is the European Union, yet the undeniable opposition of a world of nations to a global empire is treated in ironic fashion in the Bible, for the Roman Empire is understood as the providential setting for the birth and spread of the Christian faith. Rome becomes a historic type of the empire of Antichrist, thus furnishing generations of exegetes with material for discerning providential movements of history. The opposition in the New Testament, particularly in Revelation, is ultimately between two cities, not nations and imperialism. In these days of thoughtless anti-nationalism, it is important to recall this—the New Testament authors nowhere deny that the world will continue to be constituted by nations until the end of history. Rather, they affirm that it will be. John of Patmos speaks of the ten kings who will make war against the Lamb, at the same time attacking Babylon, the city that rules the whole world. Both the world of nations and that of imperialism are ultimately opposed to the reign of Christ. There is no room here for singling out the idea of a world divided into nations as the unique perpetrator of evil in the world, which is the position that too many Christian scholars are apt to state or imply these days. In addition, as the discourse on Babylon is clearly typological in the sense of not referring to a historical Babylon at the time of writing, exegetes cannot assume a historic global empire is what would transpire at the end of history. Plenty have assumed history will end this way of course, including Abraham Kuyper, whom we will meet later in this book.

Defining anti-nationalism is rather difficult, because most people who use the term nationalism don’t have a clear definition of it to begin with. In strict terms, anti-nationalism can be sub-divided into opposition to subordinated, defeated nations recovering political independence, and opposition to peoples who have never been politically independent becoming so. In more subtle terms, but just as important, there exists a variant of the former case, which constituted opposition to subordinated, defeated nations gaining some form of recognition that falls short of clear political independence (e.g., devolution within the United Kingdom, or regional autonomy within Spain). In the hard case, who is being opposed are the defeated breaking free from the rule of their conquerors. In the soft case, what is being opposed is the request that the subordinated gain a measure of recognition within the state from the dominant, often historically conquering, national group. Why some Christian theologians have been anti-nationalist is an important question. These theologians tend to stay at the safe level of general theory, rarely venturing out to investigate real case-studies. Most theologians do not really look at the literature in nationalism studies, and in my time as member of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN), I have never met another theologian who has also been a member. Yet theologians continue to write a lot about nationalism polemically, though superficially. This is not a happy state of affairs. There are several features of the anti-nationalist discourse among Western Christian theologians. The first is the obvious elitism against popular beliefs. The second is the influence of Marxism on a number of Christian intellectuals who have influenced theologians. Many of these have been Roman Catholic, e.g., Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, though John Milbank is Anglican. The third is the provenance of anti-nationalists from the imperial states, or those states that represented the European imperial and colonial projects. The fourth is a tendency for these kinds of thinkers to look back nostalgically to a past golden age of Christian thought, often the medieval period, before nationalism, though they spell this out in terms of being before modernity. In reality, what we may be seeing here is a rerun of some of the medieval conflicts between the religious orders, specifically the Dominicans against the Franciscans, the Cistercians and their offshoot the Knights Templar asserting their independence from both church and state, Thomists against Joachimists, and the Thomists, representing the Dominicans, acting as a latter-day intellectual Inquisition bringing to trial those deemed guilty of heresy, though using philosophical criteria. Concerning the Thomists opposing the Franciscans, this has contemporary relevance in that the Franciscans championed the notion of subjective natural rights (which were already found in the Decretalists a couple of centuries earlier, much to the dismay of their latter-day critics).² Notions of natural rights have often gone hand in hand with modern forms of nationalism. Milbank’s attack on John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham fits here, though not quite from an orthodox Thomist angle, more from a Cistercian Templarist attempt to appropriate Thomas symbolically. At the same time there is an anti-Joachimist subtext at work. This book does not deal with philosophers, except in passing. To be precise, Taylor and MacIntyre, mentioned above, have dealt with nationalism tangentially, but never really written on nationhood. This is hardly surprising given their background in the neo-Marxist New Left of the postwar period.³ In saying all this, it is vitally important to acknowledge the timing of these interventions. Anti-nationalism has emerged in the academy partly as a reaction to the Second World War. When viewed in this light, it is easy to see anti-nationalism as the right-thinking approach to political and social theory. At the same time, however, anti-nationalism among European intellectuals has undeniably arisen in reaction to the dismantling of the European empires and the independence of peoples formerly ruled by them, forming new nation-states. There is undeniably a darker side to anti-nationalism among Western Christian thinkers in this respect that has not truly been acknowledged in scholarship. The most significant form of anti-nationalism in Western thought since the Second World War has undoubtedly been anti-Zionism.

The theological conflicts over recognition of the State of Israel since its foundation in 1948 are conflicts over nationhood as a theological and biblically rooted concept. To be precise, what so many Christian theologians are uneasy about is the idea that theology should be required to give a theological account of the survival of a nation that was deemed cursed and rejected by God for having mostly rejected the view that Jesus is the Messiah. Scattered abroad after the fall of the temple in A.D. 70 and the quashing of the revolt of Shimon Bar Kochba by the Romans in A.D. 135, Jews were divided between a remnant who remained in Palestine and a Diaspora spread across the world. Though the hope of returning home to the land of their ancestors was kept alive down the centuries by many Diaspora Jews, and many successive waves of Jews made their way back at specific points in history, spurred on by apocalyptic prophecies, the practical plan of founding a Jewish state once again (as opposed to imagining how the law might work in a reconstituted Jewish state) belonged to the modern period, the period of modern European nationalisms. Paradoxically, this was also the time of the greatest secularization of Jewry as well as the greatest assimilation, particularly in Germany, the country where Jews would suffer the worst persecution in their history. Mention of Germany brings us to an interesting irony in the never-ending debates over Israel/Palestine, which is that Germany as a nation-state only came into being in 1870, and was split between 1949 and 1989. Yet the idea of Germany is a very old one, indeed its very name is found in Tacitus’ Germania, as that of a people who successfully resisted Roman conquest.⁴ Germany is a good example of a nation that pre-existed its state, as an idea formed by language and territory. As such, it is wholly unsurprising that the classic theory of nationalism, that a nation needs to acquire its own state in order to be truly recognized as a nation, should have been articulated by German theologians and philosophers in the Enlightenment, such as Herder and Hegel. The sentiment is sometimes made or implied that the only entities that deserve to be considered nations are those that have ancient roots. Conservative political theorists and theologians of a politically conservative bent often do this, decrying the anticipation of new nations in the form of ideas.⁵ Yet by this logic, most of the world’s nations shouldn’t exist. If those advancing such an argument are Christians, by sheer logic they should only affirm as valid those nations also named in the Bible. Of course, none of them do this, which shows their position to be absurd and arbitrary. There is no objective cut-off point at which a new nation may not be formed. Anti-Zionists, people who oppose the existence of the Jewish State of Israel, sometimes do so on the basis that it was new and disruptive in the Middle East. They seem to ignore the newness of the German state, the Jews’ foremost modern opponent. Israel as a state existed in antiquity, unlike Germany. By the same token, Zionists who oppose the possibility of a Palestinian state on the basis that Palestinian national consciousness is a relatively recent phenomenon are incoherent, for they never in practice oppose the existence of existing nation-states of recent provenance. In the same way, those who oppose the formation of a Palestinian nation-state on the basis that it is a nation that has never had a state, and that therefore Palestine is only an idea, are obviously inconsistent, for they in practice don’t oppose the existing German state simply because before 1870 (i.e., very recently in history) there had never been a unified German state. That a nation has never had its own state is also not a reason that it should never have one in the future. Thus the argument that distinguishing nationhood as an idea from the state as a concrete reality is morally dubious or wrong also falls down.

The conclusion to draw from all this is a discourse, whether theological or not, that is negative and unwilling to recognize the State of Israel has little or nothing genuinely positive to say either about Israel or about Palestine either. This is the central problem underlying the exposition of four Western European mainline Protestant theologians advanced in this book: Reinhold Niebuhr, Rowan Williams, John Milbank, and Karl Barth. Of these, only Karl Barth emerges in a largely favorable light. This is because he distinguishes properly between nationhood and statehood, thus allowing for theological recognition of both nation-states and stateless nations.⁶ In plain words, Barth allows for the possibility that the God of the Bible, the God of Israel and the nations, recognizes both nation-states and stateless nations as entities in which he has, with the witting or unwitting cooperation of human beings, placed human beings to live in order to seek him (Acts 17, recapitulating Genesis 10). As such, from reading the entire Bible, it should be clear the Bible implies God is ready to judge and pardon not only nation-states but also stateless nations. We see this clearly in the outpouring of the Spirit on Jewish and Gentile members of the nations in Acts 2. Every one of those nations was in fact stateless, not possessing a government of their own, but ruled by the Roman Empire. The descent of the Holy Spirit on all the nations of what was then the known world signaled God’s own chosen way of resolving the curse laid on the descendants of Noah when they were scattered at the destruction of the Tower of Babel. It is crucial to realize recognition, while implied in Barth’s treatment, is definitely part of a universal missiology. The peoples present at Pentecost typologically represent all the nations in world history, just like in all orthodox Christian exegesis. By contrast, Barth shows no interest in genealogies of nationhood in his work, in stark contrast to the European elites since the Reformation, who attempted to graft their own national legends of origin onto the Table of Nations in Genesis 10–11.⁷ In connection to this tradition, Herder and Hegel were the originators of the philosophy of the politics of recognition of nations in the modern period.⁸ Heidegger’s Nazi commitments, and his refusal to repent of them, were responsible for removing primordialist, ontological conceptualizations of nationhood from respectable intellectual discourse. The German tradition continued to be mined, however, now in a more narrowly self-conscious, pragmatist vein. For this reason we now turn briefly to Charles Taylor, whose own philosophical work on secularity and recognition is deeply indebted to reading Hegel in this fashion.

Charles Taylor is the main modern theorist of the politics of recognition. In his seminal essay The Politics of Recognition, he argues that the demand for recognition of distinct cultures is pressed due to being considered linked to a cultural group’s identity. The underlying view is as follows.

Our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or a group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or the society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being. . . . Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need.

⁹

It is easy to see here the next step imaginable, namely that recognition of persons or national cultures is a vital human right. The idea of human needs and rights is normally applied to persons. Taylor’s two great works on the history of modern ideas of recognition are Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. Although the former discusses changes in philosophical anthropology, much of what is said is profoundly illuminating for the purpose of understanding the rise of modern nationalist philosophies. This is partly because the same philosophers are involved in both ideological trajectories. Taylor argues that there are key characteristics to the rise of modern Western notions of the self: the focus on inwardness, the affirmation of ordinary life, and harkening to the voice of nature. Regarding the affirmation of ordinary life, he makes the usual, rather tiresome catholic charge that Puritanism was to blame for the demise of old conceptions of meaningful order. His treatment of Puritan thought is superficial and deeply misbegotten. For example, he expresses surprise that Puritanism specifically, and Calvinism more generally, held a strong affinity for ancient Israel as paradoxical in a faith which starts from a central focus on the Epistle to the Romans.¹⁰ He seems not to have noticed that Paul agonizes over the salvation of the nation of Israel at length in Romans, thus implying a continuity between Israel before Christ and after. Taylor is only able to comprehend the Puritan focus on Israel as driven by the extrinsic consideration of a felt need to rectify the disorder in the world, a people beleaguered and embattled. Thus Israel is only considered a model for moral imitation, not the nucleus of the elect people of God to join as in Romans 9–11. Taylor therefore misses the deep connection between predestination (which he mentions) and election (which he doesn’t), thus falling back on the fake picture of Calvinism that owes so much to Max Weber. Reading the rise of Calvinist orthodoxy and Puritanism as part of the history of the Western understanding of nations would put these traditions in a better light. Taylor devotes a whole chapter to John Locke, ignoring the fact that Locke was hostile to the Native Americans, unlike many Calvinists and Puritans, regarding them as lesser breeds before the law.¹¹ Taylor also devotes a chapter to the Deist notion of the natural moral sense, looking at Lord Shaftesbury, Frances Hutcheson, and David Hume.¹² There is no mention of the polygenetic theory of human origins, coupled with the theory of original polytheism, and racism, of Hume.¹³ Hume cannot represent a genuine advancement in Western understanding of the origins and recognition of national cultures. What all this tells us is that Taylor’s discussion of the affirmation of ordinary life needs to be judged in the light of the affirmation of the life of nations as an end wholly separable from the life of the church. This change is characteristic of deism. The church at best is an instrument for advancing the natural religion, but in reality, other religions will do for this task. The turn to hearkening the voice of nature is one that Taylor investigates via Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Herder. Here again, if we look at this theme insofar as it pertains to understanding the nature, relations, and purpose of nations in history, we cannot draw such positive conclusions about these thinkers. In his subsequent work The Ethics of Authenticity, Taylor singled out Rousseau, Herder, and Hegel as the originators of the modern idea of recognition, without using that term explicitly.

¹⁴

In A Secular Age, Taylor distinguishes three forms of secularity or secularization that have occurred in the West side by side.¹⁵ The first is the privatization of religion in and by common institutions and practices. The second is the shift from trusting religious authority to trusting the internal rationality of spheres of life as the main guide to public and private action. The third is the change in the social conditions of belief. Belief in God used to be inescapable; now it is an option. (This is reminiscent of Peter Berger’s theory about the collapse of the sacred canopy and the heretical imperative to be religious in modern society.) A Secular Age focuses on the third type of secularity. The key shift that Taylor identifies as responsible for making belief in God optional is the rise of deism.¹⁶ In the Enlightenment Christian belief became optional, but only for the elites. By the late twentieth century it was so for everybody. Taylor’s focus is on the rise of modern views of the self, so he is really quite weak on nationhood and politics. The period of secularization is the period of the increasing rejection of the biblical metanarrative about the life of nations. Taylor virtually ignores this, despite pointing out that deism had no time for particular providences regarding nations and individuals. He characterizes eighteenth-century Evangelicalism as a reaction against deism, yet this is one-sided.¹⁷ Evangelicalism was also continuing earlier Puritan traditions, and evangelical preachers such as Jonathan Edwards were self-conscious in developing theologies of divine providence over the history of the world’s nations. Indeed, it is an important question as to how vital a role this kind of perspective played in the spread of revivals and missions from the eighteenth century onwards. This is part of the wider problem with Taylor’s work, which is its anti-Protestant attitude, seeing the Protestant Reformation as an inevitable way station on the way to deism and atheism. He sides with the currently fashionable theory that Western theology went downhill because of those who supposedly took side with Duns Scotus against Thomas Aquinas (John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Fergus Kerr, David Burrell, plus thinkers who aren’t metaphysicians, such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas, who favor this metanarrative because it seems to defend a Thomistic version of ethics.)

¹⁸

In The Ethics of Authenticity, Taylor lists three modern malaises that grip social critics.¹⁹ The first is individualism, or the loss of meaning. The second is the primacy of instrumental reason, the eclipse of ends. The third is the claim that these two together lead to loss of freedom to act in the best way. It is possible to imagine this argument being translated into a critique of nationalism as follows. For society substitute medieval Christendom. Supplement individualism with nationalism. Put instrumental reason in a nationalist context. The result is the claim that nationalism