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181 " Too many readers regularly overestimate Augustine’s affirmation here and seem to regularly ignore his persistent affirmation that “justice is found where God, the one supreme God, rules an obedient City according to his grace, forbidding sacrifice to any being save himself alone” (19.23). Because this is de facto ruled out as a possibility in the earthly city (whose very origin is the misdirection of the fall), the earthly city can never be home to “true justice "
― James K.A. Smith , Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology
182 " There is no politics that isn’t ultimately religious. "
183 " But it is a principled pluralism because it simultaneously argues that all confessions and directional orientations should have the same opportunity and access. And so it ends up making a meta-argument for what I’m calling a kind of macroliberalism wherein a “just” society is one in which different confessional communities are free to pursue their visions of the good. "
184 " As James Davison Hunter has commented, “There have never been ‘generic’ values.”52 The issue is a kind of “sources of the self”53 concern: Does a secularized, post-Christian, increasingly antireligious society have the sources (formative communities) to engender the dispositions/virtues needed for “a modest unity” and a tolerant pluralism? "
185 " In The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin makes this point with a Tocquevillian accent: in many ways the ideal of a pluralistic liberal society has lived off the borrowed (formative) capital of “illiberal” (mostly religious) communities—including the family—as incubators for the dispositions of good citizenship. But insofar as both liberalism and capitalism54 tend to devour and erode just these institutions and communities, they end up being a parasite that, starved by its own hunger, consumes the host and thus engenders its own demise. This raises serious questions about the viability of pluralism from the left, which has of late exhibited neither patience nor tolerance nor humility. "
186 " So we don’t shuttle between the jurisdictions of two kingdoms; we live in the seasons of contested rule, where the principalities and powers continue to grasp after an authority that has been taken from them. "
187 " Christendom, then, is a missional endeavor that refuses to let political society remain protected from the lordship of Christ while also recognizing the eschatological distance between the now and the not-yet. "
188 " The call to follow Christ, the call to desire his kingdom, does not simplify our lives by segregating us in some “pure” space; to the contrary, the call to bear Christ’s image complicates our lives because it comes to us in the midst of our environments without releasing us from them. "
189 " Through his embedded experience in the Montgomery bus boycotts, Reverend King came to see the limits of Niebuhr’s abstract public theologizing. “Abstractions cannot empower acts of compassion and sacrifice,” Marsh summarizes, “or sustain the courage to speak against the day. Niebuhr’s much-heralded Christian realism was about working out ethical problems within the framework of options provided by Western liberalism. It was not about having a dream.”18 That dream was the kingdom of God, and King learned it at church. But it wasn’t just for the church: it was a vision of what the world was called to be. For King, the realization of this was not some merely evolutionary development but rather a divine gift. “God remains from beginning to end the ultimate agent of human liberation, not only in America but throughout all the nations and in creation. "
190 " Marsh goes on to observe: “The boycott year had renewed the mission of the church. The boycott showed the world a church whose power stemmed from its deliberate discipline, whose moral authority was the hard-earned result of its suffering and willing to love the enemy—religious passions, it should be noted, that Niebuhr’s thin ecclesiology could never embrace "
191 " One of the responsibilities of the pastor as political theologian, then, is to help the people of God “read” the festivals of their own polis, whether the annual militarized Thanksgiving festivals that feature gladiators from Dallas or the rituals of mutual display and haughty purity that suffuse online regions of “social justice.” Our politics is never merely electoral. The polis doesn’t just rear to life on the first Tuesday of November. Elections are not liturgies; they are events. The politics of the earthly city is carried in a web of rituals strung between one occasional ballot box and the next. Good political theology pierces through this, unveils it—not to help the people of God withdraw but to equip them to be sent into the thick of it. "
192 " Every political theology is exorcising demons—the question is which demons. "
193 " The Godfather amounts to a visual parable of a challenge and critique that dogs the Cultural Liturgies project: while I extol the formative power of historic Christian worship practices, it would seem that there can be—and are—people who have spent entire lifetimes immersed in the rites of historic Christian worship who nonetheless emerge from them not only unformed but perhaps even malformed.2 Or, to put it otherwise: clearly, regular participation in the church’s “orthodox” liturgy is not enough to prevent such “worshipers” from leaving the sanctuary to become (sometimes enthusiastic) participants in all sorts of unjust systems, structures, and behaviors. "
194 " If liturgy forms us by conforming us to the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29), then why are Christians so often conformed to the world (per Rom. 12:2)? "
195 " Mark Hamilton is surely right when he points out that we “allow athletics to dictate to us what school districts we will live in, what jobs to hold, how to spend our leisure time, whom we marry, what activities we place our children in, how we will spend large sums of money, or with whom to socialize. It reaches into every nook and cranny of life. We give it a power over us. "
196 " So we have a twofold challenge to the social task of forging life in common: the deep, confessional diversity that shapes how we think about a life well lived and the norms for a good society; and the corrosive, antisocial forces—often fostered by the pseudo-community of the market and the state—that incline us toward Randian self-interest and self-preservation. Atlas shrugs while the ties that bind fray to breaking. "
197 " Radner rightly presses us to recognize that pursuing the common good with gospel integrity requires both a healthy state and an ecclesial anchor. For some of us, that will mean rethinking our tendency to vilify “the state” and its procedures. For others of us, it will mean revaluing the centrality of the church as our political center—a body politic whose worship includes the regular confession of her sins while at the same time laboring for kingdom come, concerned about our country while at the same time desiring a better one (Heb. 11:16). "
198 " I think we should first recognize and admit that the marketing industry—which promises an erotically charged transcendence through media that connects to our heart and imagination—is operating with a better, more creational, more incarnational, more holistic anthropology than much of the (evangelical) church. "
― James K.A. Smith , Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation
199 " As lovers—as desiring creatures and liturgical animals—our primary orientation to the world is visceral, not cerebral. In this respect, ancient wisdom about spiritual disciplines intersects with contemporary psychological insight into consciousness. The result is a picture that should lead us to appreciate the significant role of the unconscious in action and behavior. "
― James K.A. Smith , You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit
200 " there are no box seats at this table, no reservations for VIPs, no filet mignon for those who can afford it while the rest eat crumbs from their table. The Lord’s Table is a leveling reality in a world of increasing inequalities, an enacted vision of “a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine” (Isa. 25:6). "