PDF Christianity and Politics A Brief Guide to the History Cascade Companions C C Pecknold 9781556352423 Books

Product details Series Cascade Companions (Book 12) Paperback 196 pages Publisher Cascade Books (Wipf & Stock Publishers) (August 6, 2010) Language English ISBN-10 1556352425

Christianity and Politics A Brief Guide to the History Cascade Companions C C Pecknold 9781556352423 Books Reviews

• Pecknold provides a helpful introduction to the complicated history of Christianity and politics. As a Baptist, I came to different conclusions than the author at various points. But all along the way, I found Pecknold’s book to be helpful and thought-provoking. I would commend this work to anyone interested in the subject.
• It is difficult to understand our situation without understanding the history that creates it. This is an excellent guide to that history.
• Well worth your time.
• The content of the book is great. It's a bit brief in places, but that't to be expected from a 170 page summary of 2000 years of political theology. The one issue I had was the actual editing of this edition. Throughout the entire book, there were missing words, split words at the ends of lines which had no hyphenation, misspelling, and various other blatant mistakes which really detracted from the overall readability of the book.
• This may be a small book (not even 200 pages) but every page is dense with intelligent questions and answers about the history of the west.
  
  Yes, without doubt, Greek philosophy and Roman law contributed to western culture. But it was Christianity that propelled the west forward in a unique way. It was "Christian ideas about time and community, especially about the purposefulness of history, communal salvation, and hope for the future" (p xix) that created the west.
  
  The idea of time as a circle prevailed, not only in the west, but throughout all of India and China. Simply put, the belief was that every golden age was followed by collapse and darkness until, once again, the same golden age would appear. All ideas and civilizations had existed before, and would reappear again.
  
  Famously, one Chinese inventor developed a clock in the 8th century. But the invention was destroyed, as was typical, at the end of the reign. Purpose did not exist. Even though the Chinese truly valued knowledge, there assumed there was no point to developing upon an invention.
  
  In the west, however, which created real science, the clock was invented independently of China in the early 1300s. Dozens and dozens of monks and inventors pounced on the idea, and feverishly worked on it. When Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century brought clocks to China, Chinese scholars were amazed by them.
  
  Yes, ideas have consequences.
  
  Across the entire of the ancient world a dark fatalism existed. You can read it in the retreat of Buddhism, the superstitious idea of Fate in Rome, Stoicism, and Hinduism. Not only was time a cycle, but a cold, arbitrary fate decided your position in the world, and little could be done to change it. In Rome and Greece slaves, women, and the poor were regarded as barely human.
  
  What changed everything in the west was Christianity.
  
  Time could no longer be viewed as cyclical because Christ came in historical time and broke the idea of cycles forever. Fatalism ended because each person had the ability to choose either right or wrong and was no longer simply a helpless victim of fate. History itself was charged with meaning and purpose. The entire of humanity had a goal, a purpose, that had never existed before.
  
  Christianity brought a cascade of goodness upon humanity. Christianity took over the ancient world, with its slaves, and turned them into serfs, human beings with rights. Because God was perfect truth and reason itself, Christians assumed they could reason their way to truth. And, of course, theologians argued about truth endlessly. Whereas it is common in China, even today, to hear that there can be many truths, all equally true, all equally false.
  
  In the political world "The Christian view of power...had turned the idea of worldly power upside down...Christ's model of servanthood...became the model for all Christian power" (p 54). All men, even kings, were equal in Christ. All men were joined in the Eucharist, "the sacramental union of the true church with the historical body of Christ" (p 61).
  
  Christianity, above all, was unity. The pope and the kings, the peasants and the scholars, were all part of the unity of Christendom, all joined together in the mystical body of the Eucharist.
  
  The unity of church and state for Christianity was shattered by Luther, with consequences snowballing across the centuries. Luther's individualism and his "depoliticized religious thought exercised a profound influence on the later evolution of political ideas" (p 95). What political theory could there be for church and state together after Luther?
  
  Calvin's answer, a theocracy, did not stand, any more than did the equally brief Purtian experiment. Decades of bloody wars pushed church and state ever further apart, and, in the end, it became clear that having the state decree a state religion was untenable.
  
  Yet the idea of unity remains locked in western consciousness. Again and again, philosophers and writers, from Hobbes to Rousseau to Marx, have proposed new kinds of community. None has stood. None has proven workable.
  
  In the end, "the Eucharist has been systematically displaced from the social imagination, and the relationship between person and community has been reshaped" (p 117), driving church from state and people from real community.
  
  These are profound ideas by a man who deserves great credit for this book. I hope that Pecknold's book will be widely read and discussed.
  
  One very nice addition to the book is that Pecknold adds a list of suggested reading at the end of every chapter.
  
  A small caveat I could hardly read the book's back cover. I hope they change it for future editions.
  
  (By the way, to get a good idea of just how revolutionary Christianity was read "When Children Became Children". Because it's such a narrow topic--the author covers only the impact of Christian belief on the treatment children in Rome--he can clearly reveal just how stunning an impact Christianity had.)
• This work does not feel like an introduction. It reads like a kind of tour of themes, trajectories and fissures; something like the guided tours at the MET in New York or the National Gallery in London. In Christianity and Politics, Pecknold traces the threads of people and ideas who have provided the West with its political imagination. Drawing on the Catholic theologian Henri de Lubac, and the political theorist, Sheldon Wolin as duel 'guides', Pecknold opens up enough of the 'imaginary' of the politics of communion and community to allow the reader to grasp the notion that 'politics as usual' hides more than it reveals. The articulation of what and who constitutes the 'polis', and how and by what means the 'social' and the 'individual' are understood, is explored by way of the ancients, Augustine, the Reformers, and finally (surprisingly?) Pope Benedict.
  
  The goal of this brief 'guide' is not just to inform, but to gesture towards a vision of community that is unintelligible outside of our participation in the communion of divine life through the gift of bread and wine. Here community is given shape; in the Eucharist, the image of the 'polis' is most clear as the proper site for human flourishing.
  
  A recommended work