Greetings All: Just as a way to kick of the new year, and to keep the flow of information steady, we’ve decided to start a blog for Theology on Tap. Here you’ll get the details for the when’s and where’s of TOT and a get the run down on whatever piece of theology we’ll be throwing under the bus.
That all said: Our first meeting for 2013 will be January the 30th, at 8:00, at the Bent Mast in James Bay. and we will be discuss this little spinet take from an interview with WIlliam Cavanaugh, a theologian working DePaul University in Chicago.
One of the assumptions of modem secular politics is that the state must be secular and religion private, lest we return to the wars of religion that devastated Europe in the 16th century Is there anything wrong with that assumption?
I don’t think there is any reason to want to restore the churches to political power, if by that one means coercive power. There is, however, good reason to question the myth of the secular state as peacemaker. The so-called wars of religion did not pit one religion against another, as in Catholics versus Protestants. They are more accurately described as wars between different theopolitical orders. This explains why, for example, Catholics killed Catholics. The second half of the Thirty Years’ War involved Hapsburgs fighting Bourbons — two Catholic dynasties fighting each other.
Obviously, the church was not innocent of the bloodshed, entangled as it was with coercive power. But neither was the modern state an innocent bystander. The whole apparatus of the state arose to enable princes to wage war more effectively. As Charles Tilly has written, “War made the state, and the state made war.” The modern nation-state is founded on violence. If the church is going to resist violence, it has to emerge from its privatization and have a political voice, one that seeks not to regain state power but to speak truthfully about it. Christians can atone for their complicity with violence in the past by refusing to be complicit with state violence now.
To see the full interview check it out here. http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3308
barnabuzz 