Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
1990
Publication Information
39 Emory L.J. 217 (1990) (book review).
Abstract
At least since the millennium, the observation that religion is pivotal in a rightly-ordered polity has been the most resilient insight in Western thought. By "pivotal," I mean that political theorizing has invariably located religion's ontological status and social dimensions at its core. So long as all political theorists were confessing Christians in profoundly Christian societies, this was inevitable. But the "pivot" was not altered by any "separation" of church and state. Instead, the pivot engendered this separation. The uniquely Western notion of two jurisdictions, including an autonomous temporal order of civil regulation, was produced entirely by Christian theological reflection. Eleventh-century ecclesiastical reformers, who inhabited an undifferentiated realm of sacralized kingship and worldly prelates, sought a more authentic Christianity by separating church from empire.' Medieval history, frequently depicted as beset by theocratic regimes, was instead one long struggle by the church to free itself of royal domination.
Recommended Citation
Gerard V. Bradley,
The Enduring Revolution: Law and Theology in the Secular State,
39 Emory L.J. 217 (1990) (book review)..
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1665
Comments
Abstract from Introduction.