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- Written by Brad Green Brad Green
- Category: Recommended Reading Recommended Reading
- Published: 25 November 2016 25 November 2016
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A quote from Michael Hanby again (again, see my earlier post for a link to his excellent First Things 2015 essay).
I have also been reading a lot of Cornelius Van Til lately, and all of this links together.
But here is Hanby on Augustine and political order: "The fundamental question for Augustine is not whether God will be worshipped, but which god will be worshipped."
Yep. That is it. If man, created in the image of God, is fundamentally "homo adorans," worshipping man, and if all of man's endeavors--including political life--reflect and flow from one's ultimate convictions (which are ultimately religious), then Hanby is right. It is religion all the way down, including the political order of any society.
As Hanby notes: "we therefore act, individually and socially, in pursuit of what we love. This axiom makes worship the basic form of human action and rules out a purely secular politics or religiously indifferent political realm." ("Democracy and Its Demons," in Augustine and Politics, 117-18).