Madness, Theocracy, and Anarchism: Political and Cultural Reflections on the Church

by Barry Harvey

Overview

According to some of the most influential thinkers of the modern era, it is madness to subordinate all one’s aims to one end. Such thinkers believe that the church in particular should limit itself to matters of religion, spirituality, and moral values, but in other areas of life submit itself to modern society. Madness, Theocracy, and Anarchism contends instead that the church should refuse to mind its assigned place or restrict its attention to a delimited sphere of activity.

The mission, calling, and purpose of the church cannot rightly be thought of or treated as a function of any other social grouping, be it family, region, state, culture, race, or class. Its mission is to cultivate a new and distinct society to act both amidst the old and as a contrast to it, displaying the form of social life intended for all humankind in Christ. The church is thus called to a different understanding of politics having to do with the practices that order the common life and relations of a people, forming the members of this community to live according to this order and to embody these relations for the whole world.

Barry Harvey examines those points where the church’s practice of politics directly challenges the many ways Christians have put national and tribal loyalties ahead of our inclusion in the pilgrim people of God, and those places where the social activities, structures, and imaginative tales animating the Western world in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries challenge the faithfulness of the Christian community. The analysis of the dominant social order is not to understand it for its own sake, but to spell out the context of the church’s worship, collective life, and testimony.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781481322379
Publisher:	Baylor University Press
Publication date:	07/15/2025
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Barry Harvey is Professor of Theology at Baylor University.

Table of Contents

Prologue: A Mixed-­Up People
1 Round and Round About the Town
2 Cheap Grace, American Style
3 Insanity, Theocracy, and the Public Realm
4 For and Against Rorty
5 The Polyphony of Christ
6 Into Lands as Yet Unknown
7 City of Carnage, City of Refuge
8 A Hard Habit to Break
9 Ransomed from Every Language
10 The Eucharistic Idiom of the Gospel
11 The Long Defeat
Epilogue: Bad Company?

What People are Saying About This

William T. Cavanaugh

Barry Harvey makes a case for a Christianity that is less about cultivating feelings and more about bodily practices that can resist prevailing pathologies like racism, nationalism, and the disciplines of the market. Christianity for Harvey is finding graceful freedom and mad joy amidst the long defeat that history seems to be. If Dietrich Bonhoeffer were alive today, this is the kind of theology and social analysis he would be writing.

Michael L. Budde

Not with a sledgehammer or a flamethrower, but with the hand of a surgeon or the touch of a musician – this is how Barry Harvey undermines the pretentions and pathologies of much of what passes for Christianity in modern cultures. By framing his theological and political analyses via three despised terms in the larger culture – ‘madness, theocracy, and anarchism’ – Harvey signals his desire to change what we think we know about the conventional wisdom of capitalist polities, Christian self-understanding, and matters of power.  If anything, the contents of this book are even more provocative than its title, and significantly more enriching to anyone who seeks a Christianity worth inhabiting. Most theologians couldn’t write a book like this, but we’re better off for Harvey having done so.