Luke Bretherton’s highly original and challenging book, Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy (Eerdmans, 2019), surveys the landscape of political theology while questioning certain dichotomies that have characterized the discipline—religious/secular, church/state, and private/public—in order to challenge Christianity to embrace the political dimensions of its very public faith without reducing theology to pragmatic political considerations.
The book’s unconventional yet innovative approach allows certain pressing existential questions to guide the conversation and in the process remind the reader that God-talk and political talk are, and have always been, mutually intertwined. At its best, Bretherton’s conception of political theology brings together the prophetic and corporate dimensions of the Christian faith for the sake of a shared common good in an increasingly pluralist context. Four scholars have been invited to review and critique this important work from a diversity of perspectives, followed by a response from the author.
