Not of this World

EDITOR of Policy Review and a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard and similar journals of opinion, Tod Lindberg is not the first man you’d expect to see adding his bit to the Jesus-and-politics genre. But here he is, entering the lists with a book whose merits quickly distinguish it from most of the others on that overcrowded shelf. Lindberg has something fresh to say. He says it with exceptional clarity, solicitous of his readers even to the point of occasionally tedious repetition. And he’s blessedly free of the impulse to huff and puff, which seems to be endemic to the genre. This is a book that genuinely invites engagement, and I can’t imagine a reader interested in the subject failing to profit from The Political Teachings of Jesus—even those who end up as I did, finding Lindberg’s account of our world not entirely plausible.

Lindberg argues that the core political commitments largely shared by Western democracies today—above all the principle of “equality in freedom”—derive primarily from the teachings of Jesus. He adds, quite correctly, that one needn’t be a Christian to accept these commitments, and that Christians, alas, often fail to live up to those teachings themselves. Moreover, Lindberg wants to differentiate Jesus’s “political teachings” (“his guidance for people about how to live in this world and how to build a just society among themselves”) from his “religious teachings” (“pertaining to such matters as the immortality of the soul, divine judgment, salvation and damnation, and so on”). Hence the references throughout the book to the politics of Jesus as “the Jesusian teaching,” emphasizing Lindberg’s particular angle of approach.

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John Wilson

John Wilson is a senior editor of the Marginalia Review of Books.

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EDITOR of Policy Review and a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard and similar journals of opinion, Tod Lindberg is not the first man you’d expect to see adding his bit to the Jesus-and-politics genre. But here he is, entering the lists with a book whose merits quickly distinguish it from most of the others on that overcrowded shelf. Lindberg has something fresh to say. He says it with exceptional clarity, solicitous of his readers even to the point of occasionally tedious repetition. And he’s blessedly free of the impulse to huff and puff, which seems to be endemic to the genre. This is a book that genuinely invites engagement, and I can’t imagine a reader interested in the subject failing to profit from The Political Teachings of Jesus—even those who end up as I did, finding Lindberg’s account of our world not entirely plausible.

Lindberg argues that the core political commitments largely shared by Western democracies today—above all the principle of “equality in freedom”—derive primarily from the teachings of Jesus. He adds, quite correctly, that one needn’t be a Christian to accept these commitments, and that Christians, alas, often fail to live up to those teachings themselves. Moreover, Lindberg wants to differentiate Jesus’s “political teachings” (“his guidance for people about how to live in this world and how to build a just society among themselves”) from his “religious teachings” (“pertaining to such matters as the immortality of the soul, divine judgment, salvation and damnation, and so on”). Hence the references throughout the book to the politics of Jesus as “the Jesusian teaching,” emphasizing Lindberg’s particular angle of approach.