{"id":11463,"date":"2010-01-06T08:49:48","date_gmt":"2010-01-06T13:49:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/?p=11463"},"modified":"2010-01-06T08:49:48","modified_gmt":"2010-01-06T13:49:48","slug":"the-reign-of-god-a-sovereign-lover-the-reign-of-love-and-ordo-amoris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2010\/01\/06\/the-reign-of-god-a-sovereign-lover-the-reign-of-love-and-ordo-amoris\/","title":{"rendered":"The Reign of God: A Sovereign Lover, the Reign of Love, and Ordo Amoris"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Over my brief tenure contributing to Vox Nova, I have written myself into a rather harsh polemic between Liberalism on the one hand and something else on the other. What this \u201csomething else\u201d is exactly, of course, is the question. Facing this question, I want to continue to defend the dialectic I have presented several times now, but I also think that I should spend less time defending myself and more time explaining what my intuitions and intentions are in the first place. I am confident that none of this will be sufficient, but it might be a start. <\/em><\/p>\n

One of the most frequent commenters here, Ronald King,\u00a0raised a critique\u00a0of my earlier post, Don\u2019t Forget, Liberalism is Bad<\/a><\/em>, that I found surprising. He rejected the notion that as Catholics we should desire the Reign of God. I empathize with the sentiment of his comment but, upon further contemplation, I think that this desire for the Reign of God begins to clarify what it is that we ought to desire\u00a0other than\u00a0Liberalism\u2014the elusive \u201csomething else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before I get to that, allow me to clarify something that is fundamental to this ongoing theme: There is a difference between what is desired and what there actually is. To desire true love is one thing, to\u00a0receive\u00a0it is another thing entirely.\u00a0While different, our desires frame\u00a0our sense of what is possible. Without the desire for\u00a0employment, for example, the possibility of getting a job is nonexistent.<\/p>\n

This is crucial to understanding why it is that I believe that we ought to broaden our political appetite and imagination. Far too many people desire\u00a0te status quo\u00a0(e.g. liberalism, secular nation-states, and alike) thereby making the possibility\u00a0of something else nonexistent\u2014even\u00a0the possibility of the existence of God.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is my view that we\u00a0need to develop an appetite\u00a0for something that is both present in our desires and not yet the case in actuality. We cannot let Liberalism, or whatever else we take as the horizon of political possibility,\u00a0stake a claim to autarky and monopolize our sense of what is\u00a0good, beautiful, and true\u2014and possible.<\/p>\n

This brings me back to Ronald King\u2019s\u00a0objection.\u00a0He is on to something.\u00a0Presenting the Reign of God as an alternative to the politics of the day has a ring to it that is off-putting and smells like an opening to religious oppression. If that is what I mean, then, I most certainly am a dangerous lunatic. But this is not what\u00a0I intend to convey.<\/p>\n

What if this theocracy\u2014this\u00a0Reign of God\u2014was\u00a0the reign the mysterious God who is love? In other words, informed by the theological challenges to knowing God and the political need for a good and just social order, we may find that seeking the Reign of God is\u00a0the only\u00a0alternative to all other problematic political ideologies; especially Liberalism. Maybe Aristole \u201cbest of the worst\u201d way of speaking hides the fact of the \u201cbest of the best\u201d from us.<\/p>\n

What would this politics be like? Well, it would seem to be a monarchy where the Sovereign\u00a0is a lover. It would be a kingdom where the reign of the Sovereign would be best described as a reign of love. Consequently, the social order would be held accountable to the ordo amoris<\/em>, the order of love.<\/p>\n

This is a rather opaque sketch of the meal\u00a0that I think that we\u00a0need to learn to crave, but it is my belief that if we truly craved the Reign of God in this particular way, we might begin to imagine and expect anew what politics should and can be like. This, of course, is not only a matter of politics. It raises eschatological questions of the now-and<\/em>-not-yet,\u00a0the here-and<\/em>-to-come, of the Kingdom of God.<\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t this the water we should be swimming in politically?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over my brief tenure contributing to Vox Nova, I have written myself into a rather harsh polemic between Liberalism on the one hand and something else on the other. What this \u201csomething else\u201d is exactly, of course, is the question. 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