Vincent W Lloyd,The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology,Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,2011. 256pp. ISBN-10: 0804768846;ISBN-13: 978-0804768849.

Reviewed by: Charles Mathewes and Kristopher Norris, The University of Virginia, USA

“There are two kinds of politics: on the one hand, the politics of Law and Grace; on the other hand, the politics of the middle” (187). With this, Vincent Lloyd begins the Conclusion to his imaginative, elliptical, yet pointed account of contemporary political theology, and it nicely sums up the book’s analysis and positive contribution, both of which are very substantial indeed.

The work follows the typical pattern of illuminating religious concepts, virtues, and practices of political import and utility. But as the subtitle suggests, Lloyd reconfigures these elements into a broad, forceful critique of the discipline and its proponents. Political theology and political theory (the latter being only a secularized version of the former, Lloyd thinks) are infected with a “supersessionist” logic represented by Grace, a theological vision of the world as fallen yet fixable, requiring some redemptive force—from either inside or outside the world—to make it right (9). This logic is rooted in multiple sources: the most potent, a neo-Kantian partitioning of the empirical from the transcendent, which is sometimes replaced by Christian triumphalism to the same effect (19−21). Such a narrative problematically “focuses on modes of redemption rather than modes of living and acting, religiously or politically,” and thus discards Law for the sake of Grace (2). We are entranced by Grace and its supersessionist logic, and seduced by them into escapism, he asserts; that is, we focus on the world we wish for to the neglect of the jagged contours of the “textured, messy, viscous, difficult” world we have.

In fact, Lloyd argues (in line with a tradition running back through Gillian Rose and Freud to Nietzsche and Marx to Spinoza), this logic enchants us, leading us to elide ordinary life and endorse an animus at the world more than an animated vision of living within it. Ignoring the ordinary is, as it were, a cardinal sin in this vision, and for good reason: for if a political theology turns us away from the world we currently inhabit, to another coming by and by, from beyond the blue, is it a tool we can use for living in the world in which we find ourselves, or is it a story we tell ourselves about why we cannot expect to find our world livable? In the end, a grace-infused, supersessionist vision obscures political options and practices not directly obvious to us—constructing what he calls the “hegemony of the visible.”

He astutely identifies a series of the repetition compulsions that grip political thinking—our repeated lapses into idolization of one’s own political community, demonization of others, a purgative internal inquisition aiming at “purity” on the homefront, and the like. He then goes on to argue acutely that these compulsions are expressive of a misapprehension of our situation and longings. Melancholia is bad (as is hope, which is only a symptom of melancholia), because it is a fixation on an object, an object that is not here; hence it is escapist (72). To do better—truly to live in our world—we must refuse the oscillation inherent in such supersessionist logics and step away from the teeter-totter of Law and Grace. Reconfiguring political theology to overcome these supersessionist impulses and the escapist animus underlying them requires attending to the quotidian and mundane, the difficult and tragic work of negotiating practices and norms. Such a “politics of the middle” would “toil” in the “chaotic, unsystematic” ordinary between practices and norms (187). Abiding between Law and Grace, it retains concepts like tradition, liturgy, and sanctity for political theorizing without either stripping them of their religious significance or leaving them fully enfleshed in theological commitments. He reconfigures three theopolitical virtues (Love, Faith, and Hope—though we will come to see that Hope, for Lloyd, is no virtue) and five theopolitical practices (Tradition, Liturgy, Sanctity, Revelation, and Prophecy). Unmooring them from their usual theological anchorages, he offers them as theopolitical strategies for opening up surprising, new possibilities and political practices. To accomplish this, he constructs an anti-supersessionist canon of political thought with thinkers “too Jewish to be Christian and too Christian to be Jewish,” marking a middle road that returns to the political ordinary by deploying theological practices as strategies.

In all this, Lloyd engages with a diverse set of protagonists. Admittedly, they make up an unlikely bunch for a book of this sort: writers and philosophers like Kafka, Weil, Rose, and Baldwin (hey, even directors of “mumblecore” cinematography get a shout-out herein). But in each case Lloyd eventually defeats one’s skepticisms about the obliquity of the chosen interlocutor. Through these several engagements, carefully and charitably undertaken, Lloyd delivers an unorthodox work of political theology that reflects the slow, textured, and messy task of attending to the ordinary tensions of life to which his book summons us. If anyone is looking for a deeply thoughtful articulation of a radically immanentist—almost Spinozistic—political theology, to contrast to the usual suspects of traditional theistic accounts, Lloyd’s approach is certainly the most lucidly expressed and crisply elaborated version of such. On these grounds alone, it is invaluable.

The politics Lloyd proposes would work on our social practices and our souls, changing our habituated social melancholia into a kind of mourning. On this account, political theology must begin in political philosophy, conceived as a “rigorous science,” an inquiry into everyday life that aims to be “a tool for making new options available, for beckoning forth from the invisible unpredictable possibilities” (216). It does so by jettisoning idealism and materialism for a sort of pragmatist holism, recognizing the non-priority of practice to theory or vice-versa; instead, proper political theology requires untethering practices from norms, acknowledging that both are perpetually entangled in tragic conflict, and that a final solution for any such conflict can only be based in death, the ultimate escape. In contrast to the melancholia of all supersessionist logics, a social and individual politics of the ordinary begins in mourning, teaches us to let go of our longing for an imaginary object and returns us to our ordinary world of the everyday. In a way this is tragic, for it suggests an ineradicable tension between us and our world. But tragedy of this sort, Lloyd suggests, may simply be our fate.

But is this truly tragic? This seems to us a deep question about the book—one that the book puts before its audience in a very interesting and compelling way. In fact, from another perspective, one can make the argument that this is a very Stoic account, one that does not welcome tragedy, but refuses it.

Consider Lloyd’s critique of not just hope, but the possibility of hope, and the concomitant attack on the idea that hope is a virtue. This is a surprising, deeply thought-provoking, and bracing part of the book. It deserves to be read by anyone talking about hope these days (and their number is legion). But Lloyd does not really argue against hope; instead he simply takes a pair of dialectical pliers to Richard Rorty’s account, and (in a lesser way) those of Christopher Lasch, Michael Walzer, and Patrick Deneen. While all of these are impressive writers, in a way their discussions of hope are idiosyncratic to themselves (in the case of Rorty and Lasch) or tethered to religious convictions they never quite fully articulate (in the case of Walzer and Deneen). But other writers have done so, and Lloyd’s silence regarding them makes the book’s critique less powerful than it might be. We are not asking that he necessarily engage any of the contemporary work on hope, but what about earlier work, such as Gabriel Marcel’s, or liberation theologians such as Moltmann and Gutierrez? What about the role of hope in figures like Thurman and King? What about a (semi-)secular thinker on hope, like Vaclav Havel?

Such thinkers might give Lloyd more serious sparring partners than his chosen interlocutors, because they do take on the question of hope in a far more direct and disciplined way. For these thinkers, hope is not otherworldly, though it may look that way from the melancholic’s perspective. By attending to them we see that there is a metaphysics of hope that Lloyd never directly engages—one that affirms that the world is simultaneously saturated and sustained by events that give us hope. Of course, apprehending and bearing such hope can be hard work, in the face of so many temptations to an easy despair; as that noted virtue theorist John Cleese says in the movie Clockwise, “it’s not despair I mind, it’s the hope I can’t stand!” This is why the Christian tradition has traditionally figured hope as a virtue—a habituated disposition grooved into our souls by the reiterated practice of a certain existential comportment. Lloyd’s critique of hope as escapist, and his dismissal of hope as a virtue, go astutely hand in hand here; but we continue to think he has refused to engage the thinkers who most seriously explore a rival account of hope along both of these axes.

There is another question to ask of this project—one more immanent to the terms in which it presents itself—a challenge to the basic dichotomy on which the book seems to be based. Recall the logical choice Lloyd offers, between “a politics of Law and Grace” and “a politics of the middle.” How is that not a reiterated dichotomy of Law and Grace at one further level of abstraction? How, that is, is this not a request to supersede supersession itself? How is the escape from grace to be done in a non-gracious manner?

Lloyd seems to want us more to renounce supersession rather than to disentangle ourselves from it therapeutically. There seems to be nothing in the dichotomy which can be transfigured and sublated to a higher understanding. His use of the mourning/melancholia distinction is fascinating and acute, but it is hard to see the passage from melancholia to mourning enacted in the book. It is mostly a matter of condemning—dare we say repeatedly?—melancholia.

Here again, we think, the language of hope might have been more useful to Lloyd than he lets it be. Hope is not always bound to elide the tragic, the ordinary, as Lloyd believes. Rather, “hope” can be one of those theopolitical strategies that Lloyd seeks—strategies capable of opening up new possibilities. Consider: purely on its rhetorical merits, the language of hope is a tremendously powerful tool for identifying and redescribing an interlocutor’s most profound positive aspirations, and then suggesting how those aspirations are better understood and promoted in a language to which the interlocutor previously thought she must be opposed. And here rhetoric and moral psychology work in tandem; for in suggesting this, the tradition of (what we may call) hopeful political theology tries to identify a route between where we are and where we might go, not in a technological sense, but in a way that shows how our longings in this world require not (most primordially) renunciation but transfiguration. In the end, then, we think Lloyd’s account seems to us finally too contrastative to accommodate the escape from the dialectic of Law and Grace that it cannily identifies; but we have learned from Lloyd that this assessment can only be provisional, and hope that in future work he continues to develop his position, not least in response to suspicions such as our own.

Despite these critiques, then, Lloyd’s achievements are considerable and necessary: in style and content, his argument offers a refreshing break from the often bland architectures and overused interlocutors of political theology. He has articulated in a serious and sustained way a stance that has been heretofore too easy to ignore, in a style that renders powerfully palpable the attractiveness of the stance, and gives readers a taste of the insights this position can contribute to the larger discussions in which it finds a place. In all these ways, the work constitutes an important critique of and addition to the canon, and should serve as required reading for any course in political theology. We may disagree with some of its material argument, but it is not a problem with The Problem with Grace that it inspires serious reflection and response from its interlocutors: it is part of its singular achievement.