Sobornost’, State Authority, and Christian Society in Slavophile Political Theology

Abstract

It has become commonplace in contemporary Christian political theology to sharply contrast the type of relationality embodied in the Church to that embodied in the liberal democratic state. While the Church is presented as a genuine communion, founded on the sacrificial self-gift of Christ and held together by the mutual love and service of its members, who “coinhere” in one another, liberal democratic society is founded on the sovereignty of the individual, and social relations represent only an external coincidence of individual interests. The theologians who have played up this contrast between the Church and liberal society have done so with the hope of shifting Christians’ political imagination away from the state and toward the Church itself. Rather than an attempt to “Christianize” society through the mechanisms of the state, they argue, Christian politics should be understood as an ecclesial “counter-politics” in which the Church does politics simply by being the Church, that is, by living out its own social principles and offering itself up as a public witness to a superior manner of social life than the one offered by liberal democracy. To conflate Christian politics with the politics of the state would mean translating the Christian social ideal into the liberal language of self-interested individualism and Hobbesian universal conflict.