Madness, Theocracy, and Anarchism: A Discussion with Barry Harvey

According to some of the most influential thinkers of the modern era, it is madness to subordinate all one’s aims to one end. Such thinkers believe that the church in particular should limit itself to matters of religion, spirituality, and moral values, but in other areas of life submit itself to modern society. Madness, Theocracy, and Anarchism contends instead that the church should refuse to mind its assigned place or restrict its attention to a delimited sphere of activity.

The mission, calling, and purpose of the church cannot rightly be thought of or treated as a function of any other social grouping, be it family, region, state, culture, race, or class. Its mission is to cultivate a new and distinct society to act both amidst the old and as a contrast to it, displaying the form of social life intended for all humankind in Christ. The church is thus called to a different understanding of politics having to do with the practices that order the common life and relations of a people, forming the members of this community to live according to this order and to embody these relations for the whole world.

Barry Harvey examines those points where the church’s practice of politics directly challenges the many ways Christians have put national and tribal loyalties ahead of our inclusion in the pilgrim people of God, and those places where the social activities, structures, and imaginative tales animating the Western world in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries challenge the faithfulness of the Christian community. The analysis of the dominant social order is not to understand it for its own sake, but to spell out the context of the church’s worship, collective life, and testimony.

Dr. Barry Harvey has been a professor of theology with Baylor’s Department of Religion and the Honors College since 2007 and has been working at Baylor since 1988. He has an MDiv from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY and a PHD from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He has written multiple books and articles including Taking Hold of the Real: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Profound Worldliness of Christianity. He is an ordained Baptist minister and a native of Denver, Colorado.