Barry Harvey is back with a book that manages to put madness, theocracy, and anarchism in the title — three despised words, deliberately chosen. It’s a collection of essays developed over his career, and beneath them all sits one assertion: the church is not a subsystem of civil society. It has its own integrity, its own allegiance, and its own context for rethinking how it relates to everything else. The preface opens with Justin Martyr noting that second-century Christians were charged with madness for putting a crucified man right next to God. Barry’s point: if the church has a healthy understanding of itself, it already is a resistance movement — rooted in scripture, liturgy, and tradition, and located, as Bonhoeffer put it, in the middle of the human village. We got into ecclesial solidarity and the ordo amoris (and the administration official who thinks he can do Catholic theology), the American form of cheap grace, the neoliberal collapse of state and market into one thing, and then — because Barry has multiple music degrees and I have no self-control — Bonhoeffer’s polyphony, Tolkien’s Silmarillion, the long defeat, eucatastrophe, and Gandalf’s ecclesiology. I skipped every one of my Richard Rorty questions the moment Tolkien came up. I regret nothing.
Highlights from the conversation
- The church as its own public. Rowan Williams wrote that a church without at least some features of a sect cannot act as an agent of transformation. Barry’s two ways of thinking about the church: the body of Christ, and the motley mob of misfits, malcontents, and miscreants. God seems to want to work with groups like that. He traces the claim back past Justin Martyr to Genesis 12 — a great nation, a land, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed — and holds the dialectic between distinctiveness and complete immersion in society. On Christendom: he doesn’t think its reemergence will succeed, thinks it would be tragic if it did, and considers its demise good news for the church recovering its own identity and calling.
- Ecclesial solidarity, and the ordo amoris. The question he keeps putting to his students in Central Texas: why am I supposed to have more moral obligation to Americans in Maine or Alaska than to Christians a few hundred miles south, on the other side of a nation-state border? His answer isn’t exclusion — ecclesial solidarity is a laboratory for love, the ground from which you learn what you owe the neighbor at hand, Christian or not. In the classical articulation of the orders of love, relation is one consideration and manifest need is another, and dire distress can trump relation. The immigrant, he notes, is both. And: justice is the front porch of love.
- The two suppositions and the conclusion. Everything Barry does rests on these. First, the American experiment has a limited shelf life — every great civilization has ended, and ironically every one of them thought it would be the exception. Second, if the gospel is true, the people who make up the church continue on, likely smaller and hard-pressed. The conclusion: only when you can hold both does what we should be doing now come into focus. Which makes him less concerned with saving democracy than with the church actually exemplifying, in its own life, what justice looks like — the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the marginalized. Not through preaching. Not through argumentative powers. The world needs to see a group of people showing what justice looks like.
- State plus market, and the fragmenting of a life. Barry’s distinction: classical liberalism, including Adam Smith (who wrote a book on ethics before Wealth of Nations), held that some things should not be left to the market. Under sixty years of neoliberalism, the bottom line is the bottom line. Which shows up as fragmentation — what’s said in church seems to have little bearing on your job or your other choices. His practical moves are unglamorous and specific: talk to middle and high schoolers about what professions and what uses of them are consistent with faith; family law and defense work versus mergers and acquisitions, where a large part of the job is deciding who gets thrown out of work this week. Support credit unions and fair trade. His own congregation ran an asylum house — and one of the first women they helped has now bought her own home. Dorothy Day loved Thérèse of Lisieux’s little way, and Barry’s friend Mike Budde’s reminder sits underneath all of it: policy must be enacted by the state or in association with it, and the state’s moral authority rests finally on coercion.
- Cheap grace, American style. Reading Bonhoeffer’s Protestantism Without Reformation, Barry noticed the same logic that opens Discipleship: grace we give ourselves, without repentance, without truth-telling. So cheap grace is thinking you can be fine with God while ignoring what has been done — to African Americans, and (as Jeremiah Wright’s sermon adds) to Indigenous peoples and to Japanese American citizens, and to people being rounded up right now and denied their day in court. Barry’s line on the golden statue in Florida and the pastor insisting this has nothing to do with idolatry: the gentleman doth protest too much. And his broader refusal: don’t call yourself a progressive Christian or a conservative Christian, because far too often what that means is your partisan politics have shaped what your Christianity is. Being Christian cuts across the partisan line at different points in different ways.
- The polyphony of Christ. Barry has multiple music degrees, and his next book is on this. The argument: musical imagery lets us perceive reality in ways vision can’t. Sight sets you up as a strategic point from which everything else is managed — I’m here, that’s over there. Sound surrounds you. You can’t turn your head away, can’t cleanly distinguish yourself from your environment, often can’t even locate the source. From Bonhoeffer’s prison letters: the loves of our life — family, friends, Duke basketball — need a cantus firmus, a main song around which everything else is ordered. We live in a cacophonous world where Christian identity is just one more unrelated line. Polyphony is potentially revolutionary. He extends it to scripture as performance — Sunday liturgy as the ensemble reading the score, and the other six days and twenty-three hours as improvisation. The original sin of improvisation is trying to be absolutely original; your fellow musicians have to recognize what you’re doing as a continuation. Which is why we need exemplars — Romero, Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, and Emmanuel Katongole’s Bethany land movement in Uganda.
- The long defeat, and Gandalf’s ecclesiology. The chapter Tripp called the most moving in the book. Tolkien’s Ainulindalë — Ilúvatar sings reality into being, Melkor decides to start music of his own, and Ilúvatar tells him that everything he has attempted has its origin in Ilúvatar and serves his purposes. Barry’s careful, respectful contrast with King’s moral arc: our attempts at justice and love invariably fail, and that does not mean they are lost or meaningless. Romero did not stop the violence in El Salvador. And Barry’s gentle pushback on the church as thermostat — the more you try to steer society toward the ends you’ve chosen, the more you play the game as it’s played. The two truths that clash in the present: if you do not love, you will not be fully alive; and if you do love, you will be enough of a danger to the powers that they will find a way to get rid of you. Then Gandalf to Denethor: Mine is a rule of no realm, but all worthy things that are in peril — which Barry gives to the church. And eucatastrophe: the incarnation as the eucatastrophe of history, the resurrection as the eucatastrophe of the incarnation. Catastrophic, earth-shattering, and — the prefix does the work — for the good.
About our guest
Dr. Barry Harvey is Professor of Theology in the Honors College and the Department of Religion at Baylor University, where he has taught since 1988. He holds an MDiv from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a PhD from Duke University. His new book is Madness, Theocracy, and Anarchism: Political and Cultural Reflections on the Church — essays including “Cheap Grace, American Style,” “For and Against Rorty,” “The Polyphony of Christ,” “The Eucharistic Idiom of the Gospel,” and “The Long Defeat.”
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