Book Review: Discipleship, Secularity, and the Modern Self: Dancing to Silent Music by Judith A. Merkle

surprisingly, Mauldin does not comment on the sharp contrast here with Barth’s assessment.) According to Bonhoeffer, the ‘Two Kingdoms’ doctrine has for a long time helped prevent precisely what Barth thought it encouraged: as long as both the Church and the State had to operate alongside each other, both as partakers in a ‘penultimate’ state of affairs, the State could not declare itself ‘ultimate’—as it did in National Socialism. In Chapter 4, ‘The Divine Mandates and Political Resistance’, Mauldin goes on to show how Bonhoeffer’s account of the ‘divine mandates’ (developed elsewhere in Ethics) is an elaboration of his assessment of the ‘Two Kingdoms’ doctrine: the point of the mandates—viz., Church, government, marriage, work—is that they function alongside and relatively independent of each other, and thus together can prevent the emergence of an overweening or even totalitarian State, including any radical resistance such an emergence would provoke. And this, Mauldin suggests, implies an important reminder for those keen to take their cue from Bonhoeffer’s practical involvement in the resistance: ‘Bonhoeffer has something to say about what do [sic] in a state of emergency. But he also has something to say about how to prevent an emergency from coming about’ (p. 109). With these four case studies, Mauldin persuasively argues that Barth and Bonhoeffer, far from being mere critics of modernity, sought rather to free modern politics from the threat of absolutism lurking within modernity—as expressed in the various narratives of decline, nostalgia or utopia that were rife in their day, and which arguably are still with us today. I did find myself wondering, though, which audience Mauldin had in mind in writing this book. It may be the academic guild of Barth and Bonhoeffer scholars, but I doubt they need to be persuaded of the kind of nuanced reading as presented here. Maybe, then, the audience is a larger circle including political scientists, analysts and commentators? After all, Mauldin is keen to emphasise that the questions Barth and Bonhoeffer address are ‘relevant far beyond the confines of the Church and academic theology’ (p. 141). Yet one might think such a wider audience would need a more thorough introduction to the theology of Barth and Bonhoeffer, and their respective hinterlands, than can be offered in this (pleasingly) slim volume. But perhaps chapter 4—in particular its critique of recent attempts to identify a ‘Bonhoeffer moment’ in US politics—gives us a clue to the audience that Mauldin is really aiming for: the ranks of American Christian commentators and opinion-makers who, given the continuing (if diminishing) role of religion in US cultural and political life, are all too easily tempted (or forced) to cast major theologians like Barth and Bonhoeffer as characters in the stories the culture warriors want (them) to tell. In any case, Mauldin has done a good job in allowing these two major theologians to speak for themselves—and indeed for the benefit of our political life today.