Secular Heresy in the Name of Christ : THE POLITICAL MEANING OF CHRISTIANITY An Interpretation<i> By Glenn Tinder (Louisiana State University Press: $29.95; 272 pp.; 0-8071-1510-X) </i>

In 1933, the English Catholic historian, Christopher Dawson, suggested that “the true social function of religion is not to busy itself with economic or political reforms, but to save civilization from itself by revealing to men the true end of life and the true nature of reality.”

In a book that is winning its author remarkable acclaim, Glenn Tinder, professor of political theory at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, undertakes to reveal “the true end of life and the true nature of reality” in light of the Gospels after another half-century of the creeping (or galloping) secularization that Dawson decried.

Tinder laments the steep price we are paying for our secularism in diminution of the value we ascribe to ourselves as individuals. The person whose “every hair is numbered” in God’s heart is, to his fellow human beings, more often a means than an end--still less an “infinitely precious end.” Tinder mercilessly dissects the self-regarding assumptions underpinning consumer society--whether in the arguments it advances for abortions, its treatment of the old and of minorities, or its casual attitude toward the use of violence, military or other.

These are but reflections of the central, psychological problem: Tinder discerns in us a complete inability to see ourselves for what we inevitably are--evil-doers, sinners, in need if not of a redeemer, then at least of the consciousness that we require redemption.

In short, he argues that the Christian vision “has to an astonishing degree been forgotten,” that Christianity is a diminishing “moral savings accumulated over many centuries but no longer being replenished.” And so, the ancient task that Tinder sets himself is to show in a new and relevant way “the correspondence between Christian truth and our needs as a society. . . .”

For this reason, the author is at well-taken pains to explicate Christian concepts in secular terms. He accomplishes this via deft and pertinent literary references that range from Greek tragedy to Fyodor Dostoevsky to Ignazio Silone and via an exposition devoid of institutional or ideological tilt: “The truth with which Christians are in touch is not one they possess. It is not a truth they can adequately embody even in the infinitely pliant and receptive material of words, much less is it a truth they can embody adequately in the intractable and rebellious material that constitutes society. . . . We can only find it in our individual destinies. . . . “

A modern classic of political theory, “The Political Meaning of Christianity” is a slow read not because it is poorly written (its prose is often elegant and austere) but because it is the distillation of a lifetime of thought and prayer (Tinder is 67). Its minutely reasoned analyses of familiar topics like sin, hope, suffering, liberty, the church, the state, power, etc., are often brilliant and always fresh and illuminating, but they defy rapid summary.

Along with discussions of familiar terms, the author proposes a number of new ideas and concepts--for example, the prophetic stance: “An attitude, a way of facing society . . . (it) means offering one’s own weakness as a medium for the sovereignty of God in history.” Or again, destiny : any individual’s call to his “glory as a human being,” his career in God, as it were.

Destiny is not to be confused with “objectively established fate,” for it may be refused or embraced, depending on the person. Thus, “Christ was not untouched by fate, for he was crucified. His fate was transformed into destiny, however,” by his acceptance of God’s will for him.

Tinder is never stronger than in analyzing Christian versus secular dichotomies--for example, the notion of community (an ideal, “a set of perfected relationships”) which he contrasts with society (“the kind of unity that comes about because of the necessities of life in the world . . . requir(ing) that the value of an individual be assessed on the basis of social utility”).

What Tinder’s thesis finally turns on is his contention that “there is no greater error in the modern mind than the assumption that Christ, the God-man, can be repudiated with impunity.” Even here, Tinder’s reasoning is subtle, and the reader who assumes he is being bludgeoned into kneeling in a pew has missed the point. The author is not pressing religious conversion--a deeply, perhaps purely, personal matter--but simply considering the political effect of the repudiation of the “God-man.”

That effect, as Tinder shows in analyses of modern culture and world politics worthy of Reinhold Niebuhr, is to lead people “inevitably to begin to dream of the man-god.” That is to say, via the confection of idols--the flag, the marketplace, the therapy session, the laboratory, etc.--society gradually comes to divinize and worship itself (or some representation of itself).

Such a society may perhaps retain a marginalized and privatized practice of traditional religion, but it has nothing approaching--and indeed even no public language for framing--a serious political commitment to the Christian “principle that we are strong only when we are weak, rich only when we are poor, alive only when we are (crucified) . . . (that) we do not command the future but receive it from the hands of God; and we receive it only by giving up all pretensions of historical sovereignty, in dying.”

The very statement of ideals like the above in a political context is apt to draw faint smiles from even sympathetic readers. But the society that rejects those ideals ends up believing that it has created its own transcendence and surrenders to “the nearly irresistible inclination to count on nothing that is not assured by (its) own power.”

Given Tinder’s vivisection of everybody else’s ideology, it is rather remarkable that his book has received raves from grandees in American religion and was the cover subject of the December Atlantic magazine. We may not be quite as far along the path to secularist perdition as Tinder thinks.

In all events, whether reveille or swan-song, Tinder’s work, like Karl Barth’s, catches the reader up in the force of an unfolding, deductive but never reductive vision of the Christian gospel. “The Political Meaning of Christianity” succeeds completely in its bid to make the reader consider seriously what he or she thought had already been adequately considered; namely what another great theologian, Edward Schillebeeckx, calls Christianity’s “tender of an offer of meaning.” Rejection may follow the reading, but it won’t be a light or ignorant rejection.

This is not to say there are no criticisms to raise. Left-wing Christians may not entirely buy Tinder’s chariness of Liberation Theology, particularly when it is set alongside the author’s sometimes uncritical affection for American democracy. More serious is a special pleading on behalf of the historical church. The author passes off Christianity’s support of jingoism with the statement: “Such behavior, however, exemplifies the weakness and sinfulness of Christians and not the true meaning of Christianity.” Many of the isms that Tinder rightly rejects would pass muster by that tolerant standard. And yet such criticisms remain external to Tinder’s central project.

Writing admiringly about Bertrand Russell’s “Worship of a Free Man,” the English critic C. S. Lewis, at the time still an agnostic, could not resist the observation that Russell, for all the virtues of his book, “does not face the real difficulty--that our ideals are after all a natural product, facts with a relation to all other facts, and cannot survive the condemnation of the fact as a whole.”

That condemnation as always raises the troubling question of the ultimate sanction. Some can do without a celestial hook, as it were, on which to hang their idealism, particularly when the going gets rough. Tinder is not among them: “I do not know how atheists can avoid political despair,” he confesses. The question, of course, was posed long before Lewis; and it will return to prove irksome again one day. But for now, anyway, Tinder has won our full attention with his answer.