As I noted earlier, the common view of the modern state as having emerged from a struggle against religion is not without foundation, and we must strive to see the truth in it. There are forms of religion that are, in fact, quite problematic for the public life of the liberal state. Let us try to understand what this problem is.

Anyone who has carefully studied the New Testament and the teachings of the early Church knows that they are, in terms of their metaphysics, something quite different from the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. I refer in particular to the supposition of a sharp disjuncture between body and soul, between the material and the spiritual, which can be found in certain post-biblical Jewish sources, but which are in evidence almost everywhere in early Christian thought. It is this clean fissure in reality—so strikingly captured in the distinction between “that which is unto Caesar,” and “that which is unto God”;¹⁹ or in Jesus’ declaration that “My kingdom is not of this world”²⁰—which permits Christians to conceive of the divine as being fundamentally of another world, along with man’s immortal soul, while man’s body is of this earth. With such a fissure in place, one quickly concludes that the other world is one of truth and goodness, and that this world is, by contrast, a realm of illusion and sin, perhaps even of evil. This understanding is the basis for the opposition between the City of Man, which is temporal, partial, and corrupt, and the City of God, which is eternal, perfect, and pure.

If you understand the world in keeping with such a dualism, it is not difficult to come to the conclusion that God’s word, if there is to be such a thing, must be a kind of an incursion of absolute purity and perfection into a fallen world. To compete with the darkness of this world, this incursion must be something overwhelming in its effective power, with the capacity to sweep away the illusion and deceit imposed on man by his materiality. God’s word becomes a “revelation,” by which is meant a form of miraculous knowledge, revealing to man what his own corrupt reason could never have attained. God’s word, as revealed in Scripture, becomes in principle something that is quite distinct from reason, or even opposed to it.

But there is a serious problem with such an understanding of revelation. For how does the individual know what ideas it contains? What we have is Scripture, which is a text consisting of words on a printed page, and our imperfect minds with which to interpret it. On this view, it cannot be the case that this text is read in the normal way, which is to say imperfectly, because then the result would be a transmission not of revelation, but of some error or illusion, and the entire promise of an effective incursion of the divine would dissipate. If the words of Scripture are to fulfill the promise of being a revelation to man, then it must be the case that when the individual goes about reading them, what he receives from this activity is itself the revelation in question. Imperfect though his mind may be, it must be the case that the individual has the capacity, in the process of reading Scripture, to attain knowledge of the absolute, the perfect, and the pure.

But of course, it does not work that way. The text does not “reveal” the absolute, the perfect, or the pure to anyone. On the contrary, the encounter with the text only spawns endless contradictory interpretations, each of which implies that the absolute, perfect, and pure do not reside with the others. Or, in other words, that the absolute, perfect, and pure have not been “revealed” at all. In reading Scripture, every individual finds himself thrown back on his own resources, struggling, with the power of his own reason, to attempt to determine its meaning. The very reading of the text refutes the thesis of miraculous knowledge, point-blank.

This is not a small problem for Christianity, as well as for any interpretation of Judaism that insists on importing a dualist metaphysics similar to that of the New Testament. For if there is no direct road to miraculous knowledge, and instead only countless human interpretations—all of them fallen, all of them corrupt—then how can one say that religion provides a way out of the maze of illusion that is this fallen world? Without the possibility of miraculous knowledge, the entire structure of New Testament metaphysics begins to totter. To head off this collapse, one clutches even more tightly at the supposedly miraculous and absolute character of one’s own interpretation. One insists that a certain understanding is rooted in “authority,” while other interpretations are not. The result, at least in medieval Europe, was the Inquisition and the Index.

What I take from this analysis of the promise of Christian religion is the following. If we try to determine what precisely it is that makes many versions of Christianity difficult to reconcile with free inquiry into the public good, we find that it is the claim to make available a miraculous knowledge. This claim, to the extent that it is accepted, paralyzes reasoned discourse; because once someone believes he has absolute and perfect knowledge, the doubts that arise as part of the normal debate regarding issues of public concern can only be seen as detracting from the perfect truth he already has. Whether intentionally or not, assertions of miraculous knowledge thus have the effect of delegitimizing all other knowledge with regard to any subject concerning which they are asserted. To admit claims of miraculous knowledge into public debate therefore comes perilously close to calling for an end to public debate.

Is there another approach to the role of Scripture in public life? I think there is another approach, which is the one advanced in the Talmud. The rabbis well knew that no one receives the content of a “revelation,” in the sense of something absolute and perfect, by reading Scripture. What we see is always partial. For this reason, the Talmud establishes the principle that each word of the Tora has “seventy faces,” that each of the many interpretations is equally “the words of the living God.”²¹ Moreover, in the struggle to demonstrate the superiority of one interpretation over another, the Talmud explicitly proscribes appeals to revelation. The word of God is “not in heaven,” but of this earth, and men must decide. In matters of interpretation, this means accepting the principle that Tora is always present as multiple views, each of which is legitimate. Where political considerations require that these be reduced to a single decision, the decision is taken not according to “voices from heaven,” but according to the majority opinion among interpreters.²²

This constant tension between the received wisdom found in the scriptural text and the present reason of the various interpreters is nowhere more in evidence than where Judaism comes to discuss matters pertaining to the public good. In fact, the Talmud is littered with legal terms whose import is the introduction of considerations of present public good in opposition to received wisdom: Yishuv haaretz (“requirements of settling the world”), derech eretz (“the customs of the world”), tzarchei tzibur (“the needs of the public”), migdar milta (“something necessary for the public good”), inyanav shel melech (“matters that affect the king’s interest”), dina demalchuta (“the accepted law of the land”), kvod habriot (“out of respect for all men”), darchei shalom (“the ways of peace”)—all of these and others are categories of public reason that are seen by the Talmud as having sufficient weight to qualify and, where necessary, even to override received wisdom. In other words, reasoning concerning what will bring the public good is not proscribed by Jewish religion, but required by it.

This brings us to the crux of the question of religion in the modern state. For if one attends carefully to the writings of Selden, Hobbes, Locke, and the thinkers of their time, it is clear that they were not fighting against the influence of the Bible in public life.²³ Far from it. What they were fighting was a particular but quite dominant view, according to which a single man sitting in Italy—or any other man, for that matter—could put an end to discussion of the public good in England by saying that he had read Scripture and was in possession of miraculous knowledge, so that no further thought would be required. In Christendom, this understanding of Scripture as a source of present miraculous knowledge meant not the advancement of inquiry into the public good, but its suppression. And the struggle to free public discourse from the shackles imposed on it by this kind of religion really is an important part of the heritage of the Western state.

But not all religion is this kind of religion. What the Bible and other Jewish sources became in the hands of thinkers such as Bertram, Cunaeus, Grotius, Selden, Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke was, I think, something at least a step closer to what they had been in the rabbinic tradition. They became the foundation for an outstanding tradition of Christian inquiry into the nature of the public good. On the basis of the limited information we now have before us concerning the political thought of this period, it seems a case may be made that it was out of this inquiry that the modern national state, of which we are today citizens, arose.