@Plough @KenBurns “Greatest nation in the world”? That is empire speech, the myth of magnitude mistaken for moral rank—and the world hears it as idolatry even when we mean it as affection. America is a nation fiercely summoned by a planetary promise, and will be judged by the same measure.
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“I tremble for my country,” Jefferson famously said in Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781, in words chiseled on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial, “when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.” George Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which Jefferson drew on for the Dec. of Independence. “The laws of impartial Providence,” he wrote in 1774 to the Virginia legislature on the question of slavery, “may avenge our injustice upon our posterity.” The idea that the God who saves the world through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is now passionately invested in the tawdry partisan politics of a particular nation-state in North America in late modernity, is a notion so ridiculous that one must laugh or cry. Well, of course. That said, Jürgen Moltmann, the German theologian recognized as one of most influential Christian systematic theologians of the 20th Century and, furthermore, pretty much the 'de facto' global authority on Christian eschatology and messianism, would like a word.
Open original document@RobertEllsberg 2/3 Hereabouts, I suspect few, if any, will refer to Moltmann's explicit affirmation of the American experiment as the messianic experiment of modernity. An endemic, epistemological substrate of religious and political exceptionalism dictates a form of separatist blindness to it.
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I believe that some people will have doubts here because in the future the liberation is not going to be ours; it will be other poeple who want to liberate themenselves – have to liberate themselves – from *us*.