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Hell Shall Not Prevail: Essays on Ecclesiocentric Postliberalism
Written by members of the Civitas Group, a research colloquium sponsored by the Theopolis Institute, the essays in Hell Shall Not Prevail focus on the crucial and distinctive role of the Body of Christ―the church―for renewing our political, social, and economic life together.
Liberalism lacks the internal resources to sustain itself.
It necessarily draws life from the contributions of “strong gods”―family solidarity, civic loyalty, national community―even as it tears them down.
Because modern liberalism pretends to be sufficient unto itself, it has become a parody and inversion of itself, increasingly repressive even as it presses radical autonomy into more areas of life. As a result, liberalism has increased alienation, restlessness, and even despair, especially for the weakest and most fragile among us.
These dramatic changes have given birth to calls for a “postliberalism” of one sort or another. These typically propose a return to one or more of the “strong gods” of the pre-modern world.
Might the cure be worse than the disease?
Written by members of the Civitas Group, a research colloquium sponsored by the Theopolis Institute, the essays in this volume focus on the crucial role the Body of Christ plays in efforts to renew our common life.
While some form of postliberalism is needed today, Jesus Christ laid bare the false promises of the ancient gods and re-centered human institutions around Himself. Only the church can answer the decay of liberal order while transcending the false promises of the ancient gods of family, nation, and city-state. In the Civitas vision of a distinctly ecclesiocentric postliberalism, the church is the Christian’s first family, city, and nation.
The church is God’s revelation that there is another, eternal kingdom against whose walls hell shall not prevail. Postliberalism must be ecclesiocentric if there is any promise for postliberalism at all.
Liberalism lacks the internal resources to sustain itself.
It necessarily draws life from the contributions of “strong gods”―family solidarity, civic loyalty, national community―even as it tears them down.
Because modern liberalism pretends to be sufficient unto itself, it has become a parody and inversion of itself, increasingly repressive even as it presses radical autonomy into more areas of life. As a result, liberalism has increased alienation, restlessness, and even despair, especially for the weakest and most fragile among us.
These dramatic changes have given birth to calls for a “postliberalism” of one sort or another. These typically propose a return to one or more of the “strong gods” of the pre-modern world.
Might the cure be worse than the disease?
Written by members of the Civitas Group, a research colloquium sponsored by the Theopolis Institute, the essays in this volume focus on the crucial role the Body of Christ plays in efforts to renew our common life.
While some form of postliberalism is needed today, Jesus Christ laid bare the false promises of the ancient gods and re-centered human institutions around Himself. Only the church can answer the decay of liberal order while transcending the false promises of the ancient gods of family, nation, and city-state. In the Civitas vision of a distinctly ecclesiocentric postliberalism, the church is the Christian’s first family, city, and nation.
The church is God’s revelation that there is another, eternal kingdom against whose walls hell shall not prevail. Postliberalism must be ecclesiocentric if there is any promise for postliberalism at all.
283 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 13, 2024
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May 23, 2025
As much as I wanted to give this five stars (the highs were really, really high), this collection is just too much of a mixed bag. Here's a brief breakdown of the essays:
Foreword and Introduction: Excellent. Set the groundwork moving forward quite nicely.
1.) Liberalism Is Heretical Ecclesiology. Also great. Leithart is always a stimulating read. Liberalism was built to suppress the Church. Any postliberalism moving forward that even has a chance of succeeding needs to recenter it.
2.) Can Liberalism Provide an Adequate Secular Justification for Respect for Persons? A very technical breakdown of Kant, Mill, and Rawls's liberal philosophies (complete with philosophical proofs) to ascertain if they can provide any basis for human dignity or worth. The answer is no, of course, only the imago Dei can do that. Interesting brain-food, but skip-able for the uninclined.
3.) The Church Builds the World. Fantastic. Perhaps the best essay. The essay provocatively argues its title.
4.) Liberalism and Restlessness of the American Soul. Another wonderful essay. This one shows how Tocqueville, a Frenchman writing in the 1820s, prophetically put his finger directly on the issues that would come to haunt America by observing our trajectory. It's like he wrote it today.
5.) Church as Polis, Church as Ethnos, Church as Oikos. As necessary as this essay is to the overall collection (many of the other essays refer to or rely on it), I found James Rogers to be overly repetitive in his points. He just kept hitting the same things again and again, and I feel the essay could have been more succinct. The last third, for instance, could have been cut entirely as it's the sole focus of the next essay.
6.) Beyond Liberalisms and Illiberalisms of Fear: Ecclesiocentrism, Tolerating, and Liberty. An important and excellent essay. Far from creating religious intolerance, Ben Peterson argues that it is only within the Christian worldview (and ecclesiocentrism) where ideas like religious toleration and liberty even make sense.
7.) The Common Good in Ecclesiocentric Economic and Social Thought. The last and weakest (by far) essay of the bunch. I initially thought it would put some meat on the skeleton they were constructing, but instead, the entire thing is about how Polanyi's view of markets is misunderstood and misapplied in modern economics. It just felt completely out of place in the collection and was quite the anticlimactic conclusion.
Foreword and Introduction: Excellent. Set the groundwork moving forward quite nicely.
1.) Liberalism Is Heretical Ecclesiology. Also great. Leithart is always a stimulating read. Liberalism was built to suppress the Church. Any postliberalism moving forward that even has a chance of succeeding needs to recenter it.
2.) Can Liberalism Provide an Adequate Secular Justification for Respect for Persons? A very technical breakdown of Kant, Mill, and Rawls's liberal philosophies (complete with philosophical proofs) to ascertain if they can provide any basis for human dignity or worth. The answer is no, of course, only the imago Dei can do that. Interesting brain-food, but skip-able for the uninclined.
3.) The Church Builds the World. Fantastic. Perhaps the best essay. The essay provocatively argues its title.
4.) Liberalism and Restlessness of the American Soul. Another wonderful essay. This one shows how Tocqueville, a Frenchman writing in the 1820s, prophetically put his finger directly on the issues that would come to haunt America by observing our trajectory. It's like he wrote it today.
5.) Church as Polis, Church as Ethnos, Church as Oikos. As necessary as this essay is to the overall collection (many of the other essays refer to or rely on it), I found James Rogers to be overly repetitive in his points. He just kept hitting the same things again and again, and I feel the essay could have been more succinct. The last third, for instance, could have been cut entirely as it's the sole focus of the next essay.
6.) Beyond Liberalisms and Illiberalisms of Fear: Ecclesiocentrism, Tolerating, and Liberty. An important and excellent essay. Far from creating religious intolerance, Ben Peterson argues that it is only within the Christian worldview (and ecclesiocentrism) where ideas like religious toleration and liberty even make sense.
7.) The Common Good in Ecclesiocentric Economic and Social Thought. The last and weakest (by far) essay of the bunch. I initially thought it would put some meat on the skeleton they were constructing, but instead, the entire thing is about how Polanyi's view of markets is misunderstood and misapplied in modern economics. It just felt completely out of place in the collection and was quite the anticlimactic conclusion.
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