Sort of political Monday

Jesus and Machiavelli
Walter Russell Mead has a great long post about Machiavelli up. It's one of those pieces that I wish everyone would read so if your choice is between reading the rest of this and going there, by all means go there.

But, good as it is, there was one point that had me wondering.

Dealing with the tensions between Christianity and Macciavelli, Mead writes:

The relationship of what might be called the pragmatic virtues of the civic republican tradition can never be totally reconciled with the otherworldly and transcendent teachings of Christ, and each person and each society must negotiate that tricky terrain as best they can.

Christ's teachings were otherworldly and transcendent? The parable of the talents, for example? His clever comeback when challenged with the potentially fatal question about whether it is okay to pay taxes to the emperor? Christianity, I'll grant you, often teaches a morality that is impractical and otherworldly but not Christ. He drove the moneychangers from the temple.

Christ is not a Machiavellian but neither, as Mead notes, was Machiavelli.

And we might note that while Jesus encounters both Herod and Pilate, the brunt of his moral criticism was directed at the religious leaders of his time not the political ones. Of course, to admit that would be also to admit that he might well have the same criticisms of the current political "ideals" of Christian leaders as he had of Pharisees and Sanhedrin.