Teaching Political Theology

Abstract

The editors of Political Theology very kindly invited me to edit this special section on teaching political theology as a way of marking the release of my book, Political Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2012). Instead of gathering excessive reviews of or responses to the book, I offer these three articles as considerations of some of the issues at stake in the task which is the main intended function of the book: teaching political theology. I am joined by two authors who also influenced my work on the book in specific ways, Anna Rowlands and Craig Hovey. My article begins this special section with a consideration of the most basic question: what is political theology? What is it that we are teaching when we teach political theology? What is political theology meant to do, and thus, what do we aim to achieve in our teaching of the subject? I consider these questions in relation to the chapter “Approaches to Political Theology” in my book, which describes how political theologies can be distinguished by their theological anthropologies, their situation in theological and ecclesial traditions, and/or in relation to the movements and schools of thought which have characterized political theology as an academic discipline since the mid-twentieth century. I discuss the importance of emphasizing the situatedness of each political theology in terms of these theological and historical variables, and of introducing each approach to political theology sympathetically. Differences in each of these categories lead to differing answers to the most basic questions about the content, shape, and function of political