Political Theology Research Articles

Christianity, Enlightenment, and the American Experiment: A Review Essay

Abstract In the Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding, Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer argue that the classical Christian Natural Law tradition is the central tradition shaping the American political order. Rejecting the scholarly consensus that the American founding was shaped by multiple traditions, Cooper and Dyer see continuity from Aristotle to Aquinas to the founding generation. This argument far exceeds the evidence: It is unpersuasive at the level of ideas, but it is even less compelling considering the epic political conflicts that surrounded these ideas—conflicts that were responsible for the genesis of Enlightenment ideas about religious liberty. Both liberalism and civic republicanism, to take the two leading schools of thought, emerged in response to conflicts over theology among the different sects of Christianity. Yet Cooper and Dyer's analysis obscures the political conflicts that were an essential feature of creating the American political order. To argue that Christianity and political theology had an important influence on thinking during the founding era, we must wrestle with what type of Christianity and political theology? How did understandings of Christianity and political theology change in their encounter with Enlightenment thinking? Cooper and Dyer do not attend to these questions. Yet such questions are all the more important given the rise of Christian nationalism and Catholic integralism, which would return us to pre-Enlightenment understandings of religious liberty that are profoundly at odds with the American experiment and the religious pluralism that stems from it.

Squatted Sacred Spaces: A Left-Radical Political Theology of Hamburg’s Rote Flora

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes Hamburg’s (in)famous squatted Rote Flora to argue that Left-radical squats can be fruitfully read as “sacred spaces.” It uses political theology vis-à-vis sacredness to understand fringe Left-radical subjects, and elucidates their purity concerns of space and political subjectivity. To this end, the paper adapts Bataille’s “left-sacred to the left-radical subject concerned with purity in the sense of being” “unassimilable” or “holy and set apart” from society. This occurs via maintaining a space that is “non-negotiable” to profane societal values, rather than in any deity-oriented or classical religious sense. Within this reading, these heterogeneous spaces must be maintained and kept “pure” of homogeneous profane (capitalist) influences. The paper analyzes these purity concerns via three manifestations: (1) the squat’s spatial purity from profane societal contamination or influence; (2) language and the fear of discursive integration through contracts; (3) the formation and reification of the pure, ascetic identity.

Debt: A Political–Theological Device Acting in Favor of the Neoliberal Ethos

This article intends to examine debt as a basilar political–theological device acting in favor of the neoliberal ethos. The Papal Encyclical Laudato Si affirms in paragraph 52 that debt today serves the control over the poor peoples in the world. In this article we demonstrate how debt can be seen as a political–theological device that works as an instrument of this specific ethos, aligned with neoliberal principles. We intend to show how these elements are related using three analytical movements. In the first, we present how we understand political theology as a critical reflection about the forms of political power. We observe that power, in its form and in the way it operates, replicates the theological–political power status prior to modernity, operating an excluding inclusion machinery. In the second movement, we analyze the political theology machinery that impacts individuals in the operation of an “excluding inclusion”. Under the political–theological machinery, individuals, groups, or populations are considered as a part of the machinery; they are included because they are incorporated in the new organism as they are excluded from their original content—language, ethos, culture, and their constitution as subjects. Then, in the third, we present the notion of the device, explicitly, a device constituted by a web of odd components and flexible relations that, when isolated as independent elements, act in the subject’s formation. In these terms, debt as a device of the political–theological machinery works to form individuals; it is a device that operates the excluding inclusion to make subjects more and more adapted to the market rules and habits. The very sense of debt in the post-productive era is challenged. We present how the possible exits from this machinery involve not only the debate on the forgiveness of foreign debts, but also how they are intrinsically linked to the creation of a new ethos, new ways of life created by relations outside the orbit of debt control. The conclusion intends to show how necessary it is to restore to people new forms of control over a way of life that is not regulated and ruled by debt. The methodology employed analyzes arguments that originated from works and articles concerning this theme.

Kierkegaard and Schmitt on the State of Exception

Abstract This essay begins with a quotation from Carl Schmitt in which he quotes Søren Kierkegaard on the significance of the exception in political theology. The essay is an extended reflection on this quotation within a quotation. Through a comparison of Kierkegaard and Schmitt, the author presents two readings of the state of exception: the first centers on the figure of the sovereign, while the second centers on the figure of the martyr. The sovereign suspends the law from above, while the martyr suspends it from below. In the political sphere, there are two ways of becoming the exception: the sovereign versus the martyr.

Shades of Complaint: Towards a Feminist Political Theology of Anger

ABSTRACT This essay is a reflection on anger as a political emotion as well as the more recent turn towards a positive (re)evaluation of this passion. I distinguish between three attempts to conceptualize anger in contrast to the more dominant idea that anger is counterproductive and revenge-driven: (1) anger as essential knowledge in the struggle against injustice; (2) anger as an apt response to affective injustice; (3) anger as feminist attention that appreciates, rather than knows, injustice. I argue that a closer look at political theology in general and an apophatic hermeneutics in particular is especially helpful in evaluating these three approaches. It also allows for a reconceptualization of anger that moves beyond the traditional either/or choices in political theology such as those between friend and enemy, good and bad, or the sacred and the secular.

The Theology of the Ethnocultural Empathic Turn: Towards the Balkan Theology of Political Liberation

The theology of the ethnocultural empathic turn, on the general level, encompasses ethnocultural empathy, which, as a branch of social psychology, strives for a thorough understanding of the life context of those ethnically and culturally different from ourselves. In the context of Christian theology, this turn also embraces the turn reflected in Mt 15:21–28 (Mk 7:24–30), in which Jesus expands his missionary work from the locally based “House of Israel” into the global realm to include the entire “inhabited world”. In this essay, the theological discourse of ethnocultural empathic turn is embedded within a specific sociopolitical context, which brings us to the Balkans, i.e., the post-Yugoslav framework, where we discuss the legacy of Bishop Srećko Badurina and layperson Franjo Starčević. During the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation, they vigorously resisted the dominant ethnonationalist-religious persuasions of the Croatian Catholic and Serbian Orthodox communities. They stood up for those who faced elimination due to the policy of ethnic cleansing. Today, both can serve as the foundation for the establishment of the theology in question, aiming at the development of the first post-Yugoslav contextual theology based on the political theology and the theology of liberation, capable of tackling the phenomenon of ethnoreligiosity as one of the most pressing problems plaguing this region.

Braised Cucumbers, Maps, and Surprises: Materialist Narratology and Political Theology in the Work of Hortense J. Spillers

Abstract This essay is an impressionistic account of Hortense J. Spillers's materialist synthesis of narrative theory, political theology, and expository logic that foregrounds people-centered histories and surprise in a proliferation of critical and theoretical paradigms and problematics. Focusing primarily on Spillers's mapping of novels by Paule Marshall, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner, the essay examines how her work consistently brings history into play alongside mobilizations of myth-criticism, narratology, and religious thought—fields that have notoriously evaded such historical groundings.

Erik Peterson’s Political Theology of the Modern Nation-State

ABSTRACT Erik Peterson is primarily known for his 1935 rebuttal to Schmitt’s Political Theology. Readers like Agamben have raised the need to investigate whether Peterson himself tried to extend or substantiate his critique. Albeit in scattered reflections, Peterson developed a genealogy of the nation-state through the ambiguity of the angelic and its relation to empire. This article presents these reflections according to the systematic connections Peterson discerns across three categories: the denial of God, the claim of human rights, and linguistic unity. Throughout, attention is paid to how Peterson’s ideas resemble those in Schmitt’s works, though he often adds his own accents through the concepts of Trinitarian and eschatological thought. The result is a nuanced conception of Peterson’s appreciation of Schmitt’s genealogical methodology. It clarifies how Peterson’s envisaged the Trinity as a political-theological paradigm becomes more intelligible. His insistence on openness to the transcendent can be linked to negative political theology.

A Signature Pedagogy: Virtue-Based Service-Learning and the Theopolitical Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas

The purpose of this conceptual essay is to explore how the theological politics of Stanley Hauerwas can provide an appropriate yet accessible ethical framework for faculty members and administrators at American Christian colleges and universities seeking to maximize the effects of service-learning. An attempt will be made to propose a virtue-based model of service-learning emphasizing the development of hope and patience through an understanding of the Christian church as a contrast society seeking to be a servant community dependent upon God.

Introduction

ABSTRACT Studies of affect center the porous non-enclosure of bodies and psyches, and temporality is crucial to our interpretations of violence, loss, rebellion, and change. The authors in this issue collectively demonstrate the inadequacy of colonialist and masculinist notions of static self-sovereign subjects in political theology. While affectability is frequently invoked for racialized and gendered modes of demonization or dismissal, the contributors to this special issue show the key role that it also plays in transforming power relations. The essays differ in the extent to which they foreground religious communities and practice, relations to nation-states, and divine or non-human agency. Together, however, they loosen assumptions about affect that limit visions for living otherwise and point to moments where we might glimpse such possibilities.

Political Islam and emancipatory politics: snapshots of Islamic liberation theology

ABSTRACT As a growing corpus of academic literature is taking notice of the plural geographies and trajectories of liberation theologies across diverse faith traditions, inquiries into the relationship between political Islam and liberative praxis are garnering renewed attention. Some scholars, casting doubt on the possibility of an Islamic liberation theology (ILT), have regarded political Islam as being devoid of liberative potential. Others, designating Islamism as the Muslim equivalent of liberation theology, have argued the emancipatory potential of Islamic political theology came to an end with the rise of fanatical renditions of Islamist militancy. Challenging these narratives, this article contributes to a recent stream of scholarship which tracks the historical and ongoing articulation of an ILT that overlaps with but is irreducible to Islamism. The article defines ILT as a manner of Islamic political theology that came into being in the context of the global emergence of liberation theologies, and one whose commitment to liberative praxis is anchored in a humanist and anti-oppression interpretation of Islamic precepts.

Anglican Political Theology

This essay develops a constructive account of the ways Anglicans have addressed political questions. The first section outlines the characteristic political rationality of Anglican political theology (APT). This provides a backdrop to a consideration of the relationship between three distinct yet interrelated phenomena—church, nation, and state—and how they were understood as together constituting a polity. The second half situates APT in the context of how Anglicanism, from its origins, is in part a response to processes of modernization, particularly as these emerged in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century onwards. It then outlines how key concerns of APT emphasize a way of imagining the role of church and nation within history, with providence as an important doctrinal point of reference. The essay closes with some critical reflections on how APT can and should develop going forward.

"ПО ТУ СТОРОНУ ПРАВОВОЙ НОРМЫ": ПОНЯТИЕ СУВЕРЕН С ПОЗИЦИИ ЮРИДИЧЕСКОГО ДЕЦИЗИОНИЗМА И ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОЙ ТЕОЛОГИИ КАРЛА ШМИТТА

The author of the article attempts to analyze the concept of sovereign according to Carl Schmitt’s legal decisionism and political theology. – the doctrines developed by the German philosopher and jurist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985). Decisionism is rightfully considered as one of the basic concepts of Schmitt’s political and legal discourse. In his voluminous treatise “Dictatorship” (1910), Schmitt initiates a detailed doctrine of decizionism, which is based on the adoption of a political decision justified by the relevant authority (and not the law). Later (in 1922), Schmitt publishes his “Political Theology”, which again takes into its optics decisionalism and those of its state-legal concepts that can be correlated with theological ones. Sovereign, sovereignty and state of emergency are the first to belong to them. And finally, in his work “On Three Types of Legal Thinking” (1934), he works out classification of legal thinking (in which it is permissible to assume the simultaneous existence of all three of its types), rejecting normativism and justifying his own inclination towards decisionism and thinking in terms of the specific order. Some researchers of Schmitt’s works – and in particular his “Political Theology” – believe that by correlating sovereign with God, state of emergency with a miracle, and political action with Way of the Cross, Schmitt tried to protect his doctrine of decisionism from any criticism, since being “passed” through the prism of the theological, not the critical politics, it became an object of faith, taking the form and expression of an indisputable dogma. In fact, such an “exploratory” vision of Schmitt’s analogies did not explain either the interpretatively complex theory of the sovereign or his political theology, but only simplified and sometimes vulgarized it. While researching the genealogy of political power, Schmitt attempted to establish a type of sovereign being characteristic for a particular era (the Pope – during the Early and Classical Middle Ages (V–XIV centuries); the Protestant reformer (represented by J. Calvin) – during the late Middle Ages (XVI century), the absolute monarch – during the period of European absolutism (XVI–XVIII centuries), the German people – during the existence of the Weimar Republic in Germany (1918–1933), the Reich president – during the birth of national socialism (the 30s of the XX century). The essential nature of each of them is revealed in the process of taking only those political decisions that the German Schmitt defines as decisions on introducing a state of emergency. At the same time, each epoch “sets” its own sovereign, what implies the obligatory subordination of its political decision to the spirit of the time in a particular historical period. Thus, with the progressive development of political theology, (legal) decisionism is also developing, resulted in the concepts of sovereign, sovereignty and emergency decision “acquiring” new semantic meanings

Power as Gift

The article addresses the question of whether Derrida in his political theology can be considered an “unfaithful” reader of Schmitt. While Derrida does not quote Schmitt’s Political Theology, some of his assertions are reminiscent of Schmitt’s disciplinary use of political theology. Indeed, Schmitt’s account of the relationship between exception, decision, and sovereignty was abundantly discussed in Derrida’s last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign. Derrida attempts in this seminar to deconstruct the sovereignty of the nation-state and its onto-theologico-political foundation. The question I raise in this article is whether, in previous years, Derrida himself had not implicitly made a different political theology that, considering the negative theological path, develops an alternative idea of power. The hypothesis explored is that this alternative paradigm is derived from one of the names of the impossible: the gift.

Political Theology and the Anthropocene in advance

Carl Schmitt’s political theology—which refers to the translation of theological concepts into secular political and legal categories, namely sovereignty and the state of exception—is defined against a background of “metaphysical” constellations where, according to Schmitt, bourgeois individualism and the nihilism of technology have come to dominate the modern age. My argument is that our contemporary age is dominated by a new “metaphysical” constellation—the Anthropocene. This condition—to which the ecological crisis is inextricably related—demands an entirely different kind of political theology to Schmitt’s sovereign-centric and anthropocentric version. As an alternative, I propose a political theology of planetary entanglement and care based on approaches from eco-political theology (Moltmann, Latour, Keller) and animal studies (Deleuze, Agamben, and Ciamatti).

Ai and/as racialised political theology

Building on earlier work engaging with the entanglement of artificial intelligence (AI) and apocalypticism and both with whiteness (Ali 2019), in the present essay I explore AI through the lens of a political theology informed by critical race theory and decolonial thought. The essay begins by setting out the meaning of a few key concepts, viz. AI, political theology, ?The World?, and the apocalyptic, before going on to consider their relationship, and concludes by briefly sketching an oppositional stance that I suggest is appropriate to adopt in relation to AI where the latter is understood as a manifestation of racialised political theology.

Hobbes’s Medeas

This article explores Thomas Hobbes’s political translations of Euripides’s Medea and, particularly, his representation of the Dionysian ritual of killing and dismembering a sacrificial victim (sparagmos). To answer the question of what forms political theology may take in modernity, I contend that Hobbes seeks to reverse the political theological meaning of ancient Greek sparagmos—which was originally depicted in Euripides as a legitimate religious sacrifice whose objective was to reunify the polis—by turning it into a senseless act of political violence that will dissolve the civil state into competing interest groups or body parts. If Hobbes seeks to expel religious sacrifice from his political state into archaic pre-history, however, the article goes on to argue—via Bramhall, Schmitt, and Cavarero’s revisionary readings of his work—that the philosopher’s critique of Medea ends up bestowing a legitimacy upon the tragic heroine that disarticulates the political theological unity upon which his Commonwealth is founded. In the tragic figure of Medea, Dionysian sparagmos returns to dismember and even potentially consume the body parts of the Leviathan.

Decision, Choice, Disclosedness in advance

This paper considers whether the category of sovereign “decision,” as it is used in Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology, has analogies with the paradigm of “choice,” as it is theorized in neoliberalism. Both decision and choice belong to that mode of judgement that “cuts” the field of alternatives into two, into two “extreme” alternatives. This mode of judgment not only presupposes the subject of the decision, but also sets up the terms of the choice, clearly indicating the optimal option. For Schmitt, a political decision arises in a “case of necessity”: in the “serious case” of war. And yet, it is precisely the neoliberal depoliticization of war that reduces it to a rule, and every choice fundamentally to a stance for or against. To escape from the neoliberal reduction of political decision in the form of a choice, I examine another mode of decision, absent from Schmitt’s texts: “disclosedness.”

Partial Iconoclasm: John Witherspoon's Presbyterian (Political) Theology and Slavery

The Reformed and Presbyterian traditions, characterized by their iconoclasm and anti-idolatry, stress the importance of rejecting false gods and idolatry, with a political theology that allows for critique of unjust authorities. Yet, there's a dichotomy in how leaders like Witherspoon applied these principles, as they criticized oppressive systems while simultaneously benefiting from the oppression of enslaved Black individuals. With respect to ending slavery, Witherspoon and other Presbyterian leaders in Princeton during the Revolutionary period adopted a strategy of gradualism, aiming for incremental changes towards the end of slavery. However, their approach often seemed inconsistent, advocating for immediate disruptive change against British rule but taking a more moderate stance on slavery and race. An in-depth theological and historical analysis of figures like Witherspoon provides insights into their complex legacies and the broader Reformed tradition's stance on slavery, race, and political upheaval.

Baroque Sovereignty Reconsidered: Walter Benjamin Quotes Diego Saavedra Fajardo

ABSTRACT: In Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels ( The Origin of German Tragic Drama , 1928), Walter Benjamin illustrates his argument on baroque sovereignty, which responds to Carl Schmitt's political theology, with a fragment from Diego Saavedra Fajardo's Empresas políticas . The quotation has hitherto been overlooked in scholarly discussions, which have often sidelined the role played by the seventeenth-century texts that represent the actual subject of Ursprung , and especially those texts from the Spanish baroque. The aim of this article is to reconsider Benjamin's interpretation of baroque political theory, and thus his critique of Schmitt, by engaging with the work of Saavedra Fajardo.