What is political theology?

There are multiple ways to come at defining political theology, which is what I’m trying to do in this little post, but basically, “classic” political theology (ala Carl Schmitt) argued that all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.

Example: Sovereign is the one who decides on the exception. That’s the secular situation in politics. The parallel in theology is the miracle, which is the supernatural “exception”.

Much of the reflection on political theology ever since Schmitt has operated in relationship to the secularization thesis, even if they’ve wanted to contradict the conservative implications he drew from it.

One of the major alternatives to this view is the one presented by folks like Moltmann and Sölle and Hauerwas. Hauerwas wants to present the ecclesia AS the political space, setting it apart. Hence his book like “resident aliens,” among other works asserting the ecclesia as the alternative polis. They want the church, the eclessia, to define the political theological space, separate from the world, as it were.

Neither of these, btw, is the old school Lutheran Two Kingdoms approach. Overall, the tradition coming out of Schmitt would ignore the Lutheran Two Kingdoms because all modern concepts of the state are now secularized, and Hauerwas and others reject the Two Kingdoms because they go further on down the anabaptist path.

After Schmitt, one great Jewish theologian who wrote a lot on Paul and on Schmitt, Jacob Taubes, said essentially that the best move is to accept one of Schmitt’s major theses, “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception,” but then to radicalize it by arguing for it from below rather than from above. In other words, rather than using it to empower a sovereign or king or dictator, use the state of exception to empower those from below, the people.

[In some ways, this is the alternative we have before us in contemporary U.S. politics. Trump operates as the exception from above, the miracle worker who tweets daily exceptions. Bernie Sanders wants the state of exception also, but on behalf of the people, democratic socialism.]

This line of inquiry, this way of speaking about political theology, is is all just one path, out of the European theological tradition. It’s highly influential, to such a degree that even other conversations on political theology the world over still take Schmitt in particular (and some of his peers, like the Frankfurt School folks, and Jacob Taubes) as primary interlocutors when doing their own analysis of political.

As I’m working on a series of lectures on political theology, there’s a whole other way to talk about political theology that doesn’t even use the term per se. I will cover these alternative ways in two more upcoming blog posts.

Some of this discourse arises out of the insights of Marxism, all the theology informed by social analysis and conditions. Liberation theology. Black theology. Womanist theology. Each of these is also a political theology but it arises out of a different discourse, sometimes literally having to trace and recover discourses that have been diminished or discredited. 

And then you can set that ALL aside and consider political theology in the jeremiad vein–Niebuhrian Christian Realism, etc. This would be the classic pragmatic “American” theology, cut in many ways from an entirely different cloth.

Returning for the time-being to the track that arises out of Taubes and Schmitt and others more of the Frankfurt School, the critical school. Benjamin and Jewish thought is huge here.

In fact, Taubes argues rather convincingly “that Judaism ‘is’ political theology” (letter to Armin Mohler, 14 February 1952). This recovery by Taubes, in direct reception and then contradiction of Schmitt, is a poignant move in 20th century political theology, especially given the forms of political thought (Nazism) Schmitt ended up furthering and supporting.

However, we can’t end this first post just with an analysis of political theology as it relates to Carl Schmitt. That would be too narrow. We need a counter-point here now that then points to the separate definings of political theology we can offer in subsequent posts.

The theologian for this is Martin Luther King Jr. On one level, it seems simply obvious that MLK Jr. was a political theologian. He participated directly in many political campaigns. He influenced politicians, and led movements that impacted significant new political decisions, like civil rights.

But intriguingly, MLK Jr. had this to say about his own vocation: “I am many things to many people; civil rights leader, agitator, troublemaker, and orator, but in the quietness of my heart, I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher. This is my being and my heritage for I am also the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher, and the great-grandson of a Baptist preacher. The church is my life and I have given my life to the church” (from ‘The Un-Christian Christian,’ Ebony, August 1965).

Somehow that’s just about the most “political theology” statement anyone could make. Given who we know MLK Jr. to be, for him to say that in the quietness of his heart, he a clergyman, and that all that he has done, it has been in giving his life to the church. Well… this is precisely what political theology can be when it is genuinely lived theology from below that is at the same integrally ecclesial.

I’ll conclude with a bit of challenge and disambiguation. There are a lot of popular uses of the word “political” around, enough for any reader to be a bit confused by the language.

We might just ask, what is the popular, as compared to the scholarly, definition of political theology. For this, Michael Kirwan in his Political Theology: An Introduction, has the most concise of offerings: “Splendid Antigone emerges as the patron saint of political theologians. We can recognize the attractiveness of the ‘Antigone’ mode of political theology, the proud resistance to injustice disguised as religion.” (22)

Proud resistance to injustice disguised as religion. That’s certainly incisive, and accurate.

So I’ll offer here a set of theses that I hope can disambiguate a few terms. In the next two posts here at the blog, I’ll reflect on political theology in the liberation theology mode, which Johann Baptist Metz calls non-idealist, and then I’ll reflect on it in the pragmatic, jeremiad mode, along the lines of the political theologians like Frederick Douglas, W.E.B. Dubois, and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Here are the disambiguating theses, in case any of the terms I’ve used above have left things less than clear:

1. Political theology is not partisan theology. It is not an attempt to justify one party’s platform as the theologically correct one.

2. Political theology is not per se an exploration of the impact of religious commitments on political action.

3. Political theology is not politicized theology.

4. In the “western” form of political theology, the touchstone is Carl Schmitt, who said political theology designated religious concepts that had been secularized and then had become political concepts.

5. However, political theology simultaneously has emerged in many global and interfaith contexts, as well as central to the discourse of significant non-Christian philosophers (Agamben, Žižek).

6. There are furthermore many “theological politics” that influence political discourse (Niebuhr and Christian Realism, or movements in liberation theology).

—

1. Politics is not “political.” When theologians speak of politics, they mean it in the wider, holistic sense, of or relating to the polis (the Greek city state, but better thought of as a body of citizens, or “the state”).

2. Those in the United States may especially confuse politics with our ongoing bipartisan power struggle between the Democrats and the Republicans. Although that is a form of politics, it is idiosyncratic to us and not the way politics functions globally in all places or historically.

3. That being said, there’s very little life outside “the party” in most political systems, so a consideration of party politics is intrinsic to any consideration of the political.

4.  For theological purposes, the political is that which relates to the state, and considers the extent to which secularized theological concepts shape the state and its way of being in relation to religious and civic life.