POLITICAL THEOLOGY

A New Introduction

M ich ael K irwan

D/1RT0N LONGM AN +TODD

First published in 2008 by
Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd
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London SW18 4JJ

2008 Michael Kirwan

The right of Michael Kirwan to be identified as the

Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.

ISBN-10 0-232-52745-8
ISBN-13 978-0-232-52745-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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CONTENTS

Preface vii

Part 1: The Parameters

1. What Is Political Theology? 3
2. Witness Against the Beast:
Leviathan versus CovenantTheologies 16
3. Love of the World:
Is Political Theology Possible? 34

Part 2: The History

4. The Doctrine of the Two:
Political Theologys High Traditions 55
5. A Stormy Pilgrimage:
Political Theologies of the Reformation 72
6. Stillborn Gods:
The Enlightenment Roots of Political Theology 88

Part 3: The Crisis

7. Theology in a Land of Screams:
The Crisis of National Socialism 107
8. We Who Come After:
Critical Theory and the Theologian 124
9. From Despair to Where?:
Habermas and Communicative Theology 140
VI CONTENTS

Part 4: The Gift

10. The Political Word of God:
Political Theology and Scripture 161
11. Fridays Children:
Political Theology and the Church 177
Epilogue 195
Notes 201
Bibliography 209
Index 219
 PREFACE

Man must & will have some religion; if he has not the
Religion of Jesus, he will have the Religion of Satan, &
will erect the Synagogue of Satan, calling the Prince of this
world, God; and destroying all who do not worship Satan
under the name of God.
William Blake, Jerusalem, ch. 3: To the Deists

I am minding my own business, travelling on the London

Underground. I pick up a copy of the free newspaper, the Metro,
which features a 60 second interview with a well-known film
actor, Jason Isaacs. He begins by telling us of his involvement
with the Holocaust commemoration in Liverpool (January
2008); how remembrance is important, not least in the face of
Holocaust deniers and the like. At the end of the interview, he is
asked what he would do if he ruled the world. His answer?
First, get everyone using Macintosh computers. Then abolish
religion.
Where to begin? As I am typing this on an Mac I suppose I
am happy enough with the first sentiment. It is the casual illogi
cality of the second that causes dismay and needs attention.
What I would call the John Lennon syndrome - and no religion
too - has become such a commonplace that it is hardly worth
noting: a throwaway comment in a free commuter newspaper.
And it certainly blends into the current intellectual and cultural
climate, shaped not least by the prodigious output from writers
who have been dubbed the new atheists.1
A vast, apparently unbridgeable gulf seems to be opening up
between belief and unbelief, and it is not pretty. The splenetic
V lll PREFACE

tenor of onslaughts such as The God Delusion by Dawkins and

God Is Not Great (Hitchens) cannot, surely, be at the service of
clear-sighted thinking, any more than religious belief is served
by those who choose to respond in acerbic kind. The Germans
have words for these things: the term Kulturkampf, or culture
struggle, describes the conflict between Chancellor Otto von
Bismarck and the Roman Catholic Church in Germany between
1871 and 1878 (for the record, Bismarcks anticlerical policies
largely failed). What we seem to have, in Britain and the USA,
in the first decade of the twenty-first century, is another bitter
Kulturkampf, this time between secular science and religious
belief: in fact the term culture war has already been in used in
recent decades in the United States to describe the battle
between secular liberals and religious social conservatives.
The present book is not specifically intended as a contribu
tion to this current debate, though it is not easy to ignore the
fireworks. My modest aim is to provide an introduction - for
students of theology and religious studies, but also for a more
general discerning readership - to the fascinating and con
tentious discipline of political theology. No subject is more
aktuell, again as the Germans say: more relevant. Yet genu
inely useful resources for thinking sensibly about the relation
between religion and politics are surprisingly scarce. I will go
further, and suggest that much of the literature is useless,
because it starts with an inadequate and unhelpful understand
ing of religion. In saying this I have no wish to take on Dawkins,
Hitchens, or even Jason Isaacs, but in the case of the latter
simply to point out the glaring discrepancy of commemorating
the Holocaust, while at the same time wishing to exterminate
religion.
To put this very simply, if the term religion refers to a set of
(probably mistaken) ideas, such as believing in Santa Claus or
the tooth fairy, then desiring its abolition makes perfect sense. If
the term religion refers to an unhealthy but contingent socio
economic or medical condition, like urban deprivation or breast
cancer, then, once again, desiring its abolition makes perfect
sense. If, however, the word religion is held to refer to com
plexes of belief, worship and action which are deeply embedded
in practices and traditions, and which are felt to be crucial to
PREFACE IX

both individual and communal self-understanding and identity,

then abolishing religion is more like getting rid of sexuality or
imagination. And it is very hard to see how this end can be
achieved without abolishing religious believers.
Here is the rub: believers themselves, of whatever epoch or
faith tradition, cannot but regard themselves in this third cate
gory. Some, perhaps many people, may fervently wish that this
was not the case: but to raise the question of religion in any
other way, to simply not see that there is a chilling disconnect
between wishing to commemorate the Holocaust and wanting
rid of religion, is to embark on a strategy that is not only offen
sive but irresponsible. And too many of the current polemicists
generate more heat than light because they work with one or
both of the dubious premises: religion as a set of ideas, or reli
gion as an external state of affairs, which can be surgically
separated from the religious person like a dangerous tumour.
This medical image occurs in one of the more thoughtful, if
still problematic analyses, Mark Lilias The Stillborn God.2 Lilia
defines political theology as discourse about political auth
ority based on a revealed divine nexus, which he regards as a
malignant growth in the body politic. In seventeenth-century
Western Europe this growth required drastic surgery, what Lilia
calls the Great Separation. He regards Thomas Hobbess
Leviathan (1651) as the first attempt at a formal disentangle
ment of theological ideas from political concerns. A tradition of
political philosophy that Lilia locates in the children of
Hobbes (John Locke and David Hume) developed and consoli
dated this innovative separation. Unfortunately, another line of
thinkers, the children of Rousseau, meaning Immanuel Kant
and G. W. E Hegel, did not perform the necessary operation
with the same rigour. Though these thinkers agreed in principle
with the Great Separation, the cancer of political theology
remained latent in their work - only to break out as the terrible
tumours of twentieth-century messianic politics, Hitlerism and
Stalinist Marxism.
It is curious how persistently the challenge of the theologico-
political (to use one of the jargon phrases) has been presented
in binary, oppositional terms. A famous formulation by Pope
Gelasius in the fifth century declares: two there are, by which
X PREFACE

this world is governed. Yes, but two xvhaf! Two Cities

(Augustine)? Two Swords (medieval political theology)? The
Kings Two Bodies (ditto)? Two Kingdoms (Luther)? Church
and State? Jesus or Satan (Blake)? Christ or Caesar - or Hitler,
for that matter? For Lilia, it is a straight choice: political
theology or political philosophy.
Is he right? Wikipedia thinks not, since its entry on political
theology intriguingly describes a branch of both political
philosophy and theology that investigates the ways in which
theological concepts or ways of thinking underlie political,
social, economic and cultural discourses. If this is so, we have
a curious hybrid discipline, one which, it is hoped, can stimulate
believer and non-believer alike to the kind of reconsideration
which Mark Lilia calls for, when he says we need to revisit the
tension between political theology and modem political philos
ophy (9) - even if we may have reservations about the way he
has set up the discussion. Suffice to note here that the principal
weakness of The Stillborn God has to be the one mentioned
above: the ingrained habit of Lilia, who is after all a historian of
ideas, to see religion, and therefore political theology, as
almost exclusively an intellectual concern. As he admits
himself, understanding political theology is hard for us, because
we are on the other shore of the Great Separation. Lilias
contribution to the Kulturkampf runs as follows:

The story reconstructed here should remind us that the

actual choice contemporary societies face is not between
past and present, or between the west and the rest. It is
between two grand traditions of thought, two ways of
envisaging the human condition. We must be clear about
those alternatives, choose between them, and live with the
consequences of our choice. That is the human condition.
(Lilia, 2007:13)

Contemporary political theologians will dispute Lilias account,

as we shall see: for example, William T. Cavanaugh reads differ
ently the history that preceded the Great Separation. To speak of
the horrendous conflicts between 1550 and 1648 as Wars of
Religion is an anachronism, says Cavanaugh, one which serves
PREFACE xi
to bolster a useful myth about the nation state as our saviour
from religious fanaticism. If Cavanaugh is correct, then Lilias
ineluctable choice between political theology and political
philosophy is false. Yet another perspective, set out in John
Grays Black Mass,3 draws a line of continuity (not rupture)
between the apocalyptic dimensions of historical Christianity
and those modem political projects that have aimed at radical,
and inevitably violent, transformations of the human. Gray lists
the French Revolution; Nazism; Soviet and Maoist communism;
and most recently the attempt, in the name of American
exceptionalism, to impose democracy in Iraq:

Modem politics is a chapter in the history of religion. ...

The greatest of the revolutionary upheavals that have
shaped so much of the history of the last two centuries
were episodes in the history of faith - moments in the long
dissolution of Christianity and the rise of modem political
religion. The world in which we find ourselves at the start
of the new millennium is littered with the debris of utopian
projects, which though they were framed in secular terms
that denied the tmth of religion were in fact vehicles for
religious myths. (Gray, 2007:1)

Gray insists that the political violence of the modem West can
only be understood as an eschatological phenomenon; that the
dominant (though not exclusive) strands of Western thought have
looked to alter the very nature of human life, an aspiration which
has always tended to violence (35). He offers a devastating
critique of the faith-based ideology that led the USA and Britain
into the disastrous war in Iraq, but there is much else of impor
tance in this short book, not least a withering counterblast to the
'new atheists. The militant Darwinism of Richard Dawkins and
Daniel Dennett is a pale imitation of the relatively nuanced
critiques of Marx and the French Positivists: [contemporary
atheism is a Christian heresy that differs from earlier heresies
chiefly in its intellectual crudity (189). One consequence of this
view is the need to re-think the secularist agenda:

Those who demand that religion be exorcized from politics

X ll PREFACE

think this can be achieved by excluding traditional faiths

from public institutions; but secular creeds are formed
from religious concepts, and suppressing religion does not
mean it ceases to control thinking and behaviour. Like
repressed sexual desire, faith returns, often in grotesque
forms, to govern the lives of those who deny i t . ... Human
beings will no more cease to be religious than they will
stop being sexual, playful or violent. If religion is a
primary human need it should not be suppressed or rele
gated to a netherworld of private life. It ought to be fully
integrated into the public realm, but that does not mean
establishing any one religion as public doctrine. (190, 209)

Gray reminds us that at its best religion has been an attempt to

deal with mystery rather than the hope that mystery will be
unveiled. But it is precisely this reticence, this civilising per
ception, which has been lost in the clash of fundamentalisms,
leaving little prospect of a future that is not shaped by violent
faith (210).
In all of this it is hard not to be reminded of the theology of
the wager. Blaise Pascal famously posed the question of belief
in these terms: he argued that theism is the rationally correct
option for every individual, since betting my life on the assump
tion that there is no God cannot benefit me if I win, and could
be disastrous if I lose. Not everyone finds this argument con
vincing! As we shall see, contemporary Christian political and
liberation theologians posit another argument from belief, this
time a mutual wager between the poor and God. The poor trust
in God as their champion, the one who will liberate them from
their suffering, while God wagers on humanity, by daring to
enter, repeatedly, into political partnership (covenant) with
human beings, and by handing over his Son (Bell, 2001;
Kirwan, 2006).
Still we await the outcome of these wagers, the first especial
ly. Are the losers of history, all those mutilated and forgotten
victims, really losers - or will God vindicate them, as wonder
fully and spectacularly as he vindicated his dead Son?
But it is not just the religious believer whose life is at hazard.
For John Gray, the future of humanity depends on the choice of
PREFACE X lll

non-utopian over utopian forms of politics. For Mark Lilia, we

are faced with the claims of political philosophy and political
theology: [w]e must be clear about those alternatives, choose
between them, and live with the consequences of our choice. It
seems we have no option but to stake our claim: on God, on
humanity, on some understanding of divine and human inter
action. The parameters of Enlightenment hope itself, as set out
by Immanuel Kant, are strictly demarcated by Kants own
version of the divine wager, to which he gave the name postu
lates of practical reason. Kant claimed that to live ethically -
und by extension politically - we must either trust in God, or run
the risk of a terrible moral despair; like the liberation and
political theologians who came after him, Kant turned his eyes
to the biblical figure of Job.4
The twentieth-century heirs of Kants Enlightenment, writing
in dark times, found themselves suspended over the same
abyss: our noble aspirations for conviviality, drowned out in a
land of screams. For Lilia and Gray it is the temptation of
utopian political religion, recurrent like a cancer, which leads
to Auschwitz. Contemporary political theologians like Jrgen
Moltmann and Johann Baptist Metz argue the opposite: the
Nazi catastrophe, above all, demonstrates the absolute
indispensability of religious hope.
The consequences of getting the wager wrong will be all too
apparent - in this world, not the next. Can a polis exist, be
sustained, without God? The advocates of the Great Separation
say that it can and must: we must rely on ourselves alone. But
how, then, does such a polity and its leaders avoid placing
themselves on the Messiahs throne - how do we prevent an
Enlightenment which radiates disaster triumphant?
My ambition is for this book to be a straightforward, largely
unpolemical introduction to this fascinating and sometimes
bewildering area of theology. To this extent the treatment is
mainly expository, and I do my best to avoid technical theo
logical terms. This book was written during a sabbatical term in
the summer and autumn of 2007, which enabled me to spend
time with my brother Jesuits in Guyana, South America, and
with the seminarians and staff at the regional seminary of
St John Vianney and the Ugandan Martyrs, Trinidad. My
XIV PREFACE

thanks to all, for their wonderful hospitality and superb witness.

And my sincerest gratitude goes once again to the students
and colleagues of Heythrop College, London, who have helped
me over the years with their insights and suggestions; above all
to the undergraduates and postgraduate classes of 2006-7,
whose insights I enlisted specially when planning this work (a
special thanks, with much love, to Sarz and Muttley). My apolo
gies to those students - few, I hope - who were not able to
follow my ramblings, and my regrets to all, because we did not
move closer to the abyss, nor were our memories dangerous
enough.
MICHAEL KIRWAN
Trinidad and London
2007-8
Chapter 1

WHAT IS POLITICAL THEOLOGY?

Murk Lilia in The Stillborn God has put a health warning on

'political theology. He sees it as a poisonous hangover from
pre-modernity, and insists that we should turn instead to its
alternative, political philosophy, for articulating our vision of
conviviality. The reader has been warned.
As soon becomes apparent, however, there are plenty of other
answers to the question, what is political theology? A British
theologian, Charles Davis, put the matter trenchantly:

Nothing could be more absurdly untrue to Christian history

than the contention that the Christian religion as embodied
institutionally in the Church is apolitical or above
politics ... The Christian religion has always been thor
oughly political, with social and political action the major
vehicle of the distinctively Christian religious experience.
Briefly, Christians find God in their neighbour rather than
in their consciousness or in the cosmos. (Davis, 1994:58)

But how do we move from this kind of principled conviction to

specific decisions and commitments - what we normally under
stand by the word politics? Another British theologian
Nicholas Lash reminds us that [t]he gospel does not itself
provide the program for the politics that it stimulates and
engenders, giving us a clue to why this peculiar hybrid dis
cipline called political theology generates so much anguish.
Christians who take their faith seriously know that it has politi
cal implications - that the gospel calls us to imagine and work
4 THE PARAMETERS

for a transformed world. However - here is the anguish - the

Bible leaves no blueprint or manifesto for this transformation;
only lots of options (some more feasible than others) about what
kind of society Christians should be struggling for, and by what
means. So perhaps political theology is meant to bridge this gap,
between gospel inspiration and specific political commitments.
Yet another theologian, Oliver ODonovan, would seem to
agree:

The passage from what God said to Abraham to what we

are now to do about Iraq, is one which the intuition of faith
may accomplish in a moment, and a preachers exhortation
in twenty minutes. An intellectual account of it, however,
can be the work of decades! (ODonovan, 1996:ix)

Three Versions of Political Theology (Scott and

Cavanaugh)
Political theology, then, consists of prolonged and painstaking
explication of insights which, in themselves, may seem obvious.
What else might it involve? We have seen that one intriguing
description holds political theology to be a branch of both polit
ical philosophy and theology, and we will need to keep this in
mind. A good place to begin is the splendid and yet in some
ways frustrating Blackwell Companion to Political Theology *, a
collection of thirty-five essays on a considerable range of
political theological themes edited by Peter Scott and the North
American theologian William T. Cavanaugh. The frustration lies
in the editors decision, for reasons of space, to shy away from
any programmatic essay that would tell us what political theo
logy is. The Companions introduction, though only five pages
long, is suggestive. First, the editors assert the discrediting of
Fukuyamas thesis of the end of history as a result of the 1989
triumph of liberal capitalist democracy. Osama bin Laden has
ensured that history has not finished with us yet! The editors
have an expansive understanding of political theology:

Theology is broadly understood as discourse about God,

and human persons as they relate to God. The political is
WHAT IS POLITICAL THEOLOGY? 5

broadly understood as the use of structural power to

organize a society or community of people ... Political
theology is, then, the analysis and criticism of political
arrangements (including cultural-psychological, social and
economic aspects) from the perspective of differing inter
pretations of Gods way with the world.
(Scott and Cavanaugh, eds, 2004:1)

Cavanaugh and Scott explore three different conceptions of the

task of political theology. First, politics is seen as a given with
its own secular autonomy. Politics and theology are therefore
two essentially distinct activities ... the task of political
theology might be to relate religious belief to larger societal
issues while not confusing the proper autonomy of each.
Secondly, theology is critical reflection on the political.
Theology is related as superstructure to the materialist politico-
economic base, and therefore reflects and reinforces just or
unjust political arrangements. The task of political theology
might then be to expose the ways in which theological dis
course reproduces inequalities of class, gender and race and to
seek to reconstruct theology to serve the cause of justice.
Thirdly, theology and politics are essentially similar activities:
both are constituted in the production o f metaphysical images
around which communities are organised. All politics has theo
logy embedded in it, and particular forms of organisation are
implicit in doctrines of, for example, the Trinity, the church,
eschatology. There is no essential separation of material base
and cultural superstructure. The task then might be one of
exposing the false theologies underlying supposedly secular
politics and promoting the true politics implicit in a true
theology. (2)
The first of these three positions sounds familiar from
Christs injunction to give unto Caesar. These words of Jesus
are usually read to mean that the secular power has legitimate
claims that must be recognised alongside the religious claims of
the Church. Each has their proper autonomy; if this autonomy
is infringed then both sides suffer.2 One small problem here is
that this is precisely what the command of Jesus does not and
cannot mean! Such a division of sacred and secular would have
6 THE PARAMETERS

been inconceivable in his time and culture, and certainly in

compatible with the Kingdom that Jesus was proclaiming. If
Charles Davis is correct, that Christianity has always been
thoroughly political, then this cordon sanitaire (ODonovan) is
a distortion of the Gospel. Whether such a separation is even
coherent is another matter; theologians have become increas
ingly vocal about its inadequacy. To mention two: Johann
Baptist Metz, one of the key figures in European political
theology, has consistently protested against the privatised or
bourgeois version of European Christianity, which has pre
vailed in the modern period, but at an unacceptably high cost:
the negation of any kind of prophetic (what Metz calls messian
ic) power to challenge and oppose injustice. This emasculation
of Christianity is evidenced for Metz in a triple difficulty for
contemporary Christianity: firstly, its domestication by the
Enlightenment; secondly, the inability of theology to respond
adequately to the questions posed by the Holocaust; thirdly, the
plight of the suffering in the Third World.
Cavanaugh is a more recent critic of the modern insistence on
keeping religion in quarantine. He stresses that the implicit
judgement of this insistence on separation - that religion must
be kept private because it leads to violence, while the power of
secular authorities is justified because it is directed towards the
maintenance of peace and harmony - is false. The alleged
volatility of religious belief is a highly serviceable myth, which
the secular powers can use to reinforce the legitimacy of their
own violence. He argues this through a re-reading of the so-
called Wars of Religion: this term is anachronistic, he main
tains, because on closer inspection these conflicts are more
truthfully described as the birth-pangs of the modem state, out
of which our contemporary notion of religion comes into
being, rather than wars fought on denominational lines
(Cavanaugh, 1995; see discussion in chapter 5). As we have
already seen, Cavanaughs view conflicts with that of Mark
Lilia, champion of modernitys Great Separation.
What about the second approach suggested by Scott and
Cavanaugh, theology as critical reflection on the political? This
is inspired by the critique of religion that we associate with
Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx: here, religion is part of the
WHAT IS POLITICAL THEOLOGY? 7

cultural superstructure that mirrors the socio-economic base.

As such, the religious beliefs of the rich and powerful will serve
to maintain their interests, by masking the conditions of
alienation and injustice on which their privilege rests. As the
notorious verse from All Things Bright and Beautiful puts it:

The rich man in his castle,

the poor man at his gate,
he made them, high or lowly,
and ordered their estate.3

On this account, religion functions as an opiate for the victims

of oppression, offering some degree of anaesthetic comfort, but
without possibility of emancipation. Such a bleak view of reli
gion seems to be an unpromising basis for political theology -
except that theologians would want to draw attention to the
positive elements within biblical and church traditions. The
strands of subversion and prophecy within Israels political
traditions, as well as the assertion of Gods preferential option
for the poor, can offer as incisive a critique as Marxist analysis.
Theologians within this tradition, such as Metz and Jrgen
Moltmann, have sought to engage in dialogue with secular
theorists of the left (notably the critical theorists associated with
the so-called Frankfurt School). They accept the validity of the
claim that religion can be alienating and oppressive, but insist
that it need not be. They go further in claiming that a purely
secular emancipation is impossible, and that without recognition
of the religious dimension the Enlightenment dream will forever
end in disappointment, even disaster. These claims derive from
some critical theorists themselves, such as Ernst Bloch, who
theorised about hope, and Walter Benjamin, whose thought is
laced with Jewish messianic speculations.
The dialogue between theology and the different strands of
Critical Theory has given shape to post-war European political
theology. The unmasking of alienating forms of religious
belief is crucial to the method of the theologians of liberation in
Latin America, and that of Johann Baptist Metz, who criticised
bourgeois religion, as we have seen. The most important recent
conversation partner for the Europeans has been Jrgen
8 THE PARAMETERS

Habermas, who has increasingly come to acknowledge the reli

gious implications which others see in his work. As the title of
Habermas important book, Knowledge and Human Interest
implies, one question is key: cui bono?: for whose benefit?
Who profits from theology being done this way rather than that,
in whose interest is it to make such and such a claim about God?
But the theologians, of course, do not end with this critique, as
a secular critic would; rather it is the prelude to a more positive
expression of liberative or messianic faith.
The third approach to political theology suggested by Scott
and Cavanaugh is the one best suited to a post-Marxist context,
and it is the one they themselves would seem to espouse:

Theology and Politics are essentially similar activities:

both are constituted in the production of metaphysical
images around which communities are organised. All poli
tics has theology embedded in it, and particular forms of
organization are implicit in doctrines of e.g. the Trinity, the
church, eschatology. There is no essential separation of
material base and cultural superstructure. The task then
might be one of exposing the false theologies underlying
supposedly secular politics and promoting the true
politics implicit in a true theology. (2)

Hence Cavanaughs analysis of the modem State as a rival to

the tme political community, the Church, graphically expressed
in his contrast in Torture and Eucharist (1998) of the Chilean
states anti-liturgy of torture and the Churchs practice of
Eucharist. Cavanaugh draws our attention to the curious fact of
the States transcendent hold on us, even to the point at which
we are willing to kill and die for it. And just as apparently
secular realities (monarchs and presidents, flags and constitu
tions) are in fact imbued with transcendence, so religious
concepts, doctrines and institutions, such as God and Church,
have political implications.
So, thanks to Scott and Cavanaugh, we have three possible
ways of understanding political theology. Political theology is
concerned with:
WHAT IS POLITICAL THEOLOGY? 9

the maintenance of a cordon sanitaire between politics and

religion;
or with reflection on unjust and alienating political structures;
or with the production of metaphysical images around which
communities are organised.

Divine and Political Authority (ODonovan)

Our second resource for delineating political theology is The
Desire o f the Nations,4 in which Oliver ODonovan posits an
analogy (grounded in reality) between the political vocabulary
of salvation which we find in the Bible, and secular use of these
same political terms, between the acts of God and human acts,
both of them taking place within the one public history which is
the theatre of Gods saving purposes and mankinds social
undertakings (1996:2). ODonovan calls for an expansion of
the horizon of commonplace politics, opening it up to the activ
ity of God. Earthly events of liberation provide us with partial
indications of what God is doing in history, but theology needs
more than scattered political images; it needs a full political
conceptuality.
Such a strategy will also seek to enable political theology to
break out of the quarantine that has in our time kept religious
and political discourses distinct from one another, so as to avoid
mutual contamination. By contrast, theology is political simply
by responding to the dynamics of its own proper themes:
Christ, salvation, church, Trinity. We see how this coheres with
the scheme of Scott and Cavanaugh, reinforcing the inadequacy
of the first of their three models, and affirming the value of the
third. This is a matter of allowing theology to be true to its task:
theology must be political if it is to be evangelical (3).
ODonovan indicates how political theology of the Southern
school (which includes, but is broader than, South American
liberation theology) has proved its seriousness by bringing neg
lected theological themes back into circulation. However, while
the Southern school is barely thirty years old, ODonovan wants
to investigate a much longer history of political theology. He
discerns a High Tradition which he dates roughly speaking
from 1100 to 1650: at the beginning, the conflicts between
10 THE PARAMETERS

papacy and secular authority occasioned by the reforms of Pope

Gregory the Great, at the other end, the early Enlightenment
seeing the development of a political theory (Moral Science)
which is independent of theology. For the most part, contempo
rary political theology is ignorant of this tradition - hence
ODonovans desire to retrieve it.
ODonovan charges contemporary political theologians with
a twofold neglect: as well as this High Tradition, we need to
recover the biblical roots of political authority, specifically con
veyed in the proclamation Yahweh malek, God rules. It is from
this acknowledgement that both the Christian political vocation
and secular political systems are authorised. ODonovan also
calls for more nuanced attention to the positive ways in which
Christendom has nurtured the early liberal traditions of politics
and the secular.
We have seen that ODonovan challenges the quarantining of
religion and politics from each other. This separation, he sug
gests, arises from two opposed suspicions, a fear of contamina
tion which works both ways. On the one hand, Augustine and
Kant each assert that a political theology can only be a cor
ruption of theology (or morality) by something baser, namely
politics. On the other hand, there is a widespread fear that the
rightful autonomy of politics is under threat by religious revela
tion. In the popular imagination of late-modern liberalism these
twin suspicions have broadened and fused together and this
division has become internalised: Each of us has a mind parti
tioned by a frontier, and accepts responsibility for policing it
(8-9).
Once again he commends the Southern schools attempts to
challenge this late-modern liberal consensus regarding the sep
aration of politics and theology. What is often lacking from their
approaches, however, is an account of theological authority. The
only reason, ultimately, for taking up the cause of the poor is
because it is a theologically given mandate; the alternative is to
be caught in a never-ending game, of allegations of sectional
interest volleyed to and fro across the net, never to be ruled out
of court, never to land beyond reach of return. This highlights
the limitation of criticism as a total stance, what is sometimes
referred to as the hermeneutic of suspicion: Totalised
WHAT IS POLITICAL THEOLOGY? 11

criticism is the modem form of intellectual innocence ... by ele

vating suspicion to the dignity of a philosophical principle, it
destroys trust and makes it impossible to learn (11). God com
missions his prophets, but they cannot speak only of the errors
of false prophets: they are also to speak positively, of Gods
purposes of renewal and mercy towards weak and fragmentary
societies like the people of Israel.

Public Religions in a Post-Secular World

A third source for reviewing the theologico-political, though a
more challenging one than the first two, is a collection of
essays entitled Political Theologies,5 In his long Introduction to
this volume, Hent de Vries offers the kind of programmatic
essay that Scott and Cavanaugh shy away from in the Blackwell
Companion. His concern is to re-open the enquiry concerning
religions engagement with the political (le politique) as well as
with politics (la politique) under the conditions of post-
secularity. In particular, the globalisation of markets and infor
mation media has had a post-Westphalian effect of loosening
or largely suspending the link that once tied theological-political
authority to a social body determined by a certain geographic
territory and national sovereignty.6 This raises the possibility
or desirability of a disembodied (virtual, transcendental) sub
stitute for the theologico-political body. De Vries recognises
that religions contain both an integrative and a potentially
disintegrating or even violent aspect of modern societies; this
ambivalence needs to be factored into any account of religions
relationship to the political, a relationship which is no longer
obvious, let alone direct. Our current problems are more elusive
and delocalised than those of the past, placing great demand on
our theoretical skill, and leaving us in need of new concepts and
new research practices. No unified theory is currently available
to hold these trends together in a compelling explanatory
account or historical narrative (8), hence the insistence on
political theologies as a plural noun.
In attempting to define political theologies (pp. 25 ff) de
Vries begins with Jan Assmanns definition of the ever-
changing relationships between political community and
12 THE PARAMETERS

religious order, in short, between power [or authority:

Herrschaft] and salvation [Heilf. He then traces the actual term
political theology through a number of authors,7 though rather
mysteriously he makes no reference to the post-war political
theology of Metz and others, whom we cited above.
But throughout these traditions, one question remains (de
Vries, 2006:26, citing Lagree). How are we to understand the
co-ordination of these two adjectives, political and theological:
as juxtaposition;
strict separation;
subordination of the political to the theological;
subordination of the theological to the political;
or interdependence?
The questions opened up by de Vries are a prelude to a daunting
collection of thirty-four essays, in four sections: What are
Political Theologies?; Beyond Tolerance: Pluralism and
Agonistic Reason; Democratic Republicanism, Secularism
and Beyond; and Opening Societies and the Rights of the
Human. This includes classic texts by Jrgen Habermas and
Pope Benedict XVI, Jean-Luc Nancy, Claude Lefort and Judith
Butler. Hardly a book for beginners, Political Theologies is
nevertheless an important resource, both for the breadth of its
scholarship and its attempt (implied in the section titles) to look
Before, Around, and Beyond the Theologico-Political. This
volume augments the interest of de Vries in previous writings;
arguing, for example in Minimal Theologies, for the continued
and extraordinary relevance of theology to contemporary
thought: T would suggest that we could conceive of philos
ophical theology as the touchstone and guardian of universality,
truth, veracity, intersubjective validity, even authentic expres
sivity in all matters concerning (the study of) religion and,
perhaps, not religion alone.8
An even more impenetrable collection of essays appeared in
2005 as Theology and the Political: the New Debate,9 and is cer
tainly not for faint hearts. The Introduction from Rowan
Williams sets out what he sees as the common conviction of
these essays, that:
WHAT IS POLITICAL THEOLOGY? 13

the fundamental requirement of a politics worth the name

is that we have an account of human action that decisively
marks its distance from assumptions about action as the
successful assertion of will. If there is no hinterland to
human acting except the contest of private and momentary
desire, meaningful action is successful action, an event in
which a particular will has imprinted its agenda on the
external world. Or, in plainer terms, meaning is power;
Thrasymachus in the Republic was right, and any discourse
of justice is illusory. (Creston Davis et al, eds, 2005:1)

In place of the barbarism that is being rejected here - namely,

the notion of meaningful action in terms of assertion, which
raises the spectre of the purest fascism - Rowan Williams sees
these essays appealing to an understanding of action as testi
mony. For the Christian, the category of martyrdom is the most
distinctive instance of this, rooted in the self-exposure of Jesus
Christ to death at the hands of political and religious meaning
makers. So a dialogue between politics and theology opens up,
with theology understood as the discipline that follows what is
claimed as the supreme act of testimony, and thus the supremely
generative and revisionary act of all human history: the Cross
for Christians, the gift of Torah and communal identity for
Judaism (3). This is all well and good, though it is not clear
exactly how this wide range of interdisciplinary contributions
(Terry Eagleton, Zizek, Milbank, Daniel Bell Jr., Catherine
Pickstock, Antonio Negri and others) constitutes a new debate;
while the horrendous opacity of too many of these essays
renders the category of testimony highly optimistic.

Setting the Stage: the Parameters, the History,

the Crisis, the Gift
I attempt in the present book to provide an introductory
overview of this vibrant and important area of Christian theo
logical reflection, not least as it is being delineated in the three
examples cited above: Scott/Cavanaugh, ODonovan and de
Vries/Sullivan, as well as other commentators. I will introduce
themes and authors who are less familiar to a general English
14 THE PARAMETERS

readership: for this reason, I have for the most part steered clear
of discussing Latin American Liberation Theology, which con
tinues to inspire a wealth of literature and interest, despite its
alleged demise, and whose significance as a cousin of
European political theology has been noted (see Petrella, 2006).
There is a similar lack of attention to other theologies which
could be gathered under the rubric political, such as feminist/
womanist, black, queer, and so on, while the challenges posed
by Islamic political theology will be addressed only indirectly.
The book is divided into four sections. The first two chapters
after this introduction attempt to set out the parameters for
political theology. This involves working with a rough and ready
distinction in chapter 2 between political theology and politi
cal mythology, which leads us to an understanding of politics
as katechon or Leviathan, or restraining force. In chapter 3,
entitled Love of the World, I will invoke the contribution of
Hannah Arendt, an important if idiosyncratic political philos
opher. Arendt offers a strident critique of Christianity, arguing
for its incompatibility with the sphere of politics, because
Christians are incapable of nurturing a love of the world, and
because the Christian virtue of humility separates the agent
from his or her deed. Though Arendts take on Christianity is
quirky, it is one which political theology needs to take seriously,
not least because Arendts own proposals have been influential
for political philosophy.
The second section (chapters 4-6) offers a breathless histori
cal overview of the patristic, medieval, reformation and early
modern roots of political theology, taking up ODonovans
specification of a High Tradition. Important figures such as
Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin will feature, as well as
the challenge for political theology posed by William T.
Cavanaughs revisioning of the early modern Wars of
Religion. The roots of this theology in the Enlightenment hope
of Immanuel Kant will also be explored.
Twentieth-century European political theology is a theology
of crisis, above all with the challenge of National Socialism, the
collapse into barbarism of the Second World War, and the
Shoah, the attempted systematic extermination of the Jewish
people. Out of these disasters there arose a desperate need to re
WHAT IS POLITICAL THEOLOGY? 15

conceive our understanding of God, the relationship between

Christians and Jews, and the nature of theology. Section 3 looks
at some themes in this history (chapter 7), as well as the main
figures in post-war political theology: Johann Baptist Metz,
Dorothee Solle and Jrgen Moltmann (chapters 8-9). In general,
these thinkers are united by their insistence on keeping faith
with the project of Enlightenment, despite its catastrophes, and
therefore by a shared quest with Critical Theory (Frankfurt
School) for the grounds of hope on which the task of
Enlightenment may be carried forward.
By contrast, theorists associated with Radical Orthodoxy,
such as John Milbank and William T. Cavanaugh, see in our
post-modern condition an irreversible collapse of the project of
modernity. They seek instead to resource theology from pre
modem thinkers, notably Augustine, offering a concept of
political theology as ecclesiology, or doctrine of the Church,
which we examine in the concluding chapter 11, together with
public theologies in North America. Both this and the penulti
mate chapter (which explores the scriptural resources for
political theology), draw attention to how questions of eschato
logy, or the end time, are crucial.
The respective section headings are straightforward, I think:
the parameters, the history, the crisis. For the fourth
section, which treats of the resources for political theology in
ecclesiology, scripture, and eschatology, 1 chose the heading the
gift. Somewhere I felt there should be a more explicit recogni
tion of the ambivalence of religion in the public sphere. The
word Gift in German means poison.
Chapter 2

WITNESS AGAINST THE BEAST1

Leviathan versus Covenant Theologies

We will further explore the subject matter o f political theology

in two investigations. The present chapter attempts a distinction
between political theology and political mythology; and
between two conceptions of politics, summed up by the German
theologian Jrgen Moltmann as Covenant or Leviathan. These
alternatives offer an optimistic and pessimistic opinion respec
tively, of the capacity of human beings to co-operate socially -
two different conceptions, therefore of politics and of political
theology.
Chapter 3 will examine a strident critique made against
Christianity by Hannah Arendt. She alleges that the Christian
ideal is unsuited to political life, that there is an inbuilt hostility
between the gospel and politics: the opposite claim, in other
words, to that made by theologians such as Lash and Davis in the
opening chapter. Christianity, she claims, endorses a retreat or
withdrawal from the world, rather than an engagement with it -
hence the title of the chapter, Is Political Theology Possible? It
is by examining Arendts critique, and by looking at some of the
historical evidence which might support or refute it, that we will
arrive at a clearer understanding of the issues involved.

Violent Beginnings
Scott and Cavanaugh asserted the similarity of Theology and
Politics insofar as both are constituted in the production of
metaphysical images around which communities are organised.
What metaphysical images are we talking about?
WITNESS AGAINST THE BEAST 17

An investigation into the sources and origins of political

thought soon brings us to what some commentators believe is
the distinguishing mark of the ancient polis, namely the paradox
o f violence. Whether we look at the world of the gods of the
polis, or at the philosophical reflection of antiquity, we find the
paradox of a harmony of opposites that holds the antique city-
state together. In Platos Politics we have the image of the
Watchers: these should be like good watchdogs, friendly to the
inhabitants of the city, but aggressive when they meet the
enemies of the state. The citizenry as a whole needs to be in
readiness for violence towards their enemies. The pre-Socratic
philosopher Heraclitus makes the paradox even more explicit,
since he goes beyond the idea of a harmony of opposites and
emphasises the fatherhood of war. Strife is not simply the
destroyer that brings an end to all peace, but, also the life
spending power at the source of culture: War is the father of all
things, the King of all things. One recognises him as god, the
other as men - he makes some slaves, he sets others free.
Marcel Detienne (2006:91-101) discusses the founding of
early Greek cities, and how a number of aspects of action, deci
sion, and the strategies of politics took shape and were analysed
with reference to the divine powers. He gives a roll call, as it
were, of the deities involved: first of all, Apollo, known as a
founder, Archgets, who marked out the territory, including the
space for the agora, then Hesta who brought the sacrificial fire.
There could be no city without an agora, no city without altars
and sacrificial fire. Hesta in particular represents the unity of
the multiplicity of individual domestic hearths and altars, and
political authority effectively came from her. As well as these
two, however, Detienne asserts that the Aphrodite-Ares pair,
which is of major importance and represents the relationship
between the rituals of warfare, on the one hand, and harmony
and concord, on the other, introduces a set of major tensions that
must be taken into account in any analysis of the political field.
(101) We can put this more strongly with the aid of Ren Girard,
who urges an intimate link between violence, political origins
and the sacred.2 Girard would posit a thematic connection
between the four deities mentioned by Detienne. The pairing of
the god of war and the goddess of love hints at the problem of
18 THE PARAMETERS

violence, but the activities associated with Apollo and Hesta

(demarcation of space, preservation of a sacrificial flame) are
themselves not free of violent overtones, if we see them as
related to the practice of foundational sacrifice.

Antigone and the Eumenides

We can see how the ambiguity of violence in social formation is
played out by examining two Greek tragedies. Shortly we will
look at Antigone, by Sophocles; but we begin with the tragedy
by Aeschylus, The Eumenides. In this play, Orestes, at the insti
gation of Apollo, kills his mother, out of rage for the murder of
his father. He is attacked by the goddesses of wrath, the Furies,
who are the ministers of justice, and the goddess Athena,
patroness of the city of Athens, seeks to adjudicate. Divine
forces, ranged against each other: this seems to be the funda
mental paradox of the polls, where the feuds of the gods are
played out: one recognises [strife] as god, the other as men.
The central problem of the play is: how is civil strife to be over
come? The Chorus of the now beneficient Eumenides (formerly
the goddesses of wrath) promises an end to the civil war:

CHORUS (chanting):
And nevermore these walls within
shall echo fierce seditions din,
unslaked with blood and crime;
the thirsty dust shall nevermore
suck up the darkly streaming gore
of civic broils, shed out in wrath
and vengeance, crying death for death!
But man with man and state with state
shall vow the pledge of common hate
and common friendship, that for man
hath oft made blessing, out of ban,
be ours unto all time.
(Eumenides, 978-87)

The play ends with songs of praise and joy over these alien
Powers that thus are made Athenian evermore, and over their
WITNESS AGAINST THE BEAST 19

promise of protection for Athens. The overcoming of civil strife

is partially attributed to the collective hatred, or readiness to
channel warfare from within the state to outside its walls: now
the citizens are united by a pledge of common hate and
common friendship.3
So the Eumenides gives us one account of the political. In
the second play, Antigone, we are presented with another
dilemma, similar to the first in some respects but markedly
different in others. Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus, and the
brother of Polynices, who has been killed in a civil war. Creon
(king of Thebes), gives orders that the body of Polynices is to
remain unburied because he is a traitor; Antigone disobeys this
order and buries him secretly at night. Creon in turn commands
that Antigone should be buried alive (later she commits suicide
before this sentence is carried out). We should be clear that the
play presents a conflict between two religious obligations: the
need to preserve and protect the city state, and the duty to hon
our the dead. Both Creon and Antigone appeal to Zeus; and while
we are more inclined to see justice on the side of Antigone, spirit
edly resisting a cruel tyrants edict, the original audience would
have been much more in sympathy with the king. Creon gives his
reason for the maltreatment of Polynices, and of anyone who
places friendship before the good of the country:

Remember this:
our country is our safety.
Only while she voyages true on course
can we establish friendships, truer than blood itself.
Such are my standards. They make our city great.
(Antigone, 11. 231-235)

It is because of this imperative to that Polynices, who thirsted

to drink his kinsmens blood and sell the rest to slavery, should
remain unburied. The common good demands that the dead
traitor and the dead patriot be treated differently, and it is this
common good that Antigone has violated by burying her
brother. When Antigone is captured and brought before Creon,
however, she insists that she broke Creons law in the name of a
higher law: the justice of Zeus himself:
20 THE PARAMETERS

It wasnt Zeus, not in the least,

who made this proclamation - not to me.
Nor did that Justice, dwelling with the gods
beneath the earth, ordain such laws for men.
Nor did I think your edict has such force
that you, a mere mortal, could override the gods,
their great unwritten, unshakeable traditions.
(11. 499-505)

Antigones spirited self-defence marks a rift in the ancient

alliance of religion and the state. Although he calls on Zeus as
witness, Creons inhumane proclamation cannot be truly from
God, and she challenges it in the name of a more ancient, more
authentic divine justice. This makes Antigone a heroic resist
ance figure, like Socrates, a martyr who dies at the hands of the
state for witnessing to a higher truth. This sympathy (to repeat,
not shared by the original audience of Sophocles play) fascinat
ed the Western philosophical tradition, with Hegel, Kierkegaard
and others writing at length and with great enthusiasm about her
(Steiner, 1984).
Incidentally, we find a moving and important parallel to
Antigones plight in the City o f God, where Augustine retells
Livys account of Horatius killing his sister, Horatia, because
she shed tears for her fianc, whom he has just killed in combat
in order to save Rome. The hero is put on trial: Livys sympathy
(and Romes) is with Horatius - even the father speaks out in his
defence - but for Augustine [t]he feelings of this woman seem
to me more humane than that of the entire Roman people.4

Political Mythology versus Political Theology

If we take these two passages: firstly, the mysterious and disturb
ing transformation of the Furies into the Eumenides, secondly,
the inspiring, heroic figure of Antigone, we have distinctive
pictures of what political theology is. Antigone appeals to reli
gious tradition in a way which challenges and negates the claim
of political authority to some kind of legitimising religious
transcendence. This appeal dsacraliss the political; it protests
against the tendency of political leaders and authorities to declare
WITNESS AGAINST THE BEAST 21

themselves divine. What is happening with The Eumenides is

more sinister, and perhaps harder to accept. Implicit in this play
is a definition of the political as the successful containment of
a societys aggression. If the tensions within a group are not
managed successfully they will bring about the violent destruc
tion of the group through civil war. In such an event, the des
tructive aspect of these energies - the Furies - is evident.
However, if this aggression is harnessed and channelled out
wards, it becomes a beneficial force (the Eumenides). Not only
do the Eumenides provide protection for the society, but they
allow the group to define itself over against outsiders, and thus
find its own identity. Terry Eagletons essay on Tragedy and
Revolution5 comments as follows:

Only if our imaginary social bonds are founded upon

the Real, upon a certain horror at the heart of the social
itself, will they prove sufficiently durable. Only if the
Furies are installed within the city-state itself will it be
secure - which is to say that only if the terrorism of the
law is turned inward as well as outward, to become
domesticated as hegemony as well as armed and hel-
meted as military might, will the social contract stand.
(Eagleton, 2005:8)

I propose that a political ideology which attempts, like Creons,

to claim religious legitimacy for itself may be more properly
understood as political mythology - with myth understood
here as something untrue, a made-up story which nevertheless
enables a community to achieve some kind of coherence.
Myth here means a kind of useful lie. By contrast, where
religious authority is invoked as a challenge to a regime or
ideology - as with Antigone, Socrates, Christ - then we are
talking about political theology in a normative sense. The
phrase from R. A. Markus describing Augustines City o f God as
a refusal to bless the state is exactly right. A true political
theology will take a negative stance towards the quasi-religious
or messianic claims of politicians, because it will recognise the
necessity of keeping open the transcendent dimension, rather
than having it sealed up in any particular context.
22 THE PARAMETERS

On this view, Antigone stands alongside the extraordinary

intransigence of political refuseniks of all shapes and sizes
throughout the ages: from the Jewish and early Christian
martyrs, challenging, at such terrible cost to themselves, the
idolatrous pretensions of the Greek and Roman imperial powers;
to Augustines rejection of providential histories (both pagan
and Christian), and his desacralisation of the Roman Empire in
The City o f God; to the millennial insurgents of the radical
Reformation. In the modern period, the same pattern appears in
the protest of Karl Barth and others against the false messianism
of National Socialism. Johann Baptist Metzs attack on bour
geois Christianity is a similar protest, as is the Kairos
Document (1978), the statement of the churches opposed to
apartheid in South Africa.
In short, the splendid Antigone emerges as the patron saint of
political theologians. We can recognise the attractiveness of the
Antigone mode of political theology, the proud resistance to
injustice disguised as religion. The other style of political
theology, represented by the ambiguities of the Eumenides, may
be less palatable. W.H. Auden draws these out in a poem,
Vespers, which tells of a strange twilight encounter: between
the speaker, a romantic innocent, and his opposite, a cynical
realist. Both simultaneously recognise his Anti-type: that I am
an Arcadian, that he is a Utopian:

He notes, with contempt, my Aquarian belly: I note, with

alarm, his Scorpions mouth.
He would like to see me cleaning latrines: I would like
to see him removed to some other planet.
Neither speaks. What experience could we possibly
share?
Glancing at a lampshade in a store window, I observe it
is too hideous for anyone in their senses to buy: He
observes it is too expensive for a peasant to buy.
Passing a slum child with rickets, I look the other way:
He looks the other way if he passes a chubby one.6

At first the speaker emphasises the gap between these two

world-views: between my Eden and his New Jerusalem, no
WITNESS AGAINST THE BEAST 23

treaty is negotiable. And yet the poem does not rest with this
antagonism, rather it speaks of the possibility that these perspec
tives, the Arcadian and the Utopian, are perhaps complemen
tary, and that the mysterious meeting forces each one:

for a fraction of a second, to remember our victim

(but for him I could forget the blood, but for me he could
forget the innocence),
on whose immolation (call him Abel, Remus, whom you
will, it is one Sin Offering) arcadias, utopias, our dear old
bag of a democracy are alike founded:
For without a cement of blood (it must be human, it must
be innocent) no secular wall can safely stand.

Romulus, killer of his brother Remus, was the founder of Rome.

According to Genesis chapter 3, Cain, the murderer of his
brother Abel, is the founder of the first town: we are dealing
here with foundational acts of sacral violence. The attitudes of
the two men, Arcadian and Utopian, may stand for the two
possibilities opened up, between the Antigone and the
Eumenides versions of politics. If Antigone stands for the
innocence, the Eumenides represent the blood. We will recall
that on this last account, political fellowship and belonging are
the flip-side of the ferocious antagonism that needs to be pro
jected outwards onto an enemy group. There is a strong tradition
in political thought which sees this process - of containment and
re-channelling of violence - as the fundamental meaning and
purpose of politics: or at the very least, as an important aspect
or criterion of the political.

The doctrine o f the katechon

Another way of understanding this theme is to take up the New
Testament notion of the katechon. This is a Greek word, which
is found in a rather mysterious passage in one of Pauls letters.
Paul is trying to dampen expectation among his readers con
cerning the Second Coming of Christ (2 Thessalonians 2:1-12).
The Greek word katecho means to hold back, hold fast, to bind,
restrain, and is used by Paul to refer to the restraining hand of
God before the chaos of the end times is unleashed. Mark 13 and
24 THE PARAMETERS

Luke 21:5-36 make similar reference to a delay or deferral o f the

apocalypse, though the theme is most graphically depicted in the
Book of Revelation, chapter 20:7-8.
The noun katechon refers to the political force whose func
tion is the restraint of chaos and disorder. This conception of
politics as katechon is important for understanding the work
of Carl Schmitt, as we shall see. For now, we are able to identi
fy two descriptions, in tension with one another, concerning
how we account for violence and coercion in politics. We have
specified an Antigone and a Eumenides motif. Antigone
stands out as a brave protester against the idolatrous violence of
the state. She sees this violence as a distortion of the political,
not a dimension of it. With the Eumenides, the opposite holds:
here, the problem of violence is at the very heart of the political,
defined precisely in terms of how the aggressive forces of
human society are to be managed: a terrifying curse if they are
unleashed internally, but a blessing if they are channelled
outwards onto a common enemy.
Political theology must arbitrate between these contrasting
accounts of what is going on. For Jrgen Moltmann, we have
two distinct anthropologies, differing views of what can be
expected of human beings as political animals, which he ex
plicates in terms of a Covenant model versus Leviathan
(Moltmann, 1994). The former tradition allows for the possi
bility of human beings entering into covenant with God and with
each other; the second, more pessimistically, sees the task in
hand as that of restraining the war of all against all which is
our natural condition, and ensuring strong central government -
a katechon - to prevent chaos. And political theology has been
resourced from both of these traditions, as a brief survey will
indicate.
For Augustine, or at least on one tragic reading of him, the
primary purpose of institutions in society is dealing with the
conflict and disorganisation resulting from the Fall - in other
words, the restraining function of the katechon: while they are
feared, the wicked are held in check, and the good are enabled
to live less disturbed among the wicked. Augustines argument
for the necessity of disciplina for an inescapably recalcitrant
human race has fateful consequences, as it forms the basis of his
WITNESS AGAINST THE BEAST 25

justification for religious coercion by the state - making him, it

has been said, the first theologian of the Inquisition. Martin
Luther follows Augustine in understanding a conflict between
the City of God and the earthly city: these are in tension until the
end of time. Luther distinguishes between the saving kingdom
of Christ and the preserving kingdom of the world: those under
the first are motivated by the Sermon on the Mount, and are in
no need of external constraints, because the authority which
they recognise is persuasive rather than coercive. They are, how
ever, only a tiny minority of the population (perhaps one in a
thousand), and effective government of the majority requires
coercive rather than persuasive measures: rulers, magistrates,
laws backed up by the sword. Luther accepts that there is a two-
tier morality in place: the high gospel standards to which
Christians seek to attain, and a less demanding ethic, based on
fear and coercion. Trying to run an entire society according to
the first, minority gospel ethic would have predictable and
disastrous consequences:

If anyone attempted to rule the world by the gospel and to

abolish all temporal law and sword on the plea that all are
baptised and Christians, and that, according to the gospel,
there shall be among them no law or sword - or need for
either - pray tell, friend, what would he be doing? What do
you imagine the effect will be? He would be loosing the
ropes and chains of the savage wild beasts and letting them
bite and mangle everyone, meanwhile insisting that they
were harmless, tame, and gentle creatures; but I would
have the proof in my wounds. Just so would the wicked
under the name of Christian abuse evangelical freedom,
carry on their rascality, and insist that they were Christians
subject neither to law nor sword, as some are already raving
and ranting.7

H obbes, Schm itt a n d th e Leviathan

So the katechon, first encountered in the New Testament, is
taken up by theologians reflecting upon the challenge of estab
lishing a correct foundation and scope for the political and
26 THE PARAMETERS

religious spheres. With Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth

century the same problem which confronted Augustine and
Luther is addressed, but in a secularised form. In many respects
his book Leviathan (1651) represents the birth of modern
political thought.
Hobbes announces his conviction of the equality of all human
beings. This takes up Luthers theological insight that we all
stand equal before God, and follows through on its sociological
and political implications in a way that Luther did not. These are
not at all good: the natural equality of humans has deadly con
sequences, as Hobbes argues in Leviathan, ch. 13: it engenders
equality of hope, which in turn breeds envy. The direct result of
equality, therefore, is universal competition and strife, the
famous war of all against all, a condition of continuall feare,
and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore,
nasty, brutish and short. Christianity is a dangerous religion,
inspiring the kind of human equality which leads to conflict; it
nevertheless yields the solution to the problem, namely the
secularised katechon. Hobbes championed the notion of an
absolute power that could prevent the outbreak of civil war, a
mortal God who would be sovereign of both politics and
religion, even the sole interpreter of scripture. Absolute power is
granted to this sovereign by the people, as a result of a social
contract. So the State functions as a katechon, with no positive
goal other than the restraining of the apocalyptic state of war.
In The Stillborn God (2007), Mark Lilia praises Thomas
Hobbes for bringing about the Great Separation between politics
and religion: as we shall see in chapter 5, this judgement is open
to contestation by political theologians. In the meantime, we
consider a thinker who has been greatly influenced by Hobbes
in modem times. Carl Schmitt has been described as the
twentieth-century godfather of political theology (Hollerich,
2004:107). Though scholarship on Schmitt is immense and
growing, he has always remained a controversial figure, because
of his complicity with the National Socialist regime from 1933
to 1936. Schmitt wrote legal studies defending the regime,
including the Nuremburg racial laws and the 1934 Night of the
Long Knives, and there is also clear evidence of his anti-
Semitism. Despite this dismal background, he was admired and
WITNESS AGAINST THE BEAST 27

sought out until his death in 1985; thinkers of both right and left
have shown interest, including political realists such as Hans J.
Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger. Many critics confirm his
status as a brilliant but highly problematic theorist. We need to
take note of Schmitts diagnoses, but also to look for solutions
that go beyond them. His key text, Political Theology, sets out
the roots of sovereignty as a secularised theological concept. In
a companion work, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, he
presents the Church as a Machtform, a bulwark of authority
against a chaotic world, while a third work, perhaps his most
influential, The Concept o f the Political, defines politics in
terms of the Freund Feind distinction, which we turn to now.

The Political as F rien d-E n em y

As the German Hobbes of the twentieth century, Carl
Schmitts thought is firmly aligned on that of his seventeenth-
century predecessor. His Freund-Feind distinction: friend or
foe, is an extension of the concept of the state set out in
Leviathan? According to Schmitt, the world is divided into
states which are aligned with or against one another, according
to a friend/enemy distinction. Political stability arises from the
balance between them: a state needs alliances, but it also needs
the unifying power which comes from having enemies. This
division between peoples and states is in fact part of Gods plan!
Two passages from Genesis are cited here: the enmity which
God sets between the woman and the serpent (Genesis 3:15),
and the incident of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:9), where the
name Babel or Babylon is related to the Hebrew word for
mixed up. It follows that any attempt to unite where God has
instituted separation and strife, such as the League of Nations
(precursor of the United Nations), is a grave mistake. This
denial of difference upsets the balance between states, and
therefore has the opposite effect of what was intended.
The religious background of the Freund-Feind distinction is
crucial to Schmitts politico-theological critique of liberalism.9
Behind the apparent neutrality of the modem liberal state is the
brutal reality of the modern revolt against God; there is a
theological enmity between Christianity and liberalism. The
liberal search for perpetual peace and a secure existence
28 THE PARAMETERS

deprives us even of our enemies (liberals, he says, would prob

ably appoint a commission to investigate the question, Christ or
Barabbas?!). From a gospel perspective, however, this search
for peace is a delusion. The decision for or against enmity:
what we have been calling Antigone or Eumenides, or Arcardian
or Utopian, is above all a political-theological criterion. Schmitt
did not believe in a world free of aggression, because the effort
to create such a world would itself have to be aggressive. He is
also sceptical about the weakened modem states ability to
provide peace, while the substitution of economic competition
for war merely disguises the coercion between states. Like the
Eumenides, Schmitt proclaims the intensity of two sentiments,
love for fellow citizens, and hatred of ones enemies: The
distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of
intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dis
sociation. Together with the dogma of original sin and the
Freund-Feind doctrine it becomes clear that the undifferentiated
optimism of a universal conception of man is impossible.
Here, it is argued by Jrgen Moltmann and others, is the core
of katechon theology - or rather mythology, as we defined it
earlier. As with the Grand Inquisitor (whom we meet below)
there is a failure of nerve, a panic at the delay in Jesus return;
meanwhile political chaos threatens to engulf us. The paradox
remains, however, of the katechon as a means of restraining
chaotic and unlimited violence through limited violence:
Leviathan, the force of anarchy, is now itself a source of order.
This is Augustines understanding of the pax Rontana, the
strictly limited peace which comes from imperial domination,
and while he clearly understands the City of God to be offering
something else, Augustine is unable, ultimately, to break free of
the necessary violence of the political.

Covenant or Leviathan?
In his article entitled Covenant or Leviathan?, Moltmann
points out two strains of political theology, arising from the six
teenth and seventeenth centuries. The first of these positions,
Covenant, derives from the Calvinist articulation of the right
of resistance against political and religious absolutism in France
WITNESS AGAINST THE BEAST 29

(after the St Bartholomews Day massacre of Huguenots in

1572). It represents a federal theology, whereby the covenant of
human beings with one another is based on and preserved by
Gods covenant with them. Federal theology presupposed that
God considers human beings to be worthy and capable of form
ing a covenant. Out of this trust of God comes the trust of
human beings in their mutual ability to form a covenant
(Moltmann, 1994:25). This covenant theology is taken by
Puritans into the New World (an exodus from theocratic dicta
torship), and the notion of America as a covenanted nation
undergirds the American Revolution. Leviathan, as we have
seen, is Hobbes name for the Utopian security state that unites
spiritual and secular power, and allows neither the division of
powers nor the right of resistance.
Beneath each of these conceptions is a political anthropology.
The covenant idea of the State has a positive anthropology, legit
imating a critical theology of power as well as democratic insti
tutions for its control: All men are created free and equal and
endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights. A foundation
of power in the covenant of free citizens recognises in the poli
ty both a created disposition of humankind, and an anticipation
of the heavenly citizenship in the Kingdom of God. However
perverted by human sinfulness, the present State belongs to the
essence and not just to the alienation of humankind. Human
beings are social beings. The Leviathan, on the other hand,
presupposes a negative anthropology in order to legitimate a
positive theology of power, authority and sovereignty. Human
beings are evil by nature, chaotic, and therefore need a strong
State to protect them from other human beings and from
themselves (Moltmann, 1994:33-4).

Nomos a n d Space in Schm itt

To understand more precisely why Carl Schmitt positions him
self in this pessimistic Leviathan tradition, we need to look at
his second major concept (after the Freund-Feind distinction),
which is a reflection upon the relationship between nomos (law)
and space or territory (Palaver, 1996). Schmitt uses the Greek
word nomos in a broad sense, rather than the more abstract
30 THE PARAMETERS

German term Gesetz. Law always comes to us through a specific

set of social institutions and structures, so that nomos means a
total concept of law that contains a concrete order and a com
munity. This total concept includes the religious dimension of
nomos; the term connotes originally a sacred location, empha
sising a strong connection between religion and territoriality. We
may refer back to Detiennes description, above, of Apollo as
one of the deities associated with the building of a city. As
founder he was invoked as the one who measures out and
marks off its dimensions, including those of the agora, the place
of assembly.
Even this straightforward activity seems to have overtones of
foundational violence. Schmitts linking of nomos and territory,
with nomos as a unity of order,10 is impelled in part by his
support of Nazi policies, including the annexation of foreign
countries. The great primal acts of law ... remain earthbound
locations (orientations). These are land appropriations, the
founding of cities and colonies. Schmitt argues for resonances
between nomos and spatial categories: for example, nomos and
wall (Heraclitus), or nomos as spatial enclosure, the enclosing
ring, the fence formed by men, the men-ring which is an image
of political community.11 By 1953 he has worked out a number
of meanings of nomos, one of which is to take or appropriate.
Land appropriations always come first: we have the biblical
stories of the appropriation of Canaan by the Israelites (see the
books of Numbers and Joshua). Another example is the
Conquista, the acquisition of land in the Americas - which
Schmitt charmingly regards as the last great European
adventure.
It should be clear now why Schmitt set himself so firmly
against any kind of universalism in international affairs:
Throughout his life, Schmitt feared nothing more than a unified
world (Palaver, 1996:111). Organisations like the League of
Nations (forerunner of the United Nations), which sought to
bring nations together in co-operation, not only ignored the
importance of the Freund-Feind distinction, but they were also
oblivious of this dimension of territoriality: namely, the arrange
ment of space as the foundation of international order. Whatever
the new post-war nomos was going to be - Schmitt did not
WITNESS AGAINST THE BEAST 31
foresee the Cold War lasting very long - it had to be one of
equilibrium between states, rather than undifferentiated uni-
versalism. Schmitts own preference was for a nomos of the
earth based on several independent large blocs, a pluralism of
Grossraume (large living spaces).12
Matthew Lamb is trenchant in his judgement that Schmitts is
a completely immanent project with no trace of the trans
cendence of Christian faith, while Hollerich contends that his
religious faith was more polemical and dramaturgical than
substantive. Critics have also objected, not surprisingly, to the
dualism of the Freund-Feind distinction, and its Hobbesian
reduction of the state to a mere question of power: not to men
tion Schmitts negation of the gospel command to love ones
enemy (though for Schmitt the biblical command applied to
individual, not political enemies!). Palaver recognises that
Schmitts two key concepts, the Freund-Feind distinction and
the connection of nomos and space, need to be subjected to a
twofold theological critique. Firstly, he recognises the presence
in Schmitts work of katchon political mythology. Many of
Schmitts key themes and concerns - the dualism of friend and
enemy, the reduction of politics to power, the instrumentalisa
tion of religion - can be discussed under the heading of
katchon.
From a Christian perspective, as Palaver acknowledges, the
idea of the katchon is highly problematic. Its true status is con
veyed in the figure of the Grand Inquisitor, from chapter 5 of
Fyodor Dostoyevskys novel The Brothers Karamazov. In this
bitterly anti-Roman Catholic satire, the Inquisitor presides over
an auto-da-f when he recognises Jesus, who has silently
returned. He arrests him, and explains to Jesus how he has
worked to repair the damage done by the Lord when he called
his followers into a dangerous freedom. Such a freedom, if taken
seriously, can only lead to chaos, even cannibalism. The Grand
Inquisitor fears this chaos and destruction, and tries to hold
back the apocalypse. Unsettled by the silence of Jesus
throughout this interrogation, the Inquisitor decides to let him
go. His final words - Go away and dont come again ... come
never, never again ... never, never! - contradict the concluding
words in the Bible: Come, Lord Jesus! And it is worth noting
32 THE PARAMETERS

that the person of Jesus hardly features at all in the Leviathan

tradition. Schmitt describes Hobbes as seeking to displace
Christianity into marginal domains, and therefore to render
harmless the effect of Christ in the social and political sphere;
of de-anarchizing Christianity, while leaving it in the back
ground a certain legitimating function.
Above all, it does seem hard to understand how these themes
in Schmitt can be prised apart from his dismal associations with
National Socialism, though clearly many contemporary thinkers
believe this is possible. Political theologians (especially the
post-war generation of Metz, Moltmann and Slle), have sought
to distance themselves from Schmitts version of political theo
logy. Like the theologians of liberation, they voice an Antigone-
like protest against the abuses of power. But this is not the same
as addressing the problematic violence at the root of politics, the
Eumenides part of the equation, as Schmitt attempted to do,
however unsavoury some of his judgements. A further theologi
cal critique is needed, which is corrective of the problematic
aspects of the Freund- Feind distinction and the nomos-space
conjunction, while preserving what may be genuinely insightful
in these concepts.
Wolfgang Palavers own analysis does soften the edges of the
contrasts we have explored here. He suggests that the Covenant
or Leviathan? options set out by Moltmann, with corresponding
positive and negative anthropologies, is too schematic. In this
respect Ren Girards mimetic theory is a deeper and stronger
overview of the conditions which lead to human violence
(Palaver, 1999:353-70). Palaver also draws attention to
Bonhoeffers use of katchon in his Ethics in a more positive
sense than Schmitt (Palaver, 2007:86).

We began with two Greek tragedies that illustrate contrasting

aspects of the theologico-political. In Tragedy and Revolution
Terry Eagleton sees these two aspects - the innocence of
Antigone, the blood of The Eumenides - present in Oedipus at
Colonus, in an analysis which resonates with those themes
(unstable identity, scapegoating, exclusionary violence) which
Ren Girard has made his own:
WITNESS AGAINST THE BEAST 33

Oedipus, broken and blind, stands before Colonus. As he

once gave an answer to the Sphinx, his presence now poses
a question to the nearby city of Athens. Is it to gather this
unclean thing to its heart, or cast it out as so much
garbage? (Eagleton, 2005:8)

The answer to the Sphinx was of course Man: four, two and
three in one. In the same way Athens needs to discern his
humanity, as the pharmakos, the impossible homeopathy of
poison and cure ... nothing is more fearful or opaque than
ourselves and those akin to us, and nothing more pitiable than a
humanity deformed alarmingly out of recognition. This is the
achievement of tragedy, that in Oedipus, Lear and in the tortured
Christ, we come to pity what we fear (8). Nothing could be
further from our contemporary political world, says Eagleton,
than this language of scapegoats and blood sacrifice. We are
embarrassed by it, just as we are uneasy with the language of
revolution. But what our reluctance amounts to politically
speaking, is a choice between one kind of death-in-life and
another. Western hubris celebrates as energy what is in fact a
nihilism secretly in love with annihilation; its death drive is the
opposite of the existence of the dispossessed, who seek to
flourish in the face of death, finitide and failure. The West

cannot recognise its own visage in the raging fury at its

gates. It is unable to decipher the symptoms of weakness
and despair in that fury and therefore is capable only of
fear rather than pity. (21)
Chapter 3

'LOVE OF THE WORLD'

Is Political Theology Possible?

Political theologians agree with Charles Davis, that [t]he

Christian religion has always been thoroughly political ...
Christians find God in their neighbour rather than in their con
sciousness or in the cosmos. We are beginning to see that the
picture is more complex. Political theology, even when it pro
claims itself Christian, has often been resourced by something
closer to pagan mythology, rather than by a genuinely biblical or
ecclesial faith - as we have seen from the last chapter, where we
discussed the mythology of the katechon. We are beginning to
see a distinction between political theology and political
mythology has begun to emerge, but it is not always an easy one
to draw.
There is a further complication. A powerful argument can be
made for Christianity being inherently apolitical or even anti
political - directly contrary to what Davis proclaims. What I
propose in this chapter is to assess the critique of Christianity
put forward by Hannah Arendt (1906-75), with a view to
answering the question: is political theology possible? Arendt is
relevant here, because her answer is no; she makes a case
which requires attention, that politics and Christianity are in fact
incompatible.

Hannah Arendt on Christianity

Hannah Arendt was a controversial political philosopher, who
has been described as one of the most important and original
LOVE OF THE WORLD 35
thinkers of the twentieth-century catastrophes. In her main
works: The Origins o f Totalitarianism (1951), The Human
Condition (1958), and On Revolution (1963), she explores poli
tics and society in the modern world, especially the terrible
events of dark times. These analyses are brought to bear in her
famous and provocative coverage of the trial of Adolf
Eichmann, who was accused of Nazi war crimes, tried and con
demned in Israel in 1961. Arendts report on the banality of
evil, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), is a classic but highly
controversial meditation on the roots of the National Socialist
horror.
Arendt reads through the prism of two earlier periods:
Classical Greece and Rome, and the early modem period,
1600-1900. By comparison with the first of these, in particular
the classical ideal of politics which she associates with the city-
states of Greece, she finds Christianity wanting. There is an
other-worldliness in the Christian faith, which Arendt inter
prets as an intrinsic hostility to the public domain, tending
instead to a glorification of the self and individual destiny. The
gospel calls for a shift from care of the world and the duties
connected with it, to care for the soul and individual salvation:
For what will it profit them to gain the whole world but forfeit
their life? This unworldliness makes a positive Christian
engagement with the polis impossible. Arendt argues for the
incompatibility of love and the public realm. In a letter to the
Black liberationist, James Baldwin, in 1962, Arendt wrote: In
politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing
is being achieved except hypocrisy ... Hatred and love belong
together, and they are both destructive, you can only afford them
in private ...
Arendts logic is clear. Love is a stranger in politics;
Christianity is love; therefore ... As James Bernauer sees it,1
there are three interrelated aspects to Arendts critique. Firstly,
Christianitys rejection of the classical viewpoints which fos
tered worldly engagement means a reversal of the Greek and
Roman world-view, according to which our only hope of
immortality (as mortals in an immortal universe) is to make a
lasting mark in the political world, through heroic action or
leadership. For the Christian, however, it is the world that will
36 THE PARAMETERS

pass away, while the individual soul endures. There is another

reversal: the Roman emphasis on the past encouraged an emula
tion of the great deeds of founders and ancestors. The Christian
steadfastly ignores these, his or her gaze directed to the future
instead, a pilgrim on the way to Paradise.
Arendts second objection, according to Bernauer, is
Christianitys demeaning of the world of political action. The
negative inner freedom of the gospel is also a freedom from
politics and secular involvement: hence, for example, the
Churchs indifference to social evils such as slavery. The
Christian conception of the common good, namely the sal
vation of ones soul, is alien to the public realm, and remains
hidden from view: Jesus declares that only God is good (Luke
8:19), and insists that acts of charity and other good works
should be carried out in secret. As a result, the agent and the act
are separated: this has serious consequences for Arendts theory
of action, which is fundamental to her political theory. Arendt
draws a curious parallel with the status of the criminal:

Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he dis

closes himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk
the disclosure, and this neither the doer of good works,
who must be without self and preserve complete anon
ymity, nor the criminal, who must hide himself from
others, can take upon themselves. Both are lonely figures,
the one being for, the other against, all men; they, there
fore, remain outside the pale of human intercourse and are,
politically, marginal figures who usually enter the his
torical scene in times of corruption, disintegration, and
political bankruptcy. (Arendt, 1958:180)

Thirdly, for Arendt, Christianity is not only indifferent to the

public realm: it is actually the source and support of values that
destroy political life. We have already mentioned love in this
regard. As a direct consequence of the Incarnation, which is the
belief that the Absolute has been incarnated in human history,
we have to live with the haunting spectre of absolute truth over
human affairs and institutions. Truth as revelation contradicts
the political model of life, which rejoices in the necessary
LOVE OF THE WORLD 37
diversity of opinions, and in the values of consent, mutual
agreement and freedom. This would correspond very much to
the alleged incompatibility of utopian politics (John Gray) or
political theology (Mark Lilia) with political life as such. A
farther legacy of Christianity is the tendency of certain moral
experiences, such as compassion and pity, to be allowed to
dictate human conduct in the political realm. Much of the vio
lence of modem revolutionary theorists arises from the victory
of moral feelings over political virtues: we are tempted to allow
moral outrage or sentiment to lead the way, and to shun the
drawn-out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation and
compromise. In other words, incamational Christianity has
brought into politics a dangerous fanaticism that is, inevitably,
the opposite of freedom.2

Three key concepts: action ...

Arendts concerns about Christianity become clearer if we look
at her own understanding of politics, especially at two closely
related concepts. One is action, which she carefully distin
guishes from labour and work, and the other is natality, a
description of human beings which is the alternative to stressing
our mortality. These need to be discussed along with a third
distinctive category in her thought, that of amor mundi: love of
the world.
In The Human Condition Arendt seeks to recover a theory of
politics that was alive in classical Greece but lost to the modern
age. She follows the Greeks in distinguishing between private
and public (a third realm, that of the social, comes in with the
Romans). It is in these three realms that human activity takes
place, namely labour, work and action. The first two are
motivated by necessity and utility respectively, the interaction of
the individual with the world in general; they are to do with
means. Action concerns human ends: only here do we have free,
unforced and direct interchange between human beings. The
private realm is pre-political, the realm of hiddenness, and is
very important for human well-being. Nevertheless, only the
public, which is the sphere of speech, space and appearance, is
political in the proper sense. So speech, action, and freedom
from necessity appear together.
38 THE PARAMETERS

The political is a fragile space, which is all too easily over

whelmed by the social, or subsumed under the concerns of
labour or work. To live principally or exclusively in the social
realm is to see our freedom reduced. And yet it is impossible for
the Christian to move out of this realm. Because action is
always accompanied by discourse, the Christian is excluded, on
account of his or her good deeds being silent, like the bad
deeds of the criminal. In passing, we can note that Arendt is
attempting to envisage a pure form of politics, outside or
beyond any form of violence or compulsion. We shall return to
this, but we can see already that her conception of politics is the
opposite of that of Carl Schmitt and philosophers of the
katechon.

... n a ta lity ...

Closely allied to this understanding of action is the notion of
natality. Arendt offers a riposte to the Western philosophical
tradition, here including Martin Heidegger, which has taken
death as its point of reference. For Heidegger, a bracing aware
ness of ones finitude in the sense of our anxious being-toward-
death is the necessary condition for truth, and a liberating
source of freedom (another, less favourable, description has it as
the confluence of two pessimistic traditions: Augustinian-
Kierkegaardian isolationism and a Teutonic-Romantic death
obsession3). Arendt takes this in the opposite direction. Like
Heidegger, she is concerned with what makes human life
authentic, but she roots human difference, not in mortality, but
in the condition of our being natal. This is intimately bound up
with the human capacity to begin new things, to initiate. To
quote in full from The Human Condition:

With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human

world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which
we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of
our original physical appearance. This insertion is not
forced upon us by necessity, like labor, and it is not
prompted by utility, like work. It may be stimulated by
the presence of others whose company we may wish to
join, but it is never conditioned by them; its impulse
LOVE OF THE WORLD 39
springs from the beginning which came into the world
when we were born and to which we respond by begin
ning something new on our own initiative.
(Arendt, 1958:176-77)

Arendt offers an etymological justification of this under

standing of action as politics: the Greek noun archein, means to
begin, to lead, and eventually to rule. She cites Augustine in
support of her reflections on natality:

Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by

virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into
action. [Initium] ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quern
nullus fuit (that there be a beginning, man was created
before whom there was nobody), said Augustine in his
political philosophy. This beginning is not the same as the
beginning of the world; it is not the beginning of something
but of somebody, who is a beginner himself. With the
creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the
world itself, which, of course, is only another way of
saying that the principle of freedom was created when man
was created but not before. (177)

The distinguishing feature is startling unexpectedness, like the

emergence of life from inorganic matter by an infinite improb
ability of inorganic processes, or the evolution of human out of
animal life. [T]he new therefore always appears in the guise of
a miracle, and if someone is capable of action we can expect the
unexpected from them:

And this again is possible only because each man is unique,

so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into
the world. With respect to this somebody who is unique it
can be truly said that nobody was there before. If action as
beginning corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actu
alization of the human condition of natality, then speech
corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualiza
tion of the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as
a distinct and unique being among equals. (1958: 7)
40 THE PARAMETERS

Arendt follows Augustine in describing birth as the entry into

life of a singular and unrepeatable individual (the citation is
from The City o f God, xii. 20). Natality makes action possible,
that is, political action, which defines authentic self-disclosure.
An individual has a capacity to stamp his or her actions as
uniquely their own, and this has to be more than just the recoil
we experience at the thought of our death. It is true, indeed, that
we are bom alone and we die alone - but it makes a difference
which of these basic facts we choose to dwell on! For Arendt,
the differentiation of self from self is primordial: every individ
ual is marked, from the moment of birth, as the possessor of a
unique telos or goal, which he or she may or may not fulfil
during a lifetime.

... and love o f the world

I have looked in some depth at Hannah Arendts ideas because
her intriguing, if lofty, ideal of the political life puts her critique
of Christianity into perspective. That critique is idiosyncratic
and overstated, and yet, I would contend, has enough uncomfort
able home truths in it to merit our serious attention. Many
Christians do seem to be allergic to politics, operating with what
we described as a cordon sanitaire to divide (erroneously!) what
is Caesars from what is Gods. An excessive or distorted con
cern for the spiritual, particularly in an individualised sense,
has too often justified a downgrading of the social, and a conse
quent model of withdrawal, rather than engagement. As we shall
see, much political theology is explicitly presented as a
corrective of some of these aspects of the Christian tradition.
There is also something valid, if disquieting, in Arendts
observation that too often political reasoning is replaced by the
certitude of moral sentiments: justified outrage or compassion.
Having overwhelmingly strong feelings about an issue is no
guarantee of wisdom about what to do about it - especially
when the solution may require consensus or compromise.
Arendt believes that Christianitys over-valuation of virtues such
as pity has brought about this kind of distortion.4
To sum up Arendts critique of Christianity, we turn to the
third key concept in her work, by alleging that for her
Christianity lacks an amor mundi:
LOVE OF THE WORLD 41
The all-absorbing passion of Hannah Arendts life was a
love for the world which exhibits itself in a relishing of
human actions promise and in a respecting of the political
structures which made action possible ... Human beings
achieve worldliness to the extent that their lives are illu
mined by the recognition that care of the world is superior
to care of the self. (Bemauer, 1987:1-2)

A love of or partisanship for the world involves a decision to

be responsible for it: such a decision was to be a founding act
of western cultures rebirth, the creation of a new political soli
darity. Conversely, in The Origins o f Totalitarianism, Arendt
identifies anti-Semitism, imperialism and totalitarianism as
crimes against the world as such. They arise out of a condition
of alienation from the world and constitute a refusal to share the
world, opting instead for non-worldly processes organised
around race, destiny and class. Like Carl Schmitt, Arendt is
attentive to the spatial dimension of politics; the ideal of the
public sphere is represented for her by the agora in the Greek
polls, or in the town square of the earliest European settlers in
America. It is a space to be entered into with relish, the space
where we disclose ourselves.
Her objections to Christianity, when set against her own
political conceptuality, can now be formulated in terms of a
specific threefold deficit. First, Christianity lacks that concept of
action (understood as a composite of deed and discourse)
required for the activity of free and unforced interchange that she
calls politics. Secondly, Christianity lacks, or has at least failed
to nourish, our sense of natality, instead, through the centuries, it
has been caught up in philosophies of mortality that paralyse
with fear rather than energise with wonderment. Thirdly,
Christianity lacks a genuine amor mundi, a love of the world that
encourages us to respect it and take responsibility for it.

Testing Arendts Critique: the Politics of the Early

Christians
An effective retort to Arendt will consist of two strands. Firstly,
it will be necessary to demonstrate that her view of Christianity
42 THE PARAMETERS

as incompatible in principle with politics is one-sided and

unfair; that those categories allegedly essential for political
activity are not missing from Christian tradition in the way
Arendt suggests. It is possible to argue that what Arendt sees as
an antipathy between faith and the world is actually something
very different, namely the birth of a new and transformed
politics, and not to be judged according to the standard or model
of the Greek polis, to which she constantly appeals. According
to Duncan Forrester, Christianity is one of a number of religious
and cultural forces in the ancient world which challenged and
pulled apart the antique unity of society and religion; what he
calls city religion;5 perhaps Christianity needs to be seen in
terms of this wider process.
The second tack is to look at Arendts own political philos
ophy, and identify within her own work the religious (Jewish
and Christian) themes which underlie what is intended as a
secular political theory: themes which Arendt herself either
ignores or downplays. What is of interest is the curious but
striking argument of Walter Benjamins parable of the puppet
and the dwarf, which we examine below. Benjamin uses it to
maintain that while theology continues to play an important
part in political discourse, nowadays it has to remain out of
sight. If this is true (both of Arendt and of political thought in
general), then, to answer the question at the head of this chapter,
political theology is not only possible but necessary.
To take the first of these strands, namely Arendts case against
Christianity, how true, in fact, is Forresters description of early
Christianity as a destructive, subversive force in the ancient
world? The history of the early Church has been classically
described as the story of the successful Christian revolution
against the Roman Empire (Frend, 1964:viii). But Frend goes
on to acknowledge a very real contrast between violent and
revolutionary theories and conservatism in practice (97), so we
need to be careful. Nevertheless, there is plenty of evidence of
the intransigence of the early Christians - which seems to
confirm Arendts point about the gospel and the polis being
irreconcilable.
We need only ask the crucial question: why, precisely, were
the Christians persecuted?
LOVE OF THE WORLD 43

The answer is clear: it is given to us over and over again in

the sources. It was not so much the positive beliefs and
practices of the Christians which aroused pagan hostility,
but above all the negative element in their religion: their
total refusal to worship any god but their own. The
monotheistic exclusiveness of the Christians was believed
to alienate the goodwill of the gods, to endanger what the
Romans called the pax deorum (the right harmonious rela
tionship between gods and men), and to be responsible for
disasters which overtook the community ... [the Chris
tians] openly maintained that the pagan gods either did not
exist at all or that they were malevolent demons. Not only
did they themselves refuse to take part in pagan religious
rites; they would not even recognise that others ought to do
so. (Ste Croix, 1963:25)

This is deity-orientated politics: the persecutions testify to

Christianitys collision course with the living heart of pagan
religiousness (Fox, 1986:125), a religious passion which, while
centuries old, was still capable of enflaming whole populations.
As early as 64 CE, when the Christians were scapegoated for
the fire in Rome, the antagonism which was to flare inter
mittently over the following two centuries was already in place,
resulting in a kind of schizophrenia in Christian attitudes
towards government (Chadwick, 1988:12). This ambivalence
is, of course, already in evidence in the New Testament writings:
from Pauline injunctions to respect the secular authorities
(Romans 13), to the hostility expressed in Revelation 17 towards
Babylon (Rome, the persecuting power). Once again, Frends
description of a revolutionary theory, conservative practice
would seem to apply. Chadwick asserts that there is no substan
tial change in Christian thinking regarding government and
power, even with the conversion of Constantine to Christianity
in 312 CE. The dominant tone seems to be one of relativism
regarding the use of power in a fallen world, though there were
alternative positions, articulated by Eusebius of Caesaria (who
saw the Christianisation of the Empire as providential, and the
earthly monarchy as a mirror of Gods heavenly rule), and by
the schismatic African Donatists, who rejected the legitimacy of
44 THE PARAMETERS

the secular authorities. But between the two extremes there lay
a passionately religious indifference to political power:

The early Christians did not launch any particular political

theory upon the Roman world. They simply ensured that
subsequent political thought would be controlled by a
greater debate, namely about the nature and destiny of
man; that no-one should long suppose man capable of
living by bread alone; that religion itself is abused if its
function becomes that of providing an ultimate legiti
mation for whatever be the current order; and that, since
individuals matter to God, they are objects of his care in
this world and the next, and therefore have rights now
meriting deep respect. (Chadwick, 1988:20)

Field (1998) recognises that [ajncient Christians regarded lib

erty as humanitys greatest and highest goal, a vision that
survived differently in East and West, to use terms which
come to denote two distinct self-understandings:

On the one hand, the Greek East became the Byzantine

Empire, which saw itself as coterminous with, and indistin
guishable from, the Church on earth. At once sacred and
temporal, it possessed two hierarchies but ultimately only
one absolute jurisdiction, which by right belonged to the
emperor. On the other hand, the Latin West became
medieval Europe, where most believed that two powers -
the royal power and the bishops consecrated authority -
ruled the world. (Field, 1998:xiii)

He draws attention to different trajectories within the New

Testament: Pauls alleged monistic view of a single principle of
governance, namely divine authority; the dualism of Johns
vision, and the martyrs struggle against the Antichrist in an
irreconcilable conflict. With these monistic and dualistic ten
dencies co-existing and qualifying one another, Christians thus
expressed a deep ambivalence toward the Roman empire (xvii).
However, this is not the full story. If the response of
Christians is schizophrenic, we should note that we find a
LOVE OF THE WORLD 45

similar ambivalence when we examine the shaping influence of

Greek and Roman political theory. Plato (the Republic and the
Politics) and Aristotle (the Politics) are of course foremost
authorities - but these philosophers do not influence the
European political tradition until after the thirteenth century.
What does take place is a shift of emphasis: from concern for
governance of the polis, the small-scale city-state, to that of
larger empires, which, experience showed, could only be
adequately ruled by a powerful monarch. So classical political
theory comes to centre more on questions of kingship and
empire, and less on democracy.
Under the emperor Augustus and his successors, a de facto
monarchy was carefully framed with respect to republican struc
tures of government; but this balance always depended upon the
goodness of the emperor. There was simply no defence against
bad emperors, such as Nero or Domitian, other than assassina
tion. The diversity of political ideals inherited from the Greeks
was in fact irrelevant to the needs of the Roman Empire, whose
lasting political legacy was to be an ideology of absolute king-
ship. Increasingly, the tendency was to revert to earlier practice,
whereby the ruler derived legitimation from above, as a delegate
or even incarnation of the godhead: From being a princeps
greeted with salutio by his fellow-citizens, he became increas
ingly the dominus, hedged with divinity and approached by his
subjects with adoratio, a ceremony of Persian origin.6 With the
apotheosis of Constantine, as we find it in Eusebius (who
describes the Emperor as the regent of God, and friend of
Gods only begotten Word), this tendency takes an aggressively
Christian guise. There is no longer an attempt even to pretend
that the ruler is answerable to a commonwealth.
R. A. Markus confirms this account when he speaks of the
salvation of the Empire from anarchy and collapse by reforming
emperors at the end of the third century.7 This reform consisted
primarily in the establishment of a centralised bureaucratic state,
by emperors whose military background left little sympathy for
the venerable traditions of Roman public life. The idea that
governance was a shared enterprise between Emperor and
Senate became increasingly fictional: it was finally dissolved in
the third century, as the traditional republican political ideal of
46 THE PARAMETERS

concordia came to be eclipsed by that of disciplina (Markus,

1988:83).
This same atrophy of Roman religious and political traditions
is reflected in the growing appeal of Christianity, even before
Constantine embraced the faith. With his conversion, Christian
antipathy to pagan culture (manifested by the likes of Tertullian)
was now out of place, so that by the middle of the fifth century
there was a complete cessation of hostilities between Christian
and society. The Constantinian revolution saw a religion that
shortly before had been subject to persecution now being
acclaimed as the legally enforced religion of the Empire. Such a
radical change of status changed the self-perception of
Christians. Under persecution,

Judeo-Christian thinking about politically organised society

had always stressed Gods initiative and action in bringing
about the only truly just society. In relation to His kingdom
men were subjects rather than agents; in respect to all
other, earthly kingdoms they were in some degree aliens,
temporary residents, exiles from their true home. (86)

From the fourth century onwards this had to be rethought. The

powerfully resonant theme of (Babylonian) exile had fortified
Christian self-definition under persecution. Now that society
was governed by Christian emperors and officials, exile could
hardly refer uniquely to Christians, though it might still be
applied to the human condition in general. There were new
issues to face: the relation of secular to sacred power, religious
freedom and coercion. As the classical inheritance of Plato,
Aristotle, Cicero had disappeared from view, a framework for
addressing these issues was provided by the Bible and by
Christian theology. The hints and mere seeds of ideas relating
to political thought have to be gleaned from the fundamentally
religious writings of Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the
Great.
More and more we have to recognise that Hannah Arendts
critique contains only an important half-truth about
Christianitys relation to the political, at least regarding the
earliest centuries of the Churchs existence. Her tactic is, one
LOVE OF THE WORLD 47

might say, to use the Greek democratic ideal of the polis as a

stick with which to beat Christianity. But the reality is more
complex. It is not simply the case that Christianity refused the
noble Greek and Roman ideals of non-coercive political par
ticipation; in fact, these ideals were themselves already being
consigned to the past, because the needs of empire dictated a
very different political vision. The ancient world had already
turned its back on the kind of classical politics envisaged by
Arendt, in favour of a style of government that was more
absolutist and coercive, and more explicit in its appeal to the
trappings of religious transcendence. Post-Constantinian
Christianity is taken up into this process and reinforces it, but
cannot be said to have initiated it.

The p ersisten ce o f the theological: Slavoj Z izek an d the

f ra g ile a b so lu te
The second retort to Arendt concerns her own attempt to estab
lish political thought on a purely secular ground. While this is
never a question of claiming Arendt as a tacit political theo
logian, the presence of religious motifs in Arendts work is
undeniable, and the possibility that her faith has a greater sig
nificance than Arendt would admit has been explored
(Bemauer, 1987).8 It is interesting to note that this discussion
has a similar pattern to the dialogue between critical theory and
political theology (see chapters 8 and 9), in which theologians
such as Metz and Moltmann try to follow through on the reli
gious implications of secular theorists like Ernst Bloch and
Jrgen Habermas. More generally, the contemporary return to
religion which has been detected in recent philosophy, and
described as the persistence of the theologico-philosophical
(Lefort, 2006:150), has to be accounted for.
Having begun with the question is political theology possi
ble? we are now faced with its opposite. Is the attempt to think
politically, without religious categories, itself a mistake? To take
the third of Scott and Cavanaughs definitions: both politics and
theology are to do with the production of metaphysical images
around which communities are organised: no cordon sanitaire is
possible. Walter Benjamin, in his Theses on the Concept o f
History tells the parable of The Puppet and the Dwarf:
48 THE PARAMETERS

The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way

that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each
move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in
Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a
chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors
created the illusion that this table was transparent from all
sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess
player sat inside and guided the puppets hand by means of
strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to
this device. The puppet called historical materialism is
to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it
enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know,
is wizened and has to keep out of sight.9

In other words, political is theology not only possible, it is

unavoidable. Theology is still a motive force of history, even
though it is ugly and unfashionable, to be kept out of sight like
the dwarf. For an orthodox Marxist, of course, this is heresy:
surely the whole point of the doctrine of Dialectical Materialism
is that it excludes any reference to the transcendent, still less the
divine, in explaining human affairs. According to this view,
political theology is a nonsensical contradiction in terms.
Walter Benjamin is breaking ranks, which is why his work is
significant for post-war political theology. In this he is not
alone, since there is no shortage of socialist thinkers who have
used religious language or motifs: Theodor Adorno and Ernst
Bloch, as well as Benjamin come to mind. But much more
recent critical theory has seen a proliferation of Marxist-
inspired writers, who have taken what has been described as a
religious turn.10 The list includes the work of Alain Badiou,
Antonio Negri, Slavoj Zizek and Terry Eagleton.
Zizeks treatment of Christianity is as idiosyncratic as
Arendts, though he is moving in exactly the opposite direction.
He seeks, from a Marxist/Lacanian perspective, to retrieve what
he regards as valuable from the Christian tradition in the face
of crass fundamentalisms (both Christian and non-Christian) on
the one hand, and post-modern and New Age obscurantism
on the other. Against todays onslaught of New Age pagan
ism, it thus seems both theoretically productive and politically
LOVE OF THE WORLD 49

salient to stick to Judaeo-Christian logic (Zizek, 2000:107).

This logic is made clear in a chapter from The Fragile
Absolute, entitled Christs Uncoupling, where Zizek sees a
contrast between global and universal religions. Global (or
pagan) religions function by assuring the individual of his or her
appropriate place in the cosmos. The ultimate good in this case
is the cosmic balance of hierarchically ordered principles. By
contrast, universal religions such as Christianity and Buddhism
upset this global balanced cosmic Order, because they offer to
the individual an immediate access to universality, not an
indirect one. In universal religions, the hierarchical social order
is fundamentally irrelevant, as we see with both Buddha and
Jesus regarding their choice of disciples, and even more
strikingly in the explicit injunction of Jesus to hate father and
mother, and in his relativisation of kindred and ethnic relation
ships. To cite Schelling, Christs appearance is the event of
Ent-Scheidung: a slicing, a differentiating decision, which
disturbs the balance of the pagan universe:

We can see here how thoroughly heterogeneous is the

Christian stance to that of pagan wisdom: in clear contrast
to the ultimate horizon of pagan wisdom, the coincidence
of opposites ... Christianity asserts as the highest act pre
cisely what pagan wisdom condemns as the source of Evil:
the gesture of separation, of drawing the line, of clinging
to an element that disturbs the balance of All. The pagan
criticism that the Christian insight is not deep enough,
that it fails to grasp the primordial One-All, therefore
misses the point: Christianity is the miraculous Event that
disturbs the balance of the One-All; it is the violent intru
sion of Difference that precisely throws the balanced
circuit o f the universe off the rails. (2000:121)

The same principle of disturbance is at work in Christs teach

ings about not returning insults and injuries, thereby breaking
the unremitting circular logic of revenge and punishment.
Passionate sexual love has something of this social un
coupling: witness the renunciation by Romeo and Juliet of their
identities, of their belonging to their respective families
50 THE PARAMETERS

(remember, Arendt thinks love is a stranger to politics). Zizek

is careful to insist that this unplugging or uncoupling does
not take the form of a perverted love of the victim as such: this,
he claims, would merely invert the hierarchy, not subvert it. Nor
does this uncoupling denote a passive withdrawal from the
world, as Arendt maintains. Rather, Christian unplugging is the
active work of love - resisting what he has elsewhere called the
temptation to decaffeinate the Other!

As every Christian knows, love is the work of love - the

hard and arduous work of repeated uncoupling in which,
again and again, we have to disengage ourselves from the
inertia that constrains us to identify with the particular
order we were bom into. Through the Christian work of
compassionate love, we discern in what was hitherto a
disturbing foreign body, tolerated and even modestly
supported by us so that we were not too bothered by it, a
subject, with its cmshed dreams and desires - it is this
Christian heritage of uncoupling that is threatened by
todays fundamentalisms, especially when they proclaim
themselves Christian. Does not Fascism ultimately involve
the return to the pagan mores which, rejecting the love of
ones enemy, cultivate full identification with ones ethnic
community? (Zizek, 2000:129)

Here is a paradox that leaves it unclear whether, finally, Zizeks

reflections are to be read in support of Arendts thesis about
Christianitys hostility to the political, or against it. For Zizek,
Christianitys essence lies in its uncoupling from given ethnic
and political identities. This makes it an important resource for
countering fascism and nationalism (pagan ideologies), as well
as the escapist vacuities of New Age thinking - hence the sub
title of Zizeks book: The Fragile Absolute, or why the Christian
legacy is worth fighting for} 1
But if the essence of Christianity is precisely this un
coupling, a refusal to be bound by ethnic or national ties, how
can it contribute positively to the project of human conviviality?
Zizek and Arendt seem to differ considerably on precisely
what is the nature of the pagan political legacy, and therefore
LOVE OF THE WORLD 51
on the desirability of retrieving or preserving it. In any ease, for
Zizek, the theologico-political contribution of Christianity is
still relevant - even urgently so: It thus seems both theoretically
productive and politically salient to stick to Judaeo-Christian
logic. But the ambiguity of that contribution suggests that, with
regard to Arendts judgement about the inadequacy of
Christianity in the realm of the polis, the jury may still be out.
Chapter 4

T H E D O CTRINE OF TH E TW O'
Political Theology's High Traditions

This is the first of three chapters in which I attempt to establish

the historical contours of political theology. The figure of
Augustine of Hippo looms large, given his immense con
tribution in The City o f God and elsewhere. An issue to confront
is Augustines alleged political pessimism, which can be ren
dered as a Leviathan rather than a Covenant option (chapter
3). This pessimistic strain is usually set against an optimistic
brand of political theology, associated with Thomas Aquinas,
and while one has to be extremely careful with such categories,
I tentatively map out the territory in this chapter.
We take up the story from chapter 3, where we considered the
early Churchs attitude of revolutionary theory, conservative
practice towards the Roman Empire, in the light of Hannah
Arendts thesis about the incompatibility of Christianity and
politics. What we found, instead of a straightforward confirma
tion of Arendts charge, was a more complex interaction
between Christian and pagan traditions, as well as within
Christianity itself.
We have also begun to explore the notion of a doctrine of the
Two, which draws on the formulation of Pope Gelasius: two
there are by which this world is governed. Field describes the
dilemma caused by the intertwining of monistic and dualistic
emphases: Politically, the Church had to endorse the status quo,
because God had ordained all powers. Yet Christians also had to
56 THE HISTORY

resist it, since it was sinful (Field, 1998:xviii). Field associates

these emphases with Pauline and Johannine tendencies in the
New Testament, which were eventually to blossom into the
distinctive political world-views of Eastern and Western
Christendom respectively.
Oliver ODonovan posits a High Tradition of political theo
logy, which he dates from 1100 to 1650 (ODonovan, 1996:4).
He maintains that the supposed novelty of twentieth-century
political and liberation theologies is due to current theologians
ignorance of this earlier tradition, bounded by the reforms of
Pope Gregory VII at the beginning, and at the other end by a
relocation of political theory in the early Enlightenment - from
theology to Moral Science. The Desire o f the Nations is an
attempt to recover this lost tradition, and to ask why it should
have been eclipsed so effectively. This High Tradition is in
cluded within a much longer historical period known as
Christendom, understood as the idea of a professedly
Christian secular political order (195). This term also denotes a
temporal era: The doctrine of the Two is, before all else, a
doctrine of two ages. The passing age of the principalities and
powers has overlapped with the coming age of Gods Kingdom.
This is an eschatological fusion, insofar as it stresses the hidden,
cosmic dimension of reality. Firstly, there is a confrontation with
the powers to be defeated, and in the longer term an attenuated
balance of the two rules. The role of secular institutions in this
overlapping of epochs is real, but clearly subordinate:

They are Christs conquered enemies; yet they have an

indirect testimony to give, bearing the marks of his sov
ereignty imposed upon them, negating their pretensions
and evoking their acknowledgement. Like the surface of a
planet pocked with craters by the bombardment it receives
from space, the governments of the passing age show the
impact of Christs dawning glory. This witness of the
secular is the central core of Christendom. (211-12)

Christendom, far from being a monolithic category, is read by

ODonovan as a series of successive attempts to recover and
reassert the missionary impulse of Christianity (196-7). He
THE DOCTRINE OF THE TWO 57

suggests six signposts or phases, the first four of which will be

summarised in this chapter:
a. the rout of the demons;
b. redefining the boundary;
c. two rules;
d. the supremacy of spiritual authority;
f. authority of word alone; and
g. restoring the balance.

a. The ro u t o f th e d em on s9
What ODonovan identifies as a triumphalist phase of
Christianity deserves closer attention. Christs Resurrection -
his overcoming of the power of death - understood as a cosmic
victory over the powers of evil, is one of the earliest Christian
theological affirmations. This corresponds to the Pauline ten
dency mentioned above: we meet it in Pauls epistles and in the
ancient and dramatic picture of the harrowing of Hell, Christ
barging noisily into Satans kingdom to release the captive souls
and lead them victoriously into heaven. The notion of a victory
procession is taken up by a number of patristic writers: Ignatius
of Antioch, in his Epistle to the Romans, describes his journey
to martyrdom as a victory procession, while Irenaeus recasts
this image under the doctrinal notion of recapitulation. Winners
as well as losers are led by Christ, in triumph, back to the Father.
This is, in short, the earliest political metaphor we have for
Christianity: a glorious military victory over enemy powers.
Constantines triumph at the Battle of Milvian Bridge outside
Rome in 312, after his having allegedly been told by Christ that
in this sign (of the cross) you shall conquer, makes this an
affirmation about history, and not just a powerful metaphor. The
fourth-century historian Eusebius captures the mood, in notori
ously slanted fashion, with his Ecclesiastical History (323/4).
Eusebius saw the hand of God at work in the conversion of the
Empire to Christianity: Constantine, was an imitation of God
himself, one who frames his earthly government according to
the pattern of that divine original, feeling strength in its con
formity to the Monarchy of God. The emperor participates, at
the level of politics, in the action of the Logos who governs
58 T H E H IS T O R Y

nature and the cosmos; he is therefore the reflection and

counterpart in the visible world of Gods invisible Logos, an
intermediary between the earthly and heavenly kingdoms. In his
Life o f Constantine, and in shorter panageyrics to the emperor,
he writes with wonder about revolutionary events, and about a
definitive revelation of Gods glory which has overthrown the
tutelary deities of the Empire. The conversion of Constantine
and the subsequent growth of public Christianity are nothing
short of miraculous. Markus summarises:

Church and Empire were both reflections of a heavenly

kingdom; the monarchy of Constantine brought that king
dom to men, and with his conversion the earthly city
became the city of God ... Christianity and the Empire
became indissolubly united: Christianity was the Empires
religion and the Empire its proper, divinely intended,
setting. (Markus, 1988:93)

What is missing is an eschatological perspective. The triumph

Eusebius is recording is totally in the present, and totally identi
fied with the person of the Christian emperor. There is no future
dimension to Gods victory: idolatry has set in. Eusebius sets the
tone for other historians, such as Rufinus (composer of another
Ecclesiastical History) and Orosius (who writes expansively of
another Christian emperor, Theodosius I). With the court his
torian Eusebius and his successors, two previously distinct ideas
had been effectively fused together: Roman and Christian.

b. R edefining the b o u n dary

ODonovan sees Ambrose (338-97 CE) and Augustine
(354-430) struggling with the new problem of authority arising
from these developments: with whom did ultimate authority rest
in a Christian society? Eusebian assumptions are occasionally
but not systematically challenged by Ambrose of Milan, though
his rebuke and disciplining of various emperors (Valentinian II
in 386, Theodosius in 390) are a powerful demonstration that in
his judgement the Emperor was in the church, not above it.
There are new lines beginning to be drawn, but in general the
identification of Christian and Roman is presupposed by
 T H E D O C T R IN E O F T H E TW O 59

Ambrose, and by most of the historians of this period - even,

initially, by Augustine himself.
For pagan and Christian commentators alike, a providential-
ist view of the Empire denoted a belief in the special mission of
Rome, which carried with it a tendency to interpret world events
e.g. military success or failure, in moral terms. Divine protec
tion was expected, which makes the incursions of the Goths and
the sacking of Rome in 410 as traumatic an event as the
September 11th atrocities for the United States in our own time.
The faithful found themselves open to two charges from their
pagan adversaries: firstly, that the ascendancy of the Christian
religion had angered the gods, secondly that Christian other
worldliness left Christians indifferent to the fate of the Empire
in any case (Hannah Arendts charge). But Christians too were
traumatised: how could such a disaster have happened, if God
was the protector of the Christian empire and its Christian
emperor?
Augustine responds with The City o f God (written between
413 and 427) as an argument against two forms of city theo
logy, one pagan, one Christian. He means to show that there
was nothing special or unique about the Roman Empire as such,
and nothing special or unique about the Empire in its baptised
version. In each case, Augustine asserts a neutral or agnostic
view of the significance of history: The Roman Empire (and by
implication, any earthly society) is of itself neither holy nor
diabolical. Like all human work, its ultimate value is determined
by the ultimate allegiances of its creators: their piety or impiety
(Markus, 1988:105).
As we shall see, the key word here is ultimate. Augustines
refusal to bless Eusebian political theology is also a refusal to
think apocalyptically, to regard the Roman Empire as a special
instrument either of God or of Satan. The fundamental distinction
runs between two cities, the civitas of God and the civitas of the
Devil. These extend beyond the human community, originating in
the choice of angels to serve or not to serve God. On a human
level, we have Cain (earthly city) and Seth (the heavenly), two
lines which progress through biblical history. The earthly city is
represented in the empires of Assyria and Rome; the Church re
presents the heavenly city ... The two cities were created by two
60 T H E H IS T O R Y

kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching

the point of contempt for God, the heavenly city by the love of
God carried as far as contempt of self. (Bk XIV, 28)
Our temporal history is called the saeculum, in which the two
cities are mixed into one another, until they shall be separated at
the end of time (Bk I, 35). These two cities are eschatological
realities, co-existing in the present saeculum. They do not differ
externally, but only internally, in how they respond to the same
experiences: both feel the same vicissitudes of fortune, good or
bad; but they do so not with the same faith nor the same hope,
not the same love - until they shall be separated in the last
judgement. Christians are therefore exiles, registered aliens,
existing in this disordered world.

For Augustine, the saeculum is a sinister thing. It is a penal

existence, marked by the extremes of misery and suffering,
by suicide, madness, by more diseases than any book of
medicine can include, and by the inexplicable torment of
small children ... Like a top set off balance, it wobbles up
and down without rhyme or reason. (Brown, 1965:11)

Brown goes on to note that there are no verbs of historical

movement in the City of God, no sense of progress to aims that
may be achieved in history. Christians are in the saeculum as a
vast experimental laboratory (the image of the olive press,
squeezing the olives for oil, is used). The earthly city was found
ed by a murderer, and has inherited the sin of Adam. Augustine
famously asks: Set justice aside, and what are kingdoms but
great robberies? (Book IV, 4). Human nature, being fundamen
tally dislocated, cannot sustain moral goals such as justice, and
the earthly city is driven by the desire to dominate:

[T]he outward expression of this lust in the form of

organised states is merely a symptom. The extent and even
the admitted injustice of the state-building that Augustine
observed, and commented on in his blistering terms, was of
purely secondary importance ... so to say, as Lord Acton
would, that all power tends to corrupt, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely, would have struck Augustine as being
 T H E D O C T R IN E O F T H E T W O 61
rather like saying that a man caught measles from having
spots. (Brown, 1965:10)

In his seminal study on Augustines political theology, Markus

agrees with Browns pessimism:

Augustine saw the whole course of history, past, present

and future, as a dramatic conflict of the two cities, that is
to say, in terms of a tension of forces which will appear in
their naked reality beyond temporal history. From this
point of view the sphere in which human kingdoms,
empires and all states have their being is radically ambigu
ous, and all social institutions and human groupings are
radically affected with this ambiguity ... in Augustines
mature thought there is no trace of a theory of the state as
concerned with mans self-fulfilment, perfection, the god
life, felicity, or with educating man towards such pur
poses. Its function is more restricted: it is to cancel out at
least some of the effects of sin.
(Markus, 1988 [1970], 62-3, 94-5)

There is, therefore, a place for an ordered hierarchy of estab

lished power that holds in check the human desire for
domination and vengeance - a pragmatic acceptance of the need
for order in society. Even so, political life is downgraded,
having no straightforward connection to the ultimates of human
destiny. Social institutions meet only limited needs, and have no
immediate relation to perfection or salvation.
Augustine is significant as the only major orthodox figure of
the fourth century who was disturbed by the Eusebian sacralisa
tion of the Empire, rejecting the fundamental assumption that
any slice of secular history, any nation, institution or society,
could have an indispensable place in the historical realisation of
Gods purpose (Markus, 1988:57). The fulfilment promised to
man is revealed as a unique possibility given in Christ and only
achieved in his kingdom: No historical conditions can provide
so much as a shadow of this fulfilment, no historical process can
lead either towards or away from it, so optimism and pessimism
are equally irrelevant.
62 T H E H IS T O R Y

c. Two there are . . . b y which this w orld is ru led

Despite Augustines eschatological vision, his views were used
in the Middle Ages to justify the creation of Christendom, in
which human history was seen as the growing together of the
earthly and heavenly cities. With figures like Otto of Freising in
the twelfth century, and the emperor Frederick Barbarossa,
Christianity and the empire became fused once more; with the
coining of the Holy Roman Empire, protest against
Christendom was left in the hands of fringe groups and protest
groups throughout the Middle Ages.
Pope Gelasius I, writing to the Emperor Anastasius in the
generation after Augustine, reworks the formula of the Two
Cities in a way that is significant, namely as a more general and
ambiguous formula about government.1 The unclarity of this
doctrine of the Two shifts the delicate eschatology of
Augustine, and in the high and late Middle Ages the problem of
the theologico-political is recast as a search for the correct
balance between two legitimate jurisdictions: the consecrated
authority of priests, and royal power. The sense of a qualitative
differentiation between them has been lost. Cavanaugh refers to
a flattening out; the two spheres now struggle with each other
for ascendancy over the one city which is to be ruled, namely
Christendom. Quoting ODonovan, Cavanaugh sees differenti
ation being sacrificed to equilibrium, the two offices turning
into each others shadows (2006:309).
With Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) we see how far the
Augustinian vision has been eclipsed. Gregory worked with a
conception of all rule and authority in terms of service, influ
enced as he was by traditions of monastic life, especially
Benedictine: in this spirit, the tension between the Two Cities
is spiritualised. While Augustine had been arguing against the
fascination of a sacralised Roman conception of the political, by
the time of Gregory, these seductive pagan traditions were sim
ply no longer a viable alternative to the Christian world-view.
The earthly powers have been absorbed into the spiritual
community, and all authority is conceived in religious terms, so
that the term rector could refer both to ruler in the general
sense and to the presider (bishop) over the Christian community.
 T H E D O C T R IN E O F T H E TW O 63

For Gregory I, the principal challenge of political life is to keep

the active and contemplative elements in balance. It is this
simpler, less nuanced vision that proves to be more acceptable
and more enduring than the complexity of Augustines careful
synthesis.

d. The suprem acy o f spiritu al authority

Several centuries later, the eschatological tension is revived
once more, with Pope Gregory VII (1020/1025-85) and his
definitive assertion of spiritual authority as supreme over the
secular powers. The high ideals of monasticism give a reform
ing spiritual energy to these claims, so that by the time of the
Investiture Crisis in the eleventh century we have, as it were, an
arm-wrestling contest between imperial power with its toady
ing bishops, or a papacy influenced by the monastic model of
strict religious separation from the world (Ozment: 1980:141).
ODonovan senses in Gregorys reforming energy a renewed
eschatological edge: a recovery of the patristic sense of conflict
with the supernatural powers, which depreciates the secular
political order and reinforces its subordination (1996:205).
The Investiture Controversy is most dramatically represented
by the stand-off between Gregory and the German emperor
Henry IV over the existence of mutual privileges of appointment
and legitimation. The attempt by Gregory and the Reformers to
rescind secular involvement in church appointments led to
mutual dethronings of Pope and Emperor in 1075/6, and a
conflict which saw the Emperor excommunicated twice and
Gregory eventually deposed and exiled from Rome in 1085.
Resolution of the controversy does not come into view until the
Concordat of Worms in 1122, by which date the political theo
logical landscape, not least in Germany, had been altered out of
all recognition.
Predominant in the Gregorian reform is a break with the early
medieval search for equilibrium and a new assertion of the
priority of the spiritual. The Church was founded by God alone,
therefore the papacy was the sole universal power, entrusted
with the task of embracing all humanity in a single society, with
divine will the only law. The pope, as head of the Church, was
vice-regent of God on earth, and disobedience towards him
64 T H E H IS T O R Y

implied disobedience to God and a defection from Christianity.

In the two centuries following the investiture crisis we see the
persistent assertion of the uncompromising claim for papal
authority which so scandalised Martin Luther. Gregory repre
sents the high water mark, along with Innocent III (1198-1216),
who effectively proclaims a theocracy by which popes and kings
are related as sun and moon; and by Boniface VIII
(1294-1303), whose bull XJnam sanctam asserted the subjection
of the secular to the spiritual power. Innocent puts it thus:

You see then who is this servant set over the household,
truly the vicar of Jesus Christ, successor of Peter, anointed
of the Lord, a God of Pharoah, set between God and man,
lower than God but higher than man, who judges all and is
to be judged by no one.

It may be assumed that many of the problems that afflicted the

popes in subsequent centuries stemmed from their trying to
assert this high ideal in increasingly hostile and unrealistic cir
cumstances. ODonovan offers a relatively benign reading:
indeed, Gregorys papal apologetic marks the beginning of what
he terms the High Tradition of political theology. At its best,
the reforming papal arguments appeal to a vision of a universal
jurisdiction bringing order to the jungle of competing claims
and interests, something like the United Nations (ODonovan,
1996:206). Without the explicit guidance, involvement and
legitimation of sacred leaders (that is, the pope), the struggling
new order of fractious kings and barons is only sheer conflict
and brute force, incapable of providing justice. That is, it lacks
true political authority.

From Investiture to the Conciliar Movement

In fact the power struggle between the papacy and secular rulers,
which is graphically symbolised in the stand-off at the
Investiture Controversy, should be seen as one of two versions
or expressions of the same late medieval controversy in the late
Middle Ages. The fifteenth-century Conciliarist crisis, arising
from the competing claims of multiple popes, addresses from
T H E D O C T R IN E O F T H E TW O 65

within the Church those issues of authority which had up to then

been pressed from outside, that is, from secular rulers. In each
case we can speak tentatively of two ways of justifying authority
from top down to bottom up.2
Regarding popes versus princes: papal pre-eminence was
justified from three sources: scripture (Matthew 16:19, Christs
commission to Peter); a patristic and Augustinian theological
tradition which saw the political community as secondary and
artificial; thirdly, from historical precedents of princely submis
sion (including a fraudulent document from the ninth century,
entitled the Donation o f Constantine). From the other side, argu
ments in favour of secular autonomy are likewise marshalled
from the New Testament (Romans 13 and Luke 20.25, Give
unto Caesar), as well as from traditions of Roman law, freshly
retrieved in the twelfth century, and, from around 1260, the
works of Aristotle, especially the Politics. Here was a tradition
that saw political communities as part of the natural order of
things, and not of a sinful world after the Fall.
Each side had its extreme positions. Giles of Rome is the
extreme apologist for papal power. Marsilius of Padua, whose
account of power devolving directly from God to the people,
who then empowered both king and pope, anticipates some
aspects of the Reformation, and would be as good a patron of
the position usually referred to as Erastian. Between these
extremes, John of Paris and Thomas Aquinas represent moder
ate positions, which attempted to see the tension in terms of
equilibrium between parallel jurisdictions: this middle ground
was more theoretical than actual, however, and under pressure,
John tilted towards royal power, Aquinas in favour of the
papal/ecclesiastical:

The ecclesiopolitical history of the Middle Ages was never

marked by true equilibrium; temporal and spiritual power
struggled for dominance within Christian Europe in a con
test secular rulers won decisively both in theory and in fact
by the eve of the Reformation. (Ozment, 1980:178)

The Conciliarist crisis replays these issues in a debate that is

internal to the church but with considerable ramifications
66 T H E H IS T O R Y

beyond it. The Council of Constance (1414-17) brought to an

end a thirty-six year long schism, which at its darkest point saw
three rival claimants to the throne of Peter. The need to adjudi
cate between them makes this a period of rich juridical and
theological reflection upon the nature of both ecclesial and,
inevitably, political power. This has meant that this short-lived
conciliar experiment and the Councils decree Sacrosancta
(1415) have been given an enormous, if perhaps exaggerated,
significance:

Probably the most revolutionary official document in the

history of the world is the decree of the Council of
Constance asserting its superiority to the pope, and striving
to turn into a tepid constitutionalism the divine authority of
a thousand years. (Figgis, 1931:32)

Sacrosancta is seen to be the religious equivalent of the Magna

Carta, a classic defence of the rights of the privileged many
against the claims of the one (Ozment, 1980:157). The enor
mity of the stakes is conveyed by Ozments comparison:
deposing a pope is like executing a king. The procedure was
psychologically and legally difficult, and conciliarist supporters
delayed over it as long as possible. In this interval, as stated,
considerable intellectual work was done, with the resources of
Aristotle to the fore, above all the principle of epikeia, or equity,
requiring that universal laws had to be adjusted to particular
circumstances. On these grounds, the deposition of a pope by a
council becomes both conceivable and justifiable. Though the
council itself was more cautious than Figgisjudgement implies,
its implications were taken up by the Reformers, not least
Calvinists articulating a right of resistance against unjust
rulers: if a council had the power to depose a pope for the sake
of the well-being of the larger community, then the same
arguments applied to the removal of political tyrants.
Finally, mention should be made of a classic and ground
breaking attempt to formulate a doctrine of the two, namely
Ernst Kantorowiczs, The King s Two Bodies (1957), a book that
would be the guide for generations of scholars through the
arcane mysteries of medieval political theology ... a wonder
 T H E D O C T R IN E O F T H E T W O 67

fully exciting and constantly rewarding book: thus writes

W. C. Jordan in his introduction to the 1997 anniversary edition
(p. xv). In his own words, Kantorowiczs study

deals with certain cyphers of the sovereign state and its

perpetuity (Crown, Dignity, Patria and others) exclusively
from the point of view of presenting political creeds such
as they were understood in their initial stage and at a time
when they served as a vehicle for putting the early modem
commonwealths on their own feet.
(Kantorowicz, 1997:xix)

The particular cypher that interests him is a mystic fiction, the

fiction of the Kings Two Bodies, its transformations, implica
tions and radiations (ibid). Kantorowicz works back from this
metaphor in Tudor political doctrine in order to reconstruct its
unknown medieval precedents: kingship is seen to be centred
variously on Christ, law, polity, or man (as in Dantes treatise on
Monarchy). Apart from the inherent value of this historical
study, Kantorowiczs investigation of political mysticism pro
vides an interesting counterpart to his German contemporary,
Carl Schmitt, whose political theology, as we have seen, is not
free of mythological content.

Augustine and Aquinas

ODonovans six-point scheme covers a range of different
expressions of the Christian faith, veering from a triumphalism
which eclipses the secular order altogether, to an accommoda
tion between the secular and religious powers which sees them
in fragile equilibrium, to different versions of reform which
insist on the primacy of the spiritual once again, followed by an
attempt to restore the balance once more.
Among these vicissitudes, we need to examine what is some
times presented as a kind of showdown between two great
political-theological traditions. The theology of Thomas
Aquinas is alleged to fit into the optimistic theonomous tradi
tion, of participatory reflection upon God as Intelligence and
Love; as humanitys common good (for a summary of this
68 T H E H IS T O R Y

argument, see Tracy, 1994). The Augustinian tradition, by con

trast, refuses this hopefulness for a decidedly more pessimistic
take on how sinful humanity stands before God. In each case the
consequences are felt in terms of what kind of political order
can be built on their respective foundations - Covenant and
Leviathan, once again. We need to proceed very carefully, as it
is nearly impossible to say anything that is not a distorting
caricature, particularly where Augustine is concerned. But pro
vided we recognise that these are very broad brushstrokes, I will
attempt to set out the parameters.
In broad terms, the story runs as follows. The great classical
heritage of political reflection (comprising Plato, Aristotle and
the Stoics) was eclipsed during the early centuries of the
Christian era, for the reasons we saw in chapter 3, so that
religious-political questions came to be resourced directly from
scripture and the Christian tradition. Augustines synthesis in
The City o f God is a clear high point, whose remarkable fruit
fulness, even today, makes him the godfather of Christian
political theology. Nevertheless, his synthesis was not main
tained: less nuanced versions of the theology of the Two came
into play, so that political theology became largely a question of
negotiating the correct balance between the spiritual and
secular realms.
Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224-74) frames the theologico-
political with the help of Aristotle, though it may be important
to note with contemporary scholars (Bauerschmidt, 2004) that
discussion of, for example, natural law and virtue in Aquinas
should never be divorced from their theological context.
Thomas appropriation of the Philosopher runs contrary to the
neoplatonist Augustinian tradition, which for the most part saw
earthly politics as a regrettable and squalid business, at best a
necessary evil, but a product of the Fall and inevitably tied up
with the sinful condition of humankind (Dyson, 2002:xxiv).
This theocratic tradition held that a complete submission of
earthly princes to the spiritual powers was the only way forward
for humanity, a view reinforced by the Investiture Crisis, and
summed up for Dyson by the Augustinian assertion that [t]rue
justice, however, does not exist other than in that commonwealth
whose founder and ruler is Christ. (City o f God: 2.21).
 T H E D O C T R IN E O F T H E TW O 69

Thomas appropriation of the Politics and Nicomachean

Ethics, always controlled by scriptural and theological tradition,
lays the foundations for a milder and more optimistic political
theory (Dyson, xxv). Where Augustine saw the individual faced
with a choice between two loves and two cities, St Thomas sees
no irreconcilable tension between the pursuit of earthly and eter
nal goods: he agrees with Aristotle, that man is by nature a
political animal (Summa Theologiae, la 96:4). There is here a
new confidence in political society and justice as natural
qualities and possibilities, which do not, after all, need to be
underwritten by the pope (as the papal apologists had been
arguing). And political society begins to look like something a
bit more respectable than the thinly-legitimised banditry scoffed
at by Augustine in The City o f God? Government is not
ordained to do little more than hold the lid on human destruc
tiveness by force and fear. It is a benevolent administration
suited to the kind of sociable and co-operating creature that man
is by nature (xxvi). The end of political activity is virtue and
happiness, not the suppression of rebellion. Dyson points out
that Thomas position is less explicitly set out, as he is never
called upon to explicate his view in the way that Augustine was,
in response to the crisis of 410. Thomas seems to be firmly
within the mainstream of tradition, which acknowledges that
spiritual and secular powers are both derived from Divine power,
but in those things which pertain to the civil good, the secular
power should be obeyed before the spiritual, according to
Matthew 22.21.4 This leads to differences of emphasis from
Augustine (though never explicit disagreement) on matters such
as resistance of tyrants, private property and analysis of law
(xxix-xxxv).
R. W. Dyson depicts a strong contrast between the two theo
logians: it is at least arguable that he overstates the case, but if
so he is far from being alone. The view that Augustines
pessimism infected his thinking about the political is fairly
widespread; put bluntly, he does not believe in the capacity of
human beings to establish a decent society for themselves. The
earthly city is marked by sin, that is, the denial of God and
others, in favour of self-love and self-assertion, of dominium as
an end in itself. Augustine denies the viability of a res publica
70 T H E H IS T O R Y

or commonwealth, since human beings are unable to achieve

true unity by agreeing on the things they love ultimately. The
fulfilment offered by the earthly city can only be intermediate or
provisional, a view that makes for a political vacuum. To use
Moltmanns terms, it seems Augustine belongs firmly in the
Leviathan rather than the Covenant camp. Once again, we
have politics understood as katechon, as restraint of social
chaos. And the disturbing outcome of this view, it is alleged, is
the ease with which Augustine was able to justify coercive
measures against the Donatist schismatics, leading to the
accusation that he is first theologian of the Inquisition.
As suggested above, Thomas Aquinas seems to speak in a
different tone of voice, though his questions are much the same.
His treatise on law and political theory (Summa Theologicae
vol. 28:1a, 2ae, 90-9) investigates political authority, and the
recognition that we are obliged to obey just rulers: what are the
roots of this obligation? By what warrant does a legislator bind
the consciences of men? Suffice to say that Thomas answer is
different from a Hobbesian or Leviathan view; rather, human
government is based on a premise of harmony rather than con
flict - a belief that all can achieve complete freedom. With
Aristotle, Aquinas holds human beings to be social by nature,
drawn into the common good, which is God, by the beauty of
order (1.96.3 ad.3). Thus we might say that, on the level of
human community, the common good is the good of ordered
common life itself, a goodness that is a participation in the
goodness of God (Bauerschmidt, 2004:56).
We need to be very careful about buying too readily into the
caricature of Augustine as a deeply pessimistic thinker - and by
the same token, building up the optimistic rationality of the
Thomist position. As we have seen in chapter 4, the Greek ideal
of the polis was already losing its hold on the classical imagina
tion at the time of Augustines writing The City o f God. The
problem now was how to govern an empire, rather than a polis,
and scepticism towards the Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic
ideals had come to be a widespread, not just a Christian trait.
Jean Bethke Elshtain argues for a clear distinction between
scepticism (which Augustine shared with many of his contem
poraries, though his own version was theologically grounded),
 T H E D O C T R IN E O F T H E T W O 71
and the pessimism of which he is often accused, as we have
seen. She warns us that the view of Augustine as a political
realist, scathingly dismissive of the political order, is too easily
gleaned by narrowly selective excerpts from The City o f God -
what she describes as Augustine Lite (Elshtain, 2004:35). Far
from his views representing a pessimistic realpolitik, they
advocate a high ideal of human social life. Augustines criticism
of the Roman commonwealths falling short of this ideal should
not be read as a dismissal of all human attempts to live socially:
Elshtain cites Rowan Williams to the effect that Augustines
condemnation of public life in the classical world is, con
sistently, that it is not public enough (Williams, 1987:68).
We may note once again the central importance of
Augustines refusal to absolutise any specific political regime.
Elshtain and Markus each recognise that this is what makes
Augustine so contemporary with us, after the collapse in our
own time of various forms of political utopianism. These fiascos
are invariably established on mistaken assumptions about
human malleability and potential. Given such nightmarish dis
tortions, perhaps it is the optimistic doctrine of Aquinas which
comes under the closest scrutiny: how does a Thomist work out
a system of government which will realise, in fact, the theoreti
cal harmony between law and freedom? For Augustines part, it
is important that he be rescued from those who wish to enlist
him on the side of political realism or limitation. This would
be to ignore his positive contribution concerning hope and
caritas: he can never be enlisted on behalf of the depredators of
mankind (Elshtain, 2004:47).
Chapter 5

'A STORM Y PILGRIMAGE'

Political Theologies o f the Reformation

Endings - things falling apart - are usually a lot easier to trace

than origins. Early modernity, coinciding with the end of the
High Tradition of political theology, can be identified by some
of the key markers of the collapse of Christendom, such as the
end of the Thirty Years War (specifically the Treaty of
Westphalia, 1648), and the publication of Hobbes Leviathan
(1651). Westphalia marks the end of the Wars of Religion, and
the enshrinement of the doctrine of cuius regio eius religio
(religion according to the ruler of the territory), the formula
that announces the pre-eminence of the secular authorities in
matters of religion. Thomas Hobbes is generally regarded as the
father of modem secular political theory, and the justification of
secular authority we find in Leviathan parallels and reinforces
the important shifts symbolised by the Westphalian doctrine.
Making sense of the two centuries that precede this event and
this publication is harder work; this chapter can do little more
than note the principal figures and influences. Even so, there is
inevitably a high degree of selection, with scant room for impor
tant figures such as John Wyclif, Jan Huss, Niccolo Machiavelli,
Desiderius Erasmus or Thomas More. I will dwell instead on
three thinkers whose achievement is especially important or
representative. Scholars speak of a mainstream reformed tradi
tion of magisterial reformers, so-called because they depended
upon the support (i.e. the coercive power) of the magistrate or
civil authority to carry out their reforms. This group includes
Martin Luther, Zwingli, John Calvin, and Thomas Cranmer. The
A S T O R M Y P I L G R I M A G E 73

more radical reformers rejected this alliance, however, and in

doing so left behind the notion of Christendom as a unitary
society, comprising a balance of secular and spiritual authori
ties. The key strands here are Thomas Mntzer and the
Anabaptist traditions. So an overview of key themes as they are
played out in the thought of Luther, Calvin and Mntzer will
open this chapter.
I will then examine W. T. Cavanaughs revision of this history,
which he undertakes as part of his critique of political liberal
ism. Cavanaugh seeks to construct a political theology that takes
seriously those ecclesiological and liturgical dimensions neg
lected or downplayed since the post-Westphalian collapse of
Christendom. In order to do this, a dramatic reconsideration of
the origins and function of the modem state is needed - which
turns out to have significant implications for contemporary
political theology.

The Magisterial Reformers: Luther and Calvin

We begin with the mainstream or magisterial reformers, who
accepted the necessity of the civil powers, though this does not
mean they were of one mind as to how civil and spiritual powers
should collaborate. The two distinct theological understandings
of the political which open up within the mainstream Protestant
Reformation in fact diverge on this issue: the Two Kingdoms
doctrine of Martin Luther, and the Reformed (Calvinist)
doctrine of the Lordship of Christ.
Martin Luthers political theology is only comprehensible in
terms of his devastating experience of the justice of God, as
prefigured by Paul and Augustine. Luthers proclamation of the
individuals fundamental and unmediated relation before God
both challenges the Churchs claim to be a mediator of salvation,
and leans in the direction of modem ideas of individualism and
modem democracy. He takes up the baton of articulating what
we have been referring to as the Doctrine of the Two (Two
there are, by which this world is mied). Luthers championing
of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers is a refutation
of the medieval Catholic notion of separate compartments, the
spiritual and secular estates: [a]ll Christians are tmly of the
74 T H E H IS T O R Y

spiritual estate, and there is no difference between them except

that of function.1 Equally unacceptable is the subordination of
the secular to the temporal, specifically in the assertion of papal
supremacy over the temporal powers.
Luthers theory of the Two Kingdoms or Two Govern
ments in Temporal Authority gives an alternative to the two
estates theory. Like Augustine, Luther finds himself arguing in
two directions at once: he also needs to refute the religious
separatism of the Anabaptists, whose refusal to recognise or take
part in the coercive power of the state was, of course, a flat
denial of the states divine origin. Given these tensions, Luther
addresses fundamental questions. What is the purpose and task
of secular authority? What are its proper limits, and how should
it relate to the spiritual? How should Christians exercise secular
authority if and when they are called to do so?
His answer, directed against the Anabaptist rejection of the
secular powers, is framed by Romans 13:1-7, and by 1 Peter
2:13-14: Be subject to every human institution for the Lords
sake, whether it be to the king as supreme to governors as sent
by him for the punishment of evildoers and the approval of those
who do good. The Two Kingdoms position runs as follows:

For God has established two kinds of government among

men. The one is spiritual; it has no sword, but it has the
word, by means of which men are to become good and
righteous, so that with this righteousness they may attain
eternal life. He administers this righteousness through the
word, which he has committed to the preachers. The other
kind is worldly government, which works through the
sword so that those who do not want to be good and right
eous to eternal life may be forced to become good and
righteous in the eyes of the world. He administers this
righteousness through the sword.

There is no uniform doctrine of the Two Kingdoms; even today

the notion is used to justify quite varied political options.
Stephenson (1981) suggests there is often a conflation of two
distinct theories or assertions: firstly, the Augustinian doctrine
of the Two Cities, intermingled in the present age like mouse
A S T O R M Y P I L G R I M A G E 75

droppings among the peppercorns, tares among the grain;

secondly, an assertion about Gods sovereignty in the world,
operating in two distinct ways or orders of government: through
the spiritual and secular authorities. Luthers so-called
doctrine of the two kingdoms is in fact a pragmatic combination
of these two conceptual pairs, the first of contrasts and the
second of correlates ... it could be used as a kind of conceptual
clotheshorse on which to spread out the whole of his theology
(Stephenson, 1981:322-3). So if we emphasise the eschatologi
cal antagonistic dualism of the first assertion, then the term two
kingdoms is usually preferred. If we are discussing the inter
related nature or method of Gods activity, then reference to two
governments (Zwei-Regiment-Lehre) is more common.
As is largely recognised, the inherent dualism of the anthrop
ology of the Two Kingdoms and the two regiments eventually
takes its toll. Martin Luther sees the spiritual regiment as
concerned with the soul and the inner person, and the worldly
regiment concerned with the body, external goods, and relation
ships in the world. Jrgen Moltmann points out how an
inversion of this doctrine becomes an affirmation of the
Protestant world, with an understanding of Church and State as
distinct and separate dimensions of the world, as well as a
separation of private and public, or inner and outer. With that,
faith was made world-less and the world was made faith-less.
God became unreal and reality God-less. The world was left to
unfaith, and faith retired into the shell of the introspection of the
pious soul (Moltmann, 1989:75).
The inherent danger and instability of the Two Kingdoms
position is that a separation of the two realms, the religious and
the political, results too easily in an other-worldly form of piety
on the one hand, and an unbridled and unaccountable national
ism on the other. McGrath notes: The way was opened to the
eventual domination of the church by the state which was to
become a virtually universal feature of Lutheranism. Above all,
Luthers scheme (unlike Augustines) does not allow for a
Christian critique of structural injustice, specifically for any
kind of effective resistance to tyranny or unjust governance - a
weakness the twentieth-century consequences of which are all
too evident. Stephenson commends the doctrine of the Two
76 T H E H IS T O R Y

Kingdoms as a salutary antidote to the idolatry of enthusiasm

which would identify law and gospel, summoning heaven
to earth and producing hell (1981:337). More generally, how
ever, commentators see Luthers opinions on allegiance and
resistance as pragmatically or even opportunistically motivated.
The other pole of mainline Protestant thought is the
Reformed teaching that the Lordship of Christ permeates
every aspect of life, and therefore demands of the Christian an
unconditional discipleship. John Calvin writes as a second-
generation reformer, when the Protestants themselves are
breaking up into sectarian factions, and when the Catholic ref
ormation is also under way. He has therefore to differentiate his
position from the extreme millenarianism of groups like the
Anabaptists, whose anarchy provoked fear in Lutheran and
Catholic alike.
Calvins position is set out in the Institutes o f the Christian
Religion, Bk IV ch 20: On Civil Government; only in this final
section does he speak of the scope and nature of the civil
political. He reinforces the understanding of the two kingdoms
as distinct, but acknowledges the dangers of anarchy and abso
lutism if the affairs of the state are divorced completely from
those of religion.

The end of secular government, however, while we remain

in this world, is to foster and protect the external worship
of God, defend pure doctrine and the good condition of the
Church, accommodate the ways we live to [the require
ments of) human society, mould our conduct to civil
justice, reconcile us to one another, and uphold and defend
the common peace and tranquillity, (para 2)

The Reformed Church developed in city-states, such as Zurich

and Geneva, which already had democratic forms of citizenship
(in contrast to Lutheran origins in the principalities). The
Christian city was already much more a fusion of faith and
politics, and there is not such a strong divide between human
and divine justice; Calvin wants to explore the relation between
them, rather than stress their distinction. Even in politics, there
is a personal call to the discipleship of Christ: According to the
A S T O R M Y P I L G R I M A G E 77

Reformed view, the Christian does not live in two different

worlds; he or she lives in the one encompassing lordship of
Christ in the various relationships of this world (Moltmann,
1989:81). In addition, where Martin Luther had expounded the
doctrine of the general priesthood of all believers in opposition
to the clerical tyranny of Rome, the Reformed recovery of the
language of covenant and the general kingship of all believers
were articulated in the face of the danger posed by political, not
ecclesial, tyrants.
Calvin was the least orginal of the main Reformers, yet pro
vided the Reformations most eloquent theological statement:
the Institutes-, and its most disciplined institutional form: the
Genevan church (Ozment: 1980:372). His lasting achievements
are well-recorded, especially the coherence of Calvinist doctrine
with modem capitalist economic developments: Max Webers
familiar account of capitalisms indebtedness to the doctrine of
predestination as an incentive to strive for signs of Gods favour
in the economic sphere. It is probably fair to say that this was a
grudging adjustment to sixteenth-century realities, rather than
inherent to Calvinism. A similar point applies to the right of
resistance which is associated with Calvinist thought, but may
owe more to historical circumstances. Regarding Moltmanns
distinction of Covenant versus Leviathan (chapter 2): the
development of a Covenant theology arises from the vulnera
bility of French Calvinists during the Wars of Religion; other
scholars argue for a Lutheran rather than Calvinist provenance
of the doctrine, however. More evident is Calvins preference for
collegiality over singularity, which lends itself to the
Covenant model; his positive attempt to construct a new society
on Christian principles is most clearly inspirational for those
who constructed one nation under God in the New World.
In some respects, Calvins position is intermediate between
that of Luther and a radical reformer like Miintzer: Calvin
clearly believed (with Luther) in the importance of order and
good governance, but (unlike Luther) saw Church and state
as equal partners in a complementary work, namely good
government according to scriptural norms. For Calvin, then,
politics was important and not secondary in Gods pecking order
to so-called purely spiritual matters (Bradstock, 2004:73). At
78 T H E H IS T O R Y

the same time, as with Luther, his is a theology of restraint;

Harro Hopfl sums up the differences thus:

Fallen humanity is constitutionally prone to wickedness,

for which Calvin had a wide range of terms which modem
English cannot match; the passions in each man are con
ceived by Calvin to resemble a boliling cauldron or a
smouldering fire. Where there is no external restraint (as is
notably the case with kings), the fire breaks out and
rages (to use Calvins and Luthers favourite terms for the
conduct of the wicked and tyrants). The imposition of a
bridle or brake is therefore indispensible. But restrain
ing is not enough: for there is Gods work to be done, and
people must be directed to it. So that, whereas Luthers
metaphor for the polity is the sword, Calvins is the
school or the bridle: the twofold government imposes
discipline, direction and restraint together.
(Hopfl 1991:xxiii)

A Stormy Pilgrimage: Thomas Miintzer and the

Radical Reform
It is this concern for restraint that distinguishes Luther and
Calvin from the radical reformers, who are often loosely and
probably not very acurately grouped together as Anabaptists.
For many critics, Luthers hardening against any support for the
peasants meant a narrowing of the social promise of the
Reformation: his writings on freedom and religious equality
were taken up by desperate people and applied to broad-based
social and religious demands, going well beyond what he en
visaged, forcing him to distance himself. And yet the logic of the
radical reform position is that taking seriously the grievances of
the peasants (which even Luther himself tried to do), could only
entail a radical community of goods, and an acceptance of the
provisionality of private property (the greatest enemy of love).
Not reform, but a radical reconstruction of the Church along
New Testament lines was called for, as well as a pacifist and
separatist break with the Churchs Constantinian past. The
political implications are summed up in the insistence on ex
A S T O R M Y P I L G R I M A G E 79

clusively adult baptism, a practice which would undermine the

concept of a national Church, and was therefore resisted
ferociously by the authorities.
The radical left reformers are of perennial interest. This has
much to do, perhaps, with the thesis of the nineteenth-century
historian Ernst Troeltsch, in Protestantism and Progress, that
the Anabaptists, spiritualists and others were the modem and
progressive wing of the Reformation, and therefore politically
more significant than mainstream reformers. The thesis can take
several forms: modern and progressive here can mean that they
are precursors of liberal democracy, human rights advocacy,
religious tolerance, and so on; or, more radically, that they are
harbingers of modem socialist or communist awareness and
commitment. Mennonite scholars (heirs to the Anabaptist
tradtion) and Marxist historians have been most favourable to
the nonconformists of the sixteenth century, and there is much
here that is of interest, though two dangers need to be re
cognised: a romantic exaggeration of their influence, and an
appropriation of their beliefs and actions for nationalist or ideo
logical purposes.
A good case study here is Thomas Mntzer, 1489/90-1525,
though his fomenting of violent revolt clearly places him outside
of the Anabaptist tradition. Under Luthers influence during his
three years at Wittenberg, he moved to a more radical position
which recognised scriptural warrant for rebellion in certain cir
cumstances. His thinking was rooted in a mystical spirituality,
which in a way reads Matthews parable of the wheatfield in
precise opposition to Augustine. A Two Cities model calls for
the wheat and tares to grow together until the harvest time;
Mntzer, on the other hand, saw the urgency of uprooting the
weeds, of all that is inauthentic and sinful in the individual
human soul. His political theology emerges from the conviction
that this must be an outer as well as inner cleansing: godless
leaders and false teachers, all who hinder the people of God
from reaching perfection, must be ruthlessly purged (Bradstock,
2004:67). Another clear difference from Luther is that Mntzer
expected the civil authorities to assist positively in the process
of transformation, and not merely provide the peaceful
conditions for it by protecting the godly from wrongdoers.
80 T H E H IS T O R Y

Here is a difference of emphasis in reading Romans 13

(Luther stresses verse 1: Be submissive to the authorities;
Mntzer is looking at verse 3, which speaks of the positive
responsibilities of those authorities). He reads Romans 13
alongside the Book of Daniel: in the Sermon which Mntzer
allegedly delivered to Duke John of Saxony and his advisors in
Allstedt in July 1524, he presents himself as the new Daniel,
interpreting the dreams of the princes to them (see Daniel 2), in
order to bring about a reconciliation between the wrath of the
princes and the rage of the people. Mntzer understood the
fifth and final worldly kingdom of the vision to be the Holy
Roman Empire, and explicitly ascribes to the Princes an active
involvement in this purification, not the passive role advocated
by Brother Soft-Life (Martin Luther) and his followers:

For they have made such a fool of you that everyone swears
by the saints that in their official capacity princes are just
pagans, that all they have to do is to maintain civic order ...
as Christ says in Matthew 10: I am not come to send
peace, but the sword. But what is one to do with the
sword? Exactly this: sweep aside those evil men who
obstruct the gospel! Take them out of circulation! ...
The tares have to be torn out of the vineyard of God at
harvest-time.

Convinced of the apocalyptic inevitability of conflict, and that

Gods harvest-time had arrived, Mntzer led a group of about
eight thousand peasants at the battle of Frankenhausen, on 15
May 1525; a definitive struggle which would clear the way for
the Kingdom of God. The rebel forces were comprehensively
defeated, and Mntzer was captured and tortured, before recant
ing his views and being reconciled to the Roman Catholic
Church. He was beheaded in Mhlhausen on 27 May, 1525.
For most scholars, Thomas Mntzer was a short-lived radical;
there is little in his ideas about the form society will take in the
new age, beyond a call to hold all things in common, and
distribution of goods according to need. It is interesting to note
how his example was adopted by socialists, such as Friedrich
Engels, as a symbol of early class struggle. The most interesting
A S T O R M Y P I L G R I M A G E 81

study for us, however, comes from Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), an

important figure for twentieth-century political theology, since
his monumental work The Principle o f Hope profoundly influ
enced Johann Baptist Metz, Jrgen Moltmann and the liberation
theologian Gustavo Gutirrez. In one of his earlier works, writ
ten in 1921, some of Blochs main hypotheses concerning
messianic hope are tested out on a historical case study entitled
Thomas Miintzer, Theologian o f the Reformation f
So how does Bloch read Miintzer? Firstly, he gives a sum
mary of the Reformers life and then an analysis of his theology
and preaching, in comparison with the alternative theologies of
his day. Bloch chastises Luther for his secret Manicheesm, and
for his justification of the atrocious treatment of the peasants,
which amounts to a Tyrannophilie (love of tyranny). By con
trast, Bloch sees in Mntzers experience a phenomenology of
God-preparation (Gottbereitung), an explosive combination of
the German mystical tradition with the Reformation rediscovery
of the Word of God, that went beyond even the radicality of
Luthers comparatively secure experience of grace. The indi
viduals state of abandonment anticipates Kierkegaard: the
souls abyss is finally made perfectly empty, and man, in the
quietest and most profound abandonment and detachment,
becomes at last aware of Gods word(Bloch, 1969 [1921]: 189).
Mntzer is describing a universal human experience, a
stretching towards the future. Bloch seeks to connect, perhaps
better, re-connect, a religious striving for the divine with that
structure of human self-understanding which we find in
Romanticism and elsewhere. The final section of the Mntzer
study is entitled The Absolute Man: or the way of the
Breakthrough, and sets out envisaging a miracle ( Wunder) of
entry into a new world, in which the relations of lordship and
slave are reversed:

To this world of faith rises the smoke of the pure dawn of

the Apocalypse, and precisely in the Apocalypse it gains its
final criterion, the metapolitical, indeed metareligious
Principle of all revolution: the beginning of the freedom of
the children of God. (Bloch, 1969 [1921]:210)
82 T H E H IS T O R Y

This is of course very strange language for a Marxist to use! For

Roberts, this is why it is not a good idea to regard Bloch as
primarily a Marxist thinker: he argues that in important passages
of The Principle o f Hope Marxism is rhetorically present but in
substantial terms predominantly supportive, even marginal
(Roberts, 1990:16). What Ernst Bloch is working toward is a
positive recovery of the divine in the human, rather than the
negative and exclusionary view of God as illusory projection
asserted by orthodox Marxism. The study of Thomas Mntzer
prefigures The Principle o f Hope and its attempted fusion of
Marxism and universal (including spiritual) culture. It is pre
cisely this idea of a joint campaign between Marxism and the
religious dreamers of history which is suppressed in the icy chill
of orthodox Marxism. Nevertheless, this utopian, anticipatory
spirit - an inheritance both Western and universal - animates the
whole of Blochs project; and Thomas Mntzer, the proto
typical religious man, is one of its heralds:

High above the ruins and fractured spheres of the culture of

this world the spirit of unobstructed Utopia shines in, certain
of its centre only ... in the house of the absolute appearance
of ourselves. In this way at last Marxism and the dream of
the undetermined join forces in an identical campaign; that
is as the driving force of the end which brings to an end the
voyage of the whole world around us, in which man is an
oppressed, a despised and lost being; as reconstruction of the
planet earth and all creation, the forced entry of the king
dom: Mntzer with all the Chiliasts remains the one who
summons us to this stormy pilgrimage.3

William Cavanaugh: A Fire to Consume the

House
The Two Kingdoms doctrine (Luther), the confession of the
Lordship of Christ (Calvin), and the proclamation of apoca
lyptic hope (Mntzer), are three distinctive responses to the
convulsions that accompanied the death throes of Christendom
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Which, if any, of these
three extraordinary figures holds the key which will help us
A S T O R M Y P I L G R I M A G E 83

solve the conundrum of the doctrine of the Two?

Each of these traditions has been called upon, four hundred
years later, to resource Christian reflection in a very different
situation of collapse and crisis. In his commentaries on Luther
and Calvin, Moltmann spells out the inadequacy of the vision of
these magisterial reformers in the face of the Nazi Leviathan.
Similarly, Blochs vision of an anti-fascist alliance between
Marxism and the religious dreamers of history, such as Miintzer,
failed to materialise. And yet, as we shall see in chapters 8 and
9, it is Blochs project which has intrigued comtemporary
political theologians such as Moltmann and Metz - at the same
time, such a project is the nightmare of secularist thinkers who
believe in the Great Separation.
By way of polemical conclusion to this chapter, I will refer to
an important if provocative essay by W.T. Cavanaugh that offers
a rereading of the history which we have just been consider
ing.4 As even the distinction between magisterial and radical
Reformers makes clear, there was no single response to the
challenge of how to relate Church and State under the new con
ditions of early modernity. During this period of immense
political and social instability, the overriding concern is the
Christian use of the coercive power of the State. The accept
ability of calling upon the secular authorities is what distin
guishes the magisterial and radical Reformers: but we should be
clear that in both cases there has been a break with the tradi
tional concept of Christendom as an all-encompassing, unitary
society (ODonovan), even if the break is more defined with the
extreme position of Thomas Miintzer et al. The exact nature of
the interplay of temporal and spiritual authorities is now up for
debate.
Cavanaugh takes up this history in order to set up a critique
of political liberalism, and to demonstrate why certain patterns
of thinking about political theology are misguided insofar as
they follow liberal assumptions about the State and about
religion. His concern arises from the way we apply a certain
double standard to the question of violence; our revulsion
towards killing in the name of religion is used to legitimise
transfer of our ultimate loyalty to the state, the violence of
which is never scrutinised in quite the same way. This is
84 T H E H IS T O R Y

because, according to its own official history, modem liberal

ism originated in the need to overcome the religious enmity of
the early modem period; specifically the so-called Wars of
Religion which afflicted Europe from roughly 1550 to 1648.
The liberal story is that liberal principles and a secularised
public discourse developed as the only alternative to societies
being tom apart by religious factionalism. The modem secular
state arose precisely as a peacekeeper between warring factions;
or, a more patronising description, the State stepped in like a
scolding schoolmaster on the playground of doctrinal dispute to
put fanatical religionists in their proper place (Cavanaugh,
1995:408).
Let me remark, in passing, on a remarkable similarity:
between Cavanaughs accusation of our double standards regard
ing violence, and the same accusation made against Luther
regarding the Peasant Wars. As we have seen, Luther judged the
princes violent suppression of the revolt to be legitimate, while
under no circumstances could he approve of the peasants
rebellion, however just their grievances might have been.
Cavanaugh challenges the official history by suggesting that
it has the sequence back to front. The Wars of Religion were
not the events which necessitated the birth of the modem State;
they were in fact themselves the birth pangs of the State (398).
At the heart of these conflicts was not a denominational struggle
between Catholic and Protestant, but differences around the
rise of the emerging State as a replacement of the declining
medieval ecclesial order. For the princes of this period, in
cluding those who instigated the worst of the killings, doctrinal
loyalty took second place to this political decision, namely
whether they were in favour of or opposed to the centralisation
of power. The Thirty Years War (1616-48) is cited as the blood
iest of the conflicts: yet Protestants and Catholics fought on both
sides, and in its last, most violent phase, this was essentially a
conflict between two rival Catholic dynasties, the Bourbons and
the Hapsburgs.
The growth of the state predates the modem notion of reli
gion as a privately held set of beliefs without direct political
relevance, and in fact goes towards the shaping of this notion. It
follows, then, that to speak of these wars as primarily religious
A S T O R M Y P I L G R I M A G E 85

is an anachronism. What Cavanaugh intends by this historical

survey is to challenge the soteriology of the modem state as
peacemaker. Soteriology means the theory or doctrine of sal
vation: what is in question is the myth of the state as the
communitys saviour from our own implacable religious fury
and fanaticism.
There is a crucial development here, broadly illustrated by a
shift from the medieval Two Swords metaphor to the Lutheran
idea of the Two Kingdoms. The Two Swords doctrine
acknowledged joint political responsibility between Church and
Prince for the ordering of society, a situation of equilibrium in
which the Church was, nevertheless, the supreme power. By the
middle of the seventeenth century this equilibrium had been
upset and the hierarchy reversed: the secular ruler was now the
dominant partner. Though the Two Kingdoms doctrine was a
laudable attempt to disentangle the Church from its inappro
priate worldly involvements, its effect was to reinforce this
dominance of the secular. The Church no longer had its own
judicial powers, because these had been handed over to the
secular authorities: What is left to the Church is increasingly
the purely interior government of the souls of its members; their
bodies are handed over to the secular authorities (399). Granted
the attractiveness of this doctrine for Lutheran princes, this was
a Catholic as well as a Protestant development.
A final word about Christendom. It is worth noting that any
contemporary political theology, in needing to establish its post-
Christendom (and now, increasingly, post-Westphalian) cred
entials, should resist the temptation to simply dismiss the
phenomenon of Christendom as an unfortunate mistake, or
worse, a fall from grace from the Churchs original political
innocence. William Cavanaugh reminds us that Christendom is
a very complex series of attempts to take seriously the Churchs
political role. Its inheritance of civic responsibilities with the
collapse of the Roman Empire was in a sense accidental - but
the conflicts of the subsequent centuries were due to the
inseparability of politics and religion, not to the fact that these
had been illegitimately yoked together.
Oliver ODonovan makes a similar plea for the baby not to be
ditched with the bathwater, when he reminds us that
86 T H E H IS T O R Y

Christendom, the idea of a professedly Christian secular

political order is the womb of late modernity: it gives us a
reading of political concepts and a reading of ourselves and our
situation. Christendoms legacy is the fruitful constellation of
social and political ideas that forms the early modem liberal
tradition, and is reflected in the institutions of Europe and
America. Whatever misgivings or critiques are made against it,
the liberal tradition has right of possession: there is no model
available to us of a political order derived from a millennium of
close engagement between state and church. It ought, therefore,
to have the first word in any discussion of what Christians can
approve, even if it ought not to have the last word (228). We
should surely be attentive to a historical challenge which the
Church has already heard and responded to, rather than trying to
construct an abstract statement which bypasses what is, after all,
a church tradition worthy of respect. With this in mind,
ODonovan goes on to to venture to characterise a normative
political culture broadly in continuity with the Western liberal
tradition (230 ft), by pointing to a family of political structures
which have carried forward, with varying degrees of success, the
traditions of Christendom.5
Cavanaugh is less sanguine than ODonovan about the merits
of political liberalism. In any case, his argument has enormous
implications for how we shape the problem of political theology,
and we shall examine these in more detail later. For the present,
we need to note the paradoxical claim that in a sense the State
has created the problem (religious diversity) that it is supposed
to have come into being to solve. And the self-understanding
and self-justification of the modem State continues to rest on
this: if it were not for its protective power, all hell would break
loose (literally). Once again we encounter the myth of the
Leviathan, or katechon: here, we can see that it is fundamental
to the raison d tre of the State. Thomas Hobbes, as was shown
earlier, is the principal theorist of the Leviathan: according to
him, the religious impulse and the urge to political co-operation
have a common source:

The war of all against all is the natural condition of

humankind. It is cold fear and the need for security, the
A S T O R M Y P I L G R I M A G E 87

foundation of both religion and the social contract, that

drives humans from their nasty and brutish circumstances
and into the arms of Leviathan. This soteriology of the
State as peacemaker demands that its sovereign authority
be absolutely alone and without rival. In Hobbes it is not so
much that the Church has been subordinated to the civil
power; Leviathan has rather swallowed the Church into its
yawning maw. (Cavanaugh, 1995:406)

It is with the soteriological presumptions of the State, and the

interaction of fear and hope that such a description implies, that
the stage is set for an examination of political religions and
State utopias, to which we proceed in the next chapter.
Chapter 6

'STILLBORN G O D S'
The Enlightenment Roots o f Political
Theology

After Westphalia: Political Religions

With this and the preceding chapter, we are entering a white-hot
intellectual war-zone. Theological readings of the sack of Rome
in 410, or the Investiture Controversy in the late eleventh cen
tury, are unlikely to arouse very much controversy today.
However, the four and a half centuries since the end of
Christendom - the epoch of Westphalia - form the historical
matrix out of which emerge our present anxieties regarding the
persistence of the theologico-political.
And we have been shocked into awareness of this persist
ence by men with beards who are willing to kill us, in the name
of God, as we travel to work on the Underground. It is little
wonder that passions are running high.
And yet the diagnoses vary wildly. Richard Dawkins sees
suicide bombers as an atavistic return to the violence which has
always accompanied this dreadful virus called religion; Jrgen
Habermas (see chapter 10) judges extremist fundament
alism to be entirely a modem phenomenon, a product of
imperfect processes of secularisation. As indicated above, there
is evidence of a new Kulturkampf between believers and non
believers. The nervous aggression in which these groups mirror
each other betokens nothing less than the fall of Westphalia:
the fragile cordon sanitaire between religion and the public,
between Church and State, seems ready to give way. For some
this is an event of euphoric liberation, for others it is a prospect
of enormous anxiety and frustration.
 S T IL L B O R N G O D S 89

Our reading of the early modem period gave air-time to one

theologian, William T. Cavanaugh, who argues for a re-thinking
of the traditional narrative of Church and State relations, by
which the modem secular liberal State came into being and
persists as the only protection against our religious aggressivity:
the State is the schoolmaster in the playground, ensuring that
we play nicely. Arguing the case against political theology, we
have Mark Lilia, to whom I am indebted for the title of this
chapter, adapted from The Stillborn God (Lilia, 2007). Lilia
holds the Enlightenments Grand Separation of religion and
politics to be a precious and fragile achievement, one that
requires especial vigilance on our part if we are not to lose it.
Lilia argues in favour of the narrative Cavanaugh rejects.
Like many commentators, he is frankly concerned by the re
appearance or the persistence of the theologico-political, and
while his take on religion is a lot more subtle and respectful than
the clunking diatribes of Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and
others, many of the basic presuppositions are the same. The
student of political theology probably needs to be exposed to
these arguments before proceeding much further.
But before the polemics, some scene-setting. In an important
but extremely challenging essay entitled The permanence of
the theologico-political? Claude Lefort identifies two essential
moments in modernity.1 In the sixteenth century we begin to see
the first signs of a modern reflection on politics and religion.
With the collapse of the Andn Regime, the king no longer held
the regime together, nor was he any longer the point of contact
between God and man, between the political and the religious.
So a sustained attempt to re-order politics ensues, to conceive
the state as an independent entity, to make politics a reality sui
generis, and to relate religion to the domain of private belief.
Religion is made private and politics is made public.
But a much wider debate opens up in the nineteenth century,
inaugurated by the French Revolution in 1789: the feeling that a
break has occurred, but not within time: it establishes a
relationship between human beings and time itself, that it makes
history ... and society ... a mystery which cannot be encom
passed in political or economic institutions. It is the religious
meaning of this break which haunts thinkers of very different
90 T H E H IS T O R Y

persuasions, restorationists and revolutionaries alike: [T]hey all

speak the same language, and it is simultaneously political,
philosophical and religious (149). G. F. W. Hegel protests
against the attempt at separation described above: It has been
the monstrous blunder of our times to try to look upon these in
separables as separable from one another, and even as mutually
indifferent.2 Hegel insists that the state rests on the ethical
sentiment, which in turn rests on the religious.
Lefort comments: The monstrous blunder which Hegel
denounces in 1817 would therefore appear to designate the truth
of modern times, the truth of our own times. Nevertheless,
Lefort wishes to stay with these earlier thinkers, caught in the
throes of revolutionary events, who:

may, even if they were mistaken, have had a singular ability

to grasp a symbolic dimension of the political, of some
thing that was later to disappear, of something that bour
geois discourse was already burying beneath its supposed
knowledge of the real order of society. (150)

He wonders if in fact Hegel did get it wrong, after all. Did the
religious actually recede from and become compartmentalised
against the political?

Can we not admit that, despite all the changes that have
occurred, the religious survives in the guise of new beliefs
and new representations, and it can therefore return to the
surface, in either traditional or novel forms, when conflicts
become so acute as to produce cracks in the edifice of the
state?

There is little space here to do other than establish the broader

picture, which I attempt with the help of two theologically
attentive historians, Michael Burleigh and Adam Zamoyski.
Burleigh (2005, 2006) discusses notorious political religions,
taking in the civic cults of the Jacobins during the French
Revolution, as well as Bolsheviks, Fascists and National
Socialists, all of whom evoke the transcendence of religion for
their respective political projects:
 S T IL L B O R N G O D S 91
These were meant to forge a sentimental community - in
which emotional plangency was the norm - by refashion
ing space and time to envelop the masses within a
dominant ideology. This would involve wider discussion of
related utopian projects, based on the creation of a new
man or new woman from the old Adam, an exercise that
presumed that human personality is as malleable as wet
clay. (Burleigh, 2005:1)

Burleigh points how the rise of Enlightenment thought worked

to unravel this alliance of throne and altar in France. For all its
appeal to the tranquil detachment of Reason, however,
Enlightened thought was haunted by the bloodshed o f the Wars
of Religion. The desire, fanatically pursued, to eradicate the
infamy of fanaticism was a reflection of these collective
memories(41). The striving for Enlightenment, in its English,
French and German versions, was haunted by the nightmare of
widespread fanatical violence, and saw in an enlightened appeal
to Reason and reasonableness the antidote to such fanaticism.
Zamoyski concurs in his history of the Age of Revolutions
(Zamoyski, 1999):

Fired by the urge to redeem mankind and themselves,

many young men struggled and died in a kind of crusade
whose Jerusalem was an idealized projection of Our Lord
Mankind; the nation, death in the service of which
brought martyrdom and life everlasting.
(Zamoyski, 1999:5)

This is in effect to echo the argument of Alexis de Tocqueville,

who remains a magisterial commentator:

Because the Revolution seemed to be striving for the

regeneration of the human race even more than for the
reform of France, it lit a passion which the most violent
political revolutions have never before been able to pro
duce. It inspired conversions and generated propaganda.
Thus, in the end, it took on that appearance of a religious
revolution which so astonished contemporaries. Or rather,
92 T H E H IS T O R Y

it itself became a new kind of religion, an incomplete

religion it is true, without God, without ritual, and without
life after death, but one which nevertheless, like Islam,
flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles, and martyrs.
(Cited in Burleigh, 2005:3)

The Stillborn God

Mark Lilia argues differently: that the European Enlightenment,
through moral philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, Baruch
Spinoza and John Locke, successfully removed ideas of divine
revelation and redemption from politics (Lilia, 2007). This is the
happy resolution of the theologico-political problem, and the
story of the Wests auto-emancipation from what Lilia calls
political theology (defined as discourse about political
authority based on a revealed divine nexus). Political theology
differs from political philosophy or political science, because it
seeks for the best form of government by asking about God,
rather than about man. Lilia speaks of the prising apart of
political theories from theology, begun with Hobbes in the
sixteenth century, as the Great Separation.
Hobbes prescribes the vital cure, namely, a translation of
religious questions into psychological and anthropological
form. By asking what humanity needs from its God, rather than
the other way round, Hobbes sets aside the political theological
approach that had obtained previously. Enter the Leviathan,
the sovereign who becomes an earthly God, and whose
totalitarian overtones are softened by the more liberal vision of
other sensible Britons such as John Locke, followed by David
Hume and John Stuart Mill.
However, if we think that this emancipation was an inevitable
and definitive achievement, like the Copemican revolution that
overturned the geocentric view of cosmology, we are sadly
mistaken. The theologico-political persists - much to the
frustration and incredulity of secularist critics. Lilia concedes
that religion is a default position: our natural impulse is to
transcend and connect beyond ourselves, and very exceptional
circumstances are required for us to decide to ifoconnect. He
notes another strain of Enlightenment thinking which has a
 S T IL L B O R N G O D S 93
more positive take on religion. These are the children of
Rousseau, a continental tradition of philosophers which
includes Jean-Jacques Rousseau himself, G. F. W. Hegel and
Immanuel Kant. In different ways these three philosophers are
unsympathetic to the Enlightenments disparagement of reli
gion, and offer instead an account of religion as an expansive
response toward the universe, and towards morality and
freedom.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is of course best known for his
articulation of a Social Contract as the basis for political
harmony, and as such is to be linked with the political philos
ophy of Thomas Hobbes. Where he differs from Hobbes, to
repeat, is over the validity of religion, or perhaps more accu
rately religious experience and emotion. Rousseau championed
the individual conscience, what he called the inner light, in
each human being. We find this set out most clearly in the fourth
book of Rousseaus novel Emile, which contains the profession
of faith of a priest from Savoy (Profession de foi du vicaire
Savoyard). This liberal, basically deist, priest explains his
approach to religious belief, referring not to the doctrines of
Christianity, or to the authority of the Bible, but above all to his
own conscience: I believe all particular religions are good when
one serves God usefully in them ... the essential cult is that of
the heart. Rousseau seeks to preserve the spiritual advantages
of religion, without resurrecting its fanatical dogmatism. The
implication of this chapter is that humanity cannot do without
the affective, personal dimension of religious belief: the sense of
connectedness that goes with signing a Social Contract is
simply not enough for us.
Kant was deeply influenced by Rousseau, and saw the role of
religion in similar terms, basically as supportive of our moral
striving (which was why everyone should belong to a church: so
that they can be helped in their quest for the good). He does not
ultimately think that morality can stand alone without religious
postulates. Both thinkers, in other words, stress the importance
of religious sentiment - whatever enlightened rationality may
say.
With German Idealism and Romanticism, this importance
becomes inevitability. We have already noted that Hegel thinks
94 T H E H IS T O R Y

the attempted separation of religion and the political is the

monstrous blunder of his time. In Hegels Lectures on
Philosophy o f Religion we read:

The object of religion as well as of philosophy is eternal

truth in its objectivity, God and nothing but God, and the
explication of God ... Philosophy explicates itself when it
explicates religion, and in explicating itself it explicates
religion ... Thus religion and philosophy come to be one.
Philosophy is itself in fact worship [Gottesdienst]; it is
religion inasmuch as it renounces subjective notions and
opinions in order to occupy itself with God.

The project implicit in these philosophers, of articulating a

Romantic liberal theology with no contradiction between reli
gious belief and the full development of human intellectual and
affective capacities, is the stillborn God of the books title. Not
only did this deity fail to materialise: worse, in its stead came an
apocalyptic version of political theology, which Lilia sees as a
preparation for the totalitarian state religions of Nazism and
Communism, with the messianic hopes of these Enlightened
philosophers somehow paving the way. Of the two strains of
Enlightenment thought, it is the fine surgeons of the English
tradition who save the day: Hobbes, Locke and Mill manage to
excise all the religious malignancies in the body politic. With
the French and Germans it is a different story; by leaving these
apparently benign growths alone, they allow them to spread
insidiously, eventually breaking out as the disastrous tumours of
twentieth-century totalitarianism. In the case of the children of
Rousseau, even allowing for the considerable differences
between the French and German Enlightenments, their surgery
was nowhere near thoroughgoing or whole-hearted enough.
There is much food for thought in Lilias thesis. Though not
totally hostile to religion, he clearly subscribes to the reigning
orthodoxy that Cavanaugh seeks to dethrone. As Lilia under
stands it, political theology is bad news, and because it can
never be definitively consigned to history, we should be on
constant guard against it. Nevertheless, we need to note a
glaring imbalance in Mark Lilias book: while he is a careful and
 S T IL L B O R N G O D S 95

thought-provoking commentator on the modem period, he is

much more slipshod on what comes before Hobbes and com
pany. The Introduction and Chapter 1 of The Stillborn God do
not merit a single footnote - and yet it is in these opening fifty-
four pages that Lilia makes extremely sweeping claims about
the origins, nature and crisis of religion. Only with Chapter 2,
entitled The Great Separation, does Lilia deign to offer some
back-up for his analysis, with appropriate citations of Hume,
Hobbes, Pascal, and Locke. It seems the case against pre
modem political theology is so self-evidently watertight as not
to require proper argument.
Given this uneven analysis, we may want to press Lilia on
why the Great Separation of 1651 (do we really need those
capitals?) should be taken as such a definitive marker. We have
already seen how it is possible to discern elements of rupture
within the ancient world, where the theologico-political fabric
of the city-state is tom apart (not just by Christianity, of course).
Is it not possible to see in Augustines refusal to bless the state
in The City o f God, and in the doctrine of the Two which issues
from it, an equally decisive turning point? The answer is, pre
sumably not, because this would interfere with the neat storyline
built around the bloody Wars of Religion. Which leads to a
further question: how does Lilias narrative fare against
Cavanaughs revisionary account, above all Cavanaughs dis
missal of the soteriology of the modem state as saviour from
our religious violence?

Immanuel Kant: Daring to Know, Daring to Hope

My argument from Immanuel Kant, which will help explain his
significance for later political theology, proceeds from three
important writings: The Critique o f Pure Reason, the Critique o f
Practical Reason, and an essay, written in 1795, entitled
Towards Perpetual Peace. If space permitted I would have liked
to dwell on a fourth work, his intriguing essay on theodicy, On
the miscarriage of all philosophical trials in theodicy 1791,
where Kant dismisses traditional theodicy (justification of evil
and suffering), before focusing, surprisingly, upon the Book of
Job.3 Perhaps the reader can bear this striking theological turn
96 T H E H IS T O R Y

in mind. As it is, with Kants first two Critiques and Towards

Perpetual Peace we have two distinct but related issues to
address:
How can the individuals belief in God be justified?
On what grounds can we hope for lasting peace between
nations?
We may recall that Kant asks three questions at the close of the
Critique o f Pure Reason: What can I know? What must I do?
What may I hope for? An answer to this third question, about the
grounds for our hope, is consequent on the first two. The rather
dispiriting outcome of the Critique o f Pure Reason is that,
strictly speaking, we cannot claim knowledge of anything other
than phenomena - the way in which the world presents itself to
us. For Kant, this meant the demolition of all alleged metaphysi
cal proofs of the existence of God, such as the cosmological or
ontological arguments. Pure reason cannot help us to God: it is
only under the heading of practical reason that indications of
Gods existence can be found.
By considering the scope and nature of our ethical obligations
(what must I do?) in his second Critique, the Critique o f
Practical Reason, Kant frames the following argument. We can
only make sense of our ethical existence if we assume or postu
late three facts that cannot be formally proved: that we are free,
that God exists, that there is an afterlife. The first of these is
clear enough; but why does morality require us to postulate God
and the afterlife? Because, says Kant, fundamental to our moral
convictions is the belief that good ethical behaviour should be
rewarded and bad behaviour punished. When this does not
happen (as plainly it does not, in so many cases) we are scan
dalised and tempted to despair - like Job. For ethics to operate
at all we need to imagine some way in which the balance is
redressed. That can only mean a just God, who gives people
what they deserve in the afterlife.
As an argument this looks about as trustworthy as a syllogism
which runs: We are surrounded by hostile Cherokee Indians;
only the cavalry appearing over the hill can save us; therefore
the cavalry are coming over the hill! Supposing the world just
is an unjust place, where peoples behaviour is rewarded
 S T IL L B O R N G O D S 97

inappropriately? (to quote Oscar Wilde: the good end happily,

the bad end unhappily: that is what fiction means.) Kants argu
ment is that to believe this would be to open ourselves up to
moral despair - and this would destroy us. There must be a God
and an afterlife, if ethics is to make sense.4
Thomas McCarthy summarises Kants argument as follows:

[W]e are commanded by the moral law to pursue certain

ends that would be impossible to achieve if God did not
exist and the soul were not immortal. The inherent tension
between our moral-rational duties and aspirations, on the
one hand, and our finite limitations, on the other, would
lead to moral despair without God and immortality. Thus,
it is a practical necessity that we postulate them; not to do
so would be to commit moral suicide.
(McCarthy, 1991:201)

In Towards Perpetual Peace, we find a marked contrast from the

two Critiques in the way Kant argues. Put very briefly, while the
Critiques and the essay on theodicy could be said to deny
knowledge so as to leave room for faith, there isnt even an
implicit faith dimension in Kants account of what is needed for
perpetual peace between nations. As we have seen, the
postulates of practical reason are necessary, because for the
individual, ethical existence is unthinkable without religious
hope. One might expect a similar proviso in this important
essay, where Kant looks at what is needed for lasting and peace
ful political coexistence. Doesnt this activity, too, require to be
underwritten by religious hope? Kant does, after all, begin the
essay with a sardonic remark concerning the phrase Towards
Perpetual Peace, found on an innkeepers sign depicting a
graveyard! Is this the best and the only peace we can hope for?
Surely, our collective striving for the good is just as prone to
moral despair as the individuals - and is in equal need of
religious postulates?
Towards Perpetual Peace is a remarkable, even inspiring and
moving work - and also troubling. It comprises six preliminary
articles for perpetual peace among states, and three definitive
articles, with two supplementary points. The three definitive
98 T H E H IS T O R Y

articles express a preference for Covenant over Leviathan:

republicanism, with its separation of powers, he sees as the only
alternative to despotism. The virtues of federalism become evi
dent: as a powerful and enlightened people becomes a republic,
other nations are inspired to imitate it and enter into alliance
with it, gradually spreading its benign influence. The right of
hospitality, grounded in the common possession of the earths
surface, has an Arendtian ring to it, particularly when Kant lists
examples of inhospitality, colonial domination and enslavement
in the Americas, East Indies, Africa. There is an angry denunci
ation of the European powers that make much ado of their piety
and, while they drink wrongfulness like water, want to be known
as the elect in orthodoxy (330).
The first supplementary point is especially important for our
purposes: On the guarantee of perpetual peace. Who, or what,
underwrites the optimistic vision Kant sets out in this philos
ophical project, in order for us to avoid the evident temptation
to moral despair? What are the postulates of perpetual peace?
The answer is intriguing, and troubling:

What affords this guarantee (surety) is nothing less than

the great artist nature (natura daedala rerum)5 from whose
mechanical course purposiveness shines forth visibly,
letting concord arise by means of the discord between
human beings even against their will ... if we consider its
purposiveness in the course of the world as the profound
wisdom of a higher cause directed to the objective final
end of the human race and predetermining this course of
the world, it is called providence.

The deployment of providence at this juncture is very eccen

tric. Kant discourses about natures foresight in scattering
people throughout even inhospitable regions of the world, pro
viding the wherewithal for human life, even in the Arctic, in
Mongolia and so on. There are also natural reasons why
republicanism is both possible and compatible with human
instincts and capacities. So: nature uses two means to prevent
people from intermingling and to separate them and thus avoid
ing despotism, namely differences of language and of religion
 S T IL L B O R N G O D S 99

(336). Nature wisely ensures that states which might otherwise

be inappropriately joined together are kept separate; and sooner
or later, the spirit of commerce takes over every nation, and the
power o f money compels states to promote honourable peace
and avoid warfare.
To put it mildly: a little suspicion towards this providential-
ist outlook would not go amiss!
The postulates of practical reason (freedom, God, immort
ality) filled in a gap, allowing us to connect up goodness and
happiness. But with perpetual peace, there is no question of
things not working out. Provided wise nature is allowed to take
its course, and statesmen make sure to consult the philosophers
before going to war, then perpetual peace between states will
certainly come to pass! We do not need to postulate God, nor an
afterlife - and we certainly dont need to invoke the inspiring
figure of Job.
Kants reticence here merits our attention. There seems to be
a need for a directly religious guarantee in one case (individual
practical reason), but not in the other (the project for perpetual
peace). But why is it necessary to invoke God to safeguard the
individual moral order, while the political order - republican,
federal, pluralist, even capitalist - can simply be entrusted into
the wise hands of providence? Why does Kant dare us to
hope in one case, but not in the second?

Living in Truth: G. W. F. Hegel

Hegels more robust and confident assertion of the theologico-
political seems to have no room at all for hope, since there is no
need: revelation is understood by Hegel as the process of the
human spirit coming to understand itself, so that humanity
itself is seen to be the manifestation of what was once called
God. The wars of religion, whose bloodiness haunts the
Enlightenment imagination, are to be seen as merely the birth
pangs of the revelation of our own divinity. In religions com
pletion in philosophy, we encounter the ambiguity of Hegels
notion of Aufhebung, which connotes abrogation or cancella
tion, but also preservation. In one sense, it looks as if religion
is annulled, left behind; in another sense its validity is main
100 T H E H IS T O R Y

tained, but on a higher level. In the end, this lack of clarity is the
weakness of Hegels religious philosophy.
One of the most accessible and useful commentaries is
Andrew Shanks, who takes us through Hegel by way of Prague.
Hegels Political Theology opens with the Czechoslovakian
novelist Milan Kundera, who introduces in his best-known novel
the phenomenon of kitsch.6 Kitsch is defined as [a] largely
self-censored perception of reality - governed by indulgence in
a common narcissim, the desire to feel good about what one is
a part o f; it is a pervasive, basic evil, exemplified, in the
words of Sabina (the novels heroine), by the image of a parade
of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical
syllables in unison - whether those people have been mar
shalled by party leaders into a May Day parade, or whether they
are protesting Western students who cant wait to spit their
innocence in the cops faces (Shanks, 1991:2, 3).
Kitsch is therefore a kind of false consciousness, which
Shanks equates with Hegels Unhappy Consciousness. In the
Conclusion this contrasts with the idea of Living in Truth, set
out in Vaclav Havels well-known parable of the greengrocer.7
Havel is examining post-totalitarian ideology, the phase of a
dictatorship when no one seriously believes any more in the
innocence and idealism of the revolution. The Emperor is naked,
but everyone goes through the motions - because it is the easi
est and safest thing to do. Until, one day, a greengrocer decides
otherwise.
For Shanks, Hegels political theology is about the transition
from a false to an authentic consciousness: how do we resist and
overcome the deeply authoritarian seduction of ideological
kitsch - as political parade, as circle dance, as religious liturgy
- and learn to live in truth? Shanks insists that the central logic
of Christianity - the cross - provides this resistance, but like any
spiritual tradition Christianity is open to corruption. This is
where Hegel comes in. His affirmation of the infinite value of
the individual as such is at the core of his struggle with the
problem of Christian religious kitsch.
Between the two Czech moments, Shanks makes more
explicit links between Hegels concerns and some prominent
figures in twentieth-century political theology (149-83).
 S T IL L B O R N G O D S 101
Dorothee Solle and Jrgen Moltmann are explicit dialogue
partners, since they engage with Hegel in their key works.
Solles Christ the Representative takes Hegels Christology to be
a restoration of the balance between two opposed doctrines of
the atonement (Luthers imputation of forgiveness and
Anselms doctrine of satisfaction). Her book Suffering and
Moltmanns The Crucified God are seen by Shanks as exemplars
of a wider movement in twentieth-century German theology,
towards a fundamental de-Platonizing of the Christian
tradition (64) - a development which Hegel has pioneered.8
We have noted in chapter 3 how Hannah Arendt argued that
Christianity lacks an amor mundi; it promotes an inner with
drawal from the world, and is therefore incompatible with
politics. For Shanks this coheres with Hegels critique of
Stoicism as a flight from action, and of the anti-political
Romantic ideal of the Beautiful Soul (156). Shanks goes on to
draw a parallel between Arendts portrayal of the thought
lessness and the banal evil of Adolf Eichmann, and Hegels
Unhappy Consciousness; other common concerns would
include the decline of the State, and of political freedom
(159-65).
As we shall see, Johann Baptist Metz likewise offers a
critique of the privatised bourgeois Christianity that so
spectacularly failed when put to the test in Germany in the
1930s. This critique matches very closely Hegels own com
ments about the state of the Church in his day. Hegel may there
fore be seen as a lonely pioneer of political theology (150)
even if there are other important themes where he and Metz
diverge - not least in Metzs resistance to an evolutionary and
elitist ideology which permits an unfeeling amnesia towards the
victims of history (152).
In brief, Andrew Shanks argues cogently for continuing to
take Hegel seriously as a pioneer of, and dialogue partner for,
contemporary political theology. For Shanks, Hegels potential
contribution is benign and necessary. Not all agree, as we have
seen: Chapter 4 of The Stillborn God, entitled The Bourgeois
God (Lilia, 2007:163-213) is Lilias account of how Christian
suspicion of Hegel is fully justified, not least concerning
whether his apparent indifference to the immense suffering of
102 T H E H IS T O R Y

history - which Hegel shockingly described as a slaughter-

bench - can be justified by its ultimate reconciliation. Hegels
system is a nightmarish distortion of Christian faith, precisely
because it operates without the eschatological checks and
balances we find in the traditional understanding of salvation
and reconciliation (Lilia, 2007:211-13). The Hegelian legacy, so
the argument runs, is to be found in the mass death of the
twentieth century. Stranger still, however, and perhaps more
disturbing, is his rendition of the world as a sensible, well-
designed bourgeois home, and his sanctification of modem
bourgeois life (212-13), making Hegel a more problematic
dialogue partner for Arendt and Metz than Shanks would imply.

Conclusion
From the children of Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, we have two
very distinctive expressions of a theologico-political vision.
Over the next three chapters we will see whether contemporary
political theology is best understood, above all, as an act of the
eschatological imagination: a daring to visualise the outcome
of our wager on God, and of Gods wager on us. Though both
these thinkers loom large, this imagining will lean more towards
the implications of the Kantian postulates of practical reason,
albeit in ways that Kant would not necessarily recognise.
The postulates of practical reason are precisely geared
towards God rewarding the good and punishing the wicked at
the end of time, while Kants essay on theodicy turns at the
crucial moment to the Book of Job, whose truthfulness vali
dates a certain kind of theodicy (Kant: 1795). Hope acts as a
postulate, it is a heuristic device: a what if? Only by assuming
the existence of God and of an afterlife do our lives make sense.
This is important, but the understanding of hope that is
offered here is anaemic, deliberately passionless. It hardly res
onates with the scriptural witness: the desperate clinging to God
of the psalmist, of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, of Job, or of
Christ in his abandonment; nor with the burning hearts on the
road to Emmaus. There seems to be little correspondence
between Kantian hope, and what we will encounter over the next
few chapters: the messianic hunger of Ernst Bloch and Walter
 S T IL L B O R N G O D S 103

Benjamin, the suffering towards God which animates the work

of Johann Baptist Metz, Jrgen Moltmann, and liberation
theologians of every hue. And yet the structure of the argument
for all of these theologians: that the only alternative to a
rationally-expressed political hope is despair - is the same as
that of Kants postulates, without which ethical existence would
not be possible.
The map we have sketched over the last three chapters is
inadequate for any purpose other than the most general orienta
tion, in what can be bewildering territory. While Section 1 may
have helped to establish the parameters of political theology,
some sense of the history is also necessary. In particular, the
seemingly endless debates about modernity and post-
modernity very often hinge on some sense of a fall from a
golden age, or more likely our taking a wrong turning
somewhere: which leaves us with the intellectual task of getting
back to Eden, or to the crossroads where we went astray. Is it the
case that Augustine got it absolutely right with The City o f God
and everything that has happened since has been a struggle to
regain the fine synthesis he achieved? Or does sanity begin in
1651, with Thomas Hobbes Leviathan and the Great Separation
of theology and politics; a benchmark for our survival which
must be preserved at all costs?
These are options set before us by William Cavanaugh and
Mark Lilia, from the perspectives of faith and secularity re
spectively. One regards political theology as essential for the
wellbeing of human communities, the second sees political
theology as a menace, against which constant vigilance is
needed.
The next three chapters take us into the twentieth century, and
the catastrophic unfolding of the dialectic of Enlightenment.
Whichever narrative we go with must attempt to explain why
the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
Meanwhile it is always good to let Franz Kafka have the last
word. In his parable entitled The City Coat o f Arms, he gives us
his version of the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel (Genesis
11:9). The plan to build a tower to the heavens is normally a
symbol of human arrogance in the face of God, therefore stands
nicely as a parable of the Enlightenments attempt to do without
104 T H E H IS T O R Y

God, or to take the place of God. In the biblical version, God

frustrates the builders plans by instilling divisions of language
among them, thereby making common action impossible. Franz
Kafka tells it differently, brilliantly illustrating how the dream of
progress turns back on the dreamer and becomes the heaviest of
nightmares:

At first all the arrangements for building the Tower of

Babel were characterised by fairly good order; indeed the
order was perhaps too perfect, too much thought was given
to guides, interpreters, accommodation for the workmen,
and roads of communication, as if there were centuries
before one to do the work in. In fact, the general opinion at
that time was that one simply could not build too slowly; a
very little insistence on this would have sufficed to make
one hesitate to lay the foundations at all.

The townspeople put off proper work on the tower until they are
adequately prepared - but because technical progress and inno
vation is constant, there is always a reason for further delay. This
does not matter, as they believe the vision itself is safe: The
idea, once seized in its magnitude, can never vanish again; so
long as there are men on earth there will also be the irresistible
desire to complete the building. But generations pass, the vision
of the tower takes second place to constructing a town for the
workmen, rivalries and fights break out, and the sense of unity
behind the project disappears:

To this must be added that the second or third generation

had already recognised the senselessness of building a
heaven-reaching tower; but by that time everybody was too
deeply involved to leave the city. All the legends and songs
that came to birth in that city are filled with longing for a
prophesied day when the city would be destroyed by five
successive blows from a gigantic fist. It is for that reason
too that the city has a closed fist on its coat of arms.
Chapter 7

TH EO LO G Y IN A LAND OF
SCREAMS
The Crisis o f National Socialism

As I write this chapter, I have before me a haunting photograph,

one of the most disturbing images of the Shoah (Holocaust) I
have come across. It is an RAF aerial reconnaissance photo
graph of Auschwitz, taken at 11 a.m. on August 23 1944, when
Hungarian Jews were being exterminated at a frenzied rate.1
Details are all too apparent, despite the altitude: the grid layout
of the camp is clearly visible, and the neat rows of huts; it is
possible to discern large groups of inmates assembled for roll
call; on the outskirts of the camp, a thick cloud of smoke issues
from a mass burial pit.
This image is peculiarly distressing, for several reasons.
There is the helplessness of the prisoners, so distant and so
small; perhaps also, the thought that such an aerial perspective
is too much of a Gods eye-view for comfort. What also dis
turbs, however, is the oversight, as in thoughtlessness, which
the photograph betrays. This piece of hard evidence of Nazi
atrocity, which, if analysed properly and acted upon, might have
saved hundreds of thousands of lives over the remaining five
months of the death-camps operation, was only discovered in
2003, during the digitalisation of aerial reconnaissance photo
graphs at the National Archives. It seems that its significance
was overlooked in the sheer volume of film - running to mil
lions of images - brought home by RAF photographers: analysts
were busily scanning these images for military data, not for evi
dence of genocide. The paradox that this recording technology
108 TH E C R IS IS

should be so efficient as to overwhelm remembrance of the

victims is one that we should bear in mind.
The catastrophe befell a nation that regarded itself as the high
repository of European artistic and philosophical culture. Many
of the key figures discussed in this book were German and, to
differing degrees, directly affected by the events of 1933 to 1945.
This is dramatically the case with Johann Baptist Metz and
Jrgen Moltmann, each of whom narrowly escaped death while
serving in the German armed forces: only to be confronted, at the
close of the war, with the cold horror of discovering the true
nature of the cause they had been defending.
In Primo Levis memoir of his arrest and transportation to a
Nazi death camp, we find the following passage:

The doors had been closed at once, but the train did not
move until evening. We had learnt of our destination
with relief. Auschwitz: a name without significance for
us at that time, but it at least implied some place on this
earth.2

Primo Levis words are unbearable. But there is more, namely

the way that Auschwitz has, increasingly, come to seem any
thing but some place on this earth. It has become a signpost, a
marker, and in many ways the signpost itself takes more of our
attention than the place, the city Auschwitz.
To take two examples among many, Susan Neiman (2002) has
written an alternative history of western philosophy, which she
understands as a reflection upon evil. She takes Lisbon - the
scene of a devastating earthquake of 1755 - and Auschwitz as
the compass points for modernitys reflection upon evil, with
September 11th, 2001 now being a further marker. Between
Lisbon and Auschwitz denotes a shift of emphasis, from an
event that is clearly acknowledged as a natural evil, to one that
is the product of human choices. Neimans principle argument is
that [e]ighteenth-and nineteenth-century philosophy was guided
by the problem of evil (Neiman, 2002:7), which therefore serves
as an organising principle for understanding the history of
philosophy. Whether expressed in theological or secular terms,
this is a problem about the intelligibility of the world as a whole.
T H E O L O G Y IN A L A N D O F S C R E A M S 109

Neiman discerns two broad philosophical traditions: one

(from Rousseau to Arendt) insists that we have a moral duty to
make evil intelligible; the other (stemming from Voltaire) insists
that evil cannot be encompassed rationally. She asserts that
these two sets of philosophers are united by a moral imperative
in thinking about evil, and one of the deficiencies of modern
philosophy is its divorce of epistemology from ethics, and there
fore an absence of the ethical urgency which guided Kant, Hegel
and so on.
Richard Bernsteins Radical Evil takes an analogous
approach, though his book is a more tentative series of interro
gations arising from his work on Hannah Arendt, quoting
Arendts response to the revelations of the Nazi death camps:
[T]he problem of evil will be the fundamental question of post
war intellectual life in Europe. Contemporary philosophy finds
itself ill equipped and reluctant to address this theme. However,
as his eight chapters on different thinkers indicate, this has not
always been the case. For Bernstein, Auschwitz necessitates a
re-reading of Kant, Hegel, Schelling (on evil, will and freedom),
Nietzsche and Freud (the moral psychology of evil), and the
post-Holocaust questionings of Emmanuel Levinas, Hans Jonas
and Hannah Arendt.
We should note the largeness of this undertaking: to reshape
the entire history of modem philosophy around events that took
place in central Europe over twelve ghastly years. What should
surprise us more is that there is nothing surprising about what
Neiman and Bernstein propose. Thinking after Auschwitz is
pretty much a defining characteristic o f post-modern thought,
and no field of human reflection - philosophy, history, politics,
literature, even architecture - has been untouched by the reality
of the Shoah.
Theology is no exception, and political theology has been
shaken in two ways: firstly, because as a political and philos
ophical discipline it has been caught up in the intellectual and
rational upheaval indicated above, and secondly because as
Christians coming from Germany the key political theologians
find themselves directly involved. As well as the general crisis
of rationality, these theologians wrestle with specifically
theologico-political challenges on at least two levels: the
 110 T H E C R IS IS

ineffectiveness of the Christian churches in resisting the

political religion of the Nazis; and the lines of complicity and
culpability o f Christians in the fate of the Jews, arising from
theologically-justified Christian anti-Semitism. ^
There is also of course, a considerable body of Jewish theo
logical responses to the Holocaust, as the victims themselves
seek to make sense of what happened. These voices need to be
heard before their Christian counterparts. I will consider the
challenges to theological reflection under three programmatic
questions:
1. What have been the Jewish theological responses to the
Shoah?
2. Why were the Churches unable to resist the Nazi
Leviathan?
3. Does the Shoah represent a unique and radical rupture
within rational thought, conditioning theology after
Auschwitz?

Jewish Theologians and the Shoah

Dan Cohn-Sherbok is probably the foremost and most accessi
ble Jewish theological commentator on the Holocaust (Shoah).
His 1989 overview, Holocaust Theology, was reissued as God
and the Holocaust (1996), and he has subsequently provided a
study on the history of Christian anti-Semitism (1997) and a
Holocaust Theology Reader (2002). In these works he has
specified three groups of theological responses: those who seek
to work within a traditional Jewish religious framework; those
who, by contrast, offer radically revised versions of this tradi
tion; and those who are inspired by the theology of liberation as
a springboard for Jewish empowerment.
The first group are trying to salvage what they can from
Jewish tradition. To mention three: Bernard Maza takes an
Orthodox perspective, according to which God punished his
people in the death camps for their failure to observe and protect
the Torah; Ignaz Maybaum depicts the Jewish victims as Gods
suffering servant, atoning for the sins of humanity (he recog
nises the Christian overtones here by describing Auschwitz as
T H E O L O G Y IN A L A N D O F S C R E A M S 111
the Golgotha of modem mankind); Emil Fackenheim attempts
to recover traditional motifs, in particular the notion of tikkun,
or cosmic repair. He insists on the Commanding Voice of God
in Auschwitz, a voice that forbids granting a posthumous vic
tory to Hitler: God demands, therefore, the primal importance of
Jewish survival. Fackenheim also asserts the uniqueness of the
Holocaust, citing five basic facts which are found together
only in the event of the Shoah, as the criteria for its uniqueness.
Though Cohn-Sherbok does not mention the work of Emmanuel
Levinas in this category, Levinas highly suggestive account of
Judaism as a religion of adults, in which Jews are called to an
unimaginable ethical responsibility, to love the Torah more than
God, surely belongs here.
A second group of responses comprises revisionist accounts
of the nature of God, to such an extent that, in Cohn-Sherboks
view, these theologians have abandoned the Jewish tradition in
the name of humanist protest. He cites Rubenstein and Cohen:3
for Richard Rubenstein the only acceptable response to the
Holocaust is an acknowledgement of the irrevocable collapse of
traditional religious belief, and a new urgency in establishing
human solidarity in a desacralised world. Rubenstein quotes
from Elie Wiesels Night: Never shall I forget those flames
which consumed my faith forever. Elsewhere Wiesel asserts the
impossibility of understanding Auschwitz without God - even
though it is just as inexplicable with him. Rubenstein holds
belief in an omnipotent, beneficient God to be no longer accept
able, especially if this means making the Nazis instruments of
Gods purposes. Judaism lives on for him, without God, but in
the form of a cosmic mysticism rather than Jewish secularly.
Another revisionist, a theistic one, is Arthur Cohen, who
conveys a sense of unfathomable mystery about the Holocaust
by his articulation of the tremendum. Here, the horror of the
Holocaust is brought into proximity with the magnificent
immensity of God: with this notion, the inadequacy of theo
logical monarchism is exposed, as an archaic structure of inter
pretation. God acts in the future, not in history, and to have
expected His intervention during the Shoah merely betrays our
infantile understanding of the divine-human relation.
The third group of responses draws upon the model of the
112 TH E C R IS IS

theology of liberation as the way forward for a Judaism seeking

to go beyond the Holocaust. Cohn-Sherbok has explored this
(1987), while Marc Ellis asks: Can a Jewish theology of liber
ation become the catalyst to break through the paralysis con
fronting the Jewish community today?4 Ellis expresses his
concern with the conservative tendency of most other Jewish
post-Holocaust theologians, for whom the fact and necessity of
Jewish empowerment, meaning an impregnable Israel, is the
overriding priority. The dynamic balance between Holocaust
and empowerment found within their analyses of the Holocaust
is lost when they enter the realities of the post-Holocaust world
(Ellis, 1986:37). Seeking to move forward from this impasse
Ellis cites movements of progression and renewal within
Judaism; he sees a solidarity between these and the Christian
liberation struggles (Black, Latin American, Asian) nourished
by the emancipatory motifs of the Jewish scriptures.
Ellis criticises the ways liberation thought can too easily use
the Jewish scriptures, while ignoring the Jewish people them
selves: a common trait throughout Christian history. In particu
lar, the post-Holocaust experience of the Jewish community
does not accord readily with the triumphalism of Exodus lan
guage, as used by Christian liberationists. Nevertheless, these
two traditions, liberationist and Jewish, can begin to probe the
night together when two questions are set alongside each other:
Activist, what do you see in the night? and that put to the
Holocaust victim: What did you see in the night?
In his overview of these three sets of responses, Dan Cohn-
Sherbok shows how many are problematic, because their view
of God is either humanly unacceptable, or revised beyond recog
nition by traditional Jewish belief. In other words, we are,
agonisingly, caught within the classical problem of theodicy, of
reconciling Gods omnipotence and goodness. What is absent
from all of the accounts he looks at, revisionist or traditional, is
an affirmation of immortality. He comes up with his own ver
sion of the Kantian postulate we examined in the last chapter: if
the Jewish faith is to survive, Holocaust theology will need to
incorporate a belief in the Afterlife in which the righteous of
Israel who died in the death camps will receive their just reward.
He reminds us that the Jewish biblical belief in life after death
T H E O L O G Y IN A L A N D O F S C R E A M S 113

comes to the fore in the narrative of political resistance and

martyrdom in the Books of the Maccabees. Holocaust theo
logians have not affirmed this doctrine strongly, and yet for
Cohn-Sherbok there can be no other way of reconciling a loving
God with the horror of the death camps.
One final area needs to be mentioned. We have seen how Ellis
is concerned that for some Holocaust theologians there has been
an overriding priority given to Jewish empowerment in the after-
math of the Shoah. The impasse he refers to is the State of Israel,
insofar as its aggressive stance towards Palestinian autonomy
and its understandable defensiveness in the face of Arab neigh
bours detracts from Jewish integrity in the face of oppression.
He cites the great leap: from Marc Bloch, accompanying a
child as they went to their deaths together in the camp, to
Baruch Goldstein, who massacred Moslems during their
Ramadan prayer in the Hebron in February 1994. And yet, for
many Israelis, Gods saving word after the catastrophe of the
Shoah is exactly and concretely this vulnerable political entity -
which makes its survival and protection an absolute, theological
priority, overriding the claims to justice and autonomy of others.
The establishment of Israel in 1947 could be said to be the most
dramatic and fateful political theological project of the
twentieth century.5

Why Were the Churches Unable to Resist the

Nazi Leviathan?
The phrasing of this question comes from Moltmann, who, we
will recall, explored the distinction between Covenant and
Leviathan as alternative modes of political existence. Here, the
Third Reich is clearly identified as an all-powerful Leviathan or
katechon. Burleigh tells how Nazi totalitarianism positioned
itself as an alternative religion, consciously rivalling Church
networks, educational and welfare institutions, social and pious
associations and workers syndicates so as to claim the kind
of total allegiance that was normally reserved for Christian
denominations, whether Catholic or Protestant.6
The success of this process of assimilation varied with demo
graphic and geographical factors, but the general outlines are
114 T H E C R IS IS

clear. Catholic opposition to Hitler was heavily weakened by the

desire of the Vatican to conclude a Concordat with Hitlers
regime: one fateful consequence of this was that it permitted the
collapse of the Catholic Centre Party. The situation of the
Protestant churches was different. The so-called German
Christian movement, which sought to re-invent the faith along
nationalist and anti-Semitic principles, was tempting in part
because it held out a reconciliation of sorts between Lutheran
and Reformed. It is probably the failure of this movement to win
broad support that convinced Hitler that the Churches could not
in the long run be co-opted, and hardened his attitude towards
Christianity.
Explicit resistance is another matter, however. Apart from the
example of the Confessing Church and a number of heroic in
dividuals, it is the quietism and passivity of the majority of
Protestant Christians that give cause for concern. Moltmann and
others are forthright about the weakness of Luthers Two
Kingdoms doctrine in this regard (Moltmann, 1989:75; though
Moltmann points out that this essentially pragmatic doctrine
was also appealed to against Hitlerism). As seen in chapter 5,
this doctrine insisted on allotting spheres of influence to Church
and State, which resulted in a withdrawal into interiority for the
faith, as the political realm was left in the hands of the princes.
Coupled with this quietism, Luthers uncompromising refusal of
the right of resistance, even against unjust rulers, was of course,
a disastrous precedent.
The other mainline Reformation political theology, namely
John Calvins doctrine the Lordship of Christ, infuses the spirit
of the Batmen Declaration. This was a document produced by
the Confessing Church in 1934 (first version); one of its prime
architects was Karl Barth, the great Reformed theologian. This
remarkable text challenged very directly, and on theological
grounds, the messianic pretensions of Hitlerism. It arose as a
response to the temptations of the German Christian movement,
which some of Karl Barths own colleagues had joined. What
will become clear, however, as we examine this text, is that
the Lordship of Christ doctrine also has its problems and
limitations.
In the First Barmen Declaration, Barth and the other signa-
T H E O L O G Y IN A L A N D O F S C R E A M S 115

tones are clear about why Christian witness in the face of

Nazism has been feeble. They speak of a theological, rather than
a political or sociological collapse. They also stress that this is a
problem that has been in place for some time, rather than a
specifically new crisis. A disastrous theological error, which
had infected the Roman Church and distorted the Reformation,
is now made manifest in the events of 1933. This theological
error is, simply, the forgetting of the Lordship of Christ:7

For in these events an error has become ripe and visible,

which has had a devastating effect upon the Evangelical
Church for centuries. It consists in the opinion that beside
Gods revelation, Gods grace, and Gods glory, a justifi
able human arbitrariness has authority to determine the
message and form of the church, that is to say, the tempo
ral path to eternal salvation. The view is thereby rejected
that the development of the church since the Reformation
has been a normal one and that the problems of our church
today are only a temporary disturbance upon the removal
of which that development might proceed normally ... this
error must today be recognised and opposed, even in its
subtlest and purest forms; and the old confession must
be opposed to the old error with a new joyfulness and
explicitness.

The shorter Barmen Theological Declaration establishes Jesus

Christ as the one word of God, such that we repudiate the false
teaching that the church can and must recognize yet other hap
penings and powers, images and truths as divine revelation
alongside this one Word of God, as a source of her preaching
(thesis 1) and we repudiate the false teaching that there are
areas of our life in which we belong not to Jesus Christ but
another word, areas in which we do not need justification and
sanctification through him (thesis 2).
The basic theological position as Moltmann (1984) evaluates
it is a Christological eschatology: the sole Lordship of Christ
had to be asserted in view of totalitarian claims of state or
nation, in order to liberate the church from political religion.
God reveals himself in his Word, not in history, in nature or in
116 TH E C R IS IS

political movements. Because Christ has already won the vic

tory, the whole world is already objectively in Christ and under
his lordship. The world is no longer subject to demonic powers,
but finds its peace and freedom in Christ. Moltmanns concern
with this Christological eschatology is that it repeats the
temptation of the Corinthian community, whom Paul accused of
forgetting that it is the Crucified One who is Lord. A triumph-
alist and theocratic position can hardly be a suitable retort to
overweening Nazi claims. This theology, says Moltmann, cannot
provide the foundation for engaging non-believers: The lord-
ship of Christ reaches according to our experience as far as
human beings, freed from sin by his death, are obedient to i t ...
Christocentric ethics can only be discipleship ethics.
More than one commentator has pointed out the irony that the
right of resistance articulated by the Covenant theology of the
sixteenth century did not surface here, and that the Reformed
theologians were as hamstrung as their Lutheran counterparts
about the legitimacy of challenging an unjust tyrant. It is also
significant that this position held together only until the out
break of war, when national unity became a stronger priority.
This last point looks eerily similar to the discussion by
Cavanaugh (2006:319-20), when he argues against the assump
tion of many Americans that protests against the war in Iraq
should cease once the decision to go to war has been taken by
the Commander in Chief. Dissent, however principled, is
expected to give way to the exigencies of national unity in a time
of war, however questionable.
The most serious objection to the theology of Barmen,
however, must be to do with the thinness of its critique, by
comparison with the nature of the crisis it seeks to address. Its
overwhelming concern is with the Nazi regimes quasi-religious
pretensions and rivalry to the Lordship of Christ. The crisis is
(for Barth) a long-standing one, but is brought to light by the
controversy of the German Christian movement: it is discussed
here, and in Barths history of the conflict, almost entirely in
ecclesiastical terms. The history contains a few scattered ref
erences to actual events in Germany, and only one reference to
the fate of the Jews (Barth, 1965:45). Barth criticises the
Confessing Church for its silence about these events - and yet
 T H E O L O G Y IN A L A N D O F S C R E A M S 117

his own allusion to them is almost in passing (an imbalance

which he himself was to recognise later). Willmer (2004:128)
warns against an anachronistic reading here, as if we who come
after should expect from the Barmen texts a full-blooded
critique of the evils of National Socialism. Certainly, in 1934,
the full horror of the death camps was not yet revealed: but
surely enough was known for a stronger protest than we have
here?
To return to the question at the head of this section: the ver
dict upon the theological resistance to Leviathan, whether from
Catholic, Lutheran or Reformed sources, is a sad one. In each
case a mistaken or inadequate doctrine of the Two left the
churches and theologians unable to withhold their blessing in a
persuasive and articulate manner. There were indeed exceptions,
but it is precisely as they were exceptions that they reinforce the
general verdict. Dorothee Solles questions - How did this
happen? ... Didnt you smell the gas? - for the most part
remain unanswered. As we shall see, it is out of this crisis that
the first generation of political theologians emerges after the
war, with an urgently felt need to do better.
Finally, however, a consideration of Barth and his theological
resistance of Nazism needs to take account of Mark Lilias long
section on Barth and the Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig
(Lilia, 2007:258-95), perhaps the most controversial section of
The Stillborn God.% Amazing as it may sound, Lilia points up
uncomfortable similarities of style and method between Barth
and his theological opponents who signed up to Nazism. They
too believed that Germany in the years after World War One had
arrived at a moment of crisis, that the collapse of liberal theo
logy necessitated a decision. For the dialectical theologian
Barth and the Confessing Church the choice was Christ or
Hitler. For opponents such as Friedrich Gogarten and Emanuel
Hirsch this moment of historic destiny enveloped both figures
with messianic expectation; the propaganda of the so-called
German Christians could declare that Christ has come to us
through Adolf Hitler (Lilla:280),. Similar startling charges are
brought against Rosenzweig, whose Jewish messianism is con
trasted here with that of the unorthodox Marxist Ernst Bloch.
What Lilia perceives to be the relationship between these
118 TH E C R IS IS

thinkers really goes to the heart of the argument of The Stillborn

God\

But every orthodoxy spawns heterodoxy. That is what the

explosive youthful works of Barth and Rosenzweig
revealed: the possibility of a new heterodoxy that could
exploit the gnostic potential embedded in the Bibles
promise of redemption. The idea of redemption has been
one of the most powerful forces shaping human existence
in all those societies that have been touched by the biblical
tradition. It has inspired individual human beings to endure
suffering, overcome suffering, and inflict suffering on
others. It has offered hope and inspiration in times of
darkness; it has also added to the darkness by arousing
unrealistic expectations and justifying those who spill
blood to satisfy them. All the biblical religions cultivate the
idea of redemption - and all fear its power to inflame
minds and deafen them to the voice of reason. In the writ
ings of Friedrich Gogarten and Ernst Bloch, we encounter
what those orthodox traditions always dreaded: the trans
lation of gnostic notions of apocalypse and redemption into
a justification of political messianism, now under
frightening modern conditions. (Lilia, 2007:294)

Does the Shoah represent a unique and radical

rupture within rational thought?
For many, the Auschwitz death camp is a kind of cultural and
rational ground zero. Everything that preceded the Shoah by
way of civilisation, culture, science, and technology, needs to be
thought anew or reconstructed after Auschwitz. Philosophy,
theology, poetry, even architecture are all subjected to what
Susan Shapiro calls a radical negation (Shapiro, 1984:4). Even
the language with which we work is impossible to the task: and
yet the urge to testify to what happened is a categorical impera
tive - that is, it is non-negotiable, since silence would be a
concession of the final word to the executioner. Above all, Hitler
must not be granted a posthumous victory. Shapiro therefore
T H E O L O G Y IN A L A N D O F S C R E A M S 119

attempts to remain true to the radical negativity of the event, but

also to leave open the possibility of a recovery of the sacred. She
speaks of a double rupture: of the coherence and meaning
of language in general, and of theological language (as the
discourse of ultimate meaning) in particular: The negating
character of the event cannot be understood, therefore, as either
external or occasional to thought. She notes the importance of
narrative and symbol in the writings of Primo Levi and Elie
Wiesel and the poetry of Paul Celan. Whatever the rupture in
thought and word, however lamed our religious and intellectual
traditions, the testimony of these survivors of the camps (Levi
and Celan subsequently committed suicide) cannot not be heard.
One imperative of political theology after Auschwitz is that
never again can the Jewish voice be ignored; on the contrary, it
must be allowed to shape and transform Christian reflection.
Needless to say, this makes for a potentially agonising dialogue,
as history must be reread, and formerly non-negotiable doctrines
and patterns of thinking need to be looked at afresh. Of the
Christian political theologians, Johann Baptist Metz has been
foremost in facing the Jews after Auschwitz.
If it is true, that Christian theology can only proceed with this
new imperative at its heart, then one Jewish interlocutor who has
probably done as much as anyone to shed light in this terrible
darkness is George Steiner. His essays of literary criticism and
cultural analysis in Language and Silence, and No Passion
Spent, as well as his other writings, probe salient themes: the
collapse and catastrophe of language (especially of the German
language, abused by the Nazis themselves, and by post-war
Germans in denial); and, agonisingly, the contortions of enmity
and self-hatred which scar the historical and theological rela
tions of Christian and Jew, and which prepared for the season
of barbarism.
What makes Steiner an important voice is the theological
sensitivity of his writing. As with the other Jewish thinkers men
tioned above, he finds himself scouring the tradition for some
way of understanding what has happened, why Gods fury
should have been poured out. There are occasional Gnostic or
kabbalistic speculations, but these are not pressed home. Once
again, the futility of theodicy is apparent, above all where it is
120 TH E C R IS IS

a question of getting God off the hook. What is striking, how

ever, is the frequency with which Steiner draws on Christian as
well as Jewish images and themes. In the end he proposes a kind
of negative theology, which falls short of assenting belief in the
traditional sense: yet he cannot let go of the sense that there is a
transcendent guarantee of the human adventure in language and
in art.
Steiners 1989 essay, Real Presences, is a broadside against
certain convoluted and dispiriting academic trends. It is also a
postulate of the existence of God, offered not on ethical grounds
(as with Kant), but on aesthetic ones. All great art, says Steiner,
is a wager on transcendence, predicated on a God who under
writes our efforts at meaning. The essay proposes a necessary
possibility:

that any coherent understanding of what language is and

how language performs, that any coherent account of
human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in
the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of Gods
presence.

This is a wager on the meaning of meaning: it is that of

Descartes, of Kant and of every poet, artist, composer of whom
we have explicit record. Towards the end of the book he asserts
that having cited some of those who know best - the poets, the
artists - I have found no deconstructionist among them. The
density of Gods absence, the edge of presence in that absence
he finds both in the death camps, and in the master-texts of our
age (he lists Beckett, Kafka, Paul Celan).
The book closes with a rich extended image, of one particu
lar day in Western history about which neither historical record
nor myth nor Scripture make report. It is a Saturday. And it has
become the longest of days.9 Steiner invites Christian and non-
Christian to see themselves between the Friday of waste and
brutality, and the Sunday which for the Christian speaks of a
justice and love which have conquered death, but which all of
us conceive of as the day of liberation from inhumanity and
servitude. We look to resolutions, be they therapeutic or
political, social or messianic. The lineaments of that Sunday
T H E O L O G Y IN A L A N D O F S C R E A M S 121

carry the name of hope (there is no word less destructible).

On the Friday the apprehensions and figurations of art are
helpless and inappropriate; on Sunday they are unnecessary. It is
only on the long days journey of the Saturday that such things
make sense. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting
which is that of man. Without them, how could we be patient?
Here is a new twist to the wager, however. The catastrophe of
Nazism underlined that humans are mysteriously and terribly
capable of torturing prisoners during the day, and being moved
by Mozart in the evening. Such an observation too quickly
becomes a clich, and Steiners persistent probing is all the more
remarkable for somehow avoiding this. Three specific points
will be mentioned, before we look at Steiner as an inspiration for
the political theologian. Firstly, though his lifes work has
unfolded in the shadow of the camps, he has refused to raise a
standard over the exclusivity or uniqueness of the Holocaust,
insisting with Marc Ellis on our answerability for the holocausts
going on around us, even as we sleep. As for the paradox of
Israeli self-empowerment: let us never forget that each time a
Jew humiliates, tortures or makes homeless another human
being, there is a posthumous victory for Hitler.
Secondly, Steiner is adamant that Christian complicity in the
Holocaust be fully acknowledged, insofar as two millennia of
theological enmity, of Christian longing to be rid of the Jew,
prepared the way for the Final Solution. As with Johann Baptist
Metz, he sees the very credibility of the Church and of
Christianity staked on the capacity to undertake this acknowl
edgement and repentance - something, he regrets, that has yet to
happen on a convincing scale. Christianity itself, he conjectures,
is sick at heart... lamed, perhaps terminally, by the paradox of
revelation and of doctrine which produced the Shoah and its
antecedents in European history.10 Catholicism and
Protestantism hardly know themselves, though Jewish identity
has been similarly wounded, by the failed experiment of our
effort to become fully human: After Auschwitz, Jew and
Gentile go lamed, as if the wrestling bout of Jacob had been well
and truly lost. In neither case has the laming generated a
theologico-philosophical renewal; perhaps it cannot do so.
Nicholas Lash judges that Real Presences stands firmly in
122 TH E C R IS IS

the great tradition of Jewish and Christian prophecy in its

challenge to repentance, and to the remaking of a broken con
tract and a betrayed covenant. With Steiners moving image of
our Sabbatarian journey, we have a Jewish commentator (a
theologian in all but name), engaging with a Christian pattern
ing of time, in such a way that it becomes a universal descrip
tion of our predicament. Political theology is a discipline of
many such translations, as we shall see, when we examine,
over the next two chapters, the messianic legacy of Walter
Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, as well as the communication theory
of Jrgen Habermas.
Should it be a cause of concern that, at face value, the scope
for developing a political theology from Steiners intuition
appears limited? He has recently made no secret of his dismay
at the extremists in all the main religious traditions, and seems
pessimistic as to the capacity and willingness of religious com
munities to withstand and overcome fundamentalist pressures.
In a way that echoes Zizeks praise of Christianitys metaphysic
of uncoupling (see chapter 3), Steiner speaks warmly of the
Jewish destiny of homelessness, as a reproach to humanitys
obsessional belonging to race, fatherland, church, or synagogue.
A hotel room in Paris, he reminds us, afforded enough space for
Marcel Proust to write his great novel.
Lash draws out some of the themes in Steiner which could
resource political theology: for example, the modulation, where
possible, of stranger into guest, a theme which, intriguingly
once again, Steiner evokes by reference to the Christian Easter
narrative, the stranger encountered on the road to Emmaus.
Making the world habitable ... making a home for others and
making others at home is also our Sabbatarian task. Lash also
offers a corrective to Steiners neglect of the mythological
resonances of the Saturday, since the ancient symbolism of the
Harrowing of Hell needs to be evoked here. We might add that
this makes Saturday a day of intense political activity, having
recognised earlier that Christs victory over and rout of the
demons, exemplified by the violent storming of Satans king
dom, is perhaps the first Christian political theological
metaphor.
Finally, we may note that the conversation to which Steiner
T H E O L O G Y IN A L A N D O F S C R E A M S 123
invites us is theological, because it is conducted on the premise
that any coherent account of human speech to communicate
meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by
the assumption of Gods presence. With this claim, Steiner
implicitly joins the company of those political theologians who
listen in to the messianic whisperings underneath Critical
Theorys account of language as emancipation of victims. It is
to theologys engagement with Critical Theory, and its challenge
to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been
smashed, that we now turn.
Chapter 8

'WE W H O COM E AFTER'

Critical Theory and the Theologian1

In the early months of 1940, Walter Benjamin was waiting in

Paris, wondering if he should escape to the USA before the
Germans moved into France. He held back from fleeing because
he did not want to give up writing his book on Baudelaire. He
renewed his readers card for the Bibliothque Nationale, and
contemplated the gas mask in his room, which reminded him of
a skull adorning a monks cell.
During this time he composed a series of eighteen medita
tions or Theses on the Concept o f History, the last piece he
wrote. He fled Paris, and on 26 September reached a Spanish
border town with a group of refugees, only for them to be told
that Spain had closed its border that same day, and that their
visas would not be recognised. They were to be sent back to
France the next morning. That night, Benjamin took his life.

Benjamin and the Angel

We have come across one of his theses in chapter 3:
Benjamins parable of the Puppet and the Dwarf. In this curi
ous tableau, Benjamin indicates how theology is still a motive
force of history, but nowadays it had to be kept out of sight,
like the ugly dwarf manipulating the chess-playing puppet. As
we shall see, Benjamin holds us to be under a paradoxical
obligation: to think in theological terms, while being forbidden
to write in directly theological concepts: My thinking relates to
theology like the blotting page to the ink. It has entirely soaked
W E WHO C O M E A F T E R 125

itself full with it. If the blotting paper had its way, nothing that
is written would remain. Yet another parable, likewise taken
from the Theses, helps us to understand what is at stake in the
dark times Benjamin is trying to chronicle. It is called
Angelus Novus (new angel) or the angel of history:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel

looking as though he is about to move away from some
thing he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his
mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one
pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the
past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one
single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls
it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken
the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a
storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his
wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer
close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the
future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris
before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call
progress.2

Even though this stormy wind goes by the name of progress, it

leaves in its wake an ever-rising tide of catastrophe and human
wreckage. This paradox has a name, the Dialectic of
Enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno summarise thus: In
the most general sense of progressive thought, the
Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and
establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth
radiates disaster triumphant. How is this possible, that an
Enlightenment that sought to overcome fear and empower
humanity should have ended in disaster? This is what dialectic
means here: something that is basically or apparently good turns
out to have dreadfully negative consequences. And there can
surely be no more poignant image of this than a cultured and
humane scholar like Walter Benjamin being hounded across
Europe to the point of suicide.
The problem of the theologico-politicaT in Benjamins work
is, precisely, the possibility of redemption for the victims of
126 TH E C R IS IS

history. Is there some way in which the Angel can disentangle

his wings from the storm, and come to the aid of the victims: to
stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been
smashed? We have seen in chapter 7 how Kant addressed this
issue, by arguing for three postulates of practical reason: that
we are free, that God exists, that there is an afterlife. If these are
not operative, if there is no chance of virtue and happiness
coinciding, then we open ourselves up to moral despair. Thus,
it is a practical necessity that we postulate them; not to do so
would be to commit moral suicide(McCarthy, 1991:201). When
we look at the nature of our ethical obligations we are con
fronted with not just the possibility, but the necessity, of
religious hope.
To return from the eighteenth to the twentieth century: one
way of understanding contemporary political theology - by
which I refer to the tradition of German Political Theology
which arose after the Second World War, and therefore in full
knowledge of the Dialectic of Enlightenment - is to see it as a
return to the approach taken by Immanuel Kant, namely
addressing the philosophical foundations of religious belief
from the point of view of practical rather than theoretical reason
(iethics instead of epistemology). These theologians echo the
theme explored in chapter 7; they maintain that human attempts
at enlightenment, progress, and modernity, conducted
independently of God, are doomed to fail, precisely because of
the serpents tail of destructiveness, the dialectic which brings
catastrophe in the wake of any project of human improvement.
In this situation we are like Klees angel as described by
Benjamin, wanting to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole
what has been smashed, but the storm of progress sweeps us on.
And that terrible helplessness is a recipe for despair.

Benjamin and Horkheimer on Theology

We have seen that for Kant this temptation to despair is the only
alternative to the postulates of practical reason. The temptation
recurs, one hundred and fifty years later, in a correspondence
between Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer, set out in
McCarthys essay Philosophical Foundations o f the Political
W E W H O C O M E A F T E R 127

Theology (McCarthy, 1991). First of all, Horkheimer insists on

the irrecoverability or closedness of the past - in effect stress
ing the hopelessness of the parable of the Angel: Past injustice
has happened and is over and done with. Those who were slain
were really slain (McCarthy:30). The materialist feels that
humanity has been abandoned:

What happened to those human beings who have perished

cannot be made good in the future. They will never be
called forth to be blessed in eternity. Nature and society
have done their work on them and the idea of a Last
Judgement, which the infinite yearning of the oppressed
and the dying has produced, is only a remnant from
primitive thought, which denies the negligible role of the
human species in natural history and humanizes the
universe. (30)

Walter Benjamin, by contrast, continues to explore the theme of

redemption of the past, with a view of history as a form of
remembrance, of empathetic memory that can open up and
transform what was closed and done with. This is theology; but
in recollection [or empathetic memory; Eingedenken] we have
an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as funda
mentally atheological, which is not at all to say that we can write
history in directly theological concepts. This extraordinary
assertion reminds us once again of the parable of the Puppet
and the Dwarf, where theology is as operative as ever, but
is wizened, and kept out sight. Horkheimer protests once
again:

The thought that the prayers of those persecuted in their

hour of direct need, the prayers of the innocents who die
without comprehending their situation, the last hopes for a
supernatural court of appeals - are all to no avail, and that
the night in which no human light shines is also devoid of
divine light - this thought is monstrous. But is monstrous
ness ever a cogent argument against the assertion or denial
of a state of affairs? (McCarthy, 1991:31)
128 TH E C R IS IS

The Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School

The problem articulated here by Horkheimer and Benjamin is
the twentieth-century attempt to answer Kants third question,
what may we hope fo ri It forms the kernel of post-war political
theologys engagement with the social sciences. We shall see
this especially with Habermas and the theologians in the next
chapter; firstly, however, a more general outline of Critical
Theory is required. Edmund Arens (1997) and Charles Davis
(1998) sketch the history of Critical Theory as a series of con
tributions from a variety of disciplines, associated with the
philosopher/sociologists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,
and with others names such as Erich Fromm (social psycholo
gist), Herbert Marcuse (philosopher) and Walter Benjamin
(literary critic). Its initial aim, before the Second World War,
was to develop a theory of the historical development of the
present epoch, one which sought to examine the relationships
between the economic life of society, the psychic development
of the individual, and the changes in various sectors of culture
in the narrower sense. It was intended that a combination of
Marxist social theory and Freuds psychoanalysis would uncover
hidden psychic and social structures.
With the onset of Nazism (which forced most of this first
generation of the Frankfurt School to flee Germany, as most
were of Jewish origin), the agenda was radically transformed.
We have referred already to Horkheimer and Adornos classic
text The Dialectic o f Enlightenment. The guiding question here
was why humanity, instead of attaining a truly human con
dition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism? Was the spirit
of reason and Enlightenment merely nothing other than the
expression of a will to self-assertion and domination? As Arens
points out, the investigation of Horkheimer and Adorno pro
duces a pessimism, even a despair, regarding the possibility of
rationally-based emancipative action; Horkheimer eventually
turns to religion (ironically, given his resistance to Benjamins
use of theology in the correspondence cited above), Adorno to
art and aesthetics.
Edmund Arens suggests two approaches in political theology
W E W HO CO M E A F T E R 129
which emerge as a result of engagement with the Critical Theory
of the Frankfurt School: Johann Baptist Metz, who takes
Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin as his guides; and
Helmut Peukert, whose conversation partner is Jrgen
Habermas, and his Theory of Communicative Action (an
integrated theory of the subject and of intersubjectivity, a theory
of society and of history). These two approaches Arens calls
apocalyptic political theology and communicative political
theology respectively. We shall look at the second of these in
the next chapter; here, our attention will focus on the recovery
of apocalyptic and eschatological themes in Johann Baptist
Metz and Jrgen Moltmann.3

Interruptions and Hope

Metz gives two examples of experiences he calls interruptions,
because their traumatic impact shattered forever the idyllic
complacency of his conservative Catholic childhood: firstly, the
mass death of his young soldier comrades during an Allied
assault towards the end of the Second World War (Metz himself
was sixteen); secondly, the realisation of the huge difference that
Auschwitz and the Shoah should have made to theology, and to
German society, but didnt. It is interesting to note that
Moltmann tells of strikingly similar experiences: during a
firestorm unleashed on Hamburg in July 1943, the friend stand
ing next to him was torn to pieces by a bomb which left
Moltmann unscathed, while Moltmann also recalls the cold
horror with which, as a nineteen-year-old prisoner of war in
Scotland, he was shown photographs of Bergen-Belsen and
Auschwitz for the first time. For Metz, however, and for
Germany as a whole, the full horror of this second memory only
surfaced gradually: There was no theology in the whole world
that talked so much about historicity. Yet they only talk about
historicity; they did not mention Auschwitz. Metz detects in
theological idealism a huge and worrying apathy in this regard,
which perhaps connects with the theme of cultural weariness
we will examine below.
Prior to these shattering experiences, Metzs childhood was
spent in Auerbach, Bavaria, which he presents as a symbol of
130 TH E C R IS IS

pre-Enlightenment Catholicism, indeed a place which seemed

caught in the Middle Ages, and which required of him a jour
ney from Auerbach to the secular world of modernity.4 His
early work is heavily influenced by the Transcendental Thomism
of Karl Rahner, but the divergence of their intellectual paths that
takes place from 1963 marks a change of emphasis for Metz. In
many ways the work of Rahner and the Transcendental Thomists
should be seen as an attempt to respond to Kants challenge to
religion in the First Critique, while Metz moves to attend more
to practical philosophy, or ethics, as we find in Kants second
work, the Critique o f Practical Reason: the shift from what
can I know? to what must I do? Metzs meeting with the
revisionist Marxist Ernst Bloch confirmed this change of
direction.
Moltmann had been similarly impressed by Blochs massive
work Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle o f Hope), which he
read in 1960. Blochs extremely intriguing philosophical project
consisted in seeking to transform religious space into a privi
leged site of utopian expectation; Moltmann was struck by the
paradox that a Jewish Marxist was writing more articulately
about scriptural hope than Christian theologians! A Theology o f
Hope appeared in 1964, intended by Moltmann not as a
baptism of Blochs book (as Karl Barth had suggested), but as
a parallel action in Christianity on the basis of its own pre
suppositions. Rather than coming under the Marxists influ
ence, it may be said that Moltmann was in fact drawing attention
to those Jewish messianic elements in Blochs thought which
Bloch himself, trying to be a good Marxist, was playing down.
To repeat the judgement which was made when we looked at
Blochs reading of Thomas Miintzer (chapter 6): in important
passages of The Principle o f Hope, Marxism is rhetorically
present but in substantial terms predominantly supportive, even
marginal.5
Marxism, it seemed, had appropriated the fire of human hope
and longing for itself; Moltmann and Metz were catalysed by
reading Bloch to reclaim this vital human capacity for Christian
theology.
A Theology o f Hope is Moltmanns attempt to do this, build
ing on a sense of anticipation of Gods future for the world,
W E WHO C O M E A F T E R 131

insofar as we can tell what this will be like from the

Resurrection of Christ. There is a dialectic, or tension,
between present and future: Gods raising his Son to life is a
contradiction of the present world of suffering and death, so that
[p]eace with God means conflict with the world. Anticipation
is the action of the political visionary, who allows a perception
of future possibilities to inform present practice. What for Bloch
is a quality inherent in nature, of course, needs to be given a
different ground by the Christian theologian (Adams,
2004:229-30).

Saving Modernitys Subject

Meanwhile, Metz sought to construct a practical fundamental
theology; in many ways the same move made by his teacher,
Karl Rahner, only expanded. Rahner had come to the aid of the
individual subject, battered into agnosticism by Kants demo
lition of the traditional proofs of Gods existence. Metz is also
concerned for the endangered subject, but this subject must be
seen in his or her social and political embeddedness, not in
isolation. For Metz, theology should address believers at those
points at which their identity as persons is most threatened by
the social and political catastrophes of history (Ashley,
2004:247). But rather than seeking to anaesthetise ourselves
against this vulnerability, we need to accept that Christian faith
is just the capacity to affirm and live an endangered identity.
His work is oriented towards subject concepts: that is, he
attends to the ways in which we struggle to become subjects and
to maintain our fragile subjectivity, in the face of those forces
which would undermine it.
In this vein, Metz offers a scathing analysis of the distorted
middle-class subject that has emerged in modernity, as well as
the distorted bourgeois Christianity to which this subject pious
ly subscribes. As Marx had argued previously, this subject is not,
as in the past, established through cultural conditions or political
systems; he or she is determined by the pervasive principle of
exchange. The marketplace - the primary location for the prin
ciple of exchange - adjudicates all norms and values of human
life by supply and demand, by replacement and substitution. In
132 TH E C R IS IS

modernity anything can be bought and sold; nothing - not even

values, traditions, and relationships - can stand in the way of the
market system. Having begun, in the 1960s, to construct a social
anthropology on the basis of a positive appraisal of modernity
and its quest for freedom, Metz now realises the ways in which
modernity actually undermines the subject to which it gave birth,
and in fact threatens its very survival.
He detects in post-modern currents of thought a paralysing
weariness, indeed a second immaturity: do we want to become
subjects in the Enlightenment sense after all? It is essential that
the theodicy question is continually brought before society, in
order to counteract this malaise. His growing awareness of this
indolence brings about another significant shift in his work, a
new emphasis upon eschatology. By 1969 Metz had allotted a
specific eschatological function to the Church, called to be an
instance of critical liberty; That is, the Church was to stress
that any present political arrangement, however benign, was
non-identical, or non-contemporaneous, with Gods future. The
Church is the guardian of an eschatological proviso, a refusal
to bless the state, once again. This concept is not without its
difficulties, and came in for criticism from the liberation
theologian Juan Luis Segundo (Kirwan, 2006).

The Weariness of Evolutionary Time

In fact Metzs later theology (from the 1970s onwards) hardly
refers to the concept, partly because of Metzs sense of this
growing weariness with being a subject. The danger now is not
of the Christian message being swallowed up and cancelled out
by rival messianisms, but rather losing its edge in the
paralysing numbness Metz calls evolutionary time. This theme
is treated by Metz in a form with which we are familiar, since he
writes a chapter in Faith in History and Society entitled Hope
as immanent expectation, or the struggle for forgotten time,
which is very reminiscent of Walter Benjamins Theses on the
Philosophy o f History, though the chapter is explicitly a tribute
to the apocalyptic wisdom of Ernst Bloch: Christian theo
logians can learn from Bloch even if they have to contradict
him (Metz, 1980:169):
 W E W HO CO M E A F T E R 133

V
Catastrophes are reported on the radio in between pieces of
music. The music continues to play, like the audible pas
sage of time that moves forward inexorably and can be held
back by nothing. As Brecht has said, When a crime is
committed, just as the rain falls, no one cries: Stop!

VI
The shortest definition of religion: interruption.

VII
The first categories of interruption: love, solidarity which
as M. Theunissen has said, takes time, memory, which
remembers not what has succeeded, but also what has been
destroyed, not only what has been achieved, but also what
has been lost and in this way is turned against the victory
of what has become and already exists. This is a dangerous
memory. It saves the Christian continuum.

VIII
There is a new form of metaphysics, called evolutionary
logic. In it, time has been made indifferent and has come
systematically to control mans universal consciousness.
Everything is tunelessly and continually reconstructed on
the basis of this philosophy. This includes the religious
consciousness and the dialectical criticism of religion.
(Metz, 1980:170-1)

I have found it very striking to look at some of these theses with

students, and to realise how startlingly resonant they are, even
thirty years after Metz wrote them. Timelessness as a system
Metz alerts us to the sinister ability of capitalist modernity to
evacuate sacred time, holy seasons when the spirit of resist
ance can and needs to be nurtured and renewed (Benjamin
makes this point in his fragment, Capitalism as a Religion).
We know about the disappearance of the sabbath in modern
societies, and the co-option of feasts like Christmas by con-
sumerist capitalism: but what are we to make of a market system
that gives us Chelsea FC or Kylie Minogue Advent calendars'?
134 T H E C R IS IS

Even this great Christian season of messianic hope and

anticipation has been trivialised.
As for our response to catastrophe and suffering: is there
anything more dispiriting about modem communications media
than watching a television news report on a human tragedy - an
earthquake, a campus massacre - while the latest football scores
or stock market prices scroll across the bottom of the screen?
No one cries: Stop!
The evolutionary logic referred to in Thesis VIII denotes
how the paradoxical undermining of the modem subject by
modernity itself takes place. The bourgeois subject is defined in
terms of his or her freedom from suffering, which means
insulating himself from the suffering of others. In place of this
middle-class subject, Metz turns to the subject o f suffering. As
with Walter Benjamin, attention is drawn not to the optimistic,
evolutionary history of the victors, but to the forgotten history
of victims. The freedom of the human subject is now defined as
the freedom to suffer, which includes the freedom to suffer the
suffering of others. The categories in which this new historical
consciousness unfolds are memory, narrative and solidarity.
Christianity represents human freedom as the dangerous
memory of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ:
through this memory we experience history as a history of the
dead and of those who suffer.

The Eschatology of Suffering

Metz takes up the idea of apocalypse as an antidote to evolu
tionary thinking. Apocalyptic thinking is a rhetorical device
against sleepiness - though it is important to stress that, in
contrast to the blood and gore of the Left Behind visionaries
whom we will consider in chapter 10, Metz sees apocalypse as
a radical hope for the other, even for ones enemies. It is
characterised, not by resentful violence, but by a prayerful dis
position which he names Leiden an Gott (Ashley translates this
as suffering unto God), making clear this is an active, not
passive stance, towards the suffering of myself and of others: the
stance once again of Job, or the Jesus of Marks Passion. This
spirituality endures the remembrance of suffering, and coheres
 W E W H O C O M E A F T E R ______________________________________ 135
with Metzs re-description of the Enlightenment subject in terms
of the freedom to suffer the suffering of others.
Suffering is at the heart of Moltmanns other notable
achievement in theology: the reconsideration of the nature of
God and the recovery for political theology of the Reformation
theology of the Cross, which we find in The Crucified God, his
second major work after A Theology o f Hope. As with Metz, the
cross has an interruptive role; it stands over against human
certainties and cannot be incorporated into history, nor even be
smoothed over by an optimistic eschatological stance. Insofar
as Moltmann is still working with German philosophical tradi
tions, it looks as if Bloch is being corrected or complemented
with a darker, more pessimistic strain of thinkers like
Rosenzweig, Benjamin, and the analysts of Enlightenments
dialectic, Adorno and Horkheimer.
Moltmann at times gets into knots trying to appropriate
essentially atheistic philosophical insights for his theology
(Adams:231-20). The same has been said about the problematic
presence of Hegels philosophy of negation and sublimation in
The Crucified God: while the emotional power of an appeal to a
God who is not apathetic towards the suffering of Auschwitz is
undeniable, there are questions about Moltmanns revision of
our traditional concept of God, and his allegedly unacceptable
restrictions on Gods freedom. Moltmanns response is to
change the terms of our notion of freedom, ascribing to God
not our bourgeois freedom of choice or self-determination,
but an alignment of freedom with friendship. We shall note
below some specific problems raised by Dorothee Solle regard
ing his book, but these criticisms aside, the implications of a
Crucified God for theology are evident, and consonant with
the judgement of Metz:

Christian theology ... must adopt a critical attitude towards

political religions in society and in the churches. The polit
ical theology of the cross must liberate the state from the
political service of idols and must liberate people from
political alienation and loss of rights.
(Moltmann, 1974:328)
136 TH E C R IS IS

A Fiery Cloud in the Night: Dorothee Solle6

The achievements of Metz and Moltmann are considerable.
Under the heading political theology their work is usually
linked with a third theologian, whose impact is in many ways
very different, even if she has not shaped the landscape in quite
the same way as her better-known male colleagues. Dorothee
Solle, also spelled Soelle (1929-2003), differed from them in
that her career included a visible and sustained political and
peace activism; one might say at the expense of an orthodox
academic career in Germany, where such extra-mural activi
ties were frowned on. Solle never held a professorship in her
native land, and between 1975 and 1987 she divided her time
between Union Theological Seminary in New York and activism
in Germany. One of Solles most famous activities was the
Politisches Nachtgebet (Political Night Prayers), which she helped
organise in Cologne from 1968, originally as a protest against
the Vietnam War, but taking in other issues of social concern,
including the arms race and poverty in the developing world. A
member of the Evangelical Church, her concern for the social
relevance of the gospel made her a very visible figure, who was
widely mourned when she died in 2003.
Her theological interests show a similar breadth, as she has
written from feminist and liberationist perspectives, has shown
an interest in mysticism (especially its anarchic dimensions),
and has also written poetry: her doctorate from Stuttgart was on
the relation between poetry and theology. It is striking how
many of the themes she addresses are close to those which
govern the thinking of Metz and Moltmann, which is why it is
appropriate that these thinkers are linked together. First of all,
and once again, they share a wartime background, over
shadowed by the catastrophe of the Holocaust, though Solle was
slightly younger than Metz and Moltmann. Her parents were
opposed to Hitler and were shocked by the way the Churches
had made their peace with him. In an essay on sin, Solle shows
herself to be very much a German of her generation: I was born
in 1929.1 am a child of fascism, and spent about ten years of my
young adulthood on the questions: How could it happen?
W E W HO C O M E A F T E R 137
Where were you when the transports were put together? Didnt
you smell the gas? 7
Solles first book Christ the Representative (1967) was her
response to the death of God theology then in vogue - at the
same time that Metz was engaging with theologies of the
secular. Like Moltmann, she saw that the event of Auschwitz
necessitated a change in the way we think of Gods omnipo
tence. The theme of the weakness of God is reinforced by
perhaps her best-known book in English, Suffering (1973). It is
worth drawing attention to difficulties she had with Moltmanns
treatment of this in The Crucified God. She objects to the blur
ring of the distinction between victim and executioner which
slips into Moltmanns presentation, when Jesus believes himself
to have come to grief over God, the Father. Solle recognises
that this potentially sado-masochistic interpretation (which is to
be resisted on feminist grounds as well as more generally) runs
counter to the overall thesis of Moltmanns book, of a com
passionate God who suffers with us; this is the picture of God
which emerges from her own book on this theme.
Political Theology (1974) is an engagement with and critique
of the existential theology of Rudolf Bultmann: she distances
herself from him in much the same way as Metz had to distance
himself from Karl Rahner, because Bultmann overemphasised
the individual dimension of Christian life at the expense of the
social. It is perhaps in her anxieties and warnings about first-
world Christianity, however, where Solle most closely resembles
the later, rather pessimistic Metz, in memorable phrases such as
Europes death by bread alone. In the article on sin mentioned
above she writes in a vein strongly reminiscent of Metzs
critique of the paralysis and sleepiness of bourgeois society,
declaring that: [s]in - the absence of warmth, love, caring, trust
- is the most normal thing in the world:

When I try to say how I see the world, I cant get away from
an image that forces itself on me and wont let go: the Ice
Age - this slow advance of cold, a freezing process which
we experience and try to forget. Ice Age in the schools, in
the factories, in the high-rise silos we live in, in those
smallest units formerly known as families. ... in the First
138 TH E C R IS IS

World, more and more people are spiritually retarded from

over-nourishment, to sum up in one word the condition we
enjoy. We dont just live in an advancing Ice Age; we pro
duce it, maintain it and profit from it. It is absurd that we
want to deny the fact of this sin; that is, the domination
of freezing over retreating human beings. (Solle, 1982)

Conclusion
A mischievous academic colleague of mine once set the follow
ing exam question: Liberation Theology gave a voice to the
oppressed; European Political Theology gave a voice to dis
affected academic theologians. Discuss. The reader will have to
judge for herself how fair a comment this is. Certainly the gap
between Europe and Latin America should not be over
emphasised, as Metz, Moltmann and Solle were keen to main
tain a dialogue with their South American cousins. This mutual
exchange has not been without its tensions and real disagree
ments, but the convergence of basic attitudes is most poignantly
symbolised by the bloodstained copy of El Dios Crucificado,
found at the murder scene of the University of Central America,
El Salvador, in November 1989. The book belonged to Jon
Sobrino, a prominent liberation theologian; the blood was of one
of his murdered Jesuit colleagues.
As for disaffection: there is a certain amount of theological
grumpiness around, and Metz in particular has been taken to
task for his negativity, as we shall see in chapter 13. Once
again, it seems, we have to account for a tension between
Augustinian and Thomist strains in how the Church relates to
society. It is hardly surprising if Metz, Moltmann and Solle tend
towards the former, given the horrendous events that shaped
their youth. Assessing their legacy is not easy. Their writings are
dated in many respects, which is far from surprising, because
they were engaging with other theological styles and questions
that have themselves receded from relevance. And if it appears
that Solles work has had the shortest shelf-life, again this is not
surprising, in the light of her sustained and effective engage
ment with the other publics for theology: the Church and the
wider society, as well as the academy.
W E WHO CO M E A F T E R 139

Then again, there is that rolling news bulletin, with its brutal
trivialisation of suffering - those advent calendars!
It may be an appropriate judgement is to follow Jon Sobrinos
lead, in claiming for liberation theology the definition of a reli
gious classic, and ask whether the same title belongs to the
work of this distinctive generation of theologians. Sobrino here
follows David Tracy in The Analogical Imagination, where the
classic describes articulations of the spirit that prove to be of
enduring fruitfulness. A definitive judgement on the validity of
a classic, by its nature, has to be postponed. Nevertheless, pro
visionally we would be laying claim to:

something valuable, something important; some dis

closure of reality in a moment that must be called one
of recognition which surprises, provokes, challenges,
shocks and eventually transforms us; an experience that
upsets conventional opinions and expands the sense of
the possible; indeed a realized experience of that which
is essential, that which endures. The presence of classics
in every culture is undeniable. Their memory haunts us.
Their actual effects in our lives endure and await ever
new appropriations, constantly new interpretations.
Their existence may be trusted to time, to the genera
tions of capable readers and inquirers who will check
our enthusiasms and ensure the emergence of some
communal sense of the importance of certain texts,
images, persons, events, symbols. (Tracy, 1983:108-9)
Chapter 9

TROM DESPAIR T O WHERE?'

Habermas and Communicative Theology

Critical Theory Continued: Jrgen Habermas

Edmund Arens begins his book Christopraxis (1996) with a
quotation from the Gospel of John: Those who do what is true
come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds
have been done in God (John 3:21). These words of Jesus are a
reproach to Nicodemus, who fearfully comes to Jesus at night.
They might also be taken as a riposte to Hannah Arendt, who
compared the activity of the Christian to the furtive secrecy of
the criminal.
This verse sums up the approach of the second strand of
theology associated with Critical Theory, which understands
authentic gospel living in terms of the Communicative Action
theory of Jrgen Habermas, seeing in his expanded concept of
reason a way to rehabilitate Christian values over against instru
mental concepts of reason that have colonized most areas of
human experience (Hewitt, 2004:466). A word of clarification
is needed here, about precisely who is undertaking this dialogue.
Arens files the theologians inspired by Habermas under the
category political theologians; they are constructing a com
municative political theology (1997:232). Marsha Eileen
Hewitt designates these interlocutors public theologians,
rather than political. She gives reasons why she considers
public theology to be not only very different from political and
liberation theologies, but even a step backwards from them. I
 F R O M D E S P A IR T O W H E R E ? 141
propose that we try and sort this out in the next chapter.
Habermas is one of the most important social theorists of the
late twentieth century. A figure of comparable stature would be
the American philosopher John Rawls, but despite the enormous
impact of A Theory o f Justice (Rawls, 1999 [1971]) there has
been surprisingly little direct contact between Rawls and politi
cal theology, at least compared to the Habermas discussions.1 In
an article entitled Saint John: the Miracle of Secular Reason
Matthew Scherer draws attention to the saintliness of John
Rawls, as evidenced both by his miraculous works and by
some aspects of Rawls own life. This is only partly tongue in
cheek: Scherer is asking seriously about the persistence of
political theology within a discourse that disavows it (341), in a
way which, as we shall see, closely matches the theological
interrogation of Jrgen Habermas. Scherer concludes that

admirable appeals to justice may find their root in the

ineliminable experiences of personal suffering that they
tend to obscure. And that the faith Rawls seeks to
inspire in his conception of liberalism is much more
closely analogous, in the needs it serves, to modalities
of religious faith, which Rawls has been taken to have
escaped. In the end, then, it would appear than even an
avowedly secular, liberal, democratic politics stands in
deep need of its saints, and that this very need can serve
as a vital source of moral and political instruction.
(Sherer, 2006:362)

Habermas is regarded as the main heir to the Frankfurt School,

carrying on the task they set themselves in the 1930s, namely,
the construction of a theory of the historical development of the
present epoch. This theory examines the relationships between
the economic life of society, the psychic development of the
individual, and the changes in various sectors of culture in the
narrower sense. As noted in the last chapter, the original
intention was to draw on the work of Marx and Freud, though
this became more complicated, not least after the Nazi catastro
phe. Habermas seeks to carry forward the overall aim of the
Frankfurt School by constructing an integrated theory of the
142 TH E C R IS IS

subject and of intersubjectivity, a theory of society and of

history (Arens: 1997:229).
It is not possible to summarise here the scope and detail of
Habermas work; excellent guides are available. What interests
us specifically is his (ambiguous) engagement with theology. In
keeping with its Marxist and Freudian ancestry, Habermas
construction of a Theory of Communicative Action adopts a
methodological atheism: the assertions of theology and reli
gion are only of value in the public sphere if they can be trans
lated into a public language, accessible to everyone. Despite this
challenge, some political theologians see this theory as the best
way to release and consolidate the emancipatory potential of the
Christian tradition. This has not been simply a defensive move:
these same theologians have been able to articulate how the
Theory of Communicative Action is itself flawed, insofar as it
does not take into account the religious dimension of human
hope.
In chapter 4 we considered Hannah Arendts concept of
political action. Insofar as this action was both interpersonal and
accompanied by speech, it could be said that her vision is a
forerunner of Habermas work. He posits authentic political
action in terms of communication, and argues that interpersonal
communication is fundamentally oriented to consensus. Of
course this communication is distorted and frustrated in all
kinds of ways. For this reason, Habermas invites us to imagine,
as a kind of template for political action, an ideal speech
community; that is, one in which there is equality of access to
the public arena: no one excluded, and no one debarred from
speech, provided each person strives to give reasons for their
case which are publicly comprehensible. Also posited along
with this community setting is unlimited time for discussion,
during which distortions are overcome and, eventually, con
sensus achieved.

A Theological Response
Helmut Peukert, yet another German theologian, has attempted
to articulate a critical theology o f communicative praxis, or a
theology of communicative action along these lines.2 His
 F R O M D E S P A IR T O W H E R E ? 143
engagement with contemporary philosophers of science led him
to the view that scientific rationality is based upon commu
nicative action, making the insights of Habermas an appro
priate way forward for thinking about science and theology
together. However, according to Peukert, the deep structure of
communicative practical reason, which is characterised by
equality, reciprocity and solidarity, contains a glaring contra
diction. There is a gap between the universalism of the
communication ethics he develops and the annihilation of
the innocent other in history. Simply put: what is the status of
the victims of history? If there is no possibility of solidarity with
them, then an ideal communication ethic is a sham. Com
municative discourse is in principle unlimited and unrestricted,
but it is evident that when perfect solidarity has finally been
achieved, these lucky few (Bertolt Brechts phrase: we who
come after):

are obliged to live with the consciousness that they owe

everything to the oppressed, the downtrodden, the victims
of the whole process of human emancipation. This genera
tion has inherited everything from past generations and
lives on what they paid for. ... The happiness of the living
consists in the appropriation of the dead. Is happiness at all
conceivable under these presuppositions?3

This last generation, it seems, must either be blissfully forgetful,

or drawn to nightmarish grief and despair. This is, in effect, to
go back to the exchange between Walter Benjamin and Max
Horkheimer. The response of theology to this crisis is similar to
Benjamins: an insistence on an anamnestic solidarity with the
dead in resurrection {Anamnesis is the Greek word for remem
brance, or literally unforgetting).4 This is summed up in two
theses:

The Judeo-Christian tradition is concerned with the reality

experienced in the foundational and limit experiences of
communicative action and with the modes of communica
tive action still possible in response to these experiences; a
fundamental theology can and must be developed as a
144 TH E C R IS IS

theory of this communicative action approaching death in

anamnestic solidarity and of the reality experienced and
disclosed in it. (Peukert, 1984:215)

As McCarthy makes clear, Peukert has then to deal with the

here comes the cavalry objection: being in a monstrous
situation cannot entail, as if by a syllogism, a happy solution.
Peukert goes no further than identifying the worm at the heart
of the apple of progress, but the lines of argument are clear:
Communicative action in universal solidarity with the innocent
victims of history only makes sense if this end is attainable, and
it is attainable only on the assumption of a Lord of History who
will somehow redeem past history (36). Arens argues that:

the insistence on the anamnestic constitution of reason and

on anamnestic solidarity ... indeed sheds light on the vic
tims of history and makes clear that modernity has not at
all put an end to victimization but, on the contrary, has
enlarged both the numbers and the quality of victimization.
By claiming universal justice, universal solidarity, and the
recognition of the others as others ..., political theology in
the face of and at the end of modernity... affirms that the
universality that the enlightenment had in view must not be
abandoned but that it must be adequately brought up,
namely as precisely the taking into account of the uni
versality of suffering that has to be addressed, denounced,
and overcome. (Arens: 1997:237)

Arens himself attempts a reading of biblical and ecclesial

traditions as a communicative praxis (Christopraxis), while
Paul Lakeland envisages the Church as an ideal speech commu
nity.5 So there has been no shortage of theological interlocu
tors, and through a reluctant dialogue with them Habermas has
become more sympathetic to the emancipatory possibilities of
religion. All of which makes for a rich and important exchange
of ideas, the most significant symbol of which has to be the
discussion between Habermas and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at
the Catholic Academy of Bavaria in January 2004: an unlikely
dialogue6 between the foremost watchdog of Catholic
 F R O M D E S P A IR TO W H E R E ? 145

doctrine - subsequently to become Pope Benedict XVI - and the

liberal intellectual heir to a tradition of Western Marxism.

Habermas Takes Note of the Theologians

Jrgen Habermas converses with theologians in the collection
Habermas, Modernity and Public Theology. Here are essays
from five theologians: David Tracy, Helmut Peukert, Francis
Schssler Fiorenza, Matthew Lamb and Charles Davis, as well
as essays from two non-theologians and Habermas response,
Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World
(Habermas, 1992:226-50). David Tracy sets the scene,7 stress
ing how communicative rationality can and must contribute to
the task of helping theology address its public, constituted by
open conversations, plural discourses and diverse communities
(5). Charles Davis (152-72) sees possibilities in the Theory of
Communicative Action for expounding the validity of religious
hope, while Helmut Peukert characterises both Enlightenment
and Theology as unfinished projects (43-65). Both these two
and Matthew Lamb see the challenge of theodicy - solidarity
with suffering victims - as central to the discussion. All wel
come the framework (superior to those of Marx and Weber)
Habermas gives them for thinking about religion in modernity,
though with reservations. In particular, Habermas is challenged
for his neglect of the positive and emancipatory dimension of
religion in the public sphere.
Habermas reply, though respectful, makes it clear that differ
ent understandings of religion are at work (Fiorenza, 1992:15).8
He admits that he finds this discussion difficult: he is more at
ease responding to objections from sociologists and philoso
phers, but is nervous of his lack of expertise in theology.
However, given that this theological interest, mainly in Germany
and the USA, has now stretched over several decades,9 he feels
that continued silence on his part would be inappropriate.
Habermas begins by recognising common ground on which
theologians and philosophers can speak to each other, insofar
as they share a self-critical assessment of modernity (226). He
recalls the admirable efforts of theologians of the Confessing
Church in post-war Germany, and cites with approval the public
146 T H E C R IS IS

theology of David Tracy and Francis Schiissler Fiorenza, for

whom the churches are communities of interpretation in which
issues of justice and conceptions of goodness are publicly dis
cussed. In comparison with other, secular, communities of
interpretation

it could turn out that monotheistic traditions have at their

disposal a language whose semantic potential is not yet
exhausted, that shows itself to be superior in its power to
disclose the world and to form identity, in its capability for
renewal, its differentiation, and its range ... where
theological argumentation is pushed so far into the neigh
bourhood of other discourses, the perspectives from within
and from without meet without restraint. (229)

So far so very good. Habermas sees how political theology has

attempted to break out of the cordon sanitaire that would keep
theological and social scientific discourses rigorously apart from
one another, afraid of mutual contamination. The task is to bring
both sides beyond the postures of nihilistic condemnation and
dogmatic self-assertion, and into a relation where arguments are
used. But he then poses two key questions and a warning:

If this, however, is the common ground of theology,

science, and philosophy, what then still constitutes the
distinctiveness of theological discourse? What separates
the internal perspective of theology from the external
perspective of those who enter into a dialogue with
theology? ... the more that theology opens itself in general
to the discourses of the human sciences, the greater is the
danger that its own status will be lost in the network of
alternating takeover attempts. (231)

Habermas takes note of a philosophical tradition which under

stands itself as critically appropriating or retrieving religious
contents within the universe of argumentative discourse: from
Hegel, to Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and Critical Theory.
The similarity between Adornos philosophical critique and
Metzs theological protest is specifically noted (232). Once
 F R O M D E S P A IR T O W H E R E ? 147
again, however: how is philosophy to be differentiated from
theology here? The difference (according to Habermas) must be
the methodological atheism which philosophy must show
towards the content of religious experience. Such experiences
can only be resources for philosophy insofar as they are in
corporated into the universe of argumentative discourse that is
uncoupled from the event of revelation (233). Habermas judges
that the theologians have not succeeded in this translation: theirs
is an indirect procedure of apologetic argumentation, which
seeks to force the secular opponent into a comer, forcing them
to concede theologically defended affirmations. Habermas
reasserts his current position on the matter:

As long as religious language bears within itself inspiring,

indeed unrelinquishable semantic contents which elude
(for the moment?) the expressive power of a philosophical
language and still await translation into a discourse that
gives reasons for its positions, philosophy, even in its post-
metaphysical form, will neither be able to replace nor
repress religion. (237)

However, this does not means that he agrees with Helmut

Peukert on the necessity of a theological foundation for a
discourse theory of morality and ethics:

The anamnestically constituted reason, which Metz and

Peukert, rightly, continually advocate ... confronts us with
the conscientious question about deliverance for the
annihilated victims. In this way we become aware of the
limits of that transcendence from within which is directed
to this world. But this does not enable us to ascertain the
countermovement of a compensating transcendence from
beyond. That the universal covenant of fellowship would
be able to be effective retroactively, toward the past, only in
the weak memory of the living generations, and of the
anamnestic witnesses handed down falls short of our moral
need. But the painful experience of a deficit is still not a
sufficient argument for the assumption of an absolute
freedom which saves in death. (238)
148 TH E C R IS IS

Peukert, says Habermas, resorts to an experience accessible only

in the language of the Christian tradition: specifically, the death
on the cross as an anticipation of Gods goodness, and the guar
antee of a favourable outcome to our unconditional solidarity.
Charles Davis similarly adopts an apologetic argumentation
when he asserts that [a] secular hope without religion cannot
affirm with certainty ... a future fulfilment. Habermas does not
see that this search for certainty can be justified; he refers us
instead to a post-Marxist social theory that has become more
humble, whose diagnoses are reliably but not infallibly
grounded. Kant already had answered the question What may
we hope for? with a postulate of practical reason, not with a
premodem certainty that could inspire us with confidence.'
(240) Habermas expresses gratitude to his theological interlocu
tors, therefore, for their engagement with his theory, but at the
heart of his response to them is a firm rejection of apologetic
figures of thought.
He wonders whether theology is in danger of losing its dis
tinctiveness: for Habermas, the task of communicating religious
traditions in the public sphere can only be a translation from one
language to another. Unlike his interlocutors, he does not
believe theology is communicative.

Recent Conversations: Secularisation and the

Post-Secular
The later writings of Habermas, which we consider below, have
a change of emphasis: they are not so much focused on the ques
tion of whether theology has something crucial to add to the
Theory of Communicative Action: by and large, Habermas
answer still seems to be in the negative. Instead, two specific but
related themes come to the fore, each establishing the positive
contribution which religion and theology can make even if
this does not quite coincide with what political theologians think
that contribution should be. They are:
a reappraisal of our understanding of the phenomenon of
secularisation, in the wake of 9/11, and
a renewed exploration of how religious traditions can and
should contribute to the project of post-secular democracy.
 F R O M D E S P A IR T O W H E R E ? 149

To begin with the most pressing and dramatic of these themes.

The events of September 11th, 2001, and the debate concerning
the violent and fundamentalist return of religion, have con
firmed Habermas in the need to revisit the phenomenon of
secularisation. This he did in a speech delivered within a couple
of months of 9/11.10 It is important to stress the difference
between what Habermas has to say about these events, and the
view of commentators like Richard Dawkins, who insist that
the actions of suicide bombers are just the type of atrocities
that religious people have always inflicted on others, ever since
this virus first infected the human race. For Habermas, on the
other hand, [djespite its religious imagery, fundamentalism is,
as we know, an exclusively modern phenomenon. Because the
process of secularisation (which he calls a process of creative
destruction), has taken place inappropriately, and too rapidly,
people in traditional societies have come to feel threatened and
embattled. There is a further ironic aspect to this, namely the use
of apocalyptic language by President Bush promising retribu
tion, and the upsurge of religious practice in the United States,
as if the blind attacks had struck a religious chord deep within
the innermost core of secular society. What is clear to Haber
mas is that, thanks to Osama bin Laden, there has been a
qualitative change in the relationship between modern secular
society and religion. Even in Europe, where for centuries we
have been living with the Janus head of modernity, there is
still ambivalence regarding secularisation. If we are to avoid a
clash of civilisations, we need to be attentive to this
ambivalence.
The models of secularisation previously in use (which speak
of a replacement or expropriation of the religious by the
secular) will not suffice, because they oppose religion and
modernity. Instead, we need a model which can describe what is
happening in post-secular societies, a term Habermas starts to
use from now on. For this he resorts once again to a translation
model, by which religious claims need to be translated into a
publicly accessible secular discourse. Communities of believers
and the secular state speak to each other by exercising demo
cratically enlightened common sense. This common sense
requires of believers that they: renounce violence; engage
150 TH E C R IS IS

seriously with the truth claims of other faiths; and recognise

the validity of the social sciences and of the secular basis of the
modem constitutional state.
The challenge of translation is developed further in the his
toric conversation between Habermas and Cardinal Ratzinger,
though here their topic is a little less dramatic than the paradigm
shift imposed by 9/11.11 These two prominent German scholars
address a crucial question: is the liberal secular state nourished
by normative preconditions that it cannot itselfguarantee,? This
raises the possibility of the states dependence upon conceptual,
ethical or religious traditions; if such a dependence were proved,
it would undermine the states commitment to ideological
neutrality in the face of pluralism. In the background here is the
issue of European constitutional unity, and whether there is
sufficient democratic enthusiasm and commitment to sustain
such a project on purely secular grounds.
Habermas breaks the theme down into two aspects: firstly,
asking whether political rule is at all open to a secular (non
religious) justification. Even if such a foundation were firmly
established, however, there remains the problem of how citizens
are to be motivated, since the sources of their solidarity might
dry up. This second part of the challenge requires, for
Habermas, an understanding of secularisation as a twofold
learning process, by which both Enlightenment traditions and
religious doctrines leam their respective limits.
Regarding the first point, Habermas holds a Kantian
Republican justification of the democratic constitutional state,
drawing on a tradition of rational law derived from seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century philosophy (rather than earlier classical
and theological sources), to be securely founded; nor should
Catholic Christianity, at least, have any difficulty with this. The
second challenge - how to motivate and enthuse - remains,
especially given that the democratic constitutional state
demands a very high level of active participation. Citizens are
required to actively exercise their communicative and participa
tory rights, not simply with regard to their own interest, but with
respect to the common good. So how does one ensure this high
motivational outlay (one cannot prescribe solidarity, or force
people to vote)? Political virtues are essential for democracy,
 F R O M D E S P A IR TO W H E R E ? 151
and Habermas concedes that these are habits which need to be
nurtured from spontaneous and prepolitical sources. This does
not imply, yet, that the liberal state is incapable of reproducing
motivational preconditions out of its own resources: never
theless, a cognitive process, without moral discernment and
consensus, is not enough:

Solidarity among the members of a political society, how

ever abstract and legally mediated it may be, emerges only
when the principles of justice find their way into the more
densely woven network of cultural values. ... A derailing
modernisation of society as a whole could very well erode
the democratic bond and drain the democratic state of the
kind of solidarity upon which it depends, without being
able to command it legally. (255)

He even envisages this as reversion to a kind of war of all

against all, though it is rights rather than weapons that are
wielded here. This disintegration is in fact what we have with
market economies, which cannot be democratised, and yet
increasingly assume control over areas of life previously held
together by political or prepolitical forms of communication.
Failing democratic operations (especially at the supra-national
level, such as attempts at international law) are leading to
disillusionment and increased civic privatisation.

Philosophys Indebtedness to Religion

Habermas prefers not to over-dramatise the situation. The ability
of an ambivalent modernity to stabilise itself by drawing on the
power of communicative reason alone is, for him, an open,
empirical question. In order to succeed, this modernity requires
a measure of interaction which includes, but goes well beyond,
respect for those persons and for those ways of life which
derive integrity from religious conviction. But what about the
other direction? Does philosophy learn anything from religious
traditions? In a section which reads a bit like what have the
Christians ever done for us? Habermas recounts that these
traditions articulate, subtly spell out, and hermeneutically keep
152 T H E C R IS IS

alive over thousands of years intuitions about fall and redemp

tion; about something which has been lost generally and cannot
be recovered, namely:

sufficiently differentiated possibilities of expression and

sensibilities for misspent life, for societal pathologies, for
the failure of individual life plans and the deformation to
be seen in distorted life contexts. (257)

He is alert to the ways in which the mutual penetration of

Christianity and Greek metaphysics brought about a philos
ophical appropriation of genuinely Christian content, in terms
of:

heavily laden, normative conceptual networks such as:

responsibility; autonomy and justification; history and
memory; beginning anew, innovation and return; emanci
pation and fulfilment; externalisation, internalisation and
embodiment; individuality and community.

Habermas speaks of the secularizing release of religiously-

encapsulated potentials of meaning. Above all, the shining
example, as it were, of such a saving translation undertaken by
philosophy is the translation of mans likeness to God into the
notion of human dignity, in which all partake equally, in which
all are respected unconditionally. He mentions Walter Benjamin
as one such translator, rendering biblical concepts accessible
to the general public, beyond the boundaries of a particular
religious community.
Given the threats identified earlier, Habermas argues that it is
in the states own interests to have a care for the sources of our
endangered solidarity - hence talk of a post-secular society.
The term post-secular is more than simply a resigned acknowl
edgement of religions de facto continued existence in the public
sphere: rather, it reflects a normative insight that has conse
quences for how believers and non-believers interact politically.
If both sides can understand secularisation of society as a com
plementary learning process, each will be able to take seriously
the others contributions to controversial issues.
 F R O M D E S P A IR T O W H E R E ? 153

The liberal state demands a political integration of its

citizens, which goes beyond an undemanding alignment of reli
gious ethos with the imposed laws of a secular society. Ethos
and laws need to be connected, or embedded, from within.
This is a costly process for believers. But it is also costly for
non-believers, who, beyond the demands of tolerance of their
religious fellow-citizens, are expected to acquire a self
reflexive handling of the limits of Enlightenment, and perhaps
even to participate in efforts to translate relevant contributions
from a religious language to a publicly accessible one.
Cardinal Ratzinger responds, finding himself largely in
agreement regarding post-secular society, the willingness to
learn and mutual self-limitation. He acknowledges those
pathologies of religion requiring reason for their purification,
but also even more threatening pathologies or hybris of reason
that in its turn calls for correction, by attending to the great
religious traditions of humanity. A fully emancipated reason,
which ignores this necessary correlativity of reason and faith,
of reason and religion, which are appointed to mutually cleanse
and heal one another (268), will be destructive. There is, in
short some degree of agreement between the theologian and the
social theorist, that religion and faith traditions do have a very
important contribution to make to the project of secular demo
cratic society. But they differ on what exactly this contribution
is, and the concessions which Habermas makes to belief prob
ably fall short of what Cardinal Ratzinger (and presumably
political theologians) would want to hear.

Is Habermas a Suitable Partner for Theology?

There are plausible reasons why some theologians remain scep
tical about Habermas as a conversation partner. Just how useful
is a system which insists on methodological atheism for the
project of political theology? There must also be a concern
about whether Habermas translation model requires the
believer to concede too much; a devils pact which favours the
secularist side of the bargain. As Hewitt reminds us (2004:466),
there are limits to how far theology can lay open its operations
to public discourse, as a Habermasian approach would require:
154 TH E C R IS IS

at least some of theologys axiomatic assumptions are non-

negotiable.
In fact, one of the most perceptive thinkers regarding the
dangers for theology is Jrgen Habermas himself. We have seen
how in 1992 he welcomed the conversation with theology, but
asked how this discipline was to preserve its distinctiveness in
this dialogue: the more that theology opens itself in general to
the discourses of the human sciences, the greater is the danger
that its own status will be lost in the network of alternating
takeover attempts (1992:231). In the conversation with
Cardinal Ratzinger, there is a related concern. He describes the
persistent movement towards transcendence in philosophy as the
place where dialogue with religious belief begins:

[RJeason, reflecting upon its most basic foundation,

discovers that its origin lies in an Other; and that it must
recognise the fateful power of this other if it is not to
lose its rational orientation in an impasse of hybrid self-
empowerment. (2006:256)

Here, there is a temptation for the theologian. This process of a

conversion of reason through reason is to be found in such
very different thinkers as Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Hegel,
Feuerbach, and Marx. There is no initial theological intention,
but reason becoming aware of its own limits steps beyond itself
toward an Other - whether this Other is a quasi-mystical
encompassing cosmic consciousness, an unforeseen historical
event, or the messianic salvation of an unalienated society.
These are the anonymous gods of post-Hegelian society, says
Habermas, and they are an easy prey for theology, which can see
them as pseudonyms for the trinity of the personal God!
If Habermas is a siren voice for theology, at least he has the
good grace to tell us where the rocks are. A fuller appraisal of
Habermas continued importance for political theology is not
possible here: Edmund Arens is confident of the fruitfulness of
this kind of social theory as a resource, enabling theology to be
interdisciplinary, competent and critical, including a self
critique of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and praxis (Arens,
1994:16).
 F R O M D E S P A IR T O W H E R E ? 155
The dialogue has continued;12 though still with reservations.
Nicholas Adams in Habermas and Theology (Adams, 2006)
argues that Habermas is not a serious theological partner in
dialogue (Adams, 2006:13): that influence in either direction
has been minimal; and that Habermas wants the power without
the danger of religious and theological discourse (13). Eduardo
Mendieta challenges each of these points, asserting that reli
gion has always been an indispensable point of reference for
Habermas. Mendieta also distances him from a Hegelian view
of religion subsumed into philosophy. Contrary to announcing
the death of religion (as Hegel does), Habermas goes a long
way to show how religion continues to be generative for social
solidarity (and unrest and enmity) and philosophical
creativity.13
At the very least, in the post 9/11 context one can note the
fact of Habermas being a rare thing: a secular commentator who
is sympathetic to the role of religion in the public sphere. If the
dreaded clash of civilisations is to be avoided, and if we are to
find a way out of the Kulturkampfwhich is hotting up around us,
then the dialogue between Jrgen Habermas and the theologians
will continue to be important for the foreseeable future.

Conclusion: Ruined Athens or New Jerusalem?

We have left hanging a question raised in chapter 7, about what,
precisely, the signpost Auschwitz points to. The theologians
and the philosophers considered in the subsequent two chapters
have responded in different ways, in accordance with their
varied readings of the crisis and the rupture of thought it
entails;
for George Steiner, we must learn to persist in some dispen
sation of twilight with what dignity and minor virtues we can
muster. We must accept, as our destiny and as precondition
of our survival, a condition of homelessness, symbolised by
his rich metaphor of the Sabbatarian journey. Only thus can
there be that modulation of strangers into guests which will
save humanity;
for the post-war political theologians, those who come after,
156 TH E C R IS IS

the task has been to address honestly the dialectic of

Enlightenment, but still to keep faith with the Enlightenment
and its postulates of hope, by taking up the messianic intu
itions of its marginal thinkers; and
for Jrgen Habermas, and the theologians inspired by his
communicative action theory, the challenge is to confront
secularist accounts of our condition with the necessity of a
religious contribution, understood as a translation of reli
gious imperatives into publicly accessible discourse oriented
towards emancipation and justice.
Some observations from the late political philosopher Gillian
Rose may help us. In a collection entitled Judaism and
Modernity, she opens with a parable on friendship, asking us
to imagine that a good friend has let us down badly.14 There are
a number of responses which we can make, the obvious one
being to try to speak to the friend, so as to find out the cause of
the misunderstanding. This approach may lead to reconciliation,
or it may lead to a mutual or unilateral decision to break off this
particular friendship. Then there is a second set of more extreme
responses: one may redefine ones understanding of friendship,
or one may even decide to renounce friendship altogether, and
break off with all ones friends.
Most would agree that this second range of possibilities is
extreme and inappropriate: and yet Rose asserts that if we sub
stitute the word reason for friendship, we have a description
of what has happened with a number of post-modern philos
ophers who have adopted fundamentally anti-rational strategies
in the face of the crisis of modern rationality. What they offer is
a false choice, between a ruined Athens and a New
Jerusalem: the apparently unnegotiable and expiatory opposi
tion between reason and witness, between knowledge/power and
new ethics, between relativising explanation and prayer (Rose,
1996:30).
What does she mean by all this? The ruined Athens is the
wreckage of modernitys hopes and projects, whether for per
petual peace or for a rationally-organised Utopia, and so on.
New Jerusalem refers to a number of post-modern philos
ophical and theological responses - many of which, as it
 F R O M D E S P A IR T O W H E R E ? 157

happens, are of Jewish provenance. Rose speaks of an exodus

from the imperium of reason, She is warning against the
temptations of fundamentally anti-rational strategies in the face
of the crisis of modem rationality: Post-modernism in its
renunciation of reason, power, and truth identifies itself as a
process of endless mourning, lamenting the loss of securities
which, on its own argument, were none such.15
If we re-read her parable on friendship, we see how Rose is
claiming that these strategies represent the second, over the top
response: they are an attenuated mourning for certainties that
never were, and also an irresponsible evasion of the risks of
political community - what she calls the third city, the city we
all live in and are responsible for.
There is a further dimension to Auschwitz which Rose points
out, in her desire to situate it at some place on this earth, as
Primo Levi puts it. Auschwitz is a fourth city: architectural
plans make it clear that the Nazis originally intended to develop
this site as a garrison town, a permanent settlement which was
to form part of the Reichs defences against Germanys great and
ancient enemy to the East. In other words, the camp had a
geography, a history and a rationale. Rose wants to resist the
tendency to situate the evil of the death camps outside of history,
a kind of irruption from hell, and therefore from the other side
of rational explanation. And if it makes sense to ask rational
questions about Auschwitz, it makes sense to ask rational
questions about the men who built it. Otherwise, philosophy -
and political theology - runs the risk of a disembodied wander
ing between Athens, Jerusalem and Auschwitz, without ever
coming home to the city where all of us must, after all, live our
lives.
Chapter 10

THE POLITICAL WORD OF GOD

Political Theology and Scripture

Looking Ahead, Left Behind

Regrettably, I have not yet made the time to read all fifteen of
the Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Since
1995, over sixty million copies of these books have been sold,1
with a multi-media franchise comprising two motion pictures,
more than twenty childrens books, graphic novels and computer
games. The series narrates the end of the world, as foreseen by
the writer of the Book of Revelation (especially chapter 20), and
by biblical prophecy in general. Assuming that most readers of
the present book are in a similar state of deprivation to me, I
offer the following summary:
Israel is restored to the Middle East as a nation;
the world coalesces into a single government, economy and
religion;
political and social chaos ensues, out of which Russia and
Islamic nations launch a sneak attack on Israel;
after a terrible war, peace is brokered by a European leader
who is in fact the Antichrist, and who takes over the world for
a seven-year period called the Tribulation;
the Antichrist (in alliance with the Russians and the Chinese)
later enters into battle with Jesus and the heavenly host, on the
plains of Armageddon in Israel;
the Antichrist is chained to a lake of fire for a thousand years,
during which time Christ establishes a new kingdom on earth;
after this millennium, however, Satan is let loose from hell
again, a iurther battle ensues (at Jerusalem), and Satan is
162 T H E G IF T

finally defeated; and

the earth is destroyed and a new earth descends from the
heavens.
Though much of the content of this series is directly inspired by
the Book of Revelation, there are other New Testament sources:
the event known as the Rapture, in which true believers are
summoned by the returning Jesus, echoes the faithful (both
living and dead) being caught up to meet the Lord in the air,
as described by Paul (1 Thessalonians 4:13-17). Those rap
tured are the true Christians, transferred immediately to heaven,
though many of those left behind are converted to Christ
during the period of the Tribulation - including the Jews.
But of course there is also a good deal of interpretation going
on here, and the diligent and competent reader of earlier
chapters will recognise some key themes. The One World
Government precisely echoes the fear of undifferentiation in
Carl Schmitts warning of the dangers of widespread inter
national co-operation. Far from leading to peace and harmony,
Schmitt asserted that internationalism is in fact a recipe for
chaos and instability. His symbol for this was the League of
Nations; in the Left Behind novels, it is the United Nations, now
located in Babylon (Iraq), which embodies this grave threat.
Similarly, the One World Religion is a syncretistic amalgam of
world faiths. Though it is led by the Pope and the Catholic
Church, its ulterior aim is the extermination of true Christianity.
The anxiety to sort good from false believers under the heading
of good and bad armies is an example of the Manichaean dual
ism which Augustine resists by his construction of the Two
Cities doctrine. Finally, the motif of the katechon or restraining
force appears, in the chaining of Satan for a specified period:

The angel threw [Satan] into the abyss, locked it and sealed
it, so that he could not deceive the nations any more until
the thousand years were over. After that he must be set
loose for a little while ... After the thousand years are over,
Satan will be set loose from his prison and he will go out
to deceive the nations scattered over the whole world.
(Revelation 20:1-3, 7-8)
T H E P O L IT IC A L W O RD O F G O D 163

And if we are tempted to be too smug about the excesses of the

Left Behind mentality, we should note that even biblical and
classical theological traditions are not entirely free of disturbing
voyeuristic and resentful elements. The early Church Father,
Tertullian, tried to dissuade his readers from attending blood-
soaked gladiatorial shows by suggesting they wait for the Final
Judgement, when they will be able to enjoy a much better
spectacle, namely the torments of the damned!
If there is one indispensable skill for doing political theology,
it is probably the ability to handle sacred texts responsibly. At
times this seems to be a lost art, not least when Christians, Jews
and Muslims draw upon their respective scriptures to make
extreme political claims - and even more so when those scrip
tures are used to justify attitudes of hostility and even actions of
violence. We return to the dilemma set out in the first chapter:
that the gospel engenders and inspires political engagement, but
offers no blueprint for specific political stances or options. It is
precisely this gap that political theology is intended to negotiate.
Charles Davis approaches this issue head-on in an essay on
the Political Use and Misuse of Religious Language (Davis,
1993:112-28). This was written during a sabbatical in Israel,
and the specific claim that occasioned it was the denial of
Zionist Israelis that Palestinians can have any political rights in
the Holy Land, because this land has been definitively granted
by God to the people of Israel as their possession.2 It is incon
ceivable that any human political claim could be allowed to
override such a gift. Davis notes that, historically, Christianity
and Islam have both made similar claims, that is, they have
made political assertions on the basis of religious writings. The
dilemma is the one mentioned above: on what grounds does the
political theologian refuse such blatantly unjust claims, and yet
still maintain that the Bible has real political purchase?
Davis begins by analysing the special nature of religious
language, in comparison with the political. Broadly speaking,
Davis sees religious language as arising from ordinary everyday
usage: our calling God Father is a specialised use of a word
which signifies an everyday human relationship. Every walk of
life can supply metaphors and concepts in this way: our words
for God can be drawn from agriculture, warfare, and marital
164 T H E G IF T

relations, as well as politics (God is King). There is no diffi

culty about moving from any sphere of human life to speak of
God; the problems arise when we try to move in the opposite
direction, namely from a religious affirmation (God is King)
to a specific political claim (This land is oars). What is hap
pening with the extreme Zionist claim mentioned above is a
misuse of religious language for political purposes, and must be
challenged as such.
We are reminded of the description of the theologian as
someone who minds their language in the presence of God.
Attentiveness to language and how it operates, especially reli
gious language, is essential. Davis suggests what an abuse of
such language looks like, but is less precise about a positive
relation between religious and political language. Once again:
what are we to understand as a responsible use of the Bible in
political theological discourse? Before looking to specific
challenges in eschatology, to do with violent endings, we will
explore the general landscape under three headings:
political theology and the Old Testament;
political theology and the New Testament; and
political theology and the in-between time.

Political Theology and the Old Testament

The need for a sensitive biblical hermeneutic or guiding prin
ciple of understanding begins with the recognition that we are
dealing with the sacred texts of two religious traditions, Judaism
and Christianity. All too often the Church has been insensitive in
the way it has simply highjacked the sacred traditions of Israel.
This is sometimes true even of liberation theology, which has
been criticised for its enthusiastic acceptance of world-trans
forming historical events, such as the Exodus, but markedly
indifferent towards the Jewish people whose history this is.
In most liberation theologies the Jewish Exodus is used as a
paradigm of revolution, but contemporary Jews are nowhere to
be found in the writings of the theologians. This continues an
age-old Christian tradition of seeing the Jewish people as
bequeathing the Old Testament and Jesus and then disappear
T H E P O L IT IC A L W O RD O F GO D 165

ing from history, their mission accomplished. The use of the

Jewish story is coupled with our historical invisibility. Thus,
liberation theologians often miss an element crucial to the
Exodus story itself; that it has a history of interpretation by the
people who lived the story and who live today.3
Bearing in mind the criticism of Marc Ellis, the question
arises: how does a Christian political theologian deal respect
fully and responsibly with this peoples history? Oliver
ODonovan4 offers four precise comments about how the Old
Testament is to be used for political theology: firstly, Israels
traditions must be respected as history, not just as raw material
to be used to construct a theological artefact. There should be no
ahistorical isolation of one element, such as Jubilee, Exodus etc.
In particular, the Exodus event needs to be stands in a tradition
alongside the conquest of Canaan, federation theology along
side the ideology of monarchy, and so on. Following on from
this, the theologian cannot simply appeal to a subversive
counter-history which exists beneath the surface of the offi
cial history of Israel. We need to have done with perpetual
unmasking. Thirdly, and again following on from the first two
points, Israels history may not be rewritten as a Whig history
of progressive undeception, charting a secularising emergence
of rationality from barbarism. A more subtle understanding is
required of why Israel looked to sacral institutions at one point
in her history, and away from them at another.
Finally, and more positively, Israels history must be read as a
history of redemption, as the story of how certain principles of
social and political life were vindicated by the action of God in
the judgement and restoration of the people. Christianity, says
ODonovan, remains indebted to the Israelite tradition for the
full articulation of its political vision. [A]ny question about
social forms and structures must be referred to a normative
critical standard: do they fulfil that will of God for human
society to which Israels forms authoritatively point us?
(ODonovan, 1996:25).
ODonovan attempts a recovery of the notion of biblical
authority by explicating the phrase Yahweh malak [God
reigns], using three points of reference: jeshuah, salvation,
mishpat, judgement, nahalah, possession of the land. These are
166 T H E G IF T

related to a fourth category, namely the human response to

Gods reign, which is praise or acknowledgement - though this
needs to be strictly understood as independent of Yahwehs
ruling actions as such: the effectiveness of his rule does not
depend on it being acknowledged, much less effected, by human
action (for example in alleged enthronement ceremonies).
To examine briefly each of these categories: salvation is
usually found to refer to military victories. Yahwehs foremost
saving action is winning battles, seen as an expression of his
favour and righteousness, and also vindication of a diminished
and humbled people (especially in the post-exilic period). God
is also seen as the judge of his people, and of the other nations.
This very important concept needs to be understood differently
from classical, Aristotelian understandings of justice: the bibli
cal notion is of justice as an event or performance, one which
has lasting validity. The third category, possession, denotes
something possessed and handed on through generations, pri
marily referring to the land which is both a unitary inheritance
of the people as a whole, and something which is apportioned
locally. As indicated above, praise is the appropriate human
response to these actions, though this human acknowledgement
is independent of the actions themselves.
ODonovan is insistent, as we have seen, that we should not
isolate one event from the Old Testament and emphasise it to the
expense of others. Scholarly opinion does differ on this, how
ever. For many commentators the narrative of the Exodus
presents a unique and lasting paradigm; this is most evident in
liberation theology. Walter Brueggemann looks at the politics
of Exodus in some depth, having first established the three
political issues or tensions that shape the history of Israel:
centralised authority versus local authority; covenantal relations
between the have and have-nots; autonomous small states in the
face of pressure from large imperial neighbours (Brueggemann,
2004:9). The Exodus story becomes a paradigm by which all
these issues are addressed; at its centre is the confrontation:
Pharoah versus YHWH, where YHWH is presented not only as
the primary, indeed exclusive actor in Israels political story, but
also as an anti-Pharoah. Many of the positive political commit
ments which Israel undertakes are to be seen in counterpoint to
T H E P O L IT IC A L W O RD O F G O D 167
the oppressive system of their neighbours, beginning with
Egypt. It is in the memory of the Exodus narrative, enacted as
liturgy, that Israel constructs its own political theology, one
which includes acute social analysis, the legitimacy of protest,
Holy Presence as a defining factor, human initiative as indispen
sable, and an alternative (covenantal) mode of public power
entertained as a legitimate practical possibility (Brueggemann,
2004:14).
He goes on to suggest that two kinds of Old Testament litera
ture perform two political functions: the Torah (the first five
books of the Bible, from Genesis to Deuteronomy), and the
prophetic literature - basically, the Law and the Prophets. The
Torah provides the foundational account, understood as para
digm, which pivots on the Sinai tradition of covenant as Israels
alternative public vision. The writings of the prophets maintain
the life and speech of Israel as it seeks to enact or apply the
paradigm in the real world. It is in this real world that the three
challenges - centralisation of authority, discrepancy between
rich and poor, and threat of imperial domination - are to be
faced. Inevitably, living out the vision of Torah in these
circumstances will usually be confrontational.5

Political Theology and the New Testament

ODonovan seeks to recover the notion of authority for politi
cal theology, beginning with the affirmation of Gods Kingship.
In the New Testament, the authority of Jesus is understood as an
extension of the mediation of Yahwehs kingship discussed
above: he manifests saving works of power, most especially on
behalf of the victims of demonic possession; he pronounces
judgement on Israel and in favour of those who have been dis
possessed; and he enables the people to acquire a fuller, more
secure possession of the law. This elicits a faith-response from
Israel that amounts to an acknowledgement of his political
claims, for example the enthusiasm for the Messianic entry into
Jerusalem:
Jesus proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom, but the
apostolic Church did not. It told the story of what
happened when the Kingdom came: its conflict with the
168 T H E G IF T

established principalities and powers and its vindication at

Gods hand through the Resurrection. (120)

Political theology here becomes a matter of Christology, that is,

doctrine of Christ. Two roles meet in Christ: he is the mediator
of Gods rule (as the Davidic monarch was), and he is the
representative individual, whom we encounter in Jeremiah and
his exilic imitators. These roles come together in the figure of
the Suffering Servant of Deutero-Isaiah. In the Christ-event we
found the elements of Gods rule: an act of power, an act of
judgement and the gift of possession. ... in which Gods rule
was mediated and his people reconstituted in Christ (133). The
representative act unfolds in four moments: Advent; Passion;
Restoration and Exaltation, which is the drama of the Paschal
event. ODonovan sees Christs drama repeated or recapitulat
ed in the Church, whose life is marked by the same four
moments. The moment of Exaltation is signified in the
Ascension, which is clothed in the imagery of a royal coronation
(144-5). Secular authority now derives from that of Christ: it
has therefore been problematised. Here are to be found some
of those notoriously tricky texts of the New Testament which
have exercised political theologians over the centuries. First and
foremost is the declaration of the disarming of the principalities
(Colossians 2:15); prayers for the secular rulers (1 Timothy 2:
Iff); Romans 13:1-7, which we need to read with fresh eyes;
the hint of a Two Kingdoms mentality for aliens in a diaspora in
1 Peter 2:13-17; the question of Christians and litigation; and
the Book of Revelation, drawing on the eschatology of the Book
of Daniel.
It is worth noting, alongside this confrontational dialectical
vision unfolding through a number of key moments, a not
dissimilar scheme put forward by the Swiss Jesuit theologian,
Raymund Schwager. Drawing on the theodrama of Hans Urs
von Balthasar, and the anthropology of Ren Girard, Schwager
understands the events of Holy Week as a dramatic theology, in
five acts. These follow dialectically from one another: Jesus
preaching of the basileia, the Kingdom of God (Act I) is met
with indifference and rejection, therefore Jesus pronounces a
message of judgement (Act II). As conflict escalates and hearts
T H E P O L IT IC A L W O RD O F GO D 169

are hardened, the forces ranged against Jesus bring about his
death in what looks like a typical scapegoating scenario (Act
III); the dramatic twist comes with Act IV (The Resurrection),
in which, instead of pouring out his wrath, God vindicates his
Son by raising him from the dead, and by offering mercy and
new life to his killers. The final Act (the Coming of the Holy
Spirit) celebrates the power given to the apostles to step into the
streets of Jerusalem and create a new community in the public
sphere of this world.
Schwagers theological explication of Girards mimetic
theory has considerable political implications.6 Once again, as
with the Old Testament stand-off between Pharoah and
YHWH, we have between Act Ills and IV, a confrontation
between two versions of God. Both Jesus and his killers live and
act out of religious conviction; both sides appealed to their God
for vindication. So the question which hangs over Golgotha,
therefore, is: who was right? Jesus the Crucified, or the ones
who crucified him? God is silent at Golgotha, which makes it
look as if Jesus was desperately deluded, and the ones who
destroyed him as a blasphemer were in the right. But the
Resurrection gives us the definitive answer: God is the God of
Jesus Christ, and not the God of the zealous mob. The
Resurrection is, so to speak, the Fathers No to the death of His
Son.
Astonishingly, the first words of the Risen Lord are peace be
with you. They are not at all the words of vengeance or
condemnation which we might expect (see the parable of the
vineyard in Mark 12:1-10, and its crux question: what will the
owner of the vineyard do to those tenants who killed his son?).
This is what is distinctive, therefore, about the new community
which is gathered in Act V This new gathering here is different
from the gathering of a mob which shores up its dubious reli
gious identity over against heretics or outsiders. It gathers, not
around an unwilling scapegoat victim, but around the Lamb of
God, who gave himself willingly for the lives of others.7
170 T H E G IF T

Political Theology and the In-between Time

With the interpretation of the Book of Revelation which we find
in the Left Behind literature, we are back in the world of the
katechon, seen here as part of a wider discourse - about inter
vals, or pregnant pauses. Perhaps there is no finer example than
the wonderful verse in Revelation 8:1: When the Lamb broke
open the Seventh Seal, there was silence in heaven for about half
an hour! Both the Book of Revelation, and the Left Behind
literature which it inspires, address the question of the long
interval of time (much longer than half an hour!) between the
Resurrection of Christ and his Second Coming. Through the two
thousand years of the Churchs existence, Christians have some
times speculated feverishly about this pregnant pause: how
long it will last, and what we are supposed to do for its duration?
A distinction between millennialist or chiliastic and
amillennialist positions allows for a crucial difference bet
ween believers whose faith impels them to fill the interval
between Resurrection and Final Judgement with detailed and
extremely violent prophecies; and mainstream Christian think
ing which insists on our ignorance of Gods future, and therefore
on keeping this space empty: the future belongs to God and we
shouldnt try and fill in the details. The empty throne waits for
the Messiah. If someone occupies this throne, we can be certain:
this is a perverted or false Messiah.8
The interest generated by the Left Behind literature is nothing
new, including even its more lurid imaginings. I leave aside the
specific anxiety about how this literature may or may be influ
encing policy-makers of the most powerful nation on the planet;
even if we take it lightly, as a kind of harmless variant of science
fiction, the Christian believer is still required to make sense of
its religious themes, in a way that the secularist is not.
The realm of theology which concerns us here, eschatology,
is defined by Jenson (2004:406) as: Christian discourse about a
final outcome and transformation, an eschaton, of history.
Political theologians who have sought to ask seriously what may
I hope fo ri have helped to generate a renewed interest in escha
tology, specifically in the different scriptural scenarios of the
end times. These are not easy to harmonise: nevertheless, they
T H E P O L IT IC A L W O R D O F G O D 171

are all evocations of one single occurrence, an infinite im

plosion of love, of a created community pressed and agitated
into perfect mutuality by the surrounding life of the triune God
(Jenson, 2004:406). As far as the biblical imagination is con
cerned, eschatology and politics are the same thing, whether we
are looking at Gods promise of fulfilment to Israel in the Old
Testament, or the advent of the Kingdom in the New. For the
early Church, notably with Augustine, biblical and classical
Christian eschatology can be taken directly as political theory.
However, after the fine synthesis of Augustine, modernity has
been characterised by a tendency to de-politicize eschatology
and de-eschatologize politics(413). The principal theological
tradition of modernity, running from Friedrich Schleiermacher
to Rudolf Bultmann, stresses the religious and existential
experience of the individual, in such a way that the eschaton is
deprived of political meaning. Over time a split emerged
between eschatology as the fate of the individual (traditionally
taught as the Catholic doctrine of the Four Last Things: death,
judgement, heaven and hell), and as the collective destiny of the
world. The challenge set for contemporary political theology,
therefore, has been to repair this split, and especially to recover
the lost dimension, to re-politicize eschatology.

Eschatology in Moltmann and Metz

Theologians from the Reformed tradition, such as Karl Barth
and Jrgen Moltmann, have been prominent in urging the cen
trality of eschatology to all theology: not as an appendix, and
certainly not as something to be annulled by the distorted
modem tradition cited above. In The Theology o f Hope
Moltmann asserts that the eschatological outlook is character
istic of all Christian proclamation, of every Christian existence
and of the whole Church (1967:16), and emphasises the future
as breaking in on the present from above. The God of scripture
is above all a God of promises, who has already broken into
history from above in the Exodus, and in the Resurrection of
Jesus: he will therefore break into history once again.
The account of eschatology which Moltmann gives here is a
dialectical one, stressing difference and contrast rather than
172 T H E G IF T

similarity: [pjresent and future, experience and hope, stand in

contradiction to each other (18). Johann Baptist Metz similarly
speaks of a non-identity of present and future - or, to use
another piece of jargon, their non-contemporaneity. There will
never be a moment in this epoch in which the Kingdom of God
has definitively arrived, when we can say that a given regime or
government manifests the fullness of Gods purposes for
humanity.
This oppositional stance is sometimes referred to as the
eschatological reserve or eschatological proviso. A term
associated with Metz, it means the opposite of the very detailed
predictions set out by the theological imagination of the Left
Behind novels, because our stance towards the future is one of
sustained ignorance rather than detailed knowledge:

[W]hat distinguishes Christian eschatology from the

ideologies of the future in the East and the West, is not that
it knows more, but that it knows less about that future
which mankind is trying to discern, and that it persists in
its lack of knowledge. (Metz, 1980:11)

We do not know what the future holds, says Metz, and the task
of the Church is to institutionalize this agnosticism towards the
future, by establishing itself as an instance of critical liberty.
But the stage is not left entirely empty: what we do have are the
scriptural hints of Gods promised future. Moltmann and Metz
draw attention to the form of promise through which God
addresses humanity. Here the prophecies of Isaiah 65:17-25,
and Revelation 21:2-4, holy mountain and Holy City, echo one
another. In each of these passages, God pledges a new heaven
and a new earth, in a future time of justice, peace and joy,
expressed in images of conviviality and nuptial union. They act
as a judgement on the present world, contesting it and revealing
its inadequacy. We are reminded of Bloch and liberation theo
logys rendition of Gods name in Exodus 3:14 as I will be
who I will be: Gods future, understood as promise (and not
Evolution or History), is the key to understanding who we are.
This kind of utopian imagination is crucial for exercising the
anamnestic solidarity which is the cornerstone of Metzs
T H E P O L IT IC A L W O RD O F G O D 173

political theology. Metz takes up the anguished questioning of

Walter Benjamin concerning the victims of history. For both
these German thinkers, redemption cannot simply look for
ward to the future generations who will be historys benefici
aries. If it is only some future generation which enjoys the fruit
of emancipation (as with orthodox Marxist eschatology), then
there is a sense in which this lucky final generation have stolen
from their predecessors: The monstrous inequity of genera
tional succession is that all our possession becomes a kind of
robbery, something we have taken from those who shared it with
us but with whom we cannot share in return (ODonovan,
1996:288). The impotence of Klees Angel is unbearable:
redemption must also stretch backwards, to embrace those
whom death has silenced and shrouded in oblivion.
For Metz, the memory of the passion, death and resurrection
of Jesus Christ functions as a dangerous memory, because it
calls into question the plausibility of present social structures
and relations. Politically, it acts as an initial movement of nega
tion with respect to the status quo, and shocks us out of ever
becoming permanently reconciled to the facts and trends of our
technological society (113).
Here are important questions. For Metz in particular, the
eschaton, or end-time, brings a negative, critical dimension to
political theology. But is this all there is: a stance of critical
refusal of the present, simply because it is not the future which
God has promised us? A number of critics express their concern
that Metz neglects any positive constructive task for political
theology. The liberation theologian Juan Luis Segundo is un
happy with the notion of an eschatological reserve: it implies
an unbridgeable separation between an absolute ideal and the
messy, relative choices which we have to make in the present. If
Gods Kingdom is permanently beyond our reach, then there is
nothing to choose between any of the various political systems
and options, such as democracy or totalitarian dictatorship. An
eschatological reserve would see no difference between them,
denying that any particular political system can cause the
Kingdom to come into being. This is absurd, and not surpris
ingly has a paralysing effect on the struggle for social justice:
But who consecrates his life to an analogy? Who dies for an
174 T H E G IF T

outline? Who moves a human mass, a whole people, in the

name of an anticipation? (Segundo, 1974:112)
R. R. Reno similarly asserts that Metz cannot remain exclu
sively in the moment of non-identification. Metz presents us
with powerful moral imagination, but one which is unanchored,
and limited almost exclusively to negation and critique: an end
less process of demystification, a perpetual clearing of the stage
for the major dramatic action which never begins, or at least
never takes place in this theater (Reno, 1992:296, 303).
It is true that in later writings Metz has been less explicit
about the notion of the eschatological reserve, perhaps partly in
response to these criticisms. It may also be the case that times
have changed: Metz wrote about the eschatological proviso at
a time (in the 1960s and 1970s) when there was a lot of politi
cal fervour around, and with it, perhaps, a danger of messianic
expectations. As we move further into post-modernity, however,
far from rampant messianism, Metz notes the pervading mood
of a sleepiness regarding the project of emancipation - as if we
have grown weary with the burden of being subjects, and are
happy to sink into a second immaturity, lulled by the gentle
waves of evolutionary time. Metz has declared that the crisis
which faces Christianity is not the crisis of its central message,
but a crisis of the subject and o f the institutions which are to
convey it. He sees in post-modernity a confirmation of his
diagnosis of the fragility of the subject, who is simultaneously
supported and undermined by that same modernity which brings
him or her into being.
The question remains: how do we deal with this long stretch
of in-between time, between the first and second comings of
Christ? If this is a space for us to imagine and dream, to labour
and struggle for Gods Kingdom, then our projects and commit
ments will have a real vitality and purpose. But suppose I fill
this space, not with dreams of liberation and solidarity, but with
nightmares of resentment, vengeance and cruel vindication -
all, still, in the name of the Lord? We may decide, on the other
hand, that this is Gods space, that we should protect it, and leave
the canvas blank for God to paint the genuine future God has
promised us. But doesnt this leave us too passive, taking up a
purely negative stance which leaves us outside history and
T H E P O L IT IC A L W O RD O F G O D 175

outside the world (and proves that Hannah Arendt was right)?

Happy Endings?
There is a further theme to be addressed: as we have noted,
scriptural warrant can be found for a whole range of eschato
logical possibilities, from the reconciling vision of the New
Jerusalem to the gleeful bloodletting of the Left Behind authors.
Once again, we meet the problem of violence, which we
addressed when trying to define the very nature and origins of
the political (Arendt, Schmitt and others). Now it seems that we
really have come full-circle, in which case we might want to
explore a link between two forms of political imagination,
pmtology and eschatology. In my beginning is my end.
Just as there is a fashion nowadays for novelists to present us
with alternative endings to a novel,9 European political theo
logians and Latin American liberationists have imagined the
end-time differently. From a European communicative per
spective, the utopian character of the Kingdom is prominent; the
prophecies of Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21 articulate Gods
future in terms of: fellowship with God, security, material well
being, conviviality, and a complete absence of death and sad
ness. By contrast, Latin American liberation theology pays more
attention to the dramatic character of justice.10 The end of his
tory is not a happy end; it is a Last Judgement, with Matthew
25:31-46 as its paradigm. In this passage, Jesus speaks of the
return of the Son of Man as King, surrounded by angels, and
gathering all the nations. The people are divided into righteous
and unrighteous, sheep and goats. The fate of each group is
decided according to their response to Jesus, who identifies
himself with the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the
sick and imprisoned. Those who have failed in compassion are
sent off to eternal punishment. The judgement meted out in
Matthew 25 has less graphic detail than the excesses of the Left
Behind literature - but it is the same punishment, and just as
violently definitive.
The eschaton is the location of ultimate justice, but also of
ultimate violence. Latin American theologians, speaking from
situations of unspeakable oppression and injustice, are readier
176 T H E G IF T

than their European counterparts to embrace those biblical texts

which celebrate the violence of justice. They might well ask,
with Duquoc (1986): if we insist on demythologising biblical
violence, then what happens to justice? If the history of
oppression ends in an excess of pardon, then what is the point
of bringing the history of the victims to mind?
The dilemma is that each of these scenarios - the Last
Judgement, the universal banquet on the holy mountain -
contains violence. In the first case, the wicked are sacrificed
to the good. In the second scenario, the demand for justice for
the oppressed is overruled by Gods bounteous pardon - as with
the anti-theodicy in Dostoyevskys The Brothers Karamazov,
where Ivan Karamazov, having told his parable of the Grand
Inquisitor, explains how he is rejecting God: because he knows
that, at the final reconciliation, even the desperate screams of
the tortured child will be drowned out again, this time by
alleluias.
Whichever of these scenarios we invest in determines the
telos, or goal, of our political theology. A theology which is
ordered towards utopian conviviality will see emancipation in
terms of a striving-for-consensus communicative rationality. It
will be primarily a correlative exercise, stressing the continuity
between our attempts at consensus and the future harmony,
though it will also stress the non-identity of the present with
this utopian future. For this theology, covenant is possible. A
theology ordered to a definitive declaration of Gods justice, on
the lines of Matthew 25, will be a dialectical and prophetic
theology, whose primary concern is a denunciation of injustice
and indifference. Its realism about the immensity and scope of
oppression means that the focus is on resisting Leviathan rather
than elaborating positive alternatives to it.
Once again, here is a question of emphasis: these two options
may seem to be incompatible, as Reno asks (though with a
different emphasis in mind): How can the Beloved Disciple
coexist theologically with a ranting Jeremiah?11 We need both,
it seems.
Chapter 11

'FRIDAY'S CHILDREN'
Political Theology and the Church

The silence after he had spoken

was the silence of a newly baked cake,
to be savoured by the actual smell of it,
fresh out of oven.
As he approached the commemoration of the last supper
and the metamorphosis of bread and wine
into body and blood
the congregation looked awake, alert, apprehensive,
as if we were in danger from the priest
or as if he were in danger from us
or as if we were all in danger together
as the moment of truth approached.
There was that sense of the moment of truth approaching.
There was an air of drama, expectation, butterflies.1

Having surveyed the main scriptural themes, we resume our

discussion of contemporary political theology from the perspec
tive of the community of Gods faithful people. This will involve
further reflection upon eschatology, above all upon martyrdom
(witness) as a theologico-political discourse.2 The resonances of
such an investigation carry much further than a study of
Church and State, or some such well-trodden area. As we
noted in chapter 1, Rowan Williams has stressed the need for an
account of human action that goes beyond simply the successful
assertion of will - politics as power, raising the spectre of
purest fascism (Creston Davis et al, 2005:1). He proposes to
178 T H E G IF T

counter this spectre with a notion of action as testimony, with

martyrdom as the most distinctive instance of this for the
Christian.
Theology is now understood as the discipline that follows
what is claimed as the supreme act of testimony, and thus the
supremely generative and revisionary act of all human history:
the Cross for Christians, the gift of Torah and communal identity
for Judaism (3).
And yet, we have heard warning voices: John Gray and Mark
Lilia, on the seductive nature of political messianism; Andrew
Shanks (citing Milan Kundera) on the sentimentality of political
kitsch; Gillian Roses wariness of post-modernitys false choice
between a ruined Athens and a New Jerusalem. What her
image implies is a further complication of the doctrine of the
Two which oriented our discussion in earlier chapters. The
question then was: how do Christians negotiate their dual
citizenship, belonging as they do to the earthly and heavenly
cities? But now we are unhoused: the earthly city of Reason
has been ransacked, and the heavenly city is as far away as ever.
What if, as in George Bemanos image, the Church is not a
community of pilgrims after all, but a platoon of troops, caught
behind enemy lines and trying to make it back to the safety of
their own front?
Less dramatically, the challenge for the Church can be suc
cinctly stated as coming to terms with the death of Christendom,
without acquiescing in the privatisation of the Great Separation.
If our context is now post-Westphalian, but a return to
Christendom is neither possible nor desirable, then what
doctrine of the Two is appropriate?
One option is a controversial theological approach called
Radical Orthodoxy, which understands itself as post-modern,
insofar as it rejects as illusory the autonomy of the secular -
because the secular is itself a theological construct. All
attempts at social theory independent of theology are them
selves only disguised or illegitimate theologies. Correcting this
misapprehension means a return to pre-modern resources, above
all to the City of God theology of Augustine. The program
matic texts are John Milbanks Theology and Social Theory,
which had a considerable impact on theologians when it
 F R ID A Y S C H I L D R E N 179

appeared in 1990, and the collection of essays entitled Radical

Orthodoxy. The pugnacious tone (ironic, given that Radical
Orthodoxy is at base an appeal to the ontological peace
described by Augustine) echoes in the firm slap with which the
gauntlet is laid down on page one:

For several centuries now, secularism has been defining

and constructing the world. It is a world in which the theo
logical order is either discredited or turned into a harmless
leisuretime activity of private commitment ... And today
the logic of secularism is imploding. Speaking with a
microphoned and digitally simulated voice, it proclaims -
uneasily, or else increasingly unashamedly - its own lack
of values and lack of meaning. In its cyberspaces and
theme-parks it promotes a materialism which is soulless,
aggressive, nonchalant and nihilistic.
(Milbank et al (eds), 1999:1)

Hence Radical Orthodoxys attempt to reclaim the world, by

resituating its concerns and activities - including politics - with
in a theological framework. In Theology and Social Theory
Milbank attempts a sceptical demolition of modern, secular
social theory, from a perspective with which it is at variance ...
Christianity. The Church has all the social theory it needs with
in its own scriptural and patristic traditions; modern theology
should reject the false humility which sees it being positioned
by secular reason, rather than the other way round.
It is true to say that the gauntlet has been picked up by
theologians on the whole, rather than social theorists, which
may not be so surprising. And these theologians have plenty of
reservations - not least the obvious one, of a post-modern
project like this slipping into a pre-modern conservatism,
despite the best intentions of its authors. Nevertheless, the
project cannot be overlooked. To understand where it fits in it
may be useful to refer to a description from Charles Davis
(1994:i), of three intellectual options open to us at this time:
neo-conservatism, post-modernism and modernity as an un
finished project. Each is defined in terms of the stance it takes
towards modernity; each has its own theological variant. If
180 T H E G IF T

Charles Davis (following Habermas) is correct in the diagnosis

of neo-orthodoxy as an understandable but ultimately inconsis
tent stance, then our choice of a credible intellectual and
theological approach lies between the remaining two options.
To return to Gillian Roses image: do we stay within the ruins
of Athens, mending the city walls as best we can, or do we leave
its ruined imperium in search of the New Jerusalem? In the case
of Radical Orthodoxy, the exodus from Athens takes the form
of a robust view of ecclesiology, the doctrine of the Church, as
the only true politics. The Christian community is called to
forsake its false humility, and to come out fighting against the
distortions of a bankrupt modernity which persistently denies its
own disguised theological suppositions.
Though modem and post-modem approaches to political
theology diverge, we should recognise what their diagnoses have
in common. Theologians in both camps are all too aware of the
dialectic of Enlightenment; no one is pretending that all is well
with modernity. Beyond this generally agreed diagnosis, how
ever, a gap opens up. Where Johann Baptist Metz seeks to work
within modernity, William Cavanaugh sets up a very direct
confrontation between ecclesiology and modernity, broadly in
line with the challenge voiced by Milbank. For these two theo
logians, enlightenment modernity is a spent project, not an
unfinished one.

Models of the Political Church

It is not possible to do more here than list the following themes
and approaches. The theological discipline of ecclesiology, or
reflection upon the Church, has in recent years been taken with
the notion of models or paradigms. This is partly due to the
Second Vatican Council, which highlighted several significant
images of the Church, such as Mystery, Body of Christ, and
above the Church as People of God. It is also due to the success
of Avery Dulles book, Models o f the Church, a classic of
comparative ecclesiology. Dulles suggested five models,
though in the later, expanded edition (2000) he added Church
as a Community of Disciples as a preliminary paradigm. What
follows is a summary of some descriptions put forward by
 F R ID A Y S C H I L D R E N 181

political theologians for thinking about the Church; though

Dulles scheme may be helpful to have in mind, these descrip
tions do overlap, and are not intended to be models in any
formal sense.

i. The Church in continuity with the p eo p le o f Israel, an d with

C hrist
The political entity Israel is essential to Christian self
understanding. The history of salvation is not told separately
from the history of politics. In the scriptures the story of salva
tion takes flesh on a public stage and interacts with pharaohs,
kings, and Caesars. Salvation itself is imaged as a coming king
dom and a new city (Cavanaugh, 2004:393). Oliver ODonovan
is insistent that a total response to the historical and political
traditions of Israel is the interpretive key that will enable us to
do political theology responsibly:

The hermeneutic principle that governs a Christian appeal

to political categories within the Hebrew Scriptures is,
simply, Israel itself. Through this unique political entity
God made known his purposes in the world ... As the
structures of Israels experience pass by us in their histori
cal sequence (tribe, monarchy, cultural-ethnic enclave,
movement of world-renewal), the concepts deployed by
Israels writers in the interpretation of those structures
(peace, judgement, possession, worship) allow us to find
the sequence of happenings intelligible. And from those
concepts we may derive an orientation of political principle
through which the legacy of Israel regulates our own politi
cal analysis and deliberation. Yhwhs victory lays hold on
our intelligence and claims us still.
(ODonovan, 1996:27, 29)

The other regulatory influence on the Churchs political imagi

nation is of course, Jesus Christ: In Christs triumph every
aspect of his work was given to the church to share in: his
coming, his passion, his restoration and his triumph too. The
sacraments are a series of formed acts and observances, through
which in acted speech (performance shaped by the interpreting
182 T H E G IF T

word, word embodied in performance) the church recapitulates

again the saving acts of Christ. ODonovan suggests four sacra
mental actions:3 Baptism, Eucharist, the Lords Day, and the
Laying on of Hands. These accompany the four moments of
recapitulation, linked in a single dramatic performance:
Advent, Passion, Restoration and Exaltation. With this last, it is
the laying on of hands is the sign of the Churchs empowerment,
though later tradition derives three separate sacraments from
what ODonovan sees as one single action.

ii. The Church as an instance o f socio-critical freed o m a n d

dangerous m em ory
Johann Baptist Metz sees the Church as exercising a special
responsibility for the world to which it belongs. It does not stand
apart from or above the world, but neither can it be identified
totally with it. In relation to his political theology, he under
stands three functions for the Church. Firstly, it is an institution
of socio-critical liberty: because it is eschatologically oriented
(i.e. toward the future end time) it must insist on the non
identity of the present with Gods future, in the face of the false
ly messianic claims of political regimes or systems. History is
subject to Gods eschatological reserve or proviso, and the
Church as an institution seeks to ensure that the Messiahs
throne remains empty until his return. Secondly, the Church is
the public form of the dangerous memory of Jesus Christ,
interrupting the complacency and amnesia of our modem
consciousness. The Church is the visible form of the memoria
passionis of Christ.
However, this memory also serves as a critique of the Church
itself, which leads us to a third paradigm for Metz, that of a
church of subjects, a Church o f people rather than for people.
We have seen how he is concerned with subject concepts, and
how the fragile identity of the modem subject must be fortified
against the forces which seek to undermine it. He sees the
ecclesial reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-5) as an
opportunity for it to become a Subjektkirche, a Church of
subjects, implied in the conciliar image of people of God and
its call for active participation of all members of the Church.
This finds further explication in another paradigm, the Church
 F R ID A Y S C H I L D R E N 183

as Basiskirche, or base church, in accordance with the grass

roots base community model found in Latin America (Molt-
mann and Solle are similarly inspired by Latin Americas new
way of being Church).

iii. The Church as an ideal speech com m unity

This derives from the application of Habermasian action theory
to theology, taking up an understanding of language as inherent
ly emancipatory. Language contains a drive for truth understood
as uncoerced consensus, arrived at through a conversation to
which all have equal access.As we have seen, this has prompted
some theologians to give an ecclesiological account of the ideal
speech situation:

The discourse of the community is founded in the emanci

patory drive of language, a drive toward an ideal speech
situation which is never fully present but whose postulation
is a necessary condition for the reality of that imperfect
and transitory consensus achieved in the community at any
given moment. Although Habermas does not use the term,
his vision is an eschatological vision. (Lakeland, 1990:243)

Edmund Arens uses the same method to articulate his own view
of the Church as an example of communicative rationality,
oriented towards ideal speech (Arens, 1995:1). He suggests that
this rationality is expressed as two communicative practices,
witnessing and confessing, which represent complementary and
at the same time basic communicative actions of faith (125).
These are further differentiated into four kinds of witness
(kerygmatic-missionary, diaconal, prophetic, and witness by
suffering), and three kinds of confession (in worship, instruc
tional confession and situational confession). The principal dif
ference between the two modes is that witnessing seeks to
achieve consensus by persuading, while confession presupposes
a consensus already achieved by the community. Witness is
undertaken by Christians individually and collectively, with the
intention of convincing, inviting and winning those recipients
for that to which and to whom they bear witness; confession is
undertaken by the community of believers as it completes,
184 T H E G IF T

makes present, repeats, and appropriates an agreement (144).

iv. The Church as a p u blic agen t in civil society

David Tracy articulates a framework for public theology when
he proposes, first of all that theology is a public discourse, that
is, accessible, and not the private language of a sect, and second
ly, that the theologian addresses one or more of three publics,
namely the academy, the Church, and society (Tracy, 1981; see
also Martinez, 2001).
Broadly understood, public theology follows the tradition of
Reinhold Niebuhr and John Courtney Murray in seeking to
undergird liberal democracy with Christian values. Their suc
cessors come from both left and right of the American political
spectrum: the Church is seen as an agent in civil society, seek
ing its flourishing by articulating Christian values on which to
ground market and political processes (Bretherton, 2006:383).
The term public theology, in other words, covers a range of
theological commitments and encounters. According to one
lucid description of the programmatic intentions of public theo
logy, it is concerned with how the Christian faith addresses
matters in society at large ... [and] with the public relevance
of Christian beliefs and doctrines, not just to Christians but to
all humanity:

It should be conceived from a perspective that recognises

both the marginal location of the Christian faith in a post-
Christendom world, and the value of other disciplines. ...
Public theology has several audiences which demand
different levels of academic rigor: the world, the Church,
and the academy .... Public theology also addresses practi
cal questions, often in the secular language of human
rights, justice, etc. Public theology is located as one voice
among many in the marketplace of ideas. Theology is no
longer the only voice in the public domain and it does not
have a privileged status. Unlike other types of theology, it
does not seek to convert, but is concerned with the well
being of society.4

Examples of critical engagement would include dialogue with

 F R ID A Y S C H I L D R E N 185

political liberalism, virtue ethics, communitarianism, and so on.

Edmund Arens considers four variants of communitarianism
(associated with Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Robert
Bellah and Michael Waltzer). He finds the last three fruitful for
emancipatory political theology: Taylors politics of recognition,
Bellahs idea of communities of remembrance, and Waltzers
prophetic social critique. David Tracy speaks of these exchanges
as mutually critical correlation. As stated in the last chapter,
the communicative task for the Church and for the theologian
is to find the language which will make these points of common
interest publicly accessible: a task of translation, in other
words.

v. The Church as the city on a hill

This is the opposite approach to public theologians, insofar as it
proclaims the distinctiveness and separation of the Church from
political institutions, rather than a systematic engagement with
them. The term can be used to cover varying degrees of mistrust
or withdrawal, and in fact it is unlikely that any ecclesial
tradition neglects this image of separation entirely: even the
Catholic Church of Vatican II, which sought to correlate itself
positively with the modern world, nevertheless included the
idea of sign and beacon to humanity among its key metaphors.
We note here the continued significance of the Radical
Reform movement which we encountered in chapter 5, not least
with the Anabaptist influence on the Pilgrims who journeyed to
America, and their contribution to the ideal of religious liberty
and to traditions of prophetic separation. The Mennonite com
mitment to peace activism makes for a powerful counterwitness.
In John Howard Yoder it produced a distinctive theological
voice, best known for his 1972 classic The Politics o f Jesus, and
for his mentoring of Stanley Hauerwas. With Yoder, a with
drawal model of church, rejecting Constantiniasm and
espousing the radical pacifism of Jesus, predominates.
Hauerwas has articulated the most coherent and influential
political theology in and for the North American context (Reno,
2004:302). He does not regard the task of theology to be a
grounding of systematic co-operation between church and state,
whether by means of a common language or by public reason.
186 T H E G IF T

Co-operation should be on an ad hoc basis only; a discrimi

nating or tactical engagement, as opposed to either complete
withdrawal or wholesale involvement. Rather than trying to
seize control of social space, the Church is itself an alternative
or contrast civil society. It is from this position as a dissident or
contrast society that the Church has the critical distance to say
no, but also to imagine, to open new horizons, provide new
languages of description and embody alternative practices
(Bretherton, 2006:386). Reno gives us another definition of
Hauerwas ecclesiology, citing his fathers occupation as a brick
layer: the church is the fundamental and density-creating form
of Gods power in the world, the kiln which gives the soul its
brick-like mass and strength, bricks which can then be used for
building - or as projectiles, if a more confrontational style is
needed! An alternative polls, therefore, where virtue and charac
ter are nurtured; the aspect of a withdrawn or skirmishing
Church being suggested by his book titles (resident aliens: life
in the Christian colony, wilderness wanderings, dispatches
from the front).5
A similar conception of the Church as a contrast society is
put forward by Norbert and Gerhard Lhfink, from Germany, to
quite a lot of criticism. With erudite scriptural scholarship they
see the Church as isomorphic with Israels status as a light to the
nations; a city on the hill. In Jesus and Community (1985;
reworked as Does God Need the Church? (1999)), Gerhard
Lhfink argues for a normative tradition on community which
can be traced, unbroken as it were, through the scriptures and
early Church; Jesus never intended to found a new religious
body, distinct from Israel, but was intent on a restoration of the
full twelve tribes. Like Walter Brueggemann and the theologians
of liberation, Lhfink is especially impressive on drawing out
political temptations and possibilities from the experiences of
the gathered community, Israel, whose defining events are
Exodus and the bestowal of Torah. Lhfinks own commitment
to the struggle to realise this ideal is shown in his decision to
resign his professorship at the University of Tbingen in order
to work with the Catholic Integrated Community (which had
been founded by young German Christians after the Second
World War).
 F R ID A Y S C H IL D R E N 187

vi. The Church as an alternative (E ucharistic) perform ance

The post-modern Augustinian school of Milbank, Cavanaugh
and others regards as mistaken the idea that the Church and
Christians are required to throw their efforts into upholding the
project of modern secularly (as Metz would hold, above).
Rather, they should be prepared to resist it and present a
counter-politics. The position looks similar to that of
Hauerwas, but is perhaps more programmatic than tactical. This
is a matter of the Church being more itself, and more distinct
ively visible: Cavanaugh is very critical of easy assertions of a
sacramental correlation between the Church and world, such
that everything is graced, and can be seen as a sacrament. This
optimism does not allow any specific sign to be saturated with
meaning, nor does it take account of the fact that it is this
graced world which set itself against Christ and murdered him
(Cavanaugh, 1998:12-14).
He calls us to a confident and articulate Eucharistic practice,
with the link between Eucharist and martyrdom heavily under
scored. The great symbols of this Eucharistic visibility are the
praxis of the base communities in Latin America; and the action
of Archbishop Oscar Romero in February 1977, of cancelling all
Sunday masses in the Archdiocese of San Salvador except the
funeral mass of Rutilio Grande SJ, who had been shot by gov
ernment security services. At this moment of great tension and
sorrow, Romero was drawing on the power of the Eucharist to
collapse the spatial barriers separating the rich and poor ... by
gathering the faithful in one particular location around the altar,
and realising the heavenly universal Catholica in one place, at
one moment, on earth.6

Public versus Political Theology

There is a terminological issue which we postponed from the
previous chapter. Much of the literature tends to link political,
liberation and public theologies together (Martinez, 2001).
However, Hewitt claims that public theology is quite different
from the other two, in fact a regression from them. According to
her, public theology has undertaken a role of giving a spiritual
188 T H E G IF T

or religious critique of modern society, responding to its crises

by helping it to develop the ultimate meanings implicit in
secular experience. It has chosen the route - in her view, retro
grade - of spiritual renewal, rather than historical change or
political action:

Public theology has fallen behind the intent of the former

political theology, whose critical method, however limited,
rejected attempts to Christianize the world. Public theology
intends to substitute Christian theology for history and
society as the locus of meaning in the quest for social
justice, resulting in a theology that is merely applied to
politics and society ... Public theology reverses political
theologys acceptance of the secularized, religiously
emancipated society (Metz, 1970:37) in an attempt to
restore itself implicitly to cultural and political hegemony.
(Hewitt, 2004:467)

It is probably fair to say that public theology in its homeland,

the United States, is at least partially fuelled by the perceived
anxieties concerning the hegemony of the religious Right. As
long as fundamentalism is the high-profile, public face of
Christianity, there is an understandable felt need to present an
alternative - in which case, any kind of public recognition and
visibility may be better than none. Being marginal to national
debate in a country which is at war is, no doubt, a further frus
tration. Nevertheless, Hewitts strictures must be questionable,
at least, given the quality of some of the work being done under
the banner of public theology, and not just in America. And the
obvious retort to Hewitt from an aggrieved public theologian
would be that this style of concerned theology at least critically
engages with the real world of public debate about policy
making and implementation, in a way that a permanently
negative critique cannot hope to do. The debate is a live one.

Time versus Space: Alternative Practices

To complicate matters further, the Radical Orthodoxy strategy
differs from both political and public theology. Its proponents
 F R ID A Y S C H IL D R E N 189

would vigorously dispute, point for point, each of the intentions

set out by Clive Pearsons description. If theology no longer
seeks to position, qualify or criticise other discourses, then it is
inevitable that these discourses will position theology; theology
most certainly does have a central, not marginal responsibility,
which can only be discharged by a Church which is visible and
distinctive, in the face of sinister forces and influences that
would have it otherwise. So there is a clash between public
theologies and a Radical Orthodox approach.
The clear blue water that has appeared between the first two
options (political and public theologies) and the third option
.(Radical Orthodoxy) is explained by Cavanaugh (2006) in terms
of a turning away from an Augustinian framework. On his read
ing of The City o f God the Augustinian version of the doctrine
of the Two is a temporal, eschatological one: the two cities
(signifying two loves) will co-exist, intermingled, until the end
of time, when the Lord will sort out whos who, like the farmer
sorting out wheat from chaff. The word saeculum, from which
our word secular derives, initially means age or epoch. It is
this temporal perspective that Radical Orthodoxy is trying to
recapture; John Milbank has explicitly christened the radically
orthodox way as post-modern critical Augustinianism.
With the waning of the Augustinian view and the rediscov
ery of Aristotle and Roman law in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, however, there begins the process of turning the
temporal into a space, one that will eventually be seen as stand
ing outside the church (Cavanaugh, 2006:343). From now on,
the problem of the doctrine of the Two is about two powers or
jurisdictions, jostling each other for elbow-room, within a single
territory that came to be known as Christendom. Political and
public theologies are still operating within its presuppositions:
these are, so to speak, land reclamation projects, which re
capture secular space for theology: either by means of
sacramental optimism (all is graced); or by correlating the
gospel with societys unacknowledged spiritual yearnings; or by
acquiescence in an amicable division of space - which is what
happened after Augustine, a recognition of two realms or two
planes, secular and religious.
William Cavanaughs critique of John Courtney Murray
190 T H E G IF T

draws out the political implications in terms of contemporary

American attitudes towards the Iraq war (2006:320). He urges
instead a temporal, not a spatial reading of the doctrine of the
Two, in accordance with his eschatological reading of
Augustine. It is not the case that there are two jurisdictions,
fighting for territorial rights within the same single public
space: Church and State are not two parts of a whole. For
Augustine, neither city is a space with clearly defined bound
aries, but both are sets of practices or dramatic performances ...
the task of the church is to interrupt the violent tragedy of the
earthly city with the comedy of redemption (315). These two
performances happen simultaneously: which is why it should
and must be possible for the Church to create an alternative
public performance, a drama of reconciliation not war, rather
than simply be expected to suspend its own performance by
ceding precedence to that of the State.
It should be acknowledged that these are large claims, and far
from uncontroverted. Chris Insole offers a response to
Cavanaugh (Insole, 2006, 2005) in which he agrees in large part
with Cavanaughs re-telling of the narrative of early modernity,
before the Great Separation (see chapter 4), but takes him to
task for misrepresenting the liberal ideal in a number of ways.
Insole is also sceptical of the appeal, in both Cavanaugh and
Hauerwas, to notions of practice or performance, as a kind of
panacea: Human salvation is not achieved by being in com
munity. No matter how virtuous the intentions, practices,
performances and efforts of that community, imperfectability
and sin will show through (Insole, 2006:329).
The urgency of the search for alternative performances and
practices is of course heightened in a state of metaphorical war
on terror and literal war in Iraq. These have, unsurprisingly,
dominated contemporary discourse on the theologico-
political. Since 2002, the journal Political Theology has in
cluded several articles on Just War theory and the theological
case for and against a pre-emptive strike, issues of citizenship
and discipleship in the US, and the thinly veiled theology of
George W. Bush. One of the ironies we can point to is that two
voices on opposite sides of the debate regarding the justice of
the war in Iraq - William T. Cavanaugh and Jean Bethke
 F R ID A Y S C H I L D R E N 191

Elshtain - are both inspired by Augustine.7 No one said this

subject was straightforward.

Political Agency: Look Busy!

Perhaps we can spell out a bit more what these practices and
performances are. The joke on the bumper sticker reads: Jesus
Is Coming: Look Busy! What, exactly, are we supposed to be
doing? We have a number of options, to compare and contrast
with the high ideal of political action championed by Hannah
Arendt (chapter 3). The vision she articulates, of political activ
ity as free, open and un-coerced communication, is extensively
developed in Critical Theorys articulation of a communicative
rationality. As we have seen in chapter 9, Jrgen Habermas
defines emancipation in terms of an ideal communicative
action which includes everyone. This in turn is subjected to a
theological critique by political theologians (Peukert, Metz) who
insist that such a notion only makes sense in terms of Christian
eschatology. Put simply, in order to posit an ideal speech situa
tion, you have to posit a resurrection from the dead - otherwise
the dead are excluded from the conversation.
While we wait for this to happen, our own political strivings
in the interval will be a model and anticipation of this future
conversation. The Church, in particular, must be an example of
communicative rationality, even if it too often falls short of this
ideal. As we have seen, Edmund Arens reflects upon the struc
tures, the dimensions, and the theological quality of Christian
praxis. He distinguishes between two basic ecclesial concepts -
witnessing and confessing - which represent complementary
and at the same time basic communicative actions of faith
(125). In bearing witness, Christians individually and collec
tively point to Jesus Christ by vouching for the truth of their
testimony with their own existence ... with the intention of
convincing, inviting and winning those recipients for that to
which and to whom they bear witness. Confession, on the other
hand, is that action, oriented by memory, in which the com
munity of believers completes, makes present, repeats, and
appropriates an agreement. To confess means to achieve
consensus. (144).
192 T H E G IF T

Witness by suffering and situational confession are ob

viously connected. It is here that the discourse of martyrdom as
a political category comes to the fore, because it straddles these
two basic activities. And martyrdom is, after all, one model of
political holiness, perhaps even its definitive expression. In
Metzs later work, as we have seen, the challenge is to give an
account of the subject other than the narcoleptic bourgeois sub
ject, whose freedom consists in being immune to suffering as
far as possible. Taking discipleship of Jesus Christ seriously, by
contrast, means a readiness to suffer the suffering of others,
especially where the choice is an exclusive one, between one
kind of subject or the other. Metz describes this as an active,
rather than passive acceptance of suffering: it can be translated
as a suffering unto God {Leiden an Gott).
For Jrgen Moltmann, martyrdom is the fellowship of
Christs sufferings: the Church is ecclesia martyrium, and takes
its bearings from those whose witness is linked to the testimony
of Christ in this special way. A Christianity that has forgotten its
martyrs has been politically assimilated, because it has forgotten
the crucified Christ as well:8

[T]he martyrs anticipate in their own bodies the sufferings

of the end-time, which come upon the whole creation; and
dying, they witness to the creation which is new. Anyone
who participates in Christs sufferings participates in the
end-time sufferings of the world. (204)

They are witnesses to the coming truth against the ruling lie:
William Cavanaugh aligns martyrdom with a new configuration
of the problematic of Church and State: [Mjartyrdom dis
ciplines the community and helps it to claim its identity, such
that in the Eucharist it re-enacts Christs conflict with the forces
of disorder. The body of the martyr is thus the battleground for
a larger contest of rival imaginations, that of the state and that of
the church (Cavanaugh, 1998, 645).
But if confession-martyrdom is a speech-act, what is the con
tent of this communication? Jean-Luc Marion, at the close of
God without Being, addresses the paradox that Christian speech
is necessarily tongue-tied: the believer can never simply take
 F R ID A Y S C H I L D R E N 193

upon herself the utterance Jesus is Lord. How can the speaker
ever be legitimated and qualified to say such a thing? The
answer, as Nicholas Lash reminds us, is that the primary witness
is not the martyr herself, but Gods self-witness, the martyr
dom of God (Lash, 1981). Only understood in this way can
predication (utterance) and performance (action) be perfectly
legitimate. And both of these, taken together, are the statement
and enactment of a claim to sovereignty: a political claim.
The confession of faith passes through the one who speaks,
but it comes from much further away and it goes much farther.
It passes right through him: coming from the mystery, hidden
before the centuries, of adoption of men in the Son (Ephesians
1:4-5), it aims at the recapitulatory lordship of the Son over the
universe (Ephesians 1:10).9
Where does this leave us, with respect to Hannah Arendts
judgement that Christianity is incompatible with politics as free,
un-coerced speech-action? If we recall, her ideal is one of
natality. With word and deed we insert ourselves into the
human world, and this insertion is like a second birth. But the
Christian is excluded, because his or her good deeds are silent,
hidden from public view like crimes. The only way of being
worldly, and political, of genuinely initiating something new,
is denied to the Christian, who is unable to take this risk of self
disclosure.
Is she right? Two words of riposte may be offered. Firstly,
what Edmund Arens and others have done is to elaborate a
theology of communicative action which, I believe, acknowl
edges the complexity of Christian communicative action and
yet, contrary to Arendt, enables that action to overcome paraly
sis and incoherence, and to be both valid and effective. Arens
typology of confession and witness allows the Church to say
different things to different people in different situations: some
times aiming at confrontation or prophetic challenge, at other
times articulating a consensus. Theology, the discipline that
follows what is claimed as the supreme act of testimony
(Williams) can therefore help us construct accounts of human
action which are honest, which go beyond overt or disguised
assertions of the will to power.
Secondly, it is, in a sense, all down to posture. A striking
194 T H E G IF T

image used by Ernst Bloch is that of the upright gait, which he

explores in a 1971 essay entitled Upright Carriage, Concrete
Utopia. Marxist analysis and action coincide with Christian
theology in the realisation that standing straight is, miraculously,
possible.10 But there is another aspect to this image. B. D. Shaw
suggests a distinction between the classical and Christian
versions of heroism, summed up in the Greek word hypomene,
meaning the capacity to undergo (suffering). The term has
implications of horizontality - a vanquished soldier on the
battlefield, or a woman in labour - and as such was depreciated,
by comparison with the vertical ideal of the victorious warrior,
or a man standing up to deliver a speech in the agora. According
to Shaw, it is one of the great cultural achievements of
Christianity that through the terrible tribulations of its martyrs,
it should have brought about a new appreciation of this virtue,
the patient and hopeful endurance of suffering (Shaw, 1996).
W. H. Auden, once again:

Let us honor if we can

the vertical man
though we value none
but the horizontal one.

The Christian response, which political theology seeks to

articulate, is clear: let us honour and value both.
EPILOGUE

Before bringing proceedings to a close, we need to highlight a

puzzling and acute dilemma, which really requires a much more
extended treatment than is possible in this work. I refer to the
marked and disturbing imbalance between the attention given by
political theologians and critical theorists to the Shoah and the
Nazi catastrophe, and the thinness of the theological reflection
upon the experience of countries which until 1989 were under
Soviet control, the Second World.
There can be no taking leave of Auschwitz for theology. Yet
there is a curious neglect of those societies and churches which,
for decades longer than Germany under National Socialism,
bore the brunt of a brutally atheistic and dehumanising
Leviathan, at a cost of millions of lives, once the expense of
Stalinist purges and engineered famines is reckoned. Much of
the venom of these regimes was aimed directly at the churches,
and at individual Christians. And yet, where one would expect a
theological critique, on a par with post-war European political
theology, or the Latin American liberationists, there is very
little. It seems, to return to the list of models of the church in the
last chapter, that we need to add a seventh: the silent Church,
which, distressingly, remains silent still.
The feeling is strong that this horrendous slice of history, the
darkness at noon, has yet to be brought to theological light;
one cannot help wondering about the culpability of Western
political theologians for the continued neglect. To give just two
examples, from the resources we have been working with, the
splendid Blackwell Companion (Scott and Cavanaugh, 2004)
testifies to the centrality of the German wartime experience,
with chapters on Schmitt, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Moltmann and
Metz. The editors find room for chapters on political theologies
in Asia, on Gustavo Gutirrez, and on southern feminist
196 E P IL O G U E

theologies; but there is nothing on (post)communist societies.

The same is true of the thirty-four essays in Political Theologies
(de Vries and Sullivan, 2006), a collection which is largely given
over to the challenge of Islam and secular society, pluralism and
democracy, all for the most part concerns of western societies.
The evidence seems to suggest that political theology is an
activity exclusive to Middle European or American theologians,
who manage to have worthwhile conversations with partners in
the South, but not to the East. The Silent Church remains
silent. When we factor in the mistrust engendered by political
theologys reliance on traditions of quirky Marxism, it may be
that a major task presents itself, of finding a new, common
starting-point for political theologies across the region.
Andras Mate-Toth (from Hungary), reflecting on a possible
theology of (in) the Second World (Toth, 2000:27), sets out
the resources: biblical images of imprisonment, Egyptian or
Babylonian captivity (depending on the severity of the re
pression), and a variety of theological approaches (neo
scholasticism, traditionalism, underground), but with renewal
hampered by an uneven and fraught engagement with theologi
cal modernity; post-1989, the filling of many new skins with
old wine.
Probably three broad avenues may be discerned. Firstly, in
keeping with the anamnestic solidarity so emphasised by Metz
and others, the painful task of truth recovery must be under
taken, and the same dilemmas faced as in other compromised
societies, such as Guatemala and El Salvador, Chile and
Argentina, South Africa, Northern Ireland and so on, of how the
exigencies of justice, truth, reconciliation, the enhancement of
democracy and human rights (the imperative never again)
must be balanced and negotiated. As with all these other cases,
the role of Christians and the Christian tradition in articulating
transcendent values cannot be neglected. Paramount, however,
must be an embrace and empowerment of the victims, and a
receiving of their testimonies as the basis for theological
reflection.1
Secondly, the churches, required to reflect anew upon their
changed status and yet, in too many cases, already required to
express repentance, for collusion and compromise under
 E P IL O G U E 197

totalitarianism, and for a lack of imagination post-1989, when

the temptation to restorationism was more powerful than the call
to creative and constructive witness. If the model of the
catacomb church, and the discourse of martyrdom, are valid
here - and of course they are - then so too is the painful example
of the traditores: those who complied with Diocletians edict in
303, requiring the handing over of Christian books to be
burned.
Thirdly, the implications of what Toth calls a Chernobyl of
souls, after the eradication, over decades and across popula
tions, of the classic concepts of person and conscience, and the
disorientation caused by the collapse of the system that was to
replace them. As ever, theology draws on the philosophers:
Vaclav Havels analysis of post-totalitarianism is open to theo
logical explication. Citizens like the greengrocer in Havels
parable, living in a post-totalitarian dictatorship (where all
idealism has been dissipated and only the brutality remains),
have the choice of continuing to live in the lie - pretending the
emperor isnt naked - or deciding to living in Truth.2 Another
remarkable witness is Petre Tutea (1902-91), an Orthodox intel
lectual whose life in prison and under house arrest in Romania,
together with experiences of torture and re-education are
recorded by Alexandra Popescu (Popescu, 2004). As the title of
the book implies, Tuteas version of living in truth is the choice
the individual makes between sacrifice and moral suicide.
It is understandable that the exigencies of a post-9/11 world
should grab most of the headlines, and whatever theological
energy is around. Even so, I would suggest that the comparative
neglect of the themes, persons and histories we have been
discussing represents an impoverishment, both for political
theology, and for the inchoate contextual theology of and in the
Second World.

Return of God, Return to God

For eschatology and for political theology, there must be a
return to fundamentals: the doctrine of God.3 The impossible
challenge for the political theologian, as for any believer, is: how
do we mind our language in the presence of the returning God;
198 E P IL O G U E

how do we ensure that our speech about God has integrity?

Rowan Williams alerts us to the ways in which invulnerable
theological pronouncements may simply represent the retreat
from conversation implicit in the concealment of purpose ...
[which] is manifestly a political matter (2000:4). We need to be
so careful.
It is one thing to wager and anticipate the end - with joyful
hope, or under protest like Ivan Karamazov - our being pressed
and agitated into perfect mutuality by the surrounding life of the
triune God. But: precisely who does the pressing and the
agitating? The cry of Yahweh malek, patiently explicated by the
political theologian, cannot mean the same as the Allahu Akbar
of the so-called suicide bomber.
I am no further than this, in addressing the more dramatic
manifestations of the persistence of the theologico-politicaF.
With a huge, frenzied literature on this subject, I make no apolo
gies for not adding to it. Suffice to say that, tempting as it may
be to put the Islamist bomber on the other side of history and
rationality, along with the Nazi monsters, this will not do.4 For
what it is worth - this will come as no surprise - I am more
impressed by arguments which root fundamentalist terrorism in
modern (nineteenth-century) complexities of resentment and
romantic nihilism, rather than an atavistic and perennial instinct
to destroy people in the name of God. The idea of terror as a
doctrine or strategy derives from the 1880s, as does the apotheo
sis of the terrorist as noble, terrible, irresistibly fascinating,
uniting the two sublimities of human grandeur, the martyr and
the hero (Rapoport, 2002:4). For Ren Girard and others, our
indispensable guide is Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of The
Devils and Notes from Underground. On their account, Islamist
terrorism is neither medieval, nor even Islamic, but an exacer
bated desire for convergence, what Girard calls mimetic
rivalry on a planetary scale.5
I began this book reading a free newspaper on the London
tube. Of all the cities we have been considering: earthly and
heavenly, Athens and Jerusalem, Babel, Auschwitz, it is the
denizens of my adopted city, London, who may help us to keep
some perspective. In the wake of the bombings of July 2005
(perpetrated, as it happens, by young men from some place on
E P IL O G U E 199

this earth - my native city, Leeds) the admirable we can take

it sentiment ran something like this: Hitler tried to break us in
the Blitz - in the 70s and 80s it was the turn of the IRA - now
the Arabs have had a go, so now they can off too! The
parallels are illuminating. There was no compromise with
Hitlerism, of course, and the evil of National Socialism was
comprehensively defeated: this was, after all, our finest hour.
But a political settlement with militant Irish republicanism was
reached, and bitter enemies now co-operate in the same power
sharing administration.6
What will be the final verdict upon Islamist terror: will it be
extinguished by its crusading enemies, or will there be some
kind of accommodation with them? If the latter, does anyone
doubt that this will be a theologico-politicaT accommodation?
But if the suicide bomber is wrong, so is the Left Behind
Christian, and for much the same reasons. As Robert Jenson
reminds us, our disparate eschatological imaginings are all
evocations of one single occurrence, an infinite implosion of
love, of a created community pressed and agitated into perfect
mutuality by the surrounding life of the triune God. The escha
tological reality which we have called the kingdom of God has
traditionally been considered alongside another description:
fulfilment as deification, or the vision of God. These two
yearnings correspond, roughly, to Western and Eastern Christian
viewpoints. If both are true, then somehow entry into the king
dom of God must be entry into the triune life of God, and vice
versa (414).
Gods self, as Trinity, displays a perfect polity; Jesus the Son
brings the Church, the redeemed community, with him into the
polis. This is the wager: that God will be who I will be, that
God will keep faith with us.
NOTES

1. In The New Atheists (DLT, London, 2007), Tina Beattie surveys the
virulent critiques of religion that have been offered recently by
Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett,
Polly Toynbee and Ian McEwan. Beattie notes with irony that no one
has done more than writers like Richard Dawkins to keep God alive,
thanks to their strident and best-selling condemnations of religious
belief. She goes on to regret the intolerant and discourteous tone of
the current Religion versus Science debate.
2. Mark Lilia, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modem
West (A. Knopf, NY, 2007).
3. John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death o f Utopia
(Allen Lane, Penguin, London, 2007).
4. See On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy;
Kant, 1992 [1791].

1: What Is Political Theology?

1. Scott and Cavanaugh, eds, 2004.
2. One version of this separation is given the name Erastianism (after
the Swiss theologian Thomas Erastus, 1524-1583), which denotes the
view that the state is supreme in church matters.
3. Words from http//www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/a/l/allthing.htm, which
helpfully points out that most hymnals omit this verse!
4. ODonovan, 1996. See also Bartholomew et al (eds.), 2002, A Royal
Priesthood: A Dialogue with Oliver O Donovan, for the results of a
Scripture and Hermeneutics consultation around the ethical and
political issues arising from ODonovans book.
5. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (eds), 2006: Introduction,
1- 88.
6. De Vries, 2006:2. The Westphalian doctrine refers to the decision by
the Treaty of Westphalia 1648, at the close of the Thirty Years War, to
allow the religious allegiance of a state to be determined by its ruler:
cuius regio eius religio
7. De Vries lists: Varros distinction between political, mythical and
cosmological theologies; Ernst Kantorowitz?s study of medieval
political theology (Kantorowiz, 1997[1957]); Spinozas Tractatus
Theologico- Politicus (1670), and the twentieth-century usage of Carl
Schmitt.
8. De Vries, Hent, 2005, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular
202 NOTES

Reason in Adorno and Levinas. Johns Hopkins UP.

9. Creston Davis, John Milbank, Slavoj Zizek (eds), Theology and the
Political (Duke University Press, London, 2005). This volume col
lects the papers from the Ontologies in Practice conference,
University of Virginia, September 2002.

2: Witness Against the Beast

1. I have lifted the title of this chapter from E. P. Thompsons fine study
of William Blake, a fiery prophetic witness against the Leviathan
and Behemoth politics of his own day (Thompson, 1993).
2. For the work of Ren Girard, see Kirwan, 2004; Fleming, 2004.
3. The same mechanism - violence channelled outwards in order to pre
serve civil peace - is wonderfully conveyed by the speech of King
Henry i y at the beginning of Shakespeares Henry IV Pt I. (I. 1.
1-27). The king is exhausted with putting down rebellions; he longs
to bring an end to the civil butchery, and unite the country behind a
single military (and religious!) project, namely a Crusade, marching
all one way in mutual well-beseeming ranks to the Holy Land.
The edge of war, like an ill-sheathed knife, no more shall cut his mas
ter.
4. Livy, History o f Rome, 1:24-26; Augustine, City of God, Bk III. 14.
For a discussion of these passages, see Atkins, 2001: 25-6.
5. Tragedy and Revolution in Creston Davis et al (eds), 2005,
Theology and the Political, 7-21. (Eagleton , 2005).
6. W. H. Auden, Vespers from Horae Canonicae (Auden, 1991:
637-39).
7. Martin Luther, Temporal Authority: to what extent it should be obeyed
(1523); see Lull (ed.), 436-7.
8. It may be worth pointing out that some commentators follow Schmitt
himself in translating this as friend-enemy, since the term foe can
have connotations of demonising the other, which is not Schmitts
intention.
9. For discussions of the theological background, see Palaver 1996,
2007, and Hollerich, 2004.
10. The German words for order and location are Ordnung and
Ortung.
11. Hannah Arendt makes a similar connection: The word polis original
ly connected something like a ring wall, and it seems the Latin urbs
also expressed the notion of a circle and was derived from the same
root as orbis. We find the same connection in our word town, which
originally, like the German Zaun, meant a surrounding fence.
(Arendt, 1958: 64).
12. This vision looks similar to the Clash of Civilisations concept
advanced by Samuel Huntington in 1992, which has been hugely
influential in shaping attitudes towards the relationship between Islam
and the West in particular.
NOTES 203

3: Love of the World

1. Bemauer, 1987,7-8.
2. This objection might be read alongside Shanks, 1991, whose intro
duction to Hegels Political Theology draws on Milan Kunderas
understanding of ideological kitsch; see chapter 8.
3. Steiner, 1992:104-7.
4. Or, to take an extreme but very topical example: Andrea Brady draws
attention to the ways in which the immense grief after the 9/11 atro
city was used to shape US self-identity (a sensible Leviathan
responding instinctively to pain), not least in framing its military
response in terms of an apocalyptic war on terror: Brady, 2002.
5. See Forrester, 1988, chapter 1: Piety and Politics in the Ancient
World: especially 5-14.
6. Procope, in Bums (ed.), 1988:32.
7. See chapters 5 and 6 by Markus, in Burns (ed.), 1988:83-91 and
92-122.
8. See in particular two essays in Bernauer (ed.) 1987: The Faith of
Hannah Arendt (Bernauer, 1987:1-28), and Enspirited Words and
Deeds: Christian Metaphors Implicit in Arendts Concept of Personal
Action (Roach, 1987:59-80).
9. See Benjamin (2002 vol. 4) for the text of the essay On the Concept
of History which includes this fragment.
10. For an overview, see Theology and Critical Theory (Ward, 2000), and
the contributors to Theology and the Political: the New Debate
(Davis, C. et al, 2005).
11. The title of another book by Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: the
Perverse Core of Christianity (Zizek, 2003), indicates his indebted
ness to Benjamins parable. See also On Belief (Zizek, 2001).

4: The Doctrine of the Two

1. Letter to Emperor Anastasius, in ODonovan and ODonovan (eds),
1999:179.
2. I summarise here from Steven Ozments The Age o f Reform (Ozment,
1980), ch. 4: The Ecclesiopolitical Tradition, 135-81.
3. For a modem version of Augustines jest about the pirate and the
emperor, see Cavanaugh, 1995:413-14; Cavanaugh takes up Tillys
analogy between the modem States monopoly on violence, and the
gangster running a protection racket!
4. Scripta super libros sententiarum II, Dist.44, quaest.3: see Dyson
(ed), 2002:278. We have already noted that this interpretation of
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesars is highly problematic!

5: A Stormy Pilgrimage
1. In To The Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520). Luthers
most important work in this area is Temporal Authority, to what extent
it should be obeyed (1523); the text can be found in Lull (ed.),
204 NOTES

2005:429-59, andHopfl (ed.), 1991:1-46.

2. Bloch, 1969 [1921]. For a commentary on Blochs reading of Thomas
Miintzer, see Roberts, 1990:13-19.
3. Bloch, 1969:229.
4. William T. Cavanaugh, A fire strong enough to consume the house:
the Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State, Modern Theology 11.4
(October 1995), 397-416. This essay forms a prelude to the critique
of the nation-state which he offers in Torture and Eucharist (1998),
and to the liturgical and ecclesiological emphasis of this key book and
subsequent writings.
5. For an extended and sympathetic examination of ODonovans
account of Christendom, see Greene, 2002:314-40; also ODonovans
response in the same volume (341-3).

6: Stillborn Gods
1. Lefort, 2006:231-55.
2. G. W. F. Flegel, from the Philosophy of Mind, cited in Lefort,
2006:149.
3. Kant, 1992 [1791],
4. For a recent reappraisal of Kants religious writings, see Firestone, C.
L. and S. R. Palmquist (eds), 2006, especially Galbraiths essay,
179-89, on Kant and theodicy.
5. This edition of Kant translates: Nature the contriver of things
(Lucretius).
6. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Faber and Faber,
London, 1984; Shanks, 1991:1-4.
7. Shanks, 1991:184-8; V Havel, Living in Truth. Faber and Faber,
London, 1987.
8. Solle, 1967 and 1975; Moltmann, 1974.

7: Theology in a Land of Screams

1. The photograph appears in an article in the Guardian newspaper, 17
January 2004, 9; the article reports that the image was being posted
on www.evidenceincamera.co.uk.
2. Primo Levi, If this is a Man. Abacus, 1979 [1958]:23.
3. Rubenstein, 1966; Rubenstein and Roth, 1987; Cohen, 1981 and
1984.
4. Ellis, 1986 and 1997.
5. For one theologians attempt to sort out some of the political-
theological complexities, see Davis, 1994.
6. Extensive historical surveys of the Churches under National
Socialism are to be found in Burleigh, 2000, and Scholder, 1985,
1988.
7. For commentary on the Barmen texts, see Ahlers, 1986; for more
extended commentary on Barths political theology, see Wilmer,
2004, and Hunsinger, 1976.
NOTES 205

8. Barth and Rosenzweig are the authors of two ground-breaking works,

of theology, the Epistle to the Romans (second edition, 1922) and The
Star of Redemption (1921) respectively.
9. Steiner, 1989:231; see also Nicholas Lashs reflection upon Steiners
image of the Saturday, in Lash, 1990:109-19.
10. Steiner, 1996:344.

8: We Who Come After

1. The chapter title echoes a poem by Bertolt Brecht, written in 1938:
To Those Bom After:
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and
friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.
2. The text of the Theses to be found in Benjamin, 1973 [1955], also
Benjamin, 2002, vol. 4.
3. For reasons of space, I will refer to just two very important books by
Moltmann, The Theology of Hope (1964) and The Crucified God
(1974), though his output and his significance go well beyond these
two works.
4. For a more extended discussion of Metzs roots in Germany, and
therefore Mitteleuropa, see Martinez, 2001: 24-38.
5. Roberts, 1990:16. For Blochs reception by theologians, see Tom
Moylan, Bloch against Bloch: the Theological Reception of Das
Prinzip Hoffnung and the Liberation of the Utopian Function
(Moylan, 1997), though Moylan argues that in fact Bloch had a pro
founder influence over prominent liberation theologians such as
Gustavo Gutirrez than Moltmann and Metz.
6. The title of a tribute to Solle, on her death in 2003.
7. Sin Is When Life Freezes: a meditation on I John 1:8; the article first
appeared in The Christian Century, May 12, 1982.

9: From Despair to Where?

1. See Freeman (ed.), 2003, for an overall view of Rawls; for attention
to the religious and theological implications of Rawls work, see
Dombrowski (2001) and Scherer (2006).
2. Peukert, 1986 [1984],
3. Peukert, 1984:209-10.
4. See discussion in McCarthy, 1986 and 1991.
5. See Arens (1996), and Lakeland (1990).
6. de Vries (ed.), 2006:49; for the texts of the conversation, see
Habermas, 2006:251-60, and Pope Benedict, 2006:261-8.
7. Habermas Modernity and Public Theology eds D. S. Brown and
Francis Schssler Fiorenza. Crossroad, NY, 1992 . Theology, Critical
Social Theory and the Public Realm, 19-42
206 NOTES

8. See Browning and Fiorenza (eds), 1992:226-53.

9. Habermas cites R. S. Siebert and the impressive bibliography
compiled by Edmund Arens (ed), 1989:9-38.
10. Habermas, 2001.
11. See Habermas, 2006:251-60; also in Mendieta, (ed.), 2005:339-48.
12. Habermas has contributed to Liberation Theology, Postmodernity and
the Americas (REF), and in the essays collected by Eduardo
Mendieta: Jrgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on
Reason, God, and Modernity. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2002.
Religion in the Public Sphere, European Journal of Philosophy 14.1
(2006): 1-25.
13. Mendieta, 2007:7; Mendietas review of Adams finds the book worth
while, but with severe misgivings about some of the overall judge
ments, as indicated above.
14. Rose, 1993:1.
15. Rose, 1996:1.

10: The Political Word of God

1. Titles include: Tribulation Force: the Continuing Drama o f Those Left
Behind (1996), Soul Harvest: the World Takes Sides (1998) and
Armageddon: the Cosmic Battle of the Ages (2003). Summaries of the
books can be found at http://www.leftbehind.com.
2. To emphasise how some things never change: when President Bush
visited Israel in January 2008, with the intention of regenerating a
peace process between Israel and Palestine, he was greeted with
Zionist placards, urging Bush, read your Bible!
3. Ellis, 1986:74.
4. ODonovan, 1996; for critical engagement with ODonovans The
Desire of the Nations, including his use of scripture, see essays in
Bartholomew et al (eds), 2002.
5. See Brueggemanns The Prophetic Imagination for a fuller treatment
of political theology as an alternative imagining to imperial theolo
gy-
6. Schwagers chapter on Christology (Schwager, 2004) is a summary
version of the case he sets out in Jesus and the Drama of Salvation.
7. With this combination of insights from Girard and Balthasar, a dis
tinctive vein of political theology is opened up, which is explored by
the dramatic theology research group at the University of Innsbruck.
For background, see Schwager (1998 and 2004), Fleming (2004), and
Kirwan (2004), as well as Girard and Palaver references.
8. Agnes Heller, cited at Manemann, 2005:52.
9. See Paul Fiddes study of eschatology in literature and theology
(Fiddes, 2000) for a discussion of this annoying post-modern liter
ary device.
10. Duquoc 1986, and 1996; Kirwan, 2006.
11. Reno, 1992:304.
NOTES 207
11: Fridays Children
1. Paul Durcan, The Death of the Ayatollah Khomeini, in Daddy
Daddy. Bladestaff Press, 1990: 46.
2. The title of this chapter alludes to a poem by W. H. Auden on Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, called Fridays Child. It is a reflection upon Christian
martyrdom; according to the nursery rhyme, of course, Fridays child
is loving and giving.
3. ODonovan, 1996:174 ff.
4. Clive Pearsons definition of public theology can be found at:
http://www.csu.edu.au/faculty/arts/theology/pact/pdf/What_is_Public
_Theology.pdf
5. For overviews of Hauerwas, consult Reno, 2004, and The Hauerwas
Reader (Berkman and Cartwright (eds), 2001). For key ecclesiologi-
cal writings, see Hauerwas 1983 and 1995.
6. Cavanaugh, 1999:196.
7. See Elshtain 2004, and 2005 for her work on Augustine; she is also
the author of Jusl War against Terror: The Burden o f American Power
in a Violent World (Elstain, 2003).
8. Moltmann, 1989:196-204.
9. Marion, 1991:196.
10. See Bloch, 1971:168-73; Gustavo Gutirrez reminds us that, for the
Christian, humans can only stand upright if the centre of gravity is
outside ourselves (Gutirrez, 1988:205).

Epilogue
1. See testimonies, from the Czech experience, of Jan Sokol and Oto
Mdr in Concilium 2000/3, Religion During and After Communism'
(Tomka and Zulehner (eds), 2000).
2. The parable of the greengrocer has been wonderfully brought to life
in the highly acclaimed German film by Florian Henckel, The Lives
of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), in which Gerd Wcislcr, an
interrogator for the Stasi, is finally alerted to the utter cynicism of the
system he is upholding. Now post-totalitarian, he decides, at great
personal risk, to subvert a surveillance operation in which he is
involved.
3. Jenson, 2004:406.
4. Paradise Now (2005), a collaboration of Arab and Jewish film-mak
ers, drew hostile responses (including accusations of pro-Nazism)
for daring to portray two would-be suicide bombers and to examine
their motives. Parallels with Arendts commitment to understanding
Adolf Eichmann come to mind.
5. See Girard, 2001; Jiirgensmeyer (ed.), 1992 and 2000; McKenna,
2002; Rapoport (2002) and Regensburger (ed) 2002, for articles argu
ing this case.