Political theology
Political theology is a term which has been used in discussion of the ways in which theological concepts or ways of thinking relate to politics. The term is often used to denote religious thought about political principled questions. Scholars such as Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi jurist and political theorist, who wrote extensively on how to effectively wield political power, used it to denote religious concepts that were secularized and thus became key political concepts. It has often been affiliated with Christianity, but since the 21st century, it has more recently been discussed with relation to other religions.
Definition and analysis[edit]
The term political theology has been used in a wide variety of ways by writers exploring different aspects of believers' relationship with politics. It has been used to discuss Augustine of Hippo's City of God[1] and Thomas Aquinas's works Summa Theologica[2] and De Regno: On Kingship.[3] It has likewise been used to describe the Eastern Orthodox view of symphonia[4] and the works of the Protestant reformers Martin Luther[5] and John Calvin.[6]
There is a long history in Christian political thought of linking politics, statecraft, and worldly authority to the broader category of carnal literalism, typed as “Jewish” by the Pauline tradition. This tradition produced a tendency to discuss political error in terms of Judaism, with the difference between mortal and eternal, private and public, tyrant and legitimate monarch, mapped onto the difference between Jew and Christian. As a result of this history, transcendence as a political ideal has often figured (and perhaps still figures?) its enemies as Jewish.[7]
Though the political aspects of Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, and other traditions has been debated for millennia, political theology has been an academic discipline since the 20th century.[8]
The recent use of the term is often associated with the work of the prominent German political theorist Carl Schmitt. Writing amidst the turbulence of the German Weimar Republic, Schmitt argued in his essay Politische Theologie (1922)[9] that the main concepts of modern politics were secularized versions of older theological concepts. Mikhail Bakunin had used the term in his 1871 text "The Political Theology of Mazzini and the International"[10] to which Schmitt's book was a response.[11] Drawing on Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan he argued that the state exists to maintain its own integrity in order to ensure order in society in times of crisis.
Some have divided the approach of political theology between a rightist traditional concern with individual "moral reform" (such as Clyde Wilcox's God's Warriors [1992] and Ted Jelen's The Political World of the Clergy [1993]) and a leftist focus on collective "social justice" (such as Jeffrey K. Hadden's The Gathering Storm in the Churches [1969] and Harold Quinley's The Prophetic Clergy [1974]).[12]
Kwok Pui-lan has argued that, while Schmitt may have come up with the term and its modern usage, political theologies were likewise forming along very different trajectories elsewhere around the world, such as in Asia. In China in the 1930s, for instance, the Protestant Wu Yaozong advocated that a social revolution was necessary to save both China and the world.[13] This would likewise be true of the role of Protestants involved in Korean nationalism in the early twentieth century.[14]
Many major non-Christian philosophers have written extensively on the topic of political theology during recent years, such as Jürgen Habermas,[15] Odo Marquard,[16] Giorgio Agamben, Simon Critchley,[17] and Slavoj Zizek.[18] Since the early 21st century, there has also been a growing discourse around Islamic political theology, especially within Western contexts that were previously dominated by Christianity.[19][20]
In the 1990s and early 2000s, political theology became an important theme within legal theory, especially in constitutional law, international law and legal history.[21][22][23] The literature draws heavily upon the legacy of Carl Schmitt (though often to debate his premises) and political philosophy (such as Ernesto Laclau), along with political phenomena, such as the 'War on Terror'.[24][25]
Another term which often occupies similar space in academic discourse is "public theology". It is said that political theology is directed more towards the government or the state, whereas public theology is more towards civil society.[26]