Political Theology - Introduction - Global Voices

Biblical Sources:

Political Theologies in the Old Testament

• Creation narratives and social theologies
• Prophets, Judges, Kings: Who has power in Israel and Judah?
• King David: From nobody to flawed, paradigmatic leader
• Messianic ideas: political hopes and how they have changed over time
• Exile: Recalibrating what it means to be in this covenant with YHWH
• Return from Exile and reestablishment of temple
• Occupied Judea: Under Roman Rule

OT

Tribal and regional forms of political organization

New Testament Texts and 'The Powers that Be'

Under occupation

• Parables on the 'Kingdom of God'
• Taxes and the Emperor
• Apostles and Authorities
• Anticolonial Frustration: Apocalypse of John and Rome, the 'Great Whore of Babylon'

NT

Cavanaugh, W and P.M. Scott, eds. Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (2nd. ed, 2019)

- Introduction locates the development of political theology from early uses of the term after WWII to renewed importance of political theology in times when democracies world-wide are under renewed pressure from authoritarian rule and influence.

-recognition that politics was never drained of the sacred

- the last centuries the primary locus of the sacred has moved to market and nation, but sacred never absent from life

- political theology is an explicit attempt to relate discourse about God to the organization of bodies in space and time

- political theology was shaped in Germany in the struggle to find proper relations between church and state

Renewed Interest

Harold Drake, Church and Empire

(Eerdmanns Reader in Contemporary Political Theology, 2012 )

Church and Empire

• What is the relationship between the 'two powers'?
• The Battle of the Milvian Bridge was a turning point
• Melito of Sardes argues that God has intended for Church and Empire to have a joint role
• Eusebius of Caesarea turns this into a rationale for Christian Empire
• by the time of Constantine, bishops had developed a mechanism for meeting across great distance and communicate with each other. The empire needed and benefited this kind of communicative infrastructure.

Dorothee Soelle, Fatherhood, Power, and Barbarism: feminist Challenges to Authoritarian Religion

Dorothee Soelle

Soelle asks: 1) Has a culture of obedience helped to create culture, or enabled barbarism?

2) Can the word father still stand for God when we have learned to think of God and liberation as inseparable? 3) What elements of the father symbol are indispensable? (327)

• It is important to not deny one's sexual, national, or socioeconomic identity
• we cannot simply be obedient without looking at the greater picture. As Christians we should never submit to the rule of power
• The cardinal virtue of authoritarian religion is obedience; the cardinal sin is resistance. (329)
• Authoritarian religion masks an infantile need for consolation that masks a compulsive need for order, fear of confusion and chaos (329)
• Feminist theologies challenge the phallocratic fantasies and the adoration of power and the destruction of life
• Soelle herself stands in the tradition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who is christo-centric but who focuses on the power-less Christ, independent of authority, who has no power but love to save and win
• Female piety that is a form of 'Uncle Tom devotion' must be transformed and the father symbol reconstructed.
• Therefore it is important that we relative each symbol for God and ask how it is being used and what kind of power it legitimates and what support it requires. (331)

Emmanuel Katongole

(Ugandan Roman Catholic priest, teaches at University of Notre Dame, USA)

'Postmodern Illusions and the Challenges of African Theology: The Ecclesial Tactics of Resistance' (Essay, 2012)

• Offers an African political theology based on a critique of colonialism and its aftereffects, focusing on three aspects: 1) the postmodern celebration of difference, 2) the global economy, 3) the 'condomization' of Africa
• While 'postmodernism' seems to be sensitive to difference, it is too caught up in the modern Western crisis of identity to actually accepts and respect tastes and habits that are truly different from Western ways of life. (504)
• 'Postmodernism' has often been involved in the determination to undermine and destroy what is different and many, including Africans, have found themselves to be too willing victims of its enchanting machinations.
• The greatest challenge facing Christian churches in Africa in the 21st century if whether they will be able to generate enough critical skills and resources to enable Christians to survive these three challenges, and recapture a sense of hope and dignity.
• New directions are charted by previously excluded voices such as women theologians and the African Independent Church (505)

Katongole, ctd. 2

• Katongole reports that he first was enchanted with the postmodern idea of challenging established and dominant truths, but found that eventually it was still invested in dominant cultural expressions. Thus, while many Africans are unfamiliar with thinkers like Foucault etc , every unlettered peasant in the Transkei, for example, has to confront and negotiate the media and market forces of late capitalism. (506)
• the challenge is to move from a 'tourist fascination' with Africa to recognize and accept African voices (507)
• such fascination can mask a crisis in respect, also of theological respect: Africa was seen as a 'dark continent', as other, and Christian interpretations often saw the continent as 'demonic' and full of pagan cultures. (508)
• In enlightenment terms this became framed as 'ignorance, error, untruth, superstition' (508)
• 'Anthropology has become our modern way of seeing the Other as, fundamenally and mererely, culturally different.' (McGrane) The history of anthropology is in some ways the history of an identity crisis. (510)
• Economic globalization obscures the inequalities between consumers in the North and peasants in the South. (511)
• Important Question: What would it take to learn from difference rather than just being 'fascinated'. Making a science out of something can be a way of not listening. (512)

Katongole, ctd. 3

Africa Under the Global Economy:

• Global economy is often a system that involves a systematic destruction of whatever is locally significant. (513)
• We have to address the meaninglessness and futility of African youth's lives
• Global culture involves standardization, efficiency, predictability, and control
• Instead of the McDonald's hamburger, it is condomization that is the symbol of postmodern culture in Africa. Endless commercials about condoms in TV and billboards,etc. (516)
• The Church as a Community of Resistance and Hope
• there has recently been a growth in religious fundamentalism that has given rise to sects in both Islam and Christianity. An implicit resistance against some of these concerns may inspire these fundamentalist movements.
• It is a sense of resistance rooted in community. The challenge is to deal with this challenge by being tactical communities of resistance. Focusing on the survival of the weak, and by reading the Bible as a story of hope.
• The theme of resistance has always been implicit in African CHristianity, but we need it manifest in more communal stories of hope that resist fundamentalisms and individualist notions of salvation and hope. (523)

Bautista/Lim

• There is a structural similarity between monotheism and the totalitarian state (8)
• religion is useful for providing moral ballast (example: China) in a time of rapid growth and change
• while it is true that there is great development in the global South in terms of Christianity, there are significant challenges that are similar to previous historical periods
• Churches can function as alternative to state control/system/infrastructure in contexts where state is absent or weak

Aloysius Pieris, Political Theologies in Asia

• Asian Christianity has seen two types of political theologies: 1) theology of domination, 2) theologies of liberation
• From 1500s on: primarily domination (Euro-ecclesiastical expansionism, unholy alliance of Christian mission and Western colonialism) - from 1970s on theologies of liberation that critique this legacy of domination
• Pieris' definition of Asian political theology: 'a political option made an Asian Christian community as a biblically-inspired response to social conflict or a social need affecting both the church and the larger (non-Christian) community around it.
• Asian Third-World Theology/Asian Theology of Liberation
• Third World originally connotes alternative to capitalist West and communist East blocs, decolonized nations
• Christians in Third World rejected the 'development' model and supported 'liberation' agenda, critique of worship of riches, Exodus motif, based in Latin America
• Asian Christians develop own model building on Asianness, multifaceted religiosity, and ambivalent terms of poverty and religiousness. Being religious can either be used to enslave or to liberate. Liberative theologies critique the accumulation of riches. (252)

Pieris 2

• liberative praxis and liberative theory: positive revaluation of cosmic religions (previously considered 'nature worship', 'polytheism' and 'idolatry' by missionaries. These cosmologies highlight a belief-practice where the powers of nature manifest and maintain the vital needs of humans, who are participant members in this cosmis community rather than controllers of it. Counters colonial industrial exploitation of indigenous lands. (252)
• 253: distinguishes 'cosmic' and 'secular': cosmic retains the sacredness of this world, lends itself to ecospirituality and has become an indispensable ingredient of an Asian Liberation theology.
• since Christians are most often a minority in Asia, they ave to articulate their theology of liberation in relation to popular forms of religion
• Asian Christology: people have raised about the uniqueness of Christ in Asian theologies. Asian political theologies are often inflected by the issue of poverty and therefore more focused on the political dimension of christology and Jesus' execution under colonial state power than Western orthodox creedal systems (254)
• Asian political theologians argue that traditional Christology has speculated too much about the incarnation rather than encouraging commitment to Christ's mission (255)

Pieris 3

• importance of seeing Christ as 'God become my oppressed neighbor' is a kind of 'covenant Christology', summed up in the two commands to love Jesus identified as the most important commandments. Love of God rather than money, Love of neighbor in those who suffer.
• Fundamentalists' zeal of converting the other is replaced by liberationlists' solidarity with the neighbors
• 257: Filipino theologians called this 'theology of struggle', Indonesians 'contextual social theology' , Koreans Minjung theology, Indians Dalit theology.
• Minjung: the awwakened people who are taking their sociopolitical destiny into their own hands (257), Korean Christianity first emerged not through Western missionaries but through contact with indigenous Christians in neighboring countries and is therefore less subject to a colonial Christianity, though today this theology is struggling to survive aggressive forms of fundamentalist evangelicalism originating primarily from the U.S.
• Dalit theology in India: among the downtrodden and excluded castes and casteless, subject to centuries of segregation and oppression, was a movement before Christians adapted it. Protest against the Hindu caste system but also against the Indian Church, where caste privilege continues to be part of the hierarchy.

Pieris 4

• Dalit regard themselves as the original inhabitants of India (adivasis) who the invading aryans with their color consciousness treated as a slave class. Dalit Christians see Jesus as Dalit, despised and rejected because of his physical appearance.
• Asian Feminist Theology: women often excluded from liberation theologies, had to fight for their own voices to be heard and gathered over time. Distinct forms of Asian feminism have been emerging, increasingly also looking at the class-gender dynamic.

What is Political Theology? / What is Politics?

Chapter 1 / 1

• many political terms are also religious terms
• symbiosis between religion and politics
• what is meant by politilcal theology?
• the confession to Christ as Lord and Savior is also a claim about the nature and purpose of politics

1) Political Theology as Theology

• politics is part of a flourishing life which cannot be built on domination of others
• should avoid seeing world entirely in structural terms.
• Pilate vs. Jesus: Jesus was executed as an enemy of the political order of the empire - cruxifixion/resurrection as rejection of the imperial order
• Pentecost: Christ is beyond worldly powers
• contingencyin any political judgments is a reality
• political order is not the same as God's oikonomia

Political Theology as Political Philosophy

• pol phil uses some theological concepts and can be confessional or non-confessional

Political Philosophy

Political Theology or Theologies?

Pol Theology or Theologies?

• sapiential/ apocalypse form etc. - political theology needs multiple genres
• a common but problematic distinction is between:
• politics as a symptom of sin, or as a means to keep a degree of justice and human flourishing
• Augustine vs. Aquinas,
• Eusebius: sacralising existing political order
• Black theologies from the underside of history critique the existing racist, oppressive order
• need to provincialize Western political theology as one contribution amongst many - decentering our world (conversion)
• denominations can have a genre/tradition of political theology
• German postwar political theologies: reacting to Schmitt and his ideas on sovereignty, Kelsen, Bloch, Benjamin; Moltmann, Soelle, Metz

What does 'political' mean?

What does 'political' mean?

• politics as a good: polis, common life, commonm wealth, res publica
• shares and structures common life and sustains it over time, synonym for statecraft, exercise of sovereignty, governance
• refers to relational practices that cultivate common world of meaning and action, 'wily wisdom', strategic analysis, knowledge
• Antipolitical forms of domination: politics often includes forms of 'low violence' (Tyranny, technocracy, Majoritarianism)

The Polis: Citizen/Noncitizen - Friends / Enemies

The Polis

• the universal scope of God's love questions divisions
• loving one's neighbor as consrtuctive framing of political relations
• three problems with the love of enemies:
• everyone is an enemy
• no one is an enemy
• enemies can claim to be friends
• care for the friendless - mode of neighboring

The Oikos: Familial and Economic Relations

• ekklesia forms a hybrid oikos - polis
• previously excluded people are now included: slaves, women, children, disabled, barbarians, etc. (Galatians 3:28)
• political and religious 'citizenship' and belonging

The Oikos

Black Self-determination

Gathering a People

• can self-determination be coordinated with realizing democracy in the U.S.?
• sometimes coalitions do not serve other times they do
• rather than seeking 'integration' which means fitting into the dominant culture's current way of doing things, it is important to seek to radically reconfigure the polity so that minorities can be at home and forge non-white- supremacist forms of common or intercommunal life with others
• Two paradoxes in this struggle:
• democratic citizenship as individual liberty but is dependent on participation in a group
• democracy presumes respect for the dignity and agency of individuals, but politics is forged out of immoral people and hieracharcical /authoritarian structures

Solidarity and Empowerment

Black Solidarity

• Black solidarity does not require territorial separation, homogenous identity or shared consciousness
• any serious black resistance must build on alliances and coalitions with other ethnic groups, Native Americans, and white people who are committed to transforming society
• 'Rome dethroned is not Israel empowered' - Exodus paradigm in the Bible addresses poverty by forming a people that leaves slavery
• Moses/Christ: miracles of healing and exorcism, releasing oppressed to form their own people
• Legion: possessing spirits that have made their home within the oikos
• after exorcism, people needs reconstituting and healing (Kirk-Duggan)
• Marcia Riggs: exclusionary separation is divisive, functional separation recognizes differences as meaninful for interrelationships between groups

Challenging the power of money in our common life

The power of money and Christian soteriologies

-difficult, since spiritual, moral and theological questions are routinely excluded from the discipline of economics

- economic terms are regularly used to describe social, political and religious relations

Thesis 1:

-it is important to remember that salvation is imagined as liberation from debt slavery

-God's economy is different from capitalism

- the interplay of gift and debt is central to many soteriological metaphors

- capitalism is the idolatry of fallen, earthly time

- debt and interest have to do with buying and selling time, which is a gift of God and thus shared by all.

Robust analysis of capitalist domination

Robust analysis of capitalism and the domination it produces

• -neoliberal capitalist ideology portrays itself as 'conservative' corrective that wants to move towards privatization and away from regulation of business by the state. This is proclaimed as 'free market', even though it is based on the power of corporations over and against individuals and local communities, and the environment, so it ends up being the domination of money and profit without any external regulation.
• There are no protections for the poor, for workers, for the environment, everything is maximised for profit for ver few people.

Critical views of credit and debt

credit and debt

- much of this financial capitalism is focused on banks and other money institutions

- in medieval times, usury was a vice that was viewed very critically by both Islam and Christiantity. During modernity much of colonial ventures and business ventures were financed through credit and allowed for domination of markets by a few.

- shfit away from citizenship as a community (koinonia) to a view based on contract and business relations .

- government taxes: used to provide services for all citizens, or primarily used to give privileges to the private sector

- debt is a means of domination

Leaving behind oppressive forms of 'free market' capitalism

Visions for a common life apart from domination capitalism

- Christan movements have offered altnernative visions:

Acts of the Apostles - having all things in common

Social gospel movements

liberation theologies and feminist theologies

involvement in suporting local initiatives to imagine koinonia and a divine oikonomia

cooperatives, mutual aid societies, credit unions and social insurance

- cure of soils, cure of souls ought to go together

- building a common life that shares power and resources

Ochs 2

Ochs 2

- importance of studying across difference

- first studying own tradition, then engage in learning and conversation with the other

- the goal is reasoning itself, not coming to a final answer

- a project in peace-making and understanding, developing relational ecologies of knowing (609)

- slowly testing method for contributions to conflict-resolution and peace-building

- Ochs then gives an example of how he was involved in governmental attempts to apply such conflict resolution

Khir, The Islamic Quest for Sociopolitical Justice

• there has been a flood of writings on 'political Islam' , often seen as odds with modernity, and thus Muslim political activism is often equated with terrorism and extremism.
• goal is to examine emergence of modern Islamic ideas of sociopolitical justice and how different groups attempt to realize these
• note: the term political theology may not be directly applicable to Islam
• History of Islam: began as a peaceful movement against severe opposition and persecution in Mecca. Prophet's hijra to Medina was a turn and begins Islamic calendar.
• Medina became a Islamic polity under the leadership of Muhammad

Khir, Islam

Khir 2

Khir 2

• covenant with other inhabitants, incl Jews begins co-existence
• wars against neighboring tribes - military struggle (jihad) becomes an instrument of defense, survival and dominance
• problem of succession creates first system of caliphate
• caliphate: elective office based on consultation and consent - modern thinkers use the principle as a basis for democractic rule
• civil war breaks out - caliphate was transformed into a monarchy founded on force and heredetary succession
• Umayyad dynasty: imperial, despotic type

Khir 3

Khir 3

• Umayyad dynasty until time of the Ottomans in 20th C
• Muslim society began administering affairs independently of government. NGOs: function of social justice no longer performed by rulers, system of endowments secured education, health, transport, mosques, mystic orders, etc
• Sources: Qur'an, Hadith, many schools of thought, but politics did not develop as its own discipline. Two major theological schools: Sunni, Shia.
• Platonic themes dominate Muslim understanding
• modern Islamic history begins with the impact of the West: Ottomans defeated by Russiia 1792, Napoleon in Egypt 1798

Khir, 4

• regions of encounter: India, Turkey, Egypt
• Fall of Ottoman rule in 1918, spread of Western secularism
• new phenomenon of 'powerless' Islam is key to understanding political ideas from liberation movements to fundamentalisms - major dislocations
• different attitudes towards Western culture and dominance etc
• anticolonial unrest, reform movements attempt to address theological challenges
• Iranian revolution against the regime of the Shah 1979
• intensified Islamic political activism

Khir 4

Khir 5

• negotiation between internal and external influences, traditional and modern ideas
• some argues that Islam is based on equality and democracy, at least internally, but this is debated
• state of human rights is often poor in Islamic political systems, relations to non-Muslims are often an issue
• there are many overlaps with Jewish and Christian beliefs and ethics and many bridges present
• Islamic writings on economic justice tend to be idealistic and it is unclear if an Islamic order would be more just
• history shows many unjust rulers and revolts against them , some more active, others passive
• Khir sees numerous similarities between Christians liberationists and Islamic ideas of liberation of the oppressed

Khir 5

Saints and Politics

• how can we analyze, interpret and counter growing authoritarian regimes in particularly in Eastern Europe and the use of religion to push break down democracy?
• many medieval saints' lives are used to give background for proto-national narratives
• St. Olav and St Vladimir of Kyiv are both royal saints, that is, their stories combine religious and political aspects. They are kings and saints, and both were involved in introducing Christianity in their regions
• saints are local religious figures that connect Christian faith to a particular region or culture
• their lives echo similar stories and show the deeds of God also among local people .
• St. Olav and St. Vladimir are both associated with Norway, Sweden as well as Novgorod and Kyiv.
• With St. Olav , we see a fusion of Nordic identity and the Christian faith

Patron Saints

Kyiv and the Rus

• Rus is a word that describes a group of vikings that traveled and settled in the Novgorod and Kyiv region.
• St. Vladimir was a ruler who chose Byzantine Christianity as religion (other possibles were Islam and Judaism) to unite people in the region. He is remembered as king and missionary saint
• Today there are various countries who see him as a key saint and as a founder of nations.
• Olav traveled to Novgorod and stayed there with his royal relatives and Vladimirs son, Jaroslav.
• Viking raiders and traders had settled throughout Europe and over time became part of the local population
• Russia takes its name from the Rus, a clan of vikings
• Vladimir established a strong state based in Kyiv

Saints and Travels

Baptism and Loyalty

Conversions, Baptisms,

• baptism functioned as a way to pull together communities not connected by genetic relations
• royal saints were popular during the time of christianitzation of Europe
• St. Olav can be read by some as a nationalist saint, but the Church of Norway has read him as an ecumenical saint and as a connecting bridge between peoples and cultures
• St. Vladimir has been used to argue that Russia has a claim on Ukraine where Kyiv is located. Putin in particular has been using Russiani fascist ideas to argue that Ukraine belongs to Russia
• Historically, it is actually more the other way around. Kyiv existed long before Moscow.

Ukraine and the Orthodox Church

Ukrainian Independence

• Ukrainian orthodox church has removed itself from under the Russian orthodox patriarchate, a move towards independence
• Russian church has reacted to this and has broken relationships with other orthodox churches and is attempting to move into the space of other orthodox churches
• Putin and Patriarch Cyrill are promoting a Christofascist narrative where Christianity is used to describe an identity that is intolerant, racist and fascist
• using a narrative of national salvation through a murderous savior figure - legitimates shedding of blood
• Similar dynamics within the US: use of Christian fascism to take away rights of minorities and destroy democratic structures
• orthodox churches have maintained the hierarchical structures of the Roman emire

Grau ctd

"a religiocultutral "provincialization" of European Christianities that is neither xenophobic nor relativistic, can be one way in which historic church bodies help support democratic political culture, democratic governance, and actively counter populist Christofacist claims" (p.266)

Sainthood is often linked to national identity in Europe (St. Olav in Noway for example), the powerful image of the saints that is painted in national and collective memory can be misused to legitimize unjust actions against other nations, or other ethnicities, like in the case of the terrorist attack from 2011 in Norway (p.272).

• Grau proposes that "countering the Christofascisms of the past and present, considering the dangerous hagiographisc memories of past and present, a constructive theology of the communion of saints frames hagiography as expansive to an ecumenical, interreligious and interspecies creation community." In other words, a reconstructed hagiography has the potential to unite diverse communities.