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The earliest antecedents to speaking of political theology might be found in the distinction, current among the Stoic philosophers and followed by Varro, then disparaged by St. Augustine in his City of God, between mythical, physical, and civil theology.

In its most influential meaning, however, political theology refers to Carl Schmitt thesis in his seminal Political Theology (1922): “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” According to Schmitt, it could hardly be otherwise considering that “the metaphysical image that a particular age forms of the world has the same structure as that which appears most self-evident to it as a form of political organization.” Schmitt’s analysis is especially concerned with the theological origins of the concept of sovereignty and of the exception that, in Schmitt’s view, defines it: “He is sovereign who decides on the exception.” Thus, for Schmitt, “the exception, in jurisprudence, has a meaning analogous to that of the miracle in theology.” Revisiting the question half a century later in his Political Theology II (1970), Schmitt reaffirms his thesis and vehemently rejects as a “myth” the notion that political theology may be considered obsolete.

Leo Strauss, one of the most renowned proponents of the study of political philosophy in the United States after World War II (1939–1945), considered facing the challenges of theology a primary responsibility for the philosopher. Thus Strauss concludes The City and Man (1964) with an exhortation to “be open to the full impact of the all-important question . . . quid sit dues?” (What would God be?) By his own profession, Strauss had found himself “in the grip of the theological-political predicament” from his earliest days as a scholar when he was grappling, from 1925 to 1928, with his study on Baruch Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise. “The theological-political problem,” he declared in his preface to the German edition of his Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1965), “has since remained the theme of my studies.” For Strauss, philosophy as the highest way of life can justify and give meaning to its ultimate demands only by meeting head-on the strongest, most radical challenge that can be put to it, which Strauss took to be the challenge posed by the life of strict obedience to divine revelation.

The theological-political problem arises from the fact that such a confrontation is as dangerous as it is indispensable to the philosophical way of life, as the death of Socrates had demonstrated for the ages. While it cannot be avoided if philosophy is to remain true to itself, it is not clear that the political-theological problem can be brought to a satisfactory resolution, and modern theologico-political treatises since Hobbes and Spinoza appear guilty, to Strauss, of declaring victory prematurely, to the ultimate detriment of philosophy as a serious way of life. Carl Schmitt’s affirmation of the political in general, and of political theology in particular, was for Strauss an affirmation of the seriousness of human life, and it is surely in this where he found the greatest affinity with his own thinking.

Among Strauss’s adherents, Heinrich Meier has perhaps shown most interest in the question of political theology. Thus Meier, who in an earlier work stressed the connection between Schmitt and Strauss, offers the most sustained study to date in his Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (2006). The revised and expanded 2009 edition of the work is also the best source for some of Strauss’s shorter, less well-known and accessible, but also most topical, writings on the theological political problem, and it includes an essay by Gerhard Krüger, whom Strauss credited with being the only reviewer to have properly grasped the meaning and importance of his book on Spinoza. Meier’s own conception of what constitutes political theology develops in Chapter 3, and was first published in Interpretation. Meier sees political theology as the core, the unifying center, of Carl Schmitt’s oeuvre, and stresses the polemical purposes that motivated him in deploying as a weapon a term he had taken from Mikhail Bakunin. According to Meier, “The obedience of faith is the raison d’être of political theology in the best sense,” and thus Saints Paul and Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin may all be included “among the most important representatives of political theology in the history of Christianity.” For Meier, a connection may even be made between political theology and postmodern thought, for example in Jean-Francois Leotard use of the divine commandment bidding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, and Abraham’s faithful obedience.

The reverse of Schmitt’s thesis, thus not that all political concepts are at bottom theological, but that all theology must be political, is also sometimes meant by political theology, for example in the work of Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz, an important influence on the development of liberation theology. Jürgen Holtmann is prominent among those Protestant theologians of the immediate post–Vatican II period who wrote on political Theology, offering his own understanding of liberation theology. Two of the earliest examples of twentieth-century theologians giving prominence to the term political theology in their writings are a book by Protestant Alfred de Quervain published in 1931 and an essay by Catholic Karl Eschweiler published in 1931 to 1932. Among the earliest original treatments of political theology in English are studies by Julian Obermann on Political Theology in Early Islam (1935), Ernst Kantorowicz on mediaeval political theology (The King’s Two Bodies, 1957), and J. Deotis Roberts on Black Political Theology (1974).

The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, published in 2003, straddles different usages when it purports, with its wide-ranging collection of newly commissioned essays, to demonstrate both the “inherently political” nature of Christian theology and its impact on contemporary ideologies and “present-day political issues.” Speaking more loosely still, political theology may be applied today to nearly any study of the interplay between political and religious questions. Thus the journal Political Theology, which published its first issue in 2002, defines its mission simply as one of investigating and examining religious and political issues from an interdisciplinary perspective. In popular usage and on the Internet, political theology can refer to anything remotely connecting politics and religion.

Bibliography:

Downey, John K. Love’s Strategy:The Political Theology of Johann Baptist Metz. Harrisburg, Pa.:Trinity Press, 1999.
Eschweiler, Karl. “Politische Theologie.” Religiöse Besinnung 2 (1931–1932): 72–88.
Holtmann, Jürgen. “Political Theology.” Theology Today 28, no. 1 (1971): 6–23.
Meier, Heinrich. Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss:The Hidden Dialogue. Translated by J. Harvey Lomax. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem. Rev. ed.Translated by Marcus Brainard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
“What Is Political Theology?” Interpretation 30, no. 1 (2002): 79–91.
Quervain, Alfred de. Die theologischen Voraussetzungen der Politik. Grundlinien einer politischen Theologie. Berlin: Furche-Verlag, 1931.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Politische Theologie II: Die Legende von der Erledigung jeder Politischen Theologie. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1970.
Scott, Peter, and William T. Cavanaugh. The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003.
Strauss, Leo. “Preface to the English Translation.” In Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, translated by E. M. Sinclair. New York: Schocken, 1965.

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