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Orienting Notes
on Course
Politics, Theology, and Political Theology
Joe R. Jones
1/11/06, rev.
1. It should be obvious that we have much grammatical work to do in sorting
through the various uses of these terms: ‘politics’, ‘theology’,
and ‘political theology.’ There is no dictionary that will
give us definitions that will hold fast throughout our readings and discussions.
We will have to sort out some differences and do some stipulating on our
own as to how we are using these terms. [GCF, 1-19 for an orienting discussion
on ‘grammar’ and ‘discourses and practices.’]
2. The word ‘polis’ comes to us out of a
Greek world in the works of Plato [ca. 428-348 BCE] and Aristotle [384-322
BCE]. Polis simply referred to the city governance that prevailed in the
various cities of the Greek world. Plato’s Republic was
a sustained examination of what would constitute the ideal city governance,
and Aristotle’s Politics was a similar inquiry. All of
these works were done in the name of ‘philosophy’: the quest
for wisdom in the ordering of human life and society, hence, it was throughout
a moral inquiry about what constitutes the good life and the good republic.
3. While the term politics did not come into currency
in describing how societies were organized and rationalized in the ancient
near East until the translation of the OT into Greek in the 3rd and 2nd
centuries BCE, it is clear that there were already various theories about
empires and nations and their structures of organization. In this context,
Israel could be considered a ‘theocracy’, namely a nation
or people who understood their basic organized life-together as life under
covenant with Yahweh, the sovereign God who created all things and who
elected Israel and delivered Israel from Egyptian servitude. The Torah
was the divinely given teachings and laws necessary to ordering Israel’s
life-together in relation to other ‘nations’ and in relation
to God. [In speaking this way, especially in these troublesome times about
‘theocracy” and ‘democracy’, we should remember
that not all putative theocracies must have the same governing structures
and legal contents. There are huge differences here.]
4. When we ask about the subject-matter of politics, we are not sure whether
to say it is about the organization of a ‘city’, a ‘people’,
a ‘nation’, an ‘empire’, or a ‘state’.
All of these are themselves difficult to define as well. The word ‘state’
is widely used today, but actually it is of a more recent use; there were
no defining agreements as to when some group of folk was a state or nation
or a people. It is perhaps the case that the word ‘government’
has come down through the centuries as referring to how some group of
folk is or ought to be organized. Governmental organization is,
therefore, the prime subject matter of political theory. Hence, politics
invariably involves relationships of authority, accountability, ruling,
and being ruled.
5. I will stipulate a distinction between:
a. politics as theory, including:
(1) descriptive theory of the actual forms of civic bodies
or social/political organization and governance;
(2) prescriptive theory of how the ideal civic body or
social/political unit ought to be organized and governed.
and
b. politics as practice: the actual processes, procedures,
rules, and practices that comprise the governance of a social group, including
how goods are distributed and responsibilities are assigned and membership
is determined. To participate in the politics of the social group is to
enter into the discourses and practices that constitute the group as just
this group over a period of time. In this sense, then,
politics as practice always presupposes some tradition of conversation
and interactions. We can also stipulate that any political group
is a civic body or a polis and involves inevitable interaction with and
dependence upon a larger sphere of culture or civil
society in which it exists.
Note well: we are stipulating these concepts and will expend some considerable
effort trying to clarify and adjudicate their usefulness.
6. Political theory, both as descriptive and normative,
thus has the difficult task of inquiring about:
a. what conditions must exist before we identify some social group as
a civic body or as a polis? Are these
just de facto arrangements of power and boundaries?
b. who comprises a governing and governable group? Who are members or
citizens?
c. for the sake of what does the governance exist? What does it aim at
and for whose good does it aim?
d. what is a good order or a just order?
Plato: justice is rendering to each citizen what is his
due: suum cuique. Due according to what criteria? What social
classes exist? Who determines and administers what is each citizen’s
due? We will see that ‘justice’ is a word that will
have a confusing and controversial history.
e. what laws or rules are necessary for the civic body to exist as a good
order?
f. where do authority and power reside in the civic body?
[Notice: it becomes prominent in Christian just war theories that war
can only be justified when it is determined necessary by a ‘legitimate
governing authority’. Question: is it always clear just what the
criteria are for determining when an authority or decision-maker about
war is a ‘legitimate authority’?]
7. Political Theories of the Enlightenment [Thomas Hobbes,
1588-1679; John Locke, 1632- 1704; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-78]
a. with the rise of the nation-states in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries,
a variety of theories are developed concerning how the state itself should
be rationally organized and how authority is to be understood. While Hobbes,
Locke, and Rousseau have considerable differences among them, the following
convictions emerge with great construal power over the ways in which folk
thought about the state, monarchies, democracies, freedom, justice, etc.:
b. when humans are considered in their state of nature, in which self-interest
and irrational desire dominate human conduct, it is war of all against
all. [Note: while Rousseau seemed to think that human beings are by nature
peaceful and free and become corrupted by society, he nevertheless supported
the political necessity of a social contract.]
c. This poses the question of how can this animalic condition of interminable
violence be brought under some rational control.
d. Basically proposed that human beings must understand themselves as
autonomous rational beings who can rationally subdue
the violence by entering into a social contract in which
a balance of self-interests can be achieved peacefully.
e. The social contract assigns rights and responsibilities
to those rational persons who enter into the contract. Previous understandings
of rights and duties had been given de facto by tradition and
traditional authorities. Upon entering and embracing the rational conditions
of the contract, individuals give up some of their arbitrary inclinations
in order to gain other rights and to be assigned certain responsibilities
for maintaining the social order established by the contract. Plainly
put, it is assumed that it is in the rational self-interest of the individual
that she will give up certain arbitrary powers in order to gain security
and safety. It is herein that the notion of equality,
as grounded in the rational and autonomous nature of humans, gets new
momentum in succeeding centuries of political theory and practice.
f. The rationally conceived social contract confers upon the state
the primary and necessary power to use coercion and violence for the common
good and to enforce the contract by maintaining the social order.
The state, what Hobbes calls Leviathan, becomes the primary
agent for securing peace and reducing violence, both internally and externally.
g. With this monopoly on justified coercion and violence,
the state becomes that power that has the primary task of providing a
just order that protects the rights and freedoms of the citizens and remains
responsible to the citizens for its authority and powers.
h. Since these theories appeal to autonomous human reason, they are thought
to entail that the rational individual will refuse any privileges, obligations,
and commitments derived from preceding traditions of whatever sort but
including at least ecclesial authorities or divisive irrational religious
beliefs. In this way religion itself, including the Christian
religion, gets reduced to the private sphere and is not authorized
to enter the rational debates necessary to the state in order for it to
meet its obligations and administer its governing powers. Civil
religion might, however, be helpful in providing support for the state
and in obtaining obedience to the state from the citizenry.
i. These beliefs are the general beliefs of what becomes known as liberal
democratic political theory, wherein ‘democratic’
refers to representative democracy and not the Democratic Party in differentiation
from the Republican Party. In fact, it seems clear that this theory has
been largely embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike in our times.
k. It still remains unclear in actual practice how one characterizes those
‘states’ that do not understand themselves as being grounded
in and formed by the rational autonomy and freedom of its citizens.
8. In ways we will explore, we will use the term polis
to refer to any social group that has a shared identity that is expressed
in discourses and practices, with developed rules and procedures of organization
and a sense of purpose or goals it is aiming to achieve and has shown
the capacity to exist with this specificity over a period of time. To
exist over time means that such a polis is embedded in an ongoing tradition
of conversation about itself and its goals. Hence, there might
be a polis that is profoundly political in process and procedures and
identity but may not be what we will call a civic body involving governing
and the governable and occupying some specifiable geographic boundaries
or an organizations of many such civic bodies that cooperate around common
goals, such as the United Nations. In our modern parlance, these civic
bodies will be those governing bodies that most folk today are concerned
about when they talk about political theory and political practices.
According to my use, then, we could call the Rotary Club a polis having
a set of identifiable goals and membership procedures and rules and existing
self-consciously over a period of time. So, we can say that the Rotary
Club in its discourses and practices is a political body engaged in politics.
For any such polis, we could make a distinction between its internal
politics—how it organizes and perpetuates itself—and
its external politics—how it relates to other political
organizations beyond itself. We should not suppose, however, that these
concerns will exist in utter isolation from one another. Typically, internal
politics will be in search of that appropriate governance that will also
preserve the polis in its relationships beyond itself.
In putting these points, I am intending to encourage us to think
more broadly about politics and thereby not reduce talk of politics
as talk applicable only to a governing state of some sort or to a group
of such states.
There are three purposes in proposing this grammar of polis:
1) it will empower us to see political practices and discourses in larger
settings than just the settings of the given nation-states and their internal
and external relations;
2) it will give us some conceptual leverage in trying to understand the
church as a polis with its own distinctive discourses and practices; and
3) it will conceptually empower us to think differently about how the
church as a distinctive polis might exist in relation to the many governmental
poleis that populate the modern world.
9. Pivotal thesis for exploration in this course: that
the church itself be considered a polis with its own sense of identity
and purpose and vision of human good existing in a shared tradition of
discourses and practices.
In exploring this proposal, we might be able to understand that Christians,
as members of the church of Jesus Christ, might be summoned to a calling
about political life that is not simply dependent on the reigning political
powers and their rationales in the larger civic world of states and their
necessary geographical boundaries.
10. Consider these points of political importance and character
about the church:
a. the church claims to be a definite body of people—the body of
Christ in the world—even though it does not have geographical boundaries
over which it presides.
b. the church is a tradition of discourses and practices existing over
almost twenty centuries.
c. the church claims that its head is Jesus Christ, and thereby is rooted
in, authorized by, and summoned by the life, death, and resurrection of
Jesus of Nazareth.
d. the basic understanding of the purpose of the church is given in Jesus
Christ as the summons to witness to the triune God for the benefit of
the world.
e. so, too, the church is constituted by rules/social ethics given by
Jesus and his proclamation of the coming Kingdom of God: obedience to
God; serving others; forgiveness; refusing to return evil for evil; loving
the neighbor, the stranger, the enemy; self-denial; freedom from sin.
f. hence, the church is a living tradition of discourses and practices
about who God is, who humans are and are called to be and become, and
what is human good and destiny.
g. the members of the church body are expected to live a distinctive way
of life, which will often be an alternative way of life in relation to
the world in which it exists.
h. the church has no army or police and does not claim to use violence
as a means of its life-together and its life in relation to the world.
i. from it own perspective, the church understands that many of the nations
and societies and cultures of the world are ruled by sin, including individual
and group pride, sloth, distorted desires that bring conflict and breed
violence, and riven with falsehoods and lies, resulting in much violence
and perpetual rivalry and warfare.
j. the church is possessed by the vision of human good that is embodied
in the vision of the Kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus.
k. hence, the church is itself a polis with a distinctive politics concerning
how humans are summoned to live before the triune God who is Creator,
Reconciler, and Redeemer of the world.
l. accordingly I would propose this theological definition of the church:
The church is that liberative and redemptive
community of persons
called into being
by the Gospel of Jesus Christ
through the Holy Spirit
to witness in word and deed
to the living triune God
for the benefit of the world
to the glory of God.
As this kind of community, the church is itself a polis.
11. If we pursue the church as a polis in this sense, then we intentionally
precipitate a discussion of the relation between the church as polis and
the world in which it exists, including the poleis of the larger
culture and the governing powers of the state.
I will propose that there is an ongoing dialectic between the
church as polis and the world as polis. [see GCF, 47-52, 648-53]
12. How, then, does or should the church live in relation to the nation-state
in which it might be located?
a. What differences seem to prevail within the church concerning this
relation?
1) the church is no more than the individual personal piety and private
beliefs of its members and therefore has no general mandates relative
to the nation-state.
2) the church is the chaplain to the larger society and nation, serving
as civil religion for the state.
3) the church is subservient to the nation-state and its political processes
and purposes.
4) the church seeks to transform the nation-state in its political life
and its need to provide social justice for its citizens.
5) the church is itself an alternative way of life and an alternative
politics or social ethics and is involved in multi-faceted ways with the
nation-state in which it exists.
b. Some lingering but urgent questions:
1) does the church have an investment in a particular form of governance
of the nation-state? Democracy? If so, on what basis?
2) what is the church’s attitude toward the inevitable use of coercion
and violence in the nation-state’s governance?
3) how does the church exist as an international body
of Christians devoted to the rule of God as revealed in Jesus Christ?
4) how does the church enter into and engage the public conversation of
the nation-state?
5) whose interests are essential to how
the church participates in American politics?
13. What then might we mean by political theology?
a. Obviously we will be in search of what this phrase might mean.
b. It is certainly clear that the church and its theologians have examined
and made proposals as to how the church should relate to the larger politics
of the civic bodies of the worlds in which it exists.
c. In the 20th century the phrase, ‘political theology’ comes
into explicit use on two different but interrelated fronts:
In post-World War II, the theologians on the European scene proposed that
the church had no other mission than to be involved in the politics of
the world in pursuit of social justice, especially for the least of these
in the world. Johann Metz and Jürgen Moltmann were especially outspoken.
In Latin America, the rise of Liberation Theology similarly emphasized
that the church has a primary obligation to seek the liberation of the
oppressed in the world, and thereby to resist and critique the conduct
of the governing authorities in the nation-states. Gustavo Guiterriéz
is a foremost example of liberation theology as political theology.
Hence, in some sense, all of the church’s discourses and practices
were to be reoriented to the practical tasks of organizing the oppressed
and exerting political power on the nation-states and their economic structures.
In both of these uses, political theology mandated a thoroughgoing discernment
and unmasking of the socio/economic powers and structures of the world.
This involves the use of socio/empirical methods of research into the
ways in which goods are developed and distributed in the world.
d. I am suggesting that we understand political theology as that
concern of the church as a distinct polis and politics in relation to
the world and its governing political bodies, bearing in mind that the
church, according to my proposal above, has as its defining mission witnessing
to the reality of the triune God for the benefit of the world.
Joe R. Jones
1/11/06, rev
Copyright© Joe R. Jones
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