Introduction

Summary

We have now completed the attempt to answer the first question to be posed in this book: is political theology possible? As we have seen, the answers to this question are controversial and will vary according to the theological stance taken. There can be no wholly definitive or authoritative political theology and, indeed, no authoritative political praxis associated with it, since the methodological controversies are so profound.

However, this is only one side of the dialectic between political theology and religious belief in a liberal society, since it is also vitally important to address the question of what is the site of political theology, that is to say, what kinds of issues and questions in a liberal democratic society could or should political theology seek to address? This is a complex issue, since however controversial or fragmentary political theology will have to be, lacking as it does an authoritative paradigm, we also need to have some understanding of what sort of political issues and questions we could reasonably expect religious belief to be able to address and at what level of generality or, indeed, specificity.

One obvious answer to this question is to say that political theology should address itself to those issues in liberal democratic societies that are a matter of collective moral concern and might be thought to embody a sense of collective moral responsibility. However, in the context of a liberal society with a market economy and democratic political organisation, this is not really possible in a straightforward way.