This excellent reader in Political Theology is a welcome companion to Elizabeth Philips's 2012 Political Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed. It can also be used independently. The editors hope that the Reader can function more as a manual than as a historical textbook. They hope to encourage students and others who are interested in Political Theology to learn ‘how to examine our assumptions about what political arrangements are for and the roots and power of our organizing political ideas and structures’ (p. 3). The editors see their work as a contribution amid the many complexities and political issues of the last decade, mentioning, among others, Brexit, the return of populism and nationalism, the Black Lives Matters movement, and the protests against climate change (p. 1).
The Reader has eight sections. Each section contains an introduction by one of the editors and a selection from primary texts concerning the topic. The issues covered are: the emergence of Political Theology; the different approaches to Political Theology; the Church and the Political; the Politics of Jesus; Violence and Peace; Liberalism and Democracy; Oppression, Marginalization and Liberation; Creation, History and Eschatology. The contributions range from the Scriptures to Slavoj Žizek; and from the Catholic social activism of Dorothy Day to the feminist postcolonial theology of Musa Dube.
The broad range of sources is the great strength of this Reader. No other resource manages to bring together so many voices from different Christian traditions of political theology. The following remarks should therefore be read as three footnotes to an outstanding work in the field.
First, in the first section, three New Testament texts on Kingship are introduced that are read on the Feast of Christ the King (Lk. 23: 33–43; Mt. 25:31; and Jn. 18: 33–37). The editor relates these texts to the institution of the feast of Christ the King in Pope Pius XI's 1925 encyclical Quas Primas, commenting ‘that it gives a striking insight in the Church's expectation for political authority as divinely ordained’. This statement is true for Jn. 18:33-37, which was the set text in 1925; but not so much for the other two texts which were added after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and seem to illustrate more the ideas on political power as service voiced in conciliar documents, than those of Pope Pius XI.
Secondly, the Reader presents modern Political Theology in three stages: a kind of prehistory as exemplified by Carl Schmitt; then a ‘first’ generation of post-war theologians (Moltmann, Metz, Sölle, Liberation Theologies); and the current generation of post liberalism, radical orthodoxy and contextual theologies (p. 109).
However, it misses two critical developments between Schmitt (1920s) and New Political Theology (mid-1960s). Firstly, there was a lively debate – largely ignored by Moltmann's discussion of that time (pp. 127–128) - on political theology in the German Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Schmitt played a role, but certainly he was not the only one. Other names include Hannah Arendt, Karl Barth, and Erik Peterson. Secondly, at the same time in France, among theologians of the Nouvelle Theologie like Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, and Henri De Lubac, political theologies were being developed that would influence the debates in post-war France (worker-priest movement) and during the Second Vatican Council. In the latter case, what might have obscured these political theologies from the editors' view is that the theologians involved in them did not use the term ‘political theology’ but often referred to ‘messianism’. This political messianism can also be found in the first attempt by the German philosopher, Romano Guardini, to offer a post-war political theology for Germany: Der Heilbringer in Mythos, Offenbarung und Politik (1945), which had as a subtitle ‘a theological-political reflection’.
I mention these interbellum and early post Second World War-traditions not to be fussy but because I think these theologies are honest attempts to wrestle with the questions of nationalism, populism, and exclusion that the editors say that they want to engage with.
Thirdly, like every theology, Political Theology has to set boundaries about who is included and who not. This publication has chosen to focus on Christian political theologies. But what about those authors writing in the margins of Christian theology, such as Hannah Arendt, who as a Jewish philosopher had studied Christian theology and had written her PhD on St. Augustine? Or the great mystic Simone Weil? And where are the political-theological voices of the post-war European project for peace and cooperation, such as Jean Monnet, Alcide de Gasperi, and Robert Schuman? Or is it too soon after Brexit for this kind of political-theological reconciliation?
Nevertheless, the Reader is an excellent resource, and it offers annotated suggestions for further reading to encourage students to follow up on the Reader’s issues. The editors should be congratulated on finishing this difficult task amid our fast-changing political circumstances.
