Political Theology

Ridding modernity of Christian political theology — and thus of the sort of false universalisms theology makes possible — requires a recognition that although this theology lies in ruins it is precisely our love of these ruins that makes us err by seeking a glorious sense of responsibility from within and for our contingent history. Modernity is thus mystified as consisting of a rupture with the medieval/traditional — even a rupture that gives rise to a parthenogenesis of a new human being and history. In this book we set aside the imaginary overcoming of tradition by modernity and, rather, suggest that tradition-in-ruins is where we find the contingent encounters of what has come to pass and what not, of the actual and the potential. Further, we argue that any attempt to ‘overcome’ our present situation through sovereign decision and action is to succumb to the temptation to take up the traditional western game of a ‘see-saw’, an never-ending oscillation between glorious but impotent sovereignty and mundane but actual implementation. Much of our book was written before the Greek anti-austerity referendum (July 2015), most of it before the Brexit referendum (June 2016), all of it before the Trump-election and the referendum on the Catalonian independence (January and October 2017). "Populism", the catchword associated often with one, some, or all of these events, was thus mostly absent from the reality that we had the occasion to observe at work in establishing the claims of our book. However, by December 2017, the situation has undergone a dramatic change that will let appear our general point, and even some of the associated, mostly historical points, in a changed and far sharper light.

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