The Architectonics of Hope

Violence, Apocalyptic, and the Transformation of Political Theology

Gingerich Hiebert

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781498209427
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development

The Architectonics of Hope provides a critical excavation and reconstruction of the Schmittian seductions that continue to bedevil contemporary political theology. Despite a veritable explosion of interest in the work of Carl Schmitt, which increasingly recognizes his contemporary relevance and prescience, there nevertheless remains a curious and troubling reticence within the discipline of theology to substantively engage the German jurist and sometime Nazi apologist. By offering a genealogical reconstruction of the manner and extent to which recognizably Schmittian gestures are unwittingly repeated in subsequent debates that often only implicitly assume they have escaped the violent aporetics that characterize Schmitt's thought, this volume illuminates hidden resonances between ostensibly opposed political theologies. Using the complex relationship between violence and apocalyptic as a guide, the genealogy traces the transformation of political theology through the work of a surprising collection of figures, including Johann Baptist Metz, John Milbank, David Bentley Hart, and John Howard Yoder.

chapter 1

Political Theology and the Task of Seeing

Introduction

As the lonely pioneer of political theology, G. W. F. Hegel was vociferously denouncing the tendency to regard the modern state as an independent entity and to relegate religion to the domain of private belief as early as 1817:

It has been the monstrous blunder of our times to try to look upon these inseparables as separable from one another, and even as mutually indifferent. The view taken of the relationship of religion and the state has been that, whereas the state had an independent existence of its own, springing from some source or power, religion was a later addition, something desirable perhaps for strengthening the political bulwarks, but purely subjective in individuals:—or it may be, religion is treated as something without effect on the moral life of the state, i.e. its reasonable law and constitution which are based on a ground of their own.1

In the immense wake of Hegel, there is perhaps no one else who so ardently strove to rectify this “monstrous blunder” than the German jurist and sometime Nazi apologist Carl Schmitt, who famously argued that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”2 Indeed, Schmitt claims that his own vision of political theology “departs from the ius reformandi [right of reformation] of the sixteenth century, culminates in Hegel and is evident everywhere today” and cites this exact passage in Hegel to emphasize that the reciprocal relationship between religion and the modern state must be understood as a politico-theological problem.3 Whereas there has been a deep and extensive engagement with Hegel within the theological disciplines, a similar kind of engagement with Schmitt has hitherto not been undertaken.4 This fact is more remarkable given the extent to which there has been a veritable explosion of interest in the work of Schmitt in recent years, which is due in no small part to the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has used Schmitt’s work to develop a powerful critique of our contemporary biopolitical situation.5 However, despite his appropriation in philosophy and political theory, there is almost no theological work that rigorously engages in any significant way Schmitt’s development of political theology.6 To be fair, Schmitt does not self-identify as a theologian—in fact, there are places where he explicitly identifies himself as a “non-theologian”7—and his work is difficult and provokes notoriously different and even opposing interpretations, owing at least in some measure to his role as jurist for the Third Reich. Many interpreters understand Schmitt’s involvement with the Nazi Party, of which he was officially a member from May 1933 to December 1936, to be the decisive locus around which his political theology is to be interpreted.8 The rhetorical force of such accounts reach their crescendo in Schmitt’s opening address from a 1934 conference on “Judaism and Jurisprudence”: “But the most profound and ultimate meaning of this battle, and thus also of our work today, lies expressed in the Führer’s sentence: ‘In fending off the Jew, I fight for the work of the Lord.’”9 Coupled with Schmitt’s infamous essay entitled “The Führer Protects the Law,”10 which provided juridical support to the bloody purge of June 30, 1934, the so-called “night of the long knives,” it is not unreasonable to argue that Schmitt’s anti-Semitism was not an indirect result of his political theology but an intrinsic element.11 Therefore, if Schmitt’s work is mentioned in theological discourse at all it is invariably used as a negative foil against which a robustly Christian political theology must be boldly asserted. Anyone acquainted with the beginnings of political theology in Germany will undoubtedly be familiar with a plethora of rather vague assertions, such as that of Johann Baptist Metz, who claims that “the notion of political theology is ambiguous, hence exposed to misunderstanding, because it has been burdened with specific historical connotations.”12 Jürgen Moltmann makes similar claims, Dorothee Sölle eventually abandons the term “political theology” altogether, and Metz insists on using the qualifer new to describe his political theology—and all of them mention Schmitt’s name only fleetingly. The underlying and largely unarticulated assumption within the discipline of theology seems to be, very simply, that Schmitt’s political theology is little more than thinly veiled ideological legitimation of Nazi policy and, therefore, is not worthy of any sustained theological engagement beyond outright denunciation. Nevertheless, what I want to suggest in the pages that follow is that Schmitt’s work deserves more sustained and charitable theological engagement than it has hitherto received and that the discipline of theology has prematurely bid adieu to Schmitt to its own detriment. Indeed, in what follows I will engage in a critical excavation and reconstruction of the Schmittian seductions that continue to bedevil contemporary political theology. By offering a genealogical reconstruction of the manner and extent to which recognizably Schmittian gestures are unwittingly repeated in subsequent debates that often only implicitly assume they have escaped the violent aporetics that characterize Schmitt’s thought, the following chapters aim to illuminate hidden resonances between ostensibly opposed political theologies. Before turning to this task, however, it is necessary to say something about the method and shape of the argument, as well as its primary themes.

A Theopolitical Optics

On the twenty-ninth day of October, 1858, John Ruskin gave the inaugural address at the Cambridge School of Art in which he suggested that the most important thing to teach in the whole range of teaching was one thing, namely, Sight.

To be taught to read—what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to speak—but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think—nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true . . . [w]e want, in this world of ours, very often to be able to see in the dark—that’s the greatest gift of all;—but at any rate to see no matter by what light, so only we can see things as they are.13

While the reflections of a Victorian art critic may seem a strange way to elucidate the shape of a book on political theology, Ruskin’s suggestion that to see rightly requires a certain kind of training opens out onto a host of suggestive possibilities for reading the signs of our times. Despite the fact that there are those who wish to argue that violence has actually declined in the modern era—though, it must be said, only on the basis of some rather creative accounting—it seems clear that the world in which we live is nevertheless racked with violence.14 Indeed, it can often appear as though violence has saturated our everyday lives such that there is no escape from its panoptic-like gaze. For our purposes, the black smoke billowing from the chimneys at Auschwitz is perhaps the most potent symbol of the horrors of violence. While this overt physical violence continues in various forms, it is also important to recognize and expose the brutality of the marketplace, the commodification of knowledge and the pathos of modern politics and economics as also a kind of distributed violence that, while often disguised, is no less terrifying. All this is nothing new. The shattering of Enlightenment dreams of perpetual peace has been described by Nietzsche as nothing less than the advent of nihilism: “For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end.”15 Nietzsche is particularly instructive here for our purposes because he sees violence itself as a discourse of the end, culminating in apocalyptic visions of catastrophe. Alongside violence, this apocalyptic tone has infiltrated our imaginations such that any crisis whatsoever can be given new urgency by describing it as “apocalyptic.” In the midst of this situation, then, what might it mean to say, with John Howard Yoder and the author of the letter to the Hebrews, “As it is, we do not see everything in subjection to him. But we do see Jesus, revealing the grace of God by tasting death for everyone”?16 Or, put differently, what might an account of the hope that is within us (1 Pet 3:15) look like in a world racked by violence? The following chapters are one attempt to answer these questions through a reading, which is, to be sure, also a kind of seeing, of the complex relationship between violence and apocalyptic as they are appropriated in political theology.

To set up the debate as a question of seeing immediately raises certain problems that must be confronted. Indeed, if much of recent French philosophy is to be believed, what was once celebrated as the most excellent of the senses must now be viewed as something of a disaster.17 Perhaps the best-known example is Michel Foucault’s influential reading of Jeremy Bentham’s treatise on a model prison.18 For our purposes we need not entertain the details of Foucault’s argument but may simply note that his analysis implicates vision itself in the maintenance of disciplinary and repressive power. That Foucault’s insights here cannot be dismissed is, however, no reason to despair that sight must ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Political Theology and the Task of Seeing
• Chapter 2: The Founding and Re-founding of Political Theology
• Chapter 3: Political Theology and the Persuasions of Beauty
• Chapter 4: Political Theology and the Power of Nonviolence
• Chapter 5: Retrospect and Prospect
• Bibliography