Messianic Political Theology and Diaspora Ethics

Essays in Exile

P. Travis Kroeker

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781620329870
  9781498286961
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532642746
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Political theology as a normative discourse has been controversial not only for secular political philosophers who are especially suspicious of messianic claims but also for Jewish and Christian thinkers who differ widely on its meaning. These essays mount an argument for a "Messianic Political Theology" rooted in an interpretation of biblical (especially Pauline), Augustinian, and Radical Reformation readings of messianism as a thoroughly political and theological vision that gives rise to what the author calls "Diaspora Ethics." In conversation also with Platonic, Jewish, and Continental thinkers, Kroeker argues for an exilic practice of political ethics in which the secular is built up theologically "from below" in the form of public service that flows from messianic political worship. Such a "weak messianic power" practiced by the messianic body inhabits an apocalyptic political economy in which the mystery of love and the mystery of evil are agonistically unveiled together in the power of the cross--not as an instrument of domination but in the form of the servant. This is not simply a matter of "pacifism" but of a messianic posture rooted in the renunciation of possessive desire that pertains to all aspects of everyday human life in the household (oikos), the academy, and the polis.

Part 1

Apocalyptic Messianism and Political Theology

1

Living “As If Not”

Messianic Becoming or the Practice of Nihilism?

Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? . . . But God has chosen what is foolish in the world to confound the wise; God has chosen what is weak in the world to confound the things which are mighty. And base things and things which are despised in the world hath God chosen, yea, and things that are not, to bring to nought things that are. (1 Cor 1:20, 27–28)

What might this confounding messianic wisdom have to say to contemporary political philosophy? In The Antichrist Nietzsche cites this passage at length to show how completely out of touch with reality the dysangelist Paul really was. He calls Paul the greatest of all apostles of revenge, an insolent windbag who tries to confound worldly wisdom—but to no effect, says Nietzsche.35 Nietzsche notwithstanding, certain recent Continental philosophers have been reading Paul the Apostle’s confounding letters to great effect, allowing his messianic message to disrupt certain modern conventions, political ontologies, and habits of mind; to challenge the technological globalizing wisdom and rulers of this age and suggest a hidden messianic counter-sovereignty not conceived in any human heart. Modern political theory has often regarded messianic political theology in particular as a dangerous threat to secular liberal democracy—and not without reason. Yet it is also the case that the first theory of the saeculum in the West, Augustine’s City of God, was developed precisely within a Pauline apocalyptic messianic understanding of history and the political. It is also the case that notions of neutral technology and juridical state sovereignty that underlie current conceptions and embodiments of the secular are themselves dangerously totalitarian, exclusivist, and violent, though this is often hidden beneath the veneer of progressivist liberal assumptions.

This is the position articulated in the apocalyptic messianism of Walter Benjamin, whose position is closely related to that of Paul’s in the New Testament on the question of sovereignty, which is the central focus of this essay. The political theological concept at the heart of modern secular politics and political theory was given its classical formulation by Carl Schmitt. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” says Schmitt, which requires that sovereignty be seen not in strictly juridical terms but as a limit concept in which there is an agential power behind the law who decides on the “state of emergency” that suspends the normal rule of law.36 This founding notion of sovereignty must be read together with Schmitt’s founding definition of the political, namely, the distinction between friend and enemy.37 For Schmitt the ultimate challenge to this basic political principle is found in the words of Jesus: “Love your enemies” (Matt 5:44)—which Schmitt, in keeping with conventional Christendom ethics, regards as a private ethic, a spiritual and individual, not a public political, ethic. Surely former President George W. Bush would agree. So also would ultraliberal Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau have agreed when he invoked the War Measures Act in Canada during the FLQ (Front de Libération du Québec) kidnapping crisis of 1970, thus deciding the exception that suspended “normal law” in the face of an “emergency situation.”

Walter Benjamin had precisely this definition of sovereignty in mind when he wrote his eighth thesis on the philosophy of history:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live . . . is the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge.38

Benjamin clearly sets himself against this secular progressivist politics to which all seeming political options are conformed, and he does so in the name of a “weak Messianic power” in which each day is lived as the day of judgment on which the Messiah comes, “not only as the redeemer” but also “as the overcomer of Antichrist.”39 Such a “Messianic time” may not be thought of within the categories of historicism but only from the perspective of a Jetztzeit (Thesis 18), a “real state of emergency” that calls into fundamental question the normal state of emergency—the politics of modern secular state sovereignty—in which we live. It will bring into view the violent and destructive foundation of this sovereignty with its homogeneous and totalitarian order by remembering another sovereignty, a messianic counter-sovereignty that reorders the secular on completely different terms, terms compatible, argue certain recent Continental philosophers, with Paul’s gospel.40

The apostle Paul stands in the messianic tradition of biblical political theology, where the central overriding claim is “Yahweh is sovereign,” a claim that subverts any merely human claim to sovereignty and political authority. This includes, as Jacob Taubes points out, any claims for the sovereignty of law—whether that law be the Torah mediated by Moses or the nomos mediated by Greco-Roman philosophy, or (we might add) the Christendom tradition of secular juridical state sovereignty and its many modern liberal copies. “We preach Messiah crucified,” says Paul, “to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness” (1 Cor 1:23), and to triumphalist globalizing Christians, one might add, a foolish scandal. Paul’s messianism will not accommodate conventional discourses of human mastery—which is to say, all conventional political discourses. As Alain Badiou puts it, for Paul the “becoming subject” founded by the messianic event “is a-cosmic and illegal, refusing integration into any totality and signalling nothing.”41 For Badiou, Paul’s relevance for the contemporary political situation is precisely to counter the relativism of postmodern identity politics, the multicultural consensus of neoliberal progressivism that has become conscripted to the globalized logic of capital. Here the only common currency is the abstract imperialist count of commercial and economic homogeneity—an empty universality that cashes out all communitarianisms. The beneficence of contemporary French cosmopolitanism that gets worked up at the sight of a young veiled woman nicely displays this problem.42

Into this political context Badiou proposes the radical disruption of Paul’s messianic proclamation concerning the conditions for a “universal singularity” that defies the globalizing logic of the count, and its prevailing juridical and economic abstractions. It does so by an appeal to what Badiou calls an “evental truth” that reconfigures the universal messianically with reference to the resurrection, as a human “becoming subject” in relation to a truth that is universal but not abstract.43 For Badiou, Paul is a “poet-thinker of the event” that neither constitutes nor claims authority from an identity or a law. It cannot therefore be a logic of mastery. Rather it is a discourse of rupture, a discourse of the sending of the Son that is detached from every particularism and every form of mastery. Paul’s apostolic calling is characterized by “militant peregrinations,”44 a “nomad leadership”45 that is equally out of place everywhere, a “nomadism of gratuitousness”46 that exceeds every law and therefore disrupts every established identity and difference. Evental grace has a particular site, of course, but the “becoming subject” that it founds is one that must “displace the experience historically, geographically, ontologically”: it can do that not by escaping the embodied particularity of customs and differences, but rat...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Permissions
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Apocalyptic Messianism and Political Theology
• Part 2: Political Theology and the Radical Reformation
• Part 3: Messianism and Diaspora Ethics
• Bibliography