Judith Gruber, one of the editors of the Transforming Political Theologies book series, spoke with four scholars who have published books in the series about their projects and the state of the field.
Judith Gruber: Political theology is a growing, vibrant, and interdisciplinary field. In its classic form, it investigates the interconnections between religion and politics. I also have to say that the origins are in a Western white tradition. The field is still confined very much by these origins. The norms and authorities of political theology remain predominantly within European and North American contexts, even as the field speaks to and from questions of global interest and import.
Our book series, Transforming Political Theologies, tries to expand this scholarly conversation by introducing national and regional contexts that go beyond the originary fields. It introduces new religious traditions and asks how questions arising from those traditions open new questions for political theology. Importantly, it also seeks to integrate new methods and new authorities by asking: who is doing political theology, and how do we do this strand of theology?
We asked four of our authors to take stock of where the field stands. We also want to go beyond the field and ask what emerging questions and what changes are transpiring for political theology.
Janna Hunter Bowman: My book is titled Witnessing Peace: Becoming Agents Under Duress in Colombia. Prior to coming into academia, I worked in human rights and peacebuilding in Colombia and throughout Latin America for nearly a decade. The questions I am working with emerge from that context, specifically from a project documenting political violence and peace in Colombia.
One of the publications I was working with was called “A Prophetic Call: Churches Document Their Suffering and Their Hope.” It was the frustration I felt at how those who were changing the conflict dynamics on the ground were remaining invisible to a lot of the institutions supposedly responsible for peacebuilding, and also invisible to academics. That drew me into the academy in order to try to think about why this was the case and to find a way to articulate with these war-affected communities what it was that they were doing, and then to offer a constructive contribution to the field of peacebuilding and, later, political theology and Christian ethics.
I came to think of this as constructive agency under duress. By this, I mean a type of agency that is not recognized where people can still change material conditions on the ground while under duress. The term “under duress” is an analogical extension of a technical term from Catholic moral theology. In that context, people are making choices that they would not make were it not for those constraints. This leads us into thinking with political theologies, here specifically political theologies concerned with political emergencies and suffering associated with injustice.
This is a normative discourse rooted in the conviction that theology cannot be separated from the political transcendence of human finitude. Thinking with the communities I was working and living alongside led me to think in terms of time, and then the principles of eschatology. One is messianic time, or messianic interruptions of linear progression that allow for radical breaks with hegemonic power. The other is gradual time, which is the kind of time that has been theorized classically in liberation theologies: sustained struggle where collective agents pursue liberative transformation through long-term processes and struggle. In Colombia, the term is lucha. These are ways to think of time differently than linear progression, which is the dominant time in peace studies.
One of the ways in which this intervenes in the political theology conversation is the displacement of Hobbesian logic. Reflecting with and on these communities transformatively displaces Hobbes’ fear of violent death as the primary source of political order with a peace that is relational and based on encounter, and that refuses to treat the state as a singular, unified, autonomous entity or idol.
The testimonies and practices of these communities call the source of political order into question. Terror was not turning people inward into increasingly small identity groups, as is often assumed. Fear was not providing the primal source of their political order. Instead, by turning outward to others in need, the community members were together countering the tendency to withdraw. This then expanded the scope of questions and engagement with peace processes, from micro-processes to the local and regional levels. And, of course, this had implications for the 2016 peace agreement. We can trace this on material levels locally, but also discursively at national and international levels.
This constructive agency under duress, and thinking with war-affected communities, helps us to think about some of the theoretical inadequacies both of liberal peace or liberal frames of reference, as well as some of the limitations of post-structuralist moves that have been very important in more recent thinking in political theology.
It helps us think beyond decoloniality as critique, which has been an important point of emphasis. We are thinking with communities who are themselves on the margins of the margins.
It also requires that we think about an earthy or territorial accounting of political theologies.
A final point that might draw us into conversation is the distinction between state ideology and the possibility of state power, and how we might think beyond the state as monolithic, and instead think about the state as a site of contestation and a site of change.
Mark Aloysius: My book is called Arendt and Augustine: A Pedagogy of Desiring and Thinking for Politics. The modest contribution I hope to make is to clarify what it means to be political for Arendt and how she understands this in engagement with Augustine. Throughout Arendt’s career, as I try to show in the book, she actively engages with Augustine to understand what it means to be political. For Arendt, politics is not a rule. She resists reducing politics to the idea of rule as it comes from Plato, for example. She develops a more Aristotelian idea of what politics is.
She often remarked that Augustine understood politics intimately because the language itself came to his help. Arendt often thought that politics coalesces around interests. In one of her most stimulating uses of philology in The Human Condition (1958), she points to the fact that the word “interest” comes from two Latin words, inter esse. For her, politics is really what it means to be inter homines esse, to live among other human beings. Thus, politics is how political actors come together, disclose themselves through speech and deeds, and work to overcome conflict and to pursue the common good. She believed Augustine understood this deeply.
And yet, in her early work, Arendt shows that Augustine denigrates the political, primarily because of his emphasis on the love of God, which, for her, denigrates the value of connection to the world. Arendt famously wanted to title her book Amor Mundi in contrast to Augustine’s Amor Dei. For her, love of the world was especially important because she herself became a refugee and lost her place in the world. At the same time that she blames Augustine for this loss of value in the connection of the human to the world, and the loss of what it means to be an active person in civic life, each time Arendt experienced a dead end in political thought, she thought about the significance of natality.
Each time she mentions natality in her works, she quotes Augustine’s City of God: “In order that there might be a beginning, the human person was created.” For Arendt, the rapid denigration of the world is rehabilitated by this movement into a temporal framework. My book follows, first, Arendt’s criticism of worldlessness, and then later shows how, using a temporal framework, she rehabilitates politics. In a sense, Arendt’s second question to Augustine—“Where am I when I think?”—which she asks in The Life of the Mind, seeks to consider the significance of withdrawal from political life for the prevention of evil. I think what Arendt is getting at here is the significance of the interior life of the mind for political life.
I think that is one of her most important contributions to political life: the cultivation of solitude in relation to the cultivation of solidarity. The first time Arendt gives this lecture, she is addressing educators at a Jesuit university in Chicago. Drawing on the spirituality of my Jesuit order, I suggest that for Arendt in her engagement with Augustine, at least for the mature Arendt, to be political is to learn to cultivate solitude in the vita contemplativa and to work toward the promotion of solidarity in the vita activa.
Jane Barter: My book is Theopolitics and the Era of the Witness. I think the most efficient thing I can do is to parse out this title. I’ll begin with the easier part, which is the “era of the witness.” That is taken directly from a book by Annette Wieviorka, a Jewish historian. Her task in the slim volume The Era of the Witness was to interrogate that moment in which the witness takes center stage rather than being regarded with a fair amount of scrutiny, epistemologically and otherwise.
Wieviorka locates that moment in 1961, in the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. In that trial, she looks at the role of the witness and how that role is at odds with the legal proceedings taking place. They are trying one particular man, but witnesses are called who are Holocaust survivors, and they are asked to account not just for Eichmann’s atrocities, but for atrocities against Jewry in general.
Then there is a narrative constructed, particularly by the Attorney General, in which the witness testimony becomes part of a broader historical arc of ongoing suppression, repression, and violence against Jews throughout history. Eyewitness testimony becomes something rather different from simply testifying in a trial or in the historical record. It becomes, I argue, a narrative and even a kind of theodicy. In my book, I try to interrogate that moment, not by saying that eyewitnessing is necessarily always fraught, but by arguing that the interpolation of witnessing can often be used for ends other than what the survivors intended.
The second part of the title is “theopolitics.” I talk about it as opposed to political theology. I was deliberate in wanting to turn to the idea of theopolitics, particularly as defined by Carlotta McCallister and Valentina Napolitano. They speak about theopolitics in contrast to political theology as grounded in negative or apophatic theology, which speaks of the divine in terms of what cannot be said. It builds on anarchist and Marxist critiques, often with roots in Jewish mysticism, Schmittian political theology, as well as Black, Latin American, and feminist liberation theologies.
I am trying to approach witnessing with a theopolitical lens, drawing on the messianic work of Walter Benjamin, to say that the task of witnessing is not to construct a teleological narrative, a triumphalist theodicy about atrocities, but rather to look at the practices in which theology and politics intersect at times and correct or feed into one another, and how that dynamism can produce something that I think can be disengaged from political power. That can be a negative or apophatic way both of doing theology and of doing politics.
Simeon Ilesanmi: As Judith has said, my book African Political Theology: Issues and Perspectives, is co-edited with my friend and colleague Ross Kane at Virginia Theological Seminary. The impetus for this volume came from both Judith and Vincent [Lloyd] about four years ago. They approached me to ask if I would consider gathering a few scholars working in the field of African political theology to produce a volume on contemporary works in the field.
We had a virtual workshop that Villanova’s Africana Studies Program sponsored, to do a sort of inventory of the field and see who was working in African political theology. What was clear at the end of that workshop was that the concept of African political theology is relatively new within Africa itself. Of course, there are different kinds of theological work being done, but under different rubrics such as liberation theology, indigenization or inculturation theology, or theology broadly construed. So, to further refine the concept of African political theology, there was a follow-up conference at KU Leuven, where we were lavishly treated by the university and by Judith and her colleagues there.
The volume has two aims. First, it shows the landscape of contemporary African political theology in Christianity and gives expression to its most promising forms. Second, it gives priority to African political theology oriented toward justice and peace. The volume also focuses on Christian expressions of African political theology while acknowledging that much African political theology in Islam and African indigenous religions shares a similar orientation. Our hope is that subsequent volumes could gather theologians, practitioners, and scholars of religion to explore African political theology that reflects the full pluralism and diversity of African religious traditions.
This is an excerpt from a longer discussion which you can watch on YouTube. You can learn more about the series here and you can read reflections from other authors in the series here. Thanks to Abel K. Aruan for help with this transcript.
