Political Theology: Essence and Limits of a Problem

The study of political theology is flourishing in both a variety of cultural and religious traditions and different fields of humanities and social sciences. Yet, the central question of ‘what is political theology’ looms over the field. This article first overviews the situation and historical background of its central questions and then reconstructs a framework for the problem of political theology within the context of its central thinkers from the last century. In that mindset, it argues that a relative distinction can be made in terms of the political eschatology (as well as the transformed higher-order orientations of the political act of the collective or the individual), and the theological legitimacy (as well as the metaphysical perspectives in which the belief in political order finds justifications). It contends that a series of genealogies of the secular bears a strong relation to an approach first defined within frames of political theology. This concerns the theological birth-marks that continued significant into the conceptual structures of state theory since early modernity. This approach can still maintain the closure of any pure theological claim upon the modern the political, and yet make distinctions of itself from both mere archaism and theological politics.