Political Theology as Critical Theory

This work describes a new path for thinking critically about history and culture. It frames a critical theory using categories and concepts derived from political theology for insights into the human political condition and to raise ongoing questions regarding meaningful action. It is a response to the failure of modern liberal individualism to provide a coherent political theory capable of shaping a good life together. These problems arise already in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Hobbes used biblical myth to characterize the power of the sovereign as “mortal god,” but his biblical criticism and scientific reasoning led to a split between the public and private uses of reason that undermined his social contract theory and still clouds our political thinking. The new political theology of Johann Baptist Metz offers an alternative way to think politically that remains rooted in history while developing an understanding of historical time and action in conversation with biblical prophetic and apocalyptic traditions. Metz’s own engagement with Critical Theory provides the impetus for developing a political theology that in the present work moves beyond God and reliance on metaphysical grounding for political judgment and towards political reason acting in history and political subjectivity.