Theology Today - Vol 28, No. 1 - April 1971 - ARTICLE

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"Political theology is therefore not simply political ethics but reaches further by asking about the political consciousness of theology itself. It does not want to make political questions the central theme of theology or to give political systems and movements religious support. Rather, political theology designates the field, the milieu, the environment, and the medium in which Christian theology should be articulated today."

RECENTLY the call for a "political theology" has furnished a new bogey for all those who are seeking only peace and quiet in the church and only inner tranquility in faith. We should ask just what political theology today really is and whether Christian theology can become a political theology.

If a preacher uses his pulpit to make political speeches instead of proclaiming the Word of God to faith or if, on the other hand, a politician uses his campaign speeches for making pious, highflown remarks instead of delivering a clear political program to the people, we all have an uneasy feeling. Politicizing theologies and pietizing politicians are neither fish nor fowl. Dealing with such mixtures certainly cannot be our object.

But what about the Christians in the world? They are left standing between the theologians and the politicians, and they hear both sides. They live in the church as well as in politics. Somehow they must bring together their personal faith and their public political interest. This, however, is becoming an increasingly difficult assignment for Christians today. Thus some abandon all interest in politics and retreat with their faith into the private dimension of their innermost piety and childhood training. To them politics seems like a "dirty business." Others abandon all interest in faith and the church because they find there no help for mastering political problems. To them religion seems like an illusion which they cannot abide.

Jürgen Moltmann is Professor of Theology at the University of Tübingen, Germany. He is the author of several books in German, as well as the well-known Theology of Hope (1967) and the recent Religion, Revolution and the Future (1969). He has lectured frequently in the United States and Canada in the last few years and has shown an increasing concern for the task of theology in an American context.

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The Sitz im Leben of the "political theology" which is being asked about today is the life of Christians in the world. It is the theological reflection of Christians who for the sake of their consciences suffer in the midst of the public misery of society and struggle against this misery.

During the Third Reich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointedly reminded the church that "only those who cry out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants," and he gladly sang Gregorian chants. The memory of what happened at that time has made us increasingly aware that we also have no right to speak of God and with God if we do not do it in the midst of the conflicts of our political world.

But what then are we to mean by the Christians' "political theology"?

The historical-critical sciences of the Enlightenment created in modern man a consciousness of the relativity of the Christian tradition which for many centuries had been considered unquestionable and absolute. These traditions are no longer the self-evident receptacles in which we live. Critical faith has achieved a reflective and free relationship with its basic traditions. But today the church, theology, and faith must engage in a social, political, and psychological criticism of the Enlightenment in order to achieve a new state of consciousness. The destiny of man has become more and more a political destiny, but politics has not yet become truly human. Consequently modern criticism asks about the practical, political, and psychic institutions and effects of the churches, of theologies, and of ways of believing.

Responsible theology must therefore engage in institutional criticism as it reflects on the "place" of the churches "in the life" of modern society and in ideological criticism as it reflects on itself. It can no longer self-forgetfully screen out its own social and political reality as the old metaphysical and personalistic theologies did. So

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in public, responsible theology itself stands consciously between the Christian, eschatological message of freedom and the sociopolitical reality. Thus through an interrogation of institutions, words, and symbols, it must ascertain whether a religious opium is being mediated to the people or a real ferment of freedom; whether faith or superstition is being spread; whether the crucified one is made present or the idols of the nation are served.

Political theology is therefore not simply political ethics but reaches further by asking about the political consciousness of theology itself. It does not want to make political questions the central theme of theology or to give political systems and movements religious support. Rather, political theology designates the field, the milieu, the environment, and the medium in which Christian theology should be articulated today.

Political theology is therefore a hermeneutical category. There is a point of departure for this hermeneutical category in former theological research, namely, in the form-historical criticism of the biblical texts. Every literary genre represents simultaneously a sociological fact. This exegetical perception prevents the simple distinction between intellectual and political history. Should not the form-historical method be capable of being directed toward present life and the contemporary expressions of life? A pure hermeneutic of understanding intellectual history of course makes us conscious of the historicity of the individual, but it represses into the unconscious the historicity of the social and political conditions in which individuals live.

It is therefore only consistent to move from the existential and personalistic interpretations of traditional texts to a political hermeneutic of these traditions and from a hermeneutic of pure understanding to an exegesis of traditional religious representations in practical intent. As Marcuse has written, "The memory of the past can allow dangerous insights to arise and the established society seems to be afraid of the subversive content of memories." Political theology would like to try to interpret the dangerous memory of the messianic message of Christ within the conditions of contemporary society in order to free man practically from the coercions of this society and to prepare the way for the eschatological freedom of the new man.

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If Christian theology becomes in this sense a political theology, it encounters in society contradictions and adversaries which often bear the same name, that is, the civil religion of a society and its ideological formulation in political theology. Thus at this point we need a historical excursus in order to make clear what was meant and what is meant by political theology.

Political religions are not the discovery of Christianity. They are the essence of ancient pagan religions in which there are no states without gods and no divinities without states. Since its origin in the Christ who was crucified for political reasons, the Christian faith has always had to struggle against the political religions of the nations.

The expression "political theology" originated with the philosophy of the Stoa. Panaetius distinguished three classes of divinity: the personified powers of nature, the gods of the state religion, and those of myth (genus physikon, politiken, mythiken). With this scheme he established the tripartita theologia, which was implemented in the rationalistic theology of Rome. Plato had already criticized the mythic theology of the poets under the political aspects of "city founders" (Republic II, 379a). In De civitate Dei Augustine argued against this political theology of Rome (VI, 12). The divine images of the poets are mythic, and mythical theology is best suited for the cultic-public theater. The theological concepts of the philosophers are substantial or metaphysical. Natural theology belongs to the philosophical school. The names and rites of the state gods are political.

The Roman Stoic, Varro, considered political theology to be the highest, for in a commonwealth the citizens and priests must know which gods have to be recognized on account of the state and through which holy acts they must be revered. According to the classical social theory, it is the finis principalis of society to render the proper honor to the gods, for they bless the welfare of the land. In the late hellenistic period the polis, once an organizational principle for religious reverence, could itself become an object of religious reverence. The cities were deified (Dea Roma). What "political reli-

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gion" meant in antiquity is made beautifully clear in an ode by Horace:

You will undeservedly suffer for the sins of the fathers, O Rome, until you restore the temples, rebuild the fallen houses of the gods, and clean the images soiled by smoke and grime.
It is only because you consider yourself subject to the gods that you rule the world. This is the foundation of everything. Let it remain your goal. Because it scorned them, the gods struck grieving Rome with many blows. (III, 6)

In his investigation, The Reproach of Atheism in the First Three Centuries (Der Vorwurf des Atheismus in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, 1905), Adolf von Harnack demonstrated that this political religion was compelling only in terms of its public practice. The merely theoretical or purely private disavowal of the state gods, however, was not yet considered to be crimen laesae religionis but only the neglect of the public duties of religion. Only in the framework of this religious raison of state was the accusation of atheism lodged against Christians. Justin Martyr, in view of the Dei populi Romani, openly referred to himself as an "atheist." But ever since the legislation of the Christian emperors Theodosius and Justinian the relations have been reversed; the Christian religion has been looked upon as a state religion-religio licita, while the Jewish religion has been viewed as sacrilege and non-Christian religions as a species of atheism.

Since Constantine and the process of the Christianization of Europe, Christianity often has taken over the role of the nations' political religions wherever it has encountered them. Of course, it has "Christianized" the existing state religions, but at the same time it has been "politicized" in the sense of the current raison of state. Therefore we cannot really speak of the Christian churches in the European societies being non-political. Precisely because today they often consider themselves non-political and want always to remain socially in the neutral middle, they fulfill needs in the fashion of a political religion; that is, they provide for the symbolic integration of society and its homogenization and self-confirmation.

Therefore we must ask whether the social topos of political religion is present also in modern societies which call themselves "pluralistic," "secularized," and "emancipated." And if it is, we should ask who fills out and formulates this topos today. I think that

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present-day sociology and psychology of religion shows that the topos "political religion" has in no way vanished from modern societies. Political religion is found wherever a society integrates itself with the help of symbols and a nation represents its origins, its struggles for existence, its destiny, and therefore its self-consciousness in mythicized stories. One can find it in national memorials and holidays, in cemeteries and symbols of dignity, in presidential addresses and school books. Political religion is found in confessional form, in universal-Christian form, in biblical-religious form, in Shintoist, Islamic, and Buddhist form, and not least of all in the form of atheistic state ideologies. A comparison between the symbols and myths of the Soviet Union-Lenin mausoleum and the October Revolution -and the symbols and myths of the United States can make this clear.

III

As is well known, however, early Christianity and those who followed the crucified were considered by pagan philosophers (Celsus), as well as the Roman Senate, to be godless. For this reason it was viewed as an enemy of the state and was persecuted. So much the more did Christian apologists make it their business to expound the Christian faith as the true religion capable of preserving the state and Christian theology as the higher, political theology. In his magnificent treatise Monotheism as Political Problem (Monotheismus als politisches Problem, 1935), Erik Petersen sketched the political history of theological ideas in early church dogmatics. Where do we find the connections and the unbridgeable differences between political metaphysics and Christian faith in God?

Quite early Christian philosophers united biblical monotheism with philosophical monotheism. A scrutiny of metaphysical monotheism, however, reveals that it was a monarchism. If there is only one God, there is also only one ruler on earth. The Universal itself has a hierarchical-monarchical structure: one God-one logos-one cosmos. Divinity is the symbol and integration point for the unity of reality as a whole. The monotheism of this "natural theology" corresponds to the imperialism of the one emperor in the related "political theology."

This convertibility of metaphysical into political and political into metaphysical concepts is already recognizable in Aristotle him-

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self. He concludes his theologic in the twelfth book of his metaphysics with the sentence: "The creatures refuse to be governed badly. It is not good to have many rulers. Let there be one lord." This is a quotation which originates as a saying of Agamemnon in The Iliad where it was intended politically.

This correspondence between world view and foundation of the state can be traced into modern times. The Christian apologists appropriated this convertibility of concepts in order to turn the early Christian denial of the Roman emperor cult into a Christian foundation of the Roman empire of peace. The people of the one God coming together in the one church from many peoples and tongues is superior to the polytheism of the many religions. The conception of unity in God and the conception of unity in the church evoke, so to speak, the corresponding political conception of unity. "To the one king on earth there corresponds the one God, the one King in heaven, and the one kingly nomos and logos" (Peterson).

Thus the Christian apologists united Christ's kingdom of peace with the idea of Pax Romana. For as Eusebius explained, when the Savior appeared on earth, and simultaneously with his arrival Augustus as the first among the Romans became lord over the nations, the rule of many on earth was dissolved, and peace embraced the whole world. Christianity became the inner religion of the external Roman empire of peace. Out of this emerged the first Christian political theology of Christianity: one God-one Savior--one emperor -one church-one kingdom.

Erik Peterson has demonstrated that this political-religious monotheism was destroyed by the inner power of the Christian faith itself. This took place at two basic points: the trinitarian doctrine of God and the eschatological concept of peace. The development of the doctrine of the trinity caused a disintegration of political metaphysics, for the mystery of the three-in-oneness exists solely in God himself and not as a political image in the creature. Christian theology intends the doctrine of the trinity as a paraphrase of the unity of God the Father with the crucified Christ in the Holy Spirit. If the revelation of God in the crucified one-and not in mere speculation -is the real beginning point for the doctrine of the trinity, then the Christian doctrine of God can no longer be used as religious background material for the ruling authorities, principalities, and powers.

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This criticism of political metaphysics remains even today, I think, the political inference of the doctrine of the trinity. Christianity is not a "monotheistic kind of belief," as Schleiermacher insisted, and not "radical monotheism," as Richard Niebuhr said, but trinitarian faith. The liberal sacrifice of the doctrine of the trinity is the sign for the unconscious dissolution of Christian faith in the political religion of a "Christian world."

On the other hand, the equation of Pax Christi with Pax Romana could never really succeed because of the infinite quality of Christian hope. The peace of God is not secured and maintained by any Caesar or ideology of power, but alone by the crucified one. Therefore, it is a peace which is higher than all reason-even political reason. The peace of God is furthermore a universal peace and therefore cannot be limited to the boundaries of the Pax Romana or of a "Christian world." Should not this hope, which is constantly becoming greater, also bring present-day Christians into a critical distance between the idea of Pax Americana and Pax Sovietica and technocratic and revolutionary conceptions of peace.

For Erik Peterson, the development of the doctrine of the triune God and of the eschatological concept of peace has forced Christian theology into a fundamental break with every political theology. For him, there is no longer any political theology in Christianity. But it seems to me that the political problems of Christian theology only begin at this point.

These problems lie concretely in the relationship of Christian faith to the political religion of a particular country. We can exemplify them by turning to the dissimilar assessments of the phenomena of American civil religion by two sociologists of religion: Robert Bellah and Peter Berger.

In his well-known article "Civil Religion in America" (Daedalus, 1967), Robert Bellah uses the inaugural speeches of American presidents to point out that in the country which has been noted for a strict separation of church and state, there is a peculiar, new political religion. It has its own distinctive character, its own existence, and its own independent development. In its appeal to the pilgrim fathers it is messianic: exodus and chosen people. In its appeal to

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the Old Testament prophets it is socio-critical and "revolutionary," as John F. Kennedy emphasized. In its veneration of Abraham Lincoln it finds its martyrdom: "The dead have died that the nation might live."

More recently it has discovered a typical focus of enmity--"communism." But it is neither Protestant nor Catholic nor Jew. It is capable of mobilizing the people for new efforts and struggles such as were embodied in Roosevelt's "New Deal," Kennedy's "New Frontier," and the Civil Rights Movement. It can lead to the national "arrogance of power" (Fulbright) in the radicalism of the right or the religion of the hard-hats as well as to the spreading of the American way of life as a special blessing to the world. Robert Bellah's criticism of this civil religion of his country works only with the distinction between particularism and universalism: "As Americans we have been well favored in the world, but it is as men that we will be judged."

With respect to its best intentions, "a world civil religion" could be viewed as the fulfillment and not the destruction of the "American dream." "Indeed such an outcome has been the eschatological hope of American civil religion from the beginning." Should it also become the Christian-ecumenical dream that out of the Christian national religion there should arise a world civil religion as the religion of humanity for a unified mankind? Many ecumenical expressions take this direction.

As early as 1961 in The Noise of Solemn Assemblies: Christian Commitment and the Religious Establishment in America, however, Peter Berger had already described this civil religion in the United States in a quite similar way, but had viewed the task of Christians as one of "disestablishment." "The God of Moses, who refused to give his name for magical uses, is the same God who comes to us in Jesus Christ." "It would perhaps be significant for our pious hygienists of the soul to remember that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified." "We think in our situation the theological task is to elaborate the eschatological character of the Christian faith against the this-worldliness of American religiosity, to set the justification by faith against our pervasive legalism, to explain the meaning of the cross in a culture which glorifies success and happiness." Berger does not only consider this a Christian task, for the denial of the civil white religion constitutes an important element in what one could call "the

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other America," in that America which is denounced in the "community of the respectable."

We have before us two clear judgments about American civil religion. They prompt us to ask the question: Is the universalization of the Christianized civil religions of Europe and America in the form of a civil religion of the world a goal for which we should be striving? Or, can the Christian hope make its universalism concrete only when, for the sake of the crucified one, it enters into a critical iconoclasm against the existing civil religions and simultaneously enters into solidarity with those who are oppressed by the civil religion of a society and are forcibly excluded? Where is the Christian eschatology of which Bellah and Berger are speaking? Is it in the universalism of a civil religion bound up with a coming world society or in the dialectic of the cross?

If we can designate something which is beyond all doubt irreplaceably Christian, it is the relation of all theological statements, even eschatological statements of hope, to the cross of Christ. The cross is the point at which Christian faith distinguishes itself from other religions and ideologies, from unfaith and superstition. It is worthy of note that the cross of Christ is also the one truly political point in the story of Jesus. It should therefore become the beginning point and the criterion for a Christian political theology.

Jesus was condemned according to the law of Israel as a blasphemer. Paul and the Reformers again and again made a theological interpretation of the fact that Jesus died at the hands of the law and that consequently the law with its demands comes to an end at the hands of the resurrected one. If Jesus, the one condemned according to the law, is the Christ of God, then man is no longer made righteous by the works of the law, but through faith. For all those who are godless and unrighteous, the "Word of the cross," the gospel, becomes the power of liberation from the curse of the law.

Jesus was not killed by stoning, the punishment for blasphemy, a punishment which the Jews of his time were authorized to carry out, as is obvious in the case of Stephen. Jesus was crucified by the Romans. Crucifixion was a political punishment for political agitators against the Pax Romana and was reserved exclusively for the Roman authorities. Certainly Jesus was no Zealot freedom-

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fighter against the Roman occupation force. Thus, the immediate legal ground for his execution by Pilate was perhaps feeble.

But is there not implicit in his eschatological message of freedom for sinners and of the coming kingdom for the poor a much greater attack against the religiously deified state? Did he not cause with this message an "agitation" in the political situation of Rome which was much more radical than the one caused by the Jewish Zealots? In this sense, his crucifixion was quite consistently political, not an accident or an error. The Christian martyrs who were sent into the arena still knew that quite well. They knew also, as the book of Revelation notes, what "Rome" could be as a power of repression. Should not Christian theology therefore interpret the political fact of the crucifixion theologically in order to unroll again the public trial "aut Christus-aut Caesar"?

From Hegel's observations in the Philosophy of Religion about the external polemical side of Jesus' death, we can gather the following basic references: If the one profaned with crucifixion by the authority of the state is the Christ of God, then what is lowest in the political imagination is changed into what is highest. What the state had considered the deepest humiliation, namely, the cross, bears the highest dignity. When the cross is raised as a standard, whose positive content is the Kingdom of God, then the life of the state is deprived of its inner disposition, that is, religion. For those who recognize the Christ of God in the crucified one, the glory of God no longer shines on the crowns of the mighty but alone on the face of the tortured Son of man. If this crucified one becomes divine authority for the believers, the political-religious faith in authority ceases to hold sway over them. For them, the political forces are deprived of direct religious justification from above.

From these few observations it is clear first of all that the Christian faith, for the sake of the crucified one, cannot accommodate itself to the political religions of the societies in which it lives. Rather, if it wants to maintain its identity as Christian faith, it must become the power of liberation from them. Adolf Schlatter said in this regard, "The vocation and work of Jesus consists in his destroying our idols, and the weapons with which he nullifies our false gods is his cross." Because there are few spheres of life more beset by idolatry and alienation than politics, we must devote our attention to the means of accomplishing liberation in it.

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We can begin our consideration of this problem with two theses: (1) The Old Testament prohibition of images says: "You shall not make yourself a graven image or any likeness of anything. You shall not bow down to them or serve them." It forbids not only religious idolatry but also political idolatry. What was criticized biblically as "idolatry" emerges again in modern times as criticism of man's alienation and tutelage.

(2)The Christian faith in the crucified one is a radical realization of the Old Testament prohibition of images, specifically (a) in mythical theology by way of demythologization, and (b) in political theology by way of the fundamental democratization of the conditions of rule.

According to the Second Commandment, the worship of gods, superstition, idolatry, fetishism, personality cults, etc., arise out of the fact that men make for themselves a visible image of the invisible God and worship a work of their own hands in order to gain self-confirmation and self-security from it. If idolatry was for the Old Testament the gravest of all sins, Paul took up this criticism (Romans 1:18 ff.) and even turned it around in the criticism of "works righteousness." It is not only that man "makes" himself images of gods, but also that he idolizes, under the constraint of self-justification, everything he "makes" or "does," his good deeds and his great achievements. This works righteousness is "idolatry" because it makes men slaves of their own works by forcing the creators to bow down before their own creations. In the Larger Catechism Luther also summed up the piety of images and works righteousness as the same and pointed to idolatry of the heart as the origin of all sins. "Whatever you set your heart on and depend on, that is really your god.

From a psychological point of view, the unfathomable anxiety of man causes him to create for himself symbols, idols, and values which then become identical with his self. Every attack against his idols therefore wounds his "highest values," and he reacts to this with deadly aggression. As long as his self depends on such idols and idolized realities, man is not free to accept the different kind of life of another along with his own life. He only accepts men who are like him. He only accepts men who value the same things and abhor the same things as he does because these men confirm him. Strangers put him in question and make him uncertain. Hence the

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attitude: "Love our country or leave it." This is the basis for xenophobia, anti-semitism, and race hatred. The liberation of man from the anxiety and the coercive force of such idols is therefore the pre-supposition for humanity and peace on earth.

It is a striking fact that since the beginning of modern times the liberation from idolatry has been transferred from Christian theology to the critical sciences. The movements of the Enlightenment can be appropriately represented as the consequent history of the prohibition of images.

Francis Bacon criticized the prejudgments of history as idola, as idols which possess the human spirit in such a way that the empirical truth cannot be impartially perceived. The history of the criticism of ideology had its beginning here. Immanuel Kant criticized the dogmatism of reason through the critical reflection of reason on its possibilities and limits and with that reason accepted the absolute boundaries of its concepts. Ludwig Feuerbach's criticism of religion was an explanation of the religious projections of the heart. In terms of criticism this can be quite felicitously understood as negative theology: You shall not make any image or likeness. Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic explanation of psychic complexes has essentially the same intentions. Karl Marx began consistently with the criticism of religion in order to transfer it to the political and economical alienation of man.

This means in terms of the criticism of religion that "the offsprings of their head have grown up above their head." In terms of the capitalistic society it means "the creators have bowed down before their creatures." In Marx's later criticism of the "fetish character" of commodities in the capitalistic society of exchange, his earlier beginning point in terms of the criticism of religion emerges again. I think that Christian theology can feel inimical toward these movements of Enlightenment criticism of superstition only to its own detriment and dispense with them only to its own impoverishment.

But how does idolatry and alienation appear in politics? Hobbes already interpreted the prohibition of images politically: "That they should not make any image to represent them, that is to say, they were not to choose to themselves, neither in heaven nor in earth any representative of their own fancying" (Leviathan, 42).

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These observations lead us to the problem of political representation.

A political representation is always necessary if a people wants to become capable of acting in the medium of history. The citizens identify themselves with their representatives and their decisions. They give up the rights of self-determination to their representatives and authorize them to act in their name. However, this necessary representation and substitution is never without a degree of alienation. "In representative institutions there is always the subordination under a visible image; and that is idolatry" (Norman O. Brown). Political idolatry and political alienation arise when-as Marx made clear-the representatives grow up over the heads of those whom they are supposed to represent and when the people bow down before their own government. The consequences then show up in the people's spreading apathy. One no longer identifies himself with the politics of his country's government or his student representatives. Because their representatives elude their control, the citizens fall back into a passivity which simply abets the further misuse of power. These are symptoms of political idolatry; out of representation there develops rule, out of unburdening there develops alienation, out of a functional authority there develops a status authority.

Enlightenment republicanism saw quite clearly this connection between idolatry and political tutelage. "Democracy has no monuments. It strikes no medallions. It does not bear the head of a man on its coins. Its true essence is iconoclasm," said John Quincy Adams, the fourth President of the United States. But if the essence of democracy is political iconoclasm, the interminable process of the permanent democratization of public life is a political fulfillment of the Second Commandment. It serves the freedom of God because it serves the freedom of his image in every man.

The Christian faith calls the crucified one "the image of the invisible God." If it wants to be consistent in its practice, it will therefore forsake and destroy all earthly images and representations of the divine in politics. With the freedom which is opened up to it in the cross it will enter into a permanent iconoclasm against political personality cults and national religions and against economic money and commodity fetishism. It seems to me that Christians should lead the way in the desacralization and democratization of

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political rule. Indeed this stands in the compass of their authentic traditions.

It follows for the Christian churches that they must fulfill further their old task of employing the Word of the cross to destroy religious idolatry and personal fetishism and to spread the freedom of faith into the very hovels of the obscure. Its new task then will lie in struggling against not only religious superstition but also political idolatry, not only religious alienation of man but also his political, social, and racial alienation in order to serve the liberation of man to his likeness to God in all areas where he suffers from inhumanity. In this sense, I think, it would also be the task of the churches today to develop "social critical freedom" in institutions. I say "also" because man is basically enslaved by anxiety, and liberation from anxiety happens in the first place through faith-not through social improvements.

A political theology of the cross has still deeper dimensions. It would be shortsighted to fix our attention only on the relationship between church and state in order to make out of the church-state marriage a cooperative relationship of freer, more reciprocal criticism. According to the biblical traditions, the church in a state has to do essentially also with those with whom there is virtually no "state at all." Despite the covenant and the nation, there is already running through the Old Testament the realization: "You are a God of the wretched, the refuge of the oppressed, the sustainer of the meek, the defense of the forsaken, the savior of the despairing." According to the Magnificat (Luke 1: 46-54), this God flings the mighty from their throne and exalts the lowly.

Jesus' proclamation and deeds were valid for all men precisely because he took sides with the weak, the poor, and the victims of discrimination. Jesus grasped human society, so to speak, at the lowest extreme, where he found the miserable and the disdained. Paul said the gospel is for all men, but he went one-sidedly to the Gentiles in order to save the Jews.

If we comprehend this partisanship of God and of the gospel, we will also discover again the subversive and revolutionary character of the Bible which has been concealed too long under dreams of humanity. The message of the cross is a glad message only for the

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poor. For the rich and the self-righteous it is quite distressing. The future of God begins in this world, as the Beatitudes show, with the poor, the mourning, the persecuted, and the pure. Christian hope does not surmount the cutting edge of human progress and development. Instead, it seeks out those with whom the crucified one has entered into solidarity and those for whom he has become a brother. These men with whom Christian hope joins itself are the "others." They are men who are forced into nothingness by a self-confirming society which has forced itself into inner homogeneity. According to the inner dialectic of Christian hope, ultimately the rich do not save the poor, but, on the contrary, the poor may save the rich.

How does this happen? I do not mean only where, according to Luke 16, the rich man calls out to Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham, but here on earth. Only the poor really know the oppression of wealth's exclusiveness. Only the hated know the misery which hate causes. The rich, the oppressor, the hater are always a bit oblivious to the misery they cause, even if they are well-intentioned. Therefore, the oppressed hold the key for the liberation of humanity from oppression. If they are filled with Christian hope, then it will not be their intention to become masters where they were once slaves or oppressors where they were once the oppressed, but they are empowered by this hope so far as possible to rid this world utterly of the master-slave relationship and the mechanism of oppression. For Albert Camus, the humane principle of revolt is not the reversal of the master-slave relationship but its elimination. Only then can man associate with man in a human way.

What does this mean for the Christian community? According to an old sentence, the true church is where Christ is: ubi Christus, ibi Ecclesia. But where is Christ present? We find in the New Testament two promises of Christ's presence:

(1)Whoever hears you, hears me. Word, sacrament, and the community of the faithful make Christ present.

(2)What you have done to one of the least of these my brothers, you have done to me. I think that these words from Matthew 25 belong not only in social ethics but primarily in ecclesiology. According to them, there is a double brotherhood of Christ: the one is the manifest brotherhood of the believers; the other is the latent brotherhood of the poor. Thus the Christian community is not

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in the full truth of Christ so long as it does not realize this double brotherhood of Christ and is not constituted by believers and the poor. It becomes the false church when in its own life it gives validity to the Aristotelian social principle which asserts, by virtue of philia politike, "birds of a feather flock together" and therefore "one crow does not pick out the eye of another." As civil religion, the church is always subjugated to this principle of homogeneity. It becomes the true church and the sacrament of hope in the new humanity as a community of "others" by virtue of agape, that is, the recognition of the other.

Then we find in it, as the Corinthian congregation proclaimed: "Jews" and their opposite "Gentiles," "Greeks" and their opposite "barbarians," "masters" and their opposite "slaves," "whites" and their opposite "blacks." Race, class, status, and national churches smack of heresy in their structures. But when the Christian churches, for the sake of the brotherhood of Christ, join themselves with those who in a particular society are concretely the "others," these churches also concretely dissolve their alliances with those who took the prerogative of declassing the others. They also dissolve their alliances with the prevailing religious needs for self-confirmation.

If Christian faith is the overcoming of self-righteousness through justification by faith, the church can realize itself only in the political, social, and economic overcoming of self-confirmation through social love. Only then can we surmise something of the beauty of the coming kingdom in the earthly fragments of the church and recognize it as a sacrament of hope in a free, new humanity.

The political theology about which we have inquired does not want to dissolve Christian faith into politics; nor does it want to replace Christianity with humanism. If we would in practice put man in place of the divine, we would theoretically have to put the human essence in place of the divine. If we would change religion into politics, as our "leftist" friends and Marxists demand, politics would have to become our religion. The state or the party would then become the Leviathan, the mortal god on earth. That would mean abolishing once again the desacralization of politics which Christianity has effected. This divinization of politics is a superstition which Christians cannot accept. They are Christians and

23 - Political Theology

hold to the crucified one in order to witness to men of a greater freedom.

A Christian "political theology" wants to bring the Christians as Christians, that is, as liberators, to the place where they are being waited upon by the crucified one. In the suffering and condemned ones of this earth Christ is waiting upon his own and their presence.

The focus of Christian hope is not simply the open future, but the future of the hopeless. The light of the resurrection illuminates the night of the cross and wants to illuminate those who are today consigned to the shadows of the cross. The cross of Christ, the community of the suffering Christ, and the sign of the oppressed creation show us the place of Christian presence.

"The cross alone is our theology," said Luther. Likewise, we contend that the dangerous memory of the cross is our political iconoclasm; the cross is our hope for the politics of liberation. The liberating memory of the crucified Jesus compels Christians to a critical political theology.