The Cities of God and Man

The term “political theology” took an unfortunate turn in the early part of the last century. Prior to then it had a rather august history. Saint Augustine’s City of God and Hobbes’s Leviathan are manifestly works of political theology, carefully tracing the ways in which theological judgments form political commitments and also the ways in which political exigencies might alter our theological dogmas. Both writers occupied themselves with the question of how political societies get constituted and on what basis, with Hobbes bringing greater conceptual clarity by borrowing Jean Bodin’s conceptions of “sovereignty.” Since then, we have organized our politics on the basis of the problem of sovereignty: its sources, nature, and operations. Read Full Article »