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Church, Gospel, and Empire - How the Politics of Sovereignty Impregnated the West (Paperback)
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Church, Gospel, and Empire - How the Politics of Sovereignty Impregnated the West (Paperback)
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Synopsis: This book addresses the apparent dislocation of the
church and theology from the socio-cultural mainstream and attempts
to recover its counterpolitical voice. It argues that early in
ecclesiastical history, the tradition's founding and constituent
principles were betrayed by a complicity with the prevailing
politics of sovereignty that has continued to this day. Following
the contours of contemporary theologians who explain the
dislocation in terms of a fall in early modernity, an initial
subsumption of transcendence by sovereignty is proposed. The
genealogy of this fall is then explored in four historical studies
focusing on the theopolitical transformations of law, violence, and
appeasement from their beginnings in the writings of Eusebius of
Caesarea to their culmination in the commodification of life
itself. The trajectory is traced through seminal soteriological
developments such as the crusade theology of Pope Innocent III, the
inversion of the corpus verum and the corpus mysticum, and the
conjunction of sovereignty and capital in the mysterious currency
of the Bank of England. The narrative culminates in the seemingly
paradoxical concurrence of the politics of biopower and the
so-called century of the Holy Spirit. Drawing on a radical
substratum intimated in the case studies, the final section
develops an innovative christological configuration of kenosis or
what is termed 'kenarchy.' This provides a re-imagining of the
divine distinct from its implication with imperial sovereignty,
which could allow theology to make a more effective contemporary
political intervention. Endorsement: "Ambitious, confident in
controlling the argument and the evidence, Mitchell's genealogy of
church and empire, sovereignty and transcendence, is as important
as it is controversial. A radical Christianity announces itself as
a subaltern project of resistance and hope. The book lays down a
challenge of enormous audacity to previous accounts of secularism
as the product of modernity, offering a new political conception of
the genesis of modernity. It is a major contribution to
contemporary Christian political theology, in fact to Christian
dogmatics that takes the incarnation of a loving God seriously.
Read it, and you'll see why." -Graham Ward University of
Manchester, England "Roger Mitchell has provided the reader with an
original, wide-ranging, thoroughly researched and very well-written
critical study of the emergence of Western Christendom as the
expression of the theologically perverse assimilation of imperial
sovereignty. In close dialogue with the major theologians and
thinkers of past and present, Mitchell develops a powerful argument
for the Christian praxis of 'kenarchy, ' a proposal that passes
beyond both imperial theology and the reduced Christology of
kenosis. Moreover, this important book is underlaid by a lifetime
of pioneer Christian ministry." -Richard H. Roberts University of
Stirling, Scotland "What is the relationship between Christian
theology and political sovereignty? Why has the Church consistently
allied itself with temporal political power from the Roman Empire
to contemporary capitalism? And how might we imagine a different
kind of theological politics that resists the lure of empire,
sovereignty, and power? In this powerful, controversial, and
passionately argued book, Roger Haydon Mitchell offers a genealogy
of political theology--its past, its present, and, most
importantly, its future. It is a study that will be of interest to
anyone working in the fields of theology and politics." -Arthur
Bradley Lancaster University, England Author Biography: Roger
Haydon Mitchell directs a charitable trust that advises the church
on negotiating social change. For the last six years he has been a
postgraduate researcher in Religious Studies at the University of
Lancaster. He is a member of the Society for the Study of Theology.
General
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