Political theology

Political theology is a term which has been used in discussion of the ways in which theological concepts or ways of thinking relate to politics. The term political theology is often used to denote religious thought about political principled questions. Scholars such as Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi jurist and political theorist, who wrote extensively on how to effectively wield political power, used it to denote religious concepts that were secularized and thus became key political concepts. It has often been affiliated with Christianity, but since the 21st century, it has more recently been discussed with relation to other religions. The term political theology has been used in a wide variety of ways by writers exploring different aspects of believers' relationship with politics. It has been used to discuss Augustine of Hippo's City of God and Thomas Aquinas's works Summa Theologica and De Regno: On Kingship. It has likewise been used to describe the Eastern Orthodox view of symphonia and the works of the Protestant reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin. There is a long history in Christian political thought of linking politics, statecraft, and worldly authority to the broader category of carnal literalism, typed as “Jewish” by the Pauline tradition. This tradition produced a tendency to discuss political error in terms of Judaism, with the difference between mortal and eternal, private and public, tyrant and legitimate monarch, mapped onto the difference between Jew and Christian. As a result of this history, transcendence as a political ideal has often figured (and perhaps still figures?) its enemies as Jewish. Though the political aspects of Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, and other traditions has been debated for millennia, political theology has been an academic discipline since the 20th century. The recent use of the term is often associated with the work of the prominent German political theorist Carl Schmitt.