This is a guest post from Ulrich Schmiedel, Lecturer in Theology, Politics, and Ethics, University of Edinburgh

Thomas Lynch’s Apocalyptic Political Theology is an astute and acerbic critique of liberalism. No surprises here. Since Carl Schmitt combined the political with the theological, the Schmittian separation of political theology from liberalism (and liberalism from political theology) has determined much of the development of the field. ‘From Schmitt onwards’, Lynch points out, ‘political theology has accused the liberal narrative of denying the violence that marks’ it (11). Of course, this accusation is mutual – liberal theologians find political theologians violent and political theologians find liberal theologians violent – so there is lots of loathing to go around. What I find intriguing about Lynch’s political theology is that – if read, admittedly somewhat annoyingly, against the grain – Lynch both confirms and corrodes the Schmittian separation.

Lynch neither defines nor describes ‘liberalism’. Given that ‘liberalism’ is such a washed-out category by now, covering all sorts of lukewarm thinkers who appear to accommodate the status quo by opting for compromise over conflict, any attempt at defining and describing liberalism would be doomed from the get-go. The account of liberalism that runs through Lynch’s apocalyptic political theology shows that ‘liberalism’ is a label that is, somewhat strangely, slippery and sticky at the same time. (A bit like the unicorn poo my four-year old niece likes to play with.) For Lynch, both the defenders and the despisers of religion in politics can be liberals. He brings his ‘methodological political theology’ to bear on the worlds in which we live in order to show how these worlds manifest, manage or mask violence. Thus, Lynch’s methodological political theology tackles the ‘pervasive forms of injustice that persist in an era defined by at least nominal commitments to liberal ideas’ (13). Continue reading “Learning to Live with Liberalism — Apocalyptic Political Theology Book Event” →

This is a guest post by Joel Kuhlin, doctoral student at the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University.

The present response attempts to think with, rather than about, certain key-aspects of Thomas Lynch’s Apocalyptic Political Theology, from the perspective of a philologist. From a philological appreciation of Apocalyptic Political Theology, instead of a purely philosophical one, I would like to argue that resources are found to renew historical investigations into the ways in which early Christianity formulates a political theology. Here, apocalypticism plays a main role. Ernst Käsemann, for instance, famously states that the “apocalyptic was the mother of all Christian theology” (The Beginnings of Christian Theology, 1962), effectively making a discussion on an early Christian theology on the political impossible without reference to apocalypticism. However, as we shall see, it remains to be demonstrated whether apocalyptic thought was able to maintain a centrality for the emerging religion, regardless of how important this concept is for the founding of the political theological discourses found in the New Testament archive. Lynch’s work highlights with clarity the ways in which a movement such as Christianity of late antiquity not only came to accept “the World” in its theology, but most importantly through the Holy Roman Empire defined itself in terms of actually defending the World.

Toward a New Concept of a Fourfold World

A primary resource the concept of apocalyptic political theology offers a historical study of early Christianity and New Testament archive is the cosmological fourfold. Lynch’s analysis of the insufficiency of Carl Schmitt’s view on the making of a “world” looks to antagonistic divisions of nature-capital-race-gender.  I would argue that Lynch’s introduction to this new theological “fourfold” cosmology ought to be considered an important supplement to Irenaeus of Lyon’s fourfold gospel. Continue reading “Toward a New Cosmological Fourfold and the Apocalyptic Grounding of Early Christian Theology–Apocalyptic Political Theology Book Event” →

This is a guest post by Alana M. Vincent, Associate Professor of Jewish Philosophy, Religion, and Imagination, University of Chester.

On 18 June 2015, I woke up and went to work.

On 3 November 2016, I woke up and went to work.

On 28 October 2018, I woke up and went to work.

On 2 June 2020—the morning I started writing this, the morning after an American President of dubious legitimacy threatened to deploy the United States military against my family and friends—I woke up, and I went to work.

This isn’t complacency, exactly. I have spent the past four years struggling, with varying degrees of success, to cope with the fact that, while I’m waking up and going to work, the world is ending all around me. It’s not that I don’t see it happening. And it’s not one of those obnoxious neoliberal hero narratives where I think that waking up and going to work is the one thing that I can do to keep the world from ending because my work is that important. It’s really just that I don’t know what else to do. Continue reading “On Getting Up and Going to Work– Apocalyptic Political Theology Book Event” →

This is a guest post by Ole Jakob Løland of the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo

Thomas Lynch’s Apocalyptic Political Theology is an ambitious and admirable effort of thinking apocalyptically through three different philosophers in light of the existing contemporary world in which we find ourselves. It contains some really capturing, nearly poetic, passages that might give rise to new forms of theologies:

Plastic apocalypticism is not a discourse of articulated hopes, though. Rather, it is the hope in the possibility of being able to one day hope. It is the conviction that the end is enough to hope in without having to also articulate the beginning that will follow. (130)

In one sense the book can be thought of as an exegesis of Taubes’ exegesis of the ὡς μὴ passage of 1 Cor 7:29 as “nihilistic” (The Political Theology of Paul). This enigmatic and unheard-of labelling of the meaning of Paul’s admonition to the Christ-believing Corinthians to live “as though… not” can be said to be creatively elaborated by Lynch’s intriguing ways of imagining life in a truly apocalyptic mode. In a world that has entered the Anthropocene and where racism, gender oppression and capitalist exploitation prevail this author has in his own non-Pauline form rightly realized that “the appointed time has grown short“ or with Agamben is a time that has “contracted itself” (The Time That Remains). And he is recognizing that “the present form of this world is passing away” in a mode free of any cheap triumphalism. He is investing his intellectual energy in an “active pessimism” (4) in the name of the poor that refuse the triumphalist hopes of this world. Although constantly and explicitly dismissing the category of “transcendence”, the author seems to share what the liberation theologian Jon Sobrino has called “la esperanza transcendente de los pobres” (Liberación con Espíritu). He appears to subscribe to Taubes’ Schmittianism “from below” (86). Continue reading “To Live “As Though… Not”: Taubes and Imagining Life in a Truly Apocalyptic Mode — Apocalyptic Political Theology Book Event” →

I am happy to announce that we are beginning the book event on Thomas Lynch’s Apocalyptic Political Theology: Hegel, Taubes, and Malabou (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Recently published in paperback, you can buy the book at the usual places online, though if you are in the US you may want to try Bookshop.org and in the UK there is Hive.co.uk. Lynch begins his study with the gnomic phrase, “It seems like a good time to write a book about the end of the world (1).” Though these words were only published about a year ago, the acceleration of the end of the worlds, of the many individual worlds that comprise this world, makes it seem like this statement was made decades ago. Over the next couple of weeks we will post interventions that engage and explore aspects of the apocalyptic political theology developed by Lynch. It seems that some of us, even when everything is falling apart, are still drawn to think about all of this that is coming to an end, to the very idea of an end itself.

Thomas Lynch is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion and the Programme Director for the BA in Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Chichester, UK. In addition to his work on political theology, he has published on the relationship of the construction of the concept religion with the conception of race in European philosophy and politics, on Lacan and his influence on liberation thinking in philosophy and theology, and the contradictions in liberal political framing of religious communities. In Lynch’s Apocalyptic Political Theology he makes a significant contribution to the field of political theology and the relationship between continental philosophy of religion and political theory by taking seriously the apocalyptic demand to end the world. After a short Introduction, Chapter 1 provides both a theory of the world and the methodology for the study. Lynch’s understanding of the world is dependent upon a bringing together of theorists like Frank B. Wilderson III with the reactionary political theology of Carl Schmitt. Lynch, who valorizes the work of those like Wilderson and rightly critiques Schmitt, deftly reads them together to argue that the world is structured by a set of divisions and antagonisms that is theologico-political at its heart. The cascading violence of these divisions is the very reason why those who are oppressed call for the end of the world. Any true liberation likes beyond the logic of this world, we are told. Methodologically, Lynch provides a helpful typology of various forms of political theology operative today, before telling us that in this study political theology is a way of philosophically engaging with ideas about the world.

What remains to be thought is an apocalyptic political theology, or a philosophical engagement with theological and political materials that takes seriously the call for the end of the world.  He does this by marshaling a significant body of literature in a succinct way by focusing them through concepts operating in Hegel’s “implicit political theology,” Taubes’s “spiritual disinvestment,” and Malabou’s concept of “plasticity” which is transformed into a “plastic apocalypticism.” The analysis and development of these concepts make up three of the main chapters of the book.

The philosophy of Hegel is the lynchpin that holds the three figure chapters together, but the book is not an investigation of Hegel as such. While Lynch impressively marshals a huge body of scholarship on Hegel, religion, philosophy, and apocalyptic thought, he is more concerned with treating Hegel as a material that emerges in response to a particular problem of a world that is intolerable and must be ended. The chapter on Taubes is important for being one of the few studies of Taubes’s work with an eye towards its cohesion as a whole. What emerges in part from Taubes’s own engagement with Hegel and apocalyptic political theology is a contradiction between affirming the end of the world as it is and some form of investment in a possible world. This contradiction is often the beginning of complicity with reproducing the world, and often a flight into transcendence, and yet Taubes condemns such complicity and such a flight to transcendence, to authotity. By turning to Malabou’s theory of plasticity Lynch is able to offer a way of understanding an apocalyptic that is “immanent, material, and desired for its own sake (141).” This crossed reading of Taubes and Malabou is original and is made possible by the isomorphism of Taubes definition of apocalyptic and Malabou’s definition of plastic as both “form destroying and creating.” This allows for an interesting consideration of the problematic between necessity and contingency that is central to any political thinking of radical change.

The book ends with a provocative conclusion that asks how we might live apocalyptically or negatively in a world that requires our investment in it for something like “a life.” While much work in political theology calls for the complicity decried by Taubes, Lynch manages to take seriously the true necessity that this world end with the trauma that comes form such a call, to say nothing of the reality of the end. Here, engaging mostly with the queer negativity of Lee Edelman and the hyperbolic demand for Black liberation that can only mean the end of the world found in Wilderson’s Afropessimist theory, Lynch sketches new lines of inquiry for political theology.

I hope you will join us in exploring and discussing these ideas.