The Politics of Heaven

Photo by Hans Eiskonen on Unsplash

We interrupt our regular schedule with the special announcement, that my random musings have now found their way into the mysterious realm of Oxford Handbooks.

I think it may have been 2015, when I received the invitation to make a contribution to the Oxford Handbook on Divine Revelation, which is edited by Balázs M. Mezei, Francesca Aran Murphy, and Kenneth Oakes. The remit I received was to contribute a chapter focusing on the subject of divine revelation and the political.

At first, I thought the invitation was one of those hoax emails that one gets from dubious sources. Who in their right mind would want to publish my stuff anywhere, let alone an Oxford Handbook. After making some further inquiries, it soon became apparent that this was not a hoax.

And so I went on with writing, making a broad survey of thought linking revelation with political thought. I adopted the rubric of cataloguing those surveyed thoughts on the basis of how each theorist presumed the transcendent source of revelation metaphysically related to the material order over which politics holds sway. On this basis, I broke the chapter up into three broad categories.

The first were the Monists who presumed that the transcendent realm operated so closely within the material that it collapsed the former collapsed into the latter. In this vein, whatever happened within the political realm was uncritically related to the transcendent. While some might question this, I included the liberal theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher in this category.

The second were the Dialecticians who, as the name suggests, presumed that the transcendent and the material realms were so diametrically opposed to each other that they could relate only in opposition to one another, and very often with the former overcoming the latter, shattering it to instantiate the rule of heaven on earth. I had fun writing this, for it afforded me the opportunity to explore three thinkers that, at first glance, were so diverse that they would seem to one another like chalk was to cheese. The first was the famous Reformed thoelogian Karl Barth, the second was Reinhold Niebuhr, and the third was the godfather of liberation theology, Gustavo Gutierrez.

The third were what I (probably clumsily) called the Participationists. In this grouping, the metaphysical presumption was that the border between transcendence and immanence was a porous one. On the one hand, this allowed one to acknowledge that there was a real distinction between the heavenly and earthly. On the other hand, the porous border also allowed for a zone of overlap between the two, so that the earthly realities to participate (albeit partially) in heavenly ones. In this category, I included John Milbank and the theological sensibility Radical Orthodoxy.

In each category, I tried to concisely summariese the histories, outline the frameworks as well as highlight pros, cons, shortfalls and twists.

I was thrilled when I heard that the Oxford Handbook on Divine Revelation is now out and even happier that my little work has been included among authors that I consider to be my theological heroes, including Francesca Murphy, William Desmond and Graham Ward. The table of contents includes other pillars in the theological world, such as Sameer Yadav, Cyril O’Regan, Jeremy Begbie and Heidi Campbell.

My thanks to the editorial team for their invitation to be part of the journey.

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