The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy

1. Orthodox Political Theology through the Centuries

Chapter One orthodox Political Theology through the centuries It is quite a remarkable fact that in t he history of theology in t he Christian East, there exists a core and guiding principle that is never challenged within the movement of the tradition: the principle of divine-human communion. This principle may sometimes be ignored , or often under-emphasized, but there are always trajectories within the tradition at any given moment in history that keeps its memory alive. Divine-human communion, or theosis, sparks the theological imagination of Orthodox Christians, and the influence of this principle is visible in writings related to questions of political theology. This chapter will trace the influence of this principle on Orthodox political theologies, and the effects of the forgetfulness of this principle in thinking about church-state relations. Although the principle of divine-human communion is discernible in the political theologies of Eusebius of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Sergius Bulgakov, and Vigen Guroian, a consensus does not exist on the implications of this principle for political theologies. Implicit is a debate about what an Orthodox political theology should look like given the consensus on the realism of divine-human communion. I will end the chapter 13 14 The Mystical as Political with a description of the post-Communist ambivalence of the Orthodox Churches to modern liberal democracy, which indicates the urgency for a m ore exhaustive political theology grounded in t he principle of divine-human communion, an outline for which is given in the remaining chapters. Eusebius’s Trinitarian Model The earliest Christian documents give no clear or consistent statements of Christian theologies of state or culture. Christianity was an emerging religion within the Roman Empire, and although they would reject the various forms of pagan religion, Christians expressed a more ambiguous attitude toward the civic and political institutions of the Roman Empire. The Gospels present a Jesus who is not particularly clear on what is being called today a “political theology,” but this vagueness does not mean that the portrait of Jesus that is given in the Gospels is not without its political implications, as various forms of liberation theology have rightly reminded us. One consistent thread in the earliest Christian texts is a nonidentification of the kingdom of God with any form of political community. The political reality at the time of both Jesus and Paul was the kingdom of the Romans, or more commonly put, the Roman Empire, and the kingdom of God was often portrayed as diametrically opposed to the Roman Empire or to any kingdom of this world. The Gospel narration of Jesus’s few comments on political matters, such as his proclamation to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar ’s and to God the things that are God’s” (Mt 22:21), together with his stance before Pontius Pilate, could be interpreted in such a way as to justify a condemnation of all political institutions as falling short of the promised kingdom of God. Further support for such an interpretation might come from the fall of Babylon in the book of Revelation (Rv 17:1–18:24), the rejection of the “world” in the letters of John (1 Jn 2:15), and the metaphor of the “two ways” in the early Christian document Didache. A trajectory within Christian thought emerged orthodox Political Theology through the centuries 15 in which, although Christians knew they had to live within the world until the promised kingdom of God, all other kingdoms were seen as the anti-kingdom, a form for arranging power and human relations structured according to all that is opposed to God’s kingdom. The common description for this Christian positioning vis-à-vis political communities is in terms of the distinction between “this world” and “the other world,” a dualism that often gets hardened into a Manichean mutual exclusivity. Although it was within the context of the Roman Empire that such a separation developed, it is still evident in contemporary Christian approaches to political theologies. A less hardened opposition to the structures of political power is discernible both in the book of Acts and the writings of Paul, the latter appearing even to offer divine sanction of political institutions when he writes that “those authorities that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom 13:1). While appearing to offer a divine grounding to political power, what the book of Acts and Paul both have in...