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509 Trinitarian Theology and Social Ethics 43 0Ever since the work of Catholic theologians Karl Rahner and Karl Barth gave special attention to a renewed consideration of trinitarian theology, there has been something of a renaissance in the theology of the Trinity. The emphasis on the relationality of the persons as constituting the unity of the divine life in the communion of love has led to the development of commensurate visions of social justice. Selection 1: Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom Jürgen Moltmann (b. 1926) is acknowledged to be among the most influential theologians of our time. He spent most of his career at the University of Tübingen . His eschatological theology stands, along with Wolfhart Pannenberg, as the paramount expressions of the theology of hope. His books Theology of Hope and The Crucified God, among other of his works, embody within them a strong political theology that influenced liberation theologies. Moltmann is also regarded as one of the major thinkers in contemporary Trinitarian theology. The implications of his approach for a vision of political ethics are clear here. 1. Political Monotheism What is the relationship between the religious ideas of any given era and the political constitution of its societies? That is the question asked by political theology. The originally Stoic concept of political theology presupposes the unity of politics and religion because it was the polis itself that exercised the public practice of religion . Political theology dealt with the sacred rites and sacrifices that the polis had to offer to the gods. To reverence the gods counted as the highest function of the state, for it was the gods who secured the peace and welfare of the whole community. The correspondence between the community’s religious ideas and its political constitution counted as being one of life’s self-evident premises. 510 # Part 11: Contemporary Issues: The Mid-Twentieth Century to the Present When the churches took on an independent function in the practice of religion , and as differentiations increased in the sphere of both religion and politics, it became increasingly difficult to sum up the relation between religion and politics in any given situation by means of a single definition. The two modern theories about this relationship also prove inadequate in the face of the complex realities of the modern world. The reflection theory, according to which economic interests and political relationships are merely reproduced in the superstructure of religion is only applicable to a limited degree; while it is only in a very few cases that the contrary theory of the secularization of religious ideas can clearly demonstrate that religion has actually determined politics and economics. Causal reductions and deductions are only very rarely realistic. Reciprocal influence and conditioning is much more frequent. Generally alliances between religious ideas and political options can be discovered, alliances evoked by particular situations and the interests of those involved. Within these alliances one can then discover affinities, correspondences, interdependencies and, occasionally, contradictions as well. Today’s political theology , therefore, which enquires into the relationship between religious and political ideas, must note and define the situation and the constellations of interests in which these correspondences and contradictions appear and make themselves felt. This applies to historical situations, and to the present even more. It was the Christian apologists of the ancient world who developed one of the first forms of political monotheism. Since it meant discipleship of the Jesus who had been crucified by the power of the Roman state, early Christianity was felt to be hostile to the state and godless, and it was because of this that it was persecuted. Consequently it was all-important for the Christian apologists to present their faith as the truly reasonable religion, and hence as the divine worship which really sustained the estate. Following Josephus, they linked biblical tradition about the one rule of the one God with philosophical monotheism. Philosophical monotheism was already associated with the cosmological doctrine of the single, hierarchical world order. The universe itself has a monarchical structure: one deity—one Logos—one cosmos. The fusing of biblical and cosmological monarchism gave rise to the notion of the single, universal pyramid: the one God is Creator, Lord and possessor of his world. His will is its law. In him the world has its unity and its peace. By distinguishing between Creator and creature, the biblical doctrine of creation (compared with Aristotelian and Stoic cosmology) accentuated the idea of God’s power of disposal and the...

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