Synopsis: This book addresses the apparent dislocation of the church and
theology from the socio-cultural mainstream and attempts to recover its
counterpolitical voice. It argues that early in ecclesiastical history,
the tradition's founding and constituent principles were betrayed by a
complicity with the prevailing politics of sovereignty that has
continued to this day. Following the contours of contemporary
theologians who explain the dislocation in terms of a fall in early
modernity, an initial subsumption of transcendence by sovereignty is
proposed. The genealogy of this fall is then explored in four historical
studies focusing on the theopolitical transformations of law, violence,
and appeasement from their beginnings in the writings of Eusebius of
Caesarea to their culmination in the commodification of life itself. The
trajectory is traced through seminal soteriological developments such as
the crusade theology of Pope Innocent III, the inversion of the corpus
verum and the corpus mysticum, and the conjunction of sovereignty and
capital in the mysterious currency of the Bank of England. The narrative
culminates in the seemingly paradoxical concurrence of the politics of
biopower and the so-called century of the Holy Spirit. Drawing on a
radical substratum intimated in the case studies, the final section
develops an innovative christological configuration of kenosis or what
is termed 'kenarchy.' This provides a re-imagining of the divine
distinct from its implication with imperial sovereignty, which could
allow theology to make a more effective contemporary political
intervention. Endorsement: "Ambitious, confident in controlling the
argument and the evidence, Mitchell's genealogy of church and empire,
sovereignty and transcendence, is as important as it is controversial. A
radical Christianity announces itself as a subaltern project of
resistance and hope. The book lays down a challenge of enormous audacity
to previous accounts of secularism as the product of modernity, offering
a new political conception of the genesis of modernity. It is a major
contribution to contemporary Christian political theology, in fact to
Christian dogmatics that takes the incarnation of a loving God
seriously. Read it, and you'll see why." -Graham Ward University of
Manchester, England "Roger Mitchell has provided the reader with an
original, wide-ranging, thoroughly researched and very well-written
critical study of the emergence of Western Christendom as the expression
of the theologically perverse assimilation of imperial sovereignty. In
close dialogue with the major theologians and thinkers of past and
present, Mitchell develops a powerful argument for the Christian praxis
of 'kenarchy, ' a proposal that passes beyond both imperial theology and
the reduced Christology of kenosis. Moreover, this important book is
underlaid by a lifetime of pioneer Christian ministry." -Richard H.
Roberts University of Stirling, Scotland "What is the relationship
between Christian theology and political sovereignty? Why has the Church
consistently allied itself with temporal political power from the Roman
Empire to contemporary capitalism? And how might we imagine a different
kind of theological politics that resists the lure of empire,
sovereignty, and power? In this powerful, controversial, and
passionately argued book, Roger Haydon Mitchell offers a genealogy of
political theology--its past, its present, and, most importantly, its
future. It is a study that will be of interest to anyone working in the
fields of theology and politics." -Arthur Bradley Lancaster University,
England Author Biography: Roger Haydon Mitchell directs a charitable
trust that advises the church on negotiating social change. For the last
six years he has been a postgraduate researcher in Religious Studies at
the University of Lancaster. He is a member of the Society for the Study
of Theology.
