This session includes papers that draw on nineteenth century thinkers and movements to shed light on recent debates in political theology, as well as offering new perspectives on how questions now associated with political theology were being formulated in the nineteenth century.
This paper argues that Kierkegaard, while famously politically conservative, and a notorious opponent of “women’s emancipation,” was actually progressive in his views on the inherent equality of men and women. More importantly, it argues that Kierkegaard's views on the nature of masculine and feminine gender stereotypes and the processes of socialization that resulted from these stereotypes, when sufficiently appreciated, can serve as a point of departure for the emancipation of both sexes from these artificial and limiting stereotypes, and can point us in the direction of genuine social progress.
This paper seeks to elucidate the politico-theological significance of the anthropotheistic position taken by Ludwig Feuerbach in his magnum opus, The Essence of Christianity (1841). In doing so, it pursues a circuitous route that begins by considering Feuerbach’s call, in a letter he sent to Hegel in 1828, for the establishment of the Alleinherrschaft or “sole sovereignty” of reason in a “kingdom of the actuality of the Idea and of existent reason.”
As a means of clarifying Feuerbach’ underlying purpose in seeking to “place the so-called Positive Philosophy in a most fatal light by showing that the original of its idolatrous image of God [Götzenbild] is man, that flesh and blood belong to personality essentially,” the paper considers the personalistic arguments against popular sovereignty, and in defense of “the monarchical principle,” advanced by Friedrich Julius Stahl, one of Feuerbach’s principle ideological adversaries and a leading mid-century theorist of political conservatism.
Regarded by his contemporaries as one of the most prolific theological minds of his time, Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898) was an unrepentant defender of chattel slavery and white supremacy, and a leading theological contributor to Lost Cause revisionism after the Civil War. A Reformed systematic theologian and a slaveholder, Dabney fought for the Confederacy, serving as the chief of staff and biographer for Stonewall Jackson. This paper documents Dabney’s nineteenth-century career as a Reformed theologian in the public square and argues that political theology in the United States has not yet reckoned sufficiently with Dabney’s legacy. The problems that Dabney’s political theology embodied have instead been swept under the rug—or hidden in the attic—of political theology as an embarrassing secret. In a time when rising neo-Confederate movements are self-consciously and overtly returning to Dabney as an intellectual and theological source, there is renewed urgency to confront Dabney’s legacy.
| Thomas A. Lewis | tlewis@brown.edu | View |