Schmitt’s Political Theology as a Methodological Approach Kinga Marulewska
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Abstract: In his two essays Carl Schmitt described a specific approach called by him a political theology. The exact interpretation of this method and its limits has not been clearly set, as there are at least two main aspects of Schmitt’s political theology. The first one is his strictly specified view of the relation between theology and the political sphere, which situates him in a long tradition of theologico-political reflection. However, this paper focuses mainly on the second aspect: political theology understood as a theory of conceptual history. Core features of Schmitt’s methodological approach seem promising for research conducted in the different fields of the modern humanities.
What is political theology? Problems with the exact definition of the concept of “political theology” are gaining more and more attention in the last decades. At first sight they seem to resemble those with all other concepts constructed within the social sciences. Repeated a ttempts to create one, unifying de finition show that the scope of the concept depends on the position of the researcher, and therefore strongly differs in the range of inclusion and exclusion of the phenomena. Regardless of this, in the broadest sense political theology means all possible relations between politics and religion or theology (Hepp 1105), and in this understanding it is independent of the religious commitment of scholars, who equally well can be believing Christians as well as atheists fighting against the “opium of the people”. Hence it can be said that different disciplines are now carrying out research in the field of political theology without even being aware of it. Certainly philosophy, sociology, theology, anthropology etc. are open to those questions. Yet, this broad sense of political theology is not sufficient. A reflection on the relations and analogies between transcendence and immanence, religion and politics or Church and state in the 20 th century cannot ignore the work of Carl Schmitt, who according to Erik Peterson, a German Catholic theologian and Schmitt’s friend and opponent, “introduced in the literature” the concept of political
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