Moltmann and the political theology of Davos
Rather disturbingly, Moltmann begins by seemingly blaming the events of 1989 for the emergence of the new nationalism:
Gorbachev wanted to keep socialist internationalism alive, but Yeltsin won and a new Russia with a new brand of Russian nationalism emerged. Russia had become an overburdened guardian for the soviet world and its cause. When Yeltsin won, the dream of a united communist humankind died. Today President Putin represents this new nationalism.
If only the Soviet bloc had remained, we would not be confronted by a nasty nationalism. Forget the fact that these regimes had actively persecuted Christians, and that the Churches had worked and witnessed for liberation. It is difficult not read to Moltmann's words as suggesting that the world would be a better place if these dictatorships had remained in power.
Immediately we can see an obvious and significant weakness in this critique of populism. Highlighting how populist movements often abandon the commandment to love our neighbour when the neighbour is an immigrant, asylum seeker, a refugee, or an ethnic minority community loses moral force when human rights abuses of the Soviet bloc regimes are set aside in the interests of "socialist internationalism". Put simply, this results in the critique of populism being neither morally coherent or convincing.
If Moltmann's assessment of the collapse of the Soviet empire is, to say the least, rather disconcerting, what of his view of the West? There are two strands of thought present in Moltmann's view. He begins by offering a liberal 'throne and altar' vision. The monarch sitting upon the throne takes the form of the UN the EU, and the WTO:
A result of this new nationalism is that the transnational organisations of humankind that were built to guarantee peace, such as the United Nations or the European Union, are to be destroyed ... These organisations exert normative pressure on countries, whose leaders have decided to put their own interests before the common good. Economically, bilateral “deals” have supplanted the WTO’s multilateral agreements. Whilst it may look as if the hard–work towards a democratic dream of a peaceful humankind is coming apart, I would argue that it is a temporary hiccup – not a requiem for a dream.
It is surely a somewhat pale, sickly, and uninspiring "democratic dream" if it finds embodiment in the UN (a body with numerous members who do not conform to democratic norms), the EU (defined by a neo-liberal commitment to the free movement of goods, capital, services and persons), and the WTO, the body which serves the interests of international free-market capitalism. This, however, goes to the heart of the weakness of many critiques of populism from within the Churches: it sounds like a political theology written in Davos, serving the interests of Davos.
To suggest that it is this political order to which the Churches should offer support against the forces of populism, is to radically undermine the Christian vision of the Good and how polities should be oriented towards it. It is also to be reconciled to the injustices and violence of this order, while critiquing populist injustices and violence.
If Moltmann's liberal 'throne and altar' political theology has the UN, EU, and WTO sitting on the throne, it is Kant who provides the altar:
The ideal State of Humankind on this earth, which Immanuel Kant referred to as the “Menschheitsstaat” is no longer a humanistic dream, but a bare necessity, if humankind is to survive. Whilst these ideas have been around for a long time, they have not led to the desired political actions of their supporters ... Immanuel Kant followed Lessing’s example in his 1793 book, “Religion in the limits of reason alone”. The “church belief” can only unite human beings “provisionally”. Faith based on pure reason, however, serves “that God may all in all” bring “eternal peace” on earth. As such, the “State of Humankind” is not only the final goal of human history, but also the end purpose of all of creation.
Kant's 'religion in the limits of reason alone' is particularly suited to be the altar for a political order designed to serve Reason, Market, and Autonomous Individual. Such an abstract, invisible religion of "universal practical rules" would not challenge enthroned Reason, Market, and Individual. As Kant himself says:
Now since a pure religion of reason, as public religious faith, permits only the bare idea of a church (that is, an invisible church), and since only the visible church, which is grounded upon dogmas, needs and is susceptible of organization by men, it follows that service under the sovereignty of the good principle cannot, in the invisible church, be regarded as ecclesiastical service, and that this religion has no legal servants, acting as officials of an ethical commonwealth.
What is more, the Kantian eschatological hope - Menschheitsstaat - is not the vibrant vision glorious of the City of God in John the Divine or Augustine, but monochrome, sterile "will of a World-Ruler revealed ... through reason". This being so, we should not perhaps be surprised at the imaginative failure of liberal political theology: this is hardly an attractive, fulfilling vision of the Good to which earthly cities should be ordered.
Moltmann declares that the Church is a pattern of the universal commonwealth that is required:
In building these international structures world leaders have indeed something to learn from Christians. Starting with the church, it is essentially all–embracing, and can never be limited to a national religion. It is ecumenically oriented towards the whole of humanity and understands itself as an anticipation of the universal kingdom of God.
The Church, however, is ecumenical, precisely because it does gather up the nations into the Kingdom of God. As such, it dwells within the nation, sanctifying national life. Embedded within the nation or realm, living out its calling in the nation or realm, it also has ordered its life in recognition of this. As the Articles of Religion declare:
Every particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish ceremonies or rites of the Church ordained only by man's authority ... The King's Majesty hath the chief power in this Realm of England, and other his Dominions, unto whom the Chief Government of all Estates of this Realm, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Civil, in all causes doth appertain, and is not, nor ought to be, subject to any foreign jurisdiction.
Rather than being particularly Anglican, these affirmations reflect long-standing Christian practice, retrieved at the Reformation in the face of an authority claiming universal jurisdiction, a retrieval of what John Hughes called "the more non-dualist, integralist ecclesiology of the first millennium". And even then, it is important to note that universal jurisdiction was claimed by a particular church, a Church of Somewhere, of Rome, with a particular history and a particular tradition. Not only does Moltmann's account of the Church's life entirely fail to account for the good ordering of national Churches, it also surely implies that the Churches require an authority with universal jurisdiction. If so, it is a somewhat startling stance for a Reformed theologian. If not, why is it that the Churches can order themselves nationally but states cannot?
Missing from Moltmann's account of both church and state is the nation, the realm, the civitas: in other words, the particular. This is particularly evident when he addresses the Incarnation:
When God became human, he became just that, and did not become American or German.
To be human is necessarily to be American, or Nigerian, or Indian ... or Jewish. As Barth declared:
The Word did not simply become any 'flesh,' any man humbled and suffering. It became Jewish flesh. The Church's whole doctrine of the incarnation and the atonement becomes abstract and valueless and meaningless to the extent that this comes to be regarded as something accidental and incidental ... His universality is revealed in this particularity - Church Dogmatics IV.1.166-7.
Moltmann here presents us with the Incarnation as abstraction, in which the particular is denied. Doing so serves his political theology and its denial of the particular. By contrast, recognising and celebrating the particularity of the Incarnation leads to both ecclesiology and political theology receiving the gift of particularity as an inherent human characteristic. To use words from John Milbank, a Christianity which does not recognise particularity "is disincarnate and so not really the religion of the Incarnation at all". It is disincarnate ecclesiology which does not affirm the "particular or national Church" and it is disincarnate political theology which does not recognise that the call to love our neighbour and to be ordered towards the Good is lived out in the particularity of a polity.
The urgent need for the Churches to critique populism is self-evident. Nationalistic impulses and hostility towards the alien and stranger require the Churches to challenge such movements. However, the political theology outlined by Moltmann in this essay is spectacularly unsuited to this task. It is the political theology of Davos, a defence of an exhausted and unjust order, incapable of addressing the populist desire - a legitimate and worthy desire - for polities with denser meaning than being merely trading centres in the global marketplace.
If the main Christian traditions of Europe and North America can offer nothing but Moltmann's thin gruel in response to populist movements, they will have failed to read the signs of the times, to respond meaningfully to the desire for polities ordered towards a fuller, richer understanding of the Good, rather than being naked public realms, in which Reason, Market, and Individual are a veneer for the grim ideologies of autonomy and greed.
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