Political Theology
POLITICAL THEOLOGY is one in a series of attempts made by Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians since the 1960s to come to grips with the foundations of Christianity in light of the twentieth-century crisis of culture. After World War I, theology had reached a kind of equilibrium wherein the Protestants were constellated about the three giants, Karl Barth (1886–1968), Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), and Paul Tillich (1886–1965), and the Catholics were still operating under the auspices of the scholasticism evoked by Pope Leo XIII in 1879, when he called for a renewal of Thomism. By the close of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), however, these liberal and neoorthodox solutions to the mediation between Christianity and modern cultures had suddenly become irretrievably passé, for it was widely felt that none of the dominant theologies, estimable as they might be, had really come to terms with the crisis of modern culture in ways that were sufficiently profound or adequately differentiated.
These deficiencies were registered within the mainly academic context of European and North American theology through the increasing influence of the nineteenth-century "masters of suspicion," Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Nietzsche's critique of modernity had probed the enervating effects upon life in the West caused by the invasion of other cultures and the various forms of reflection upon culture by historical consciousness in terms of nihilism and the death of God.
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