Roger Haydon Mitchell's Blog

A symbolic representation of the genealogy of church and empire

THESIS ABSTRACT

CHURCH, GOSPEL AND EMPIRE

a theological enquiry into the manner in which empire has impacted ecclesial formation and displaced originary gospel principles in the course of church history, indicating an alternative direction for future theology and praxis.

By Roger Haydon Mitchell,

The University of Lancaster, Department of Philosophy, Politics and Religion,

Successfully submitted for the degree of PhD, awarded July 2011

The dissertation argues that at an early stage in ecclesiastical history, the tradition’s founding and constituent principles were betrayed by a complicity with the prevailing politics of sovereignty.  This has led to a recasting of divine transcendence in terms of sovereign power and a displacement of Christianity by Christendom, from which the Western church has not recovered. The thesis follows the contours of contemporary theologians who seek to explain a dislocation between faith and socio-political life in terms of a fall in early modernity, but proposes that the earlier compromise represents a more decisive and determinative fall.

In order to trace the genealogy of this compromise, the dissertation examines its various manifestations in four synchronic historical studies.  These are the third/fourth century writings of Eusebius of Caesarea; the early thirteenth century careers of Pope Innocent III and Emperor Frederick II; the late seventeenth-century latitudinarianism of William III, Gilbert Burnet and the associated founding of the Bank of England; and the contemporary expression of what Hardt and Negri have termed ‘Empire’ and the rise of the politics of biopower, or ‘naked life’ alongside the eruption of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. Through this genealogy, the historical alignment of the Christian church with the mundane politics of sovereign power is demonstrated.  The contemporary significance of this alignment, it is argued, is that the Christian church is robbed of any political emancipatory potential. 

The final section of the dissertation considers the radical possibility of aligning the potential power of immaterial labour and living by faith and gestures towards ways in which theology may recover such a potential.  Drawing on an alternative theological configuration which has already been intimated in the four 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.

The thesis has now been been published by the American academic publishers Wipf and Stock under the title “Church, Gospel and Empire: How the Politics of Sovereignty Impregnated the West.” I am currently preparing a more popular book on the politics of kenarchy, which is developed from the kenotic theology pointed towards in the third part of the thesis. I have a publisher possibly interested in this in hope of getting it out sometime in 2012. If you are interested in either of these books, please let me know at roger@2mt.org.uk and I will get in touch with you as soon as they are available.