Political theologies of Christian missionaries,European colonialism,and postcolonial resistance

William Bain’s Political Theology of International Order moves the literature on political theology into a more international terrain and, at the same time, prompts international political theory to reckon more directly with the theological grounding of the basic presuppositions, metaphors, and structures that have informed competing understandings of global order. Putting international political theory and political theology into conversation is exciting; this is a valuable addition to both fields of inquiry, and it demonstrates by example that political theology offers one of the most fertile grounds for critical inquiry today. The book also begins to sketch out an alternative account of the history of political thought that puts political theology at its center. Against the popular construction that politics and religion have been ruptured by “modernity,” Bain argues for deeper conceptual continuities that locate the origins of the modern international order in theological disputes and finds the traces of competing theological ideas in the contemporary world.

The book’s central idea, which is presented with remarkable elegance, is that there are two incompatible theological modes of explaining political order. Across the chapters, international political thinking is classified according to these two modes. Their social lives and the dynamics of their opposition represent a different narrative of the history of international political theory. In the beginning, there was immanent order. According to this theory, a rational God arranged the world according to a necessary pattern. The existing world is the best and only possible one, or it is how it is for a reason. All the pieces are arranged for the good of “the whole.” Thinkers who subscribe to this view use the rhetoric of a pre-existing logic or plan, the whole over the part, obligations beyond self-interest and will, the rootedness of authority in something beyond consent and convention, an overarching law of universal progress, or the existence of an objective reason of things to which conventions, norms, and institutions should align.

Eventually, immanent order was displaced, and a different theological orientation informed political thinking about the world. Bain calls it imposed order. Ironically, it emerged out of the attempt to silence philosophers and take some ideas off the table. Bain traces this theory to The Condemnation of 219 Propositions of 1277, in which Bishop Étienne Tempier argued against the philosophers’ understanding of a rational God. Here, the idea of a rational God inspired by Aristotle (or, by Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina) was too heretical because there is no rational answer about why God acts as he does, no rules that God must follow, and no necessarily rational and comprehensible reason for why things are the way they are. According to imposed order, inasmuch as there is a pattern in the world, it is contingent; this is not the only possible world, and there is not always reason to assume that it is the best one. The parts take precedence over the whole, whether it is in elevating the state or the individual. In fact, “the whole,” if such a thing even exists, is merely the sum of the parts, all comprising a constructed system. Within the logic and language of imposed order, people are free to choose among an array of possibilities, and there are no preset, rationally available criteria.

The logics are incompatible: either God is not free to violate reason, or God is unfettered pure will. As Bain (2020) helpfully summarizes, according to immanent order, God thinks, whereas according to imposed order, God speaks (p. 7). The world can look very different if these theological vocabularies and doctrines are transferred to the realm of politics. Either the world’s arrangement is rational and necessary, or it is arranged by will and contingency. Bain traces these two logics from 1277 and the Renaissance and Reformation to a series of canonical thinkers and to contemporary international relations. In an especially exciting chapter (Bain, 2020: Ch. 4), he offers a Martin Luther who “separates religion and politics, only to re-theologize politics, and indeed the rest of the world, by suspending everything from God’s will” (Bain, 2020: 102). Meanwhile, against readings of Hugo Grotius as the father of cooperative international society, he refers to the author of The Truth of the Christian Religion as an immanent-ian whose understanding of law and rights derive from theological ideas about God and the immutability of the law of nature (Bain, 2020: Ch. 5). Although the view that Thomas Hobbes is an imposed-er who gives primacy to the will is unlikely to spark disagreement, regarding him as “a latter-day protagonist in the medieval quarrel about God’s freedom” provocatively and insightfully runs counter to a literature that secularizes his writings, showing instead that in fact his theology and his politics go hand in hand (Bain, 2020: Ch. 6). The next two chapters discuss more recent examples of imposed order, including in seemingly opposed theories that emphasize either balance of power or global constitutionalism; both, in turns out, emphasize a constructed world. The final chapter, among other things, finds an echo of immanent order in the vocabularies of human rights, humanity, and nature.

In what follows, I wish to supplement Bain’s account by sketching out two historical threads that, I think, are inseparable from the histories and genealogies of European thought and European order that occupy much of the book. There are gestures toward both strands along the margins of Bain’s account, in a handful of observations and footnotes. I think that they also have important implications for the place of political theological difference in this story and for the status of colonialism, hierarchy, and resistance. First, I expand on some of the book’s references to non-Christians and discuss the place of Islamic theology. Second, reflecting on Luther in relation to Muslim empires and adapting Bain’s acknowledgment of Grotius’s justifications for colonialism, I highlight the significance of hierarchy, enmity, and violence for a number of the thinkers mentioned, especially what their political theologies authorize in relation to non-Christians. These two sets of observations, I think, can help us imagine a complementary story less about international order than about the politics of proselytization and colonization. It also raises questions about the work that political theology as an analytic can do, especially when we globalize political theory and international political thought. I conclude by pondering the place of resistance in relation to imposed order and immanent order.

The relative absence of non-Christian political theology in this story is striking, though it may have implications both for this story and beyond it. There are two references in the book to the significance of Muslim thinkers for the translation of Aristotle and the elaboration of the immanent position (Bain, 2020: 39, 39n.52), as well as the acknowledgment that “Christian theologians, not to mention a host of Jewish and Islamic thinkers, proved to be remarkably adept at engaging pagan philosophy in creative ways” (Bain, 2020: 28). Bain (2020) observes, “Not only did [Muslim thinkers] set philosophy on a course that diverged from the authority of Christian theology, they also held out a formidable alternative to the Christian faith” (p. 39n.52). If one starts with this footnote, the significance of these thinkers and of Islamic theology, I suspect, runs deep, perhaps constituting a dialectic of borrowing and otherness. After all, it is noteworthy that the Aristotelian interpretation of a rational God and the eternity of the world was both substantively and symbolically identified with Ibn Rushd, or Averroes as Latinate Christians called him (Bain, 2020: 38–40). ¹ The basic component of the immanent-ian position was identified with a Muslim. Some of Tempier’s condemnations were barely veiled references to (or caricatures of) positions held by Averroes and his readers, just as some of his refutations resonate with Algazel’s (al-Ghazali in Latin) own responses to the philosophers. Shortly after the earlier condemnation of 1270, Giles of Rome compiled the chief theological errors of the major six non-Christian philosophers: Aristotle, Averroes, Avicenna, Algazel, Alkindi, and Maimonides (Dales, 1990: 154). Other contemporaneous refutations of natural philosophy’s errors about the nature of God, such as Bonaventure’s, drew on Algazel’s arguments in the Metaphysica against the idea of the eternity of the world (Dales, 1990: 91–94). To overstate the matter somewhat, the story of immanent and imposed order might be recast, on the one hand, as threaded by a Christian heresiographical discourse molded through and against the Saracen, the Turk, the Muslim (who represents either the spread of heresy or the rational overcoming of Islam); and on the other hand, as a trans- or cross-faith polemic in which philosophers and theologians shared arguments and insults across religious divides to debate the nature of God and the universe. The polemic has its roots in (or is the echo of) Islamic theological disputes that were later picked up by Latinate Christians. These features are important not because they multiply the cast of characters or offer a more inclusive story, but rather because they suggest other configurations of politics and theology: rather than a translation of theological ideas to politics or the unfolding of a parochial intra-Christian debate in Paris unto the rest of the world, the entanglements of politics in theology, of the Christian alongside and against the non-Christian, theos and polemos, would locate geopolitical relations and a somewhat more global story as already in the beginnings of the genealogy of immanent and imposed order.

If some of this is partly right, it would also point to the significance of religious difference for political theology more generally, including for many of the other central characters in the book. That, in turn, can invite us to consider the status of difference in political theology and to attend to other political theologies. Consider Martin Luther’s theology. It can be reasonably argued that it is inseparable from his understanding not only of the Pope, but also of Jews and the Ottoman Empire. He was supportive of Jewish resistance to the Catholic Church because he thought Jews were meant to—and would—convert, and when they did not, they more clearly became an enemy and religious competitor. Here, theological questions about providence and God’s will are inseparable from questions of antagonism and difference. Put differently, for Luther, the place and significance of Jews is to be understood and elaborated in relation to God’s will, just as God’s will is to be understood and elaborated in relation to the Jew. Similarly, in his writings on Islam and the Ottoman Empire, but also in his 95 Theses and across his entire oeuvre, Luther identifies Islam and the Pope as two sides of the same Satanic coin, and he seems to have understood the Turk to be God’s punishment, put on Earth to serve a higher Christian purpose, and ultimately will have been a necessary step along the road to salvation. (Indeed, the political-theological discourse of the Turk as a scourge sent by God was common for more than a hundred years.) And yet, he imagined that the Turk will eventually be converted, as did many of his contemporaries, including Erasmus (whose other arguments are largely immanent-ian). ² In both cases of non-Christians, or with Islam and Judaism, it would seem that theological claims about the nature of God, God’s will, conversion, and authority are inseparable from the political background of Jewish and Muslim difference and the theological problems therein. Rather than issuing as the logical political consequences of already settled theological principles, Luther’s theological positions were elaborated through and against political-theological otherness. ³ All of this would suggest that imposed and immanent orders are also political theologies for explaining, translating, and dealing with difference.

This claim might signal a disagreement about whether to start from theological statements and treat them as purely intellectual, or whether such statements are always already reflections of and reflections on political relations and conditions (the answer, I think, is that the extent depends on the thinker). Nonetheless, similar questions can be raised about Grotius’ and Hobbes’s political theologies. I agree with Bain that Grotius defended Dutch imperialism and that he did so in a language that relied on the idea of God’s reason and emphasized humanity as a single whole. Bain (2020) also seems to suggest that Grotius “did not advocate the plunder of foreign lands at the expense of indigenous rulers in the East Indies, but the defense of a well ordered and disposed concord in which every thing has a divinely appointed place and purpose” (p. 121, 121n.82). But whether Grotius defended colonial conquest in a “self-serving” way (Bain, 2020: 126) or whether this was a logical entailment of sincerely held immanent-ian convictions—which seems impossible to adjudicate—the status of colonial dispossession is remarkably unchanged. And yet, here too the non-Christian seems just as fundamental for Grotius’s theology as for Luther’s. His approach to the Americas, his belief in the universality and perpetuity of law among all peoples, his ethnographic treatment of all peoples in the mold of Christianity, and his interest in the active proselytization of peoples in Africa, America, and the Middle East inform, not only reflect, his political theology. More than being merely compatible, these strike me as fundamental. Meanwhile, Hobbes offers an “account of human relations that presupposes the God of power” (Bain, 2020: 145)—and here, too, the status of the non-Christian discloses the structure of a colonial political theology. For example, Hobbes preaches the universality and universal accessibility of the golden rule as well as the absolute status of sovereignty. The elaboration of the two in The Leviathan again traces a colonial line around the world: it would be a problem, he writes, for a pagan from the Indies to attempt to convert Christians in Europe, because the golden rule, but a European Christian traveling to convert people in the Americas is uncontroversial and a violation of nothing. The radically different tones he adopts in each description, or the different logic when considering missionary activity in Europe versus in America, reflects a racialized settler colonial hierarchy underlying his political theology, or a political theology of imperial order. ⁴

These examples are about the insistent presence of theological difference and religious opposition in the elaboration of both theological and political ideas. With each of Luther, Grotius, and Hobbes, some constellation of missionary activity, colonial conquest, and theological difference winds through the “international order” they envision. It is possible that immanent and imposed orders offer two sharply contrasting justifications for missionary conversion and the conquest of the world, one based on a rational God and the other on a God of power. More cynically, the two logics simply expand the repertoire available to modern European Christian thinkers for articulating and defending their missionary and colonial politics. Take, for example, Roger Bacon, who argued that rather than war or miracles, converting infidels had to take place through human reason and rational argumentation, bringing the mathematical sciences together with history and theology. (Bacon was dismissive of scholasticism and hostile to Tempier’s condemnation of Aristotle, which landed him in jail.) (Tolan, 2002: 226). Meanwhile, Luther seemed to think that conversion would work through miracles. Erasmus seemed to think the Turk would convert if shown by example that European Christians are good and peaceful people. Or, alongside Luther, the scope and structure of political theology and international order would look different if Francisco de Vitoria and settler colonialism are threaded through it: on the one hand, Vitoria acknowledges that the Native is human, that he has rights, that the various reasons for the conquest are basically unjust and self-serving, but, on the other hand, he apologizes that preaching Christianity must always be allowed and now that some Indigenous peoples have converted, it would be unjust for their dispossessors to just leave (De Vitoria, 1991). ⁵

Attention to these dynamics of translating difference and to this broader cartography would suggest, within or adjacent to the two political theologies of international order, the political theologies of European empire and Christian missionary expansion. Such a redescription can be potentially significant for three reasons. First, it provincializes the idea and scope of “international order,” pointing to how its boundaries and hierarchies are themselves part of a theology (see Pitts, 2019). This would also point to the political theology by which Latinate Christendom could stand in for the world and international order while obscuring its recurrent violence. Second, it would carve out space to consider alternative political theologies. This would include non-Christian cosmologies and theologies, some of which exceed the rational/willful binary. It would also include those that were displaced, transformed, or in confrontation with a colonial order; a notable example is the Hawaiian cosmology that accounts for “the world and all things upon it” as beautifully and brilliantly theorized by Chang (2016). Third, the redescription draws attention to the significance of the colonial politics of missionaries across the colonial world, from Hawaii to Natal (Chang, 2016; Tallie, 2019). It would invite a reconsideration of the genealogy of the missionary, both as a neglected figure of political theory and as a history of the present across the globe.

Furthermore, understanding these as modes that lend themselves to colonial enterprises raises two further questions and avenues for inquiry about political theology and colonialism. On the one hand, the language of the part and the whole is employed differently by immanent-ians and imposed-ers, but either deployment easily lends itself to colonial justifications. One can erect a racial hierarchy and champion the subjection of others in the name of the good of the whole or as in the interest of the part. More deeply, what counts as the whole or a part, or as a part claiming to be the whole, expelling others from consideration, treating two parts as two irreconcilable wholes, or writing the history of the whole as the destiny of one part, these uses may exceed the binary.

On the other hand, if the two logics do different kinds of work for the criticism of prevailing orders and the possibility of imagining different ones, what is the place of resistance in them? One of the book’s arguments is that “the language of immanent order does not disappear altogether; it survives as a rhetoric. . .which is set against what human beings assert and do in the name of will and artifice” (Bain, 2020: 109). What is the relationship of this hollowing out to the languages available to anticolonialism and postcolonial resistance? Appeals to human society, human rights, humanity, or for the need to understand the prevailing structure as both violating nature but also a necessary step toward re-awakening and “restoring” a just order were common in the twentieth century, as were criticisms that colonial dispossession violates the interests of a people and that the entire international order is illegitimate because it is constructed to serve the interests of white supremacy and colonial capitalism. From Gandhi to Du Bois to Sayyid Qutb, there are traces of both immanent-ian and imposed-er vocabularies, simultaneously diagnosing the hidden political theologies underlying the contemporary order and championing anticolonial political theologies that reconfigured necessity and freedom. These are, I think, some of the possible avenues that Bain opens up.

Bain convincingly challenges his readers to recognize that competing understandings of necessity and freedom continue to shape the political world, and that these terms reflect unacknowledged theological commitments. The observations and questions above attempt to draw out three sets of issues that complement Political Theology of International Order. All three revolve around political theological difference, or the place of politics and difference in theology. From the place of Islam and broadening our geographic scope, to the status of colonialism and missionaries for both immanent and imposed order, and finally to the possibilities of resistance that either of these or other logics might facilitate, the questions that remain are about reading difference, violence, and empire back into or out of the logics of international order.