NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 77, Issue 4, 2023

The concept of figure was used by theology from its origins in Paul of Tarsus to the explicit strange hybridisation that is present in Sacred Scriptures of the symbolic—the space of discourse and meanings—and the historical— the space of existence. With the publication of Figure, Eric Auerbach offered a genealogy of the idea of figure that made its use possible in disciplines other than theology. Considering the genealogy of the figure presented by Auerbach, this article explores the possibilities offered by figural thinking for opening new avenues in political-theological research. To this end, the article will, firstly, relocate the meaning of the theological idea of figuration in one of the representatives of 20th-century theology, Henry de Lubac. Secondly, the article will briefly recover the idea of figuration in Eric Auerbach’s genealogy in Figura (1956) and compare it with the similar concept of signature, coined by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, which, unlike figuration, has been prolifically exploited in contemporary political theology. The article will conclude with some remarks to explore the possibilities of the political implications of figural theology.

Canonicity might seem to be the opposite of creativity. Yet, cultures and communities, hence any political realm, depends on strategies of simplification and fixation. Canons do have the role of creating habits and “normality” through which individuals feel to belong to a same world. That counts explicitly in the academic world where researchers, precisely in order to operate inventively, canot but rely on conventions and canonicity.

This paper explores the concept of the “theo-political” within the paradigm of inventive theology. Such a theology methodologically abstracts from classical dogmatic or hermeneutic content. It asks primarily the question of the possibility of believing and making to believe. Informed by philosophical rhetoric (amongst others, Chaim Perelman) and postmodern critique, inventive theology proposes to be pistology before becoming a practice of idea-construction. Postmodern theology is no longer a standalone operation or a master-discourse, but a practice of connectiveness, a theology of and in relation to something. The hypen in the notion of the “theo-political” marks this interdependency of theological and—in this case—political approaches. The paper analyzes Schmitt’s insights in the theo-political in three steps. After sketching out briefly his definition of the political, it will speculatively reconstruct Schmitt’s ontology to revert to his (non-outspoken) theology as it appears in his eschatological worldview. Then it will connect Schmitt’s political ontology with the rhetorical paradigm and will close with some brief remarks on liberal-inventive theo-politics. Liberal-inventive political theology could then be defined as “talking-cure” that will hinder the effectuation of Schmitt’s real possibilities of politics by working semantic and ethical “inventiveness” in the Messianic light of the unreal possibility.

What does Gorgias has to say about religious speech considered as a form of rhetorical speech directed at persuasion? Or more precisely, what does his rhetoric teaches us about the nature and origin of the persuasiveness of religious speech? Now, to properly understand how, according to Gorgias, from a rhetorical perspective religious beliefs arise, this article shall first deal with his conception of the connection between language, thinking and being. And for this purpose, it will consider his treatise On the Non-Existent or On Nature—after which it shall engage with his rhetorical interpretation of religious speech in the Helen. In this way it becomes clear wherein lies the power of religious speech and what it means for the way in which people are religiously convinced and come to religious faith.

The “propaganda by the deed” is a 19th-century anarchist notion emphasizing the communicative power of action in revealing the non-inevitability of human political organization. In this article, I offer a reading of the 1527 Schleitheim Confession in light of this notion. Schleitheim is similarly animated by an assertion of possibility: ecclesial and worldly sovereign order are not inevitable, but can be remade. Schleitheim gives us in detailed rigor techniques by which the ecclesiopolitical community can be shaped. In giving us these practices—including regulations on baptism, church discipline, and the election of leaders, among others—the text seems aware that this new community, too, is not inevitable. This becomes especially apparent in its closing statements, instructing its followers to refuse the swearing of oaths. Instead of such sovereign guarantees, it points toward the lived practice of the community as what we might call the confession by the deed, as a form of life that is never guaranteed, but must be lived, interminably to be restaged and reasserted.