Dark Liberation: Why This Political Theology? 1 Anthony Mansueto When interest in political theology began to emerge on the Christian Left and Center Left in the 1960s, those engaging the discipline were at pains to distinguish not just their specific theological positions but their entire set of questions and concerns from those which motivated the “Old Political Theology” of the NAZI jurist Carl Schmitt. This concern is reflected in the outstanding status questionis prepared by Francis Schussler Fiorenza in 1977 (Fiorenza 1977/2012), which makes it clear that the Schmittian problematic is simply one among many possible approaches, whether to a theology of the political or to what he and his associates call a “consciously political theology" as opposed to the unconsciously political theology which is created when theologians do not understand the social basis and political valence of their claims. Specifically, Fiorenza identifies the following political-theological paradigms: • The tripartite distinction between mythical, philosophical, and civic or political theology associated with Varro (cited in Augustine 427/1972), • Augustine’s doctrine of the Two Cities (Augustine 427/1972), • An Enlightenment doctrine centered around natural theology and civic religion (Locke 1690/1967, Rousseau 1762/1962) , • The political theology of the Catholic Restoration, within which he situates Schmitt, but which also includes the much earlier and somewhat different work of de Maistre and de Bonald (Bonald 1796, Maistre 1775-1821/1965, • The German political theology of the 1960s 1970s (Solle 1974) and • Latin American liberation theology (Solle 1974). To these, even restricting ourselves to the limited historical and civilizational frame which Fiorenza analyzes, I would add, at a minimum: • Thomistic political theology, both in its original form, and in its Baroque and social Catholic/ Christian Democratic incarnations (Goerner 1965, Gilson 1968), and • An entire spectrum of Protestant political theologies including, at least, early Lutheran and Reformed political theologies, the competing liberal and Evangelical political theologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Neo-Orthodoxy, and an entire sub-spectrum of fundamentalist political theological, from Dispensationalism through Reconstruction and Dominion (Niebuhr 1951). If we were to bring the typology up to date, we would need to add: • The Communio theology which developed in reaction to Latin American liberation theology (Ratzinger 1984, 1986) and This paper appears in Seeking Wisdom, April 2021, accessible at www.seekingwisdom.com. 1 1