The object of this paper of itself demands to be unfolded in two considerations: one, reflecting on the meaning and the task of “political theology” (I), the other, investigating the relations between religion and society in the light of this “political theology” (II).

Love as a moral norm has a very prominent place within the discussions of contemporary Christian ethics. There are three definite trends especially evident in the most popular of these discussions of love. In the first instance, there is a tendency to make love serve as the sole norm in ethics. There is a second tendency to equate love with beneficence. This means, among other things, that love tends to be put into a utilitarian type of calculus and that specific norms such as the Ten Commandments are either played down or dropped entirely. Both of these views of love, by themselves or held in concert, collapse the traditional distinction between love and justice. There is yet a third ten-1 dency to drop any distinction between love for God and love for/the neighbor. Love for God is simply to be understood as love for the neighbor and, as such, it is not something to pursue or cultivate for its own sake. That all three of these tendencies are significantly related to one another should become evident from our further discussion of them.

Several years before his death the Irish novelist and playwright, George Moore, wrote his “one joyous book,” A Story Teller's Holiday Combining “oddments of folklore” and the “rich Anglo-Irish idiom,” Moore traced in Boccaccian fashion the ancient Christian practice of syneisactism in early Celtic Christianity. In his work Moore was admittedly stimulated by the great Celticist, Kuno Meyer, and by the then burgeoning translations of ancient Irish manuscripts describing syneisactism.

1. The present state of the discussion.

Fifty years ago Bernhard Duhm, in the introduction of his book Israels Propheten, wrote: “Prophecy has its history. It is not a timeless revelation of a supernatural truth. Again, its task is not to ‘prophesy’ events of a distant future in order to allow a simple faith to enjoy the consistent agreement of promise and fulfillment. The prophets are God's messengers. They are charged to proclaim to their contemporaries firstly God's decisions and, furthermore, his demands. Whereas divination in various forms occurs among all nations, the prophets with whom we are dealing here are a distinct Israelite phenomenon.”

Confronted with the conventional genre of Hegelian interpretation, the following pages take on a rather unusual cast, for their concern is exclusively theological. Furthermore, I make the large assumption in this essay that the customary theological critique of Hegel, which flagellates him for the Aujhebung of theology into philosophy, is both inadequate and even crude, however much the principal motivation of such a critique may be quite justifiable.

The philosophical problem of whether God can create free men has a special form for Christian theologians. Among the many kinds of freedom that might be claimed for men, theologians are most interested in the kind that involves the human response to God. For Christians the important response is to God's revelation in Christ. The form of the problem of creation and freedom of chief interest to Christian theologians, therefore, is whether these two doctrines are compatible:

1. that God is the creator of everything finite and contingent, including men and their responses, and

2. that through the gospel of Jesus Christ God addresses men who may respond freely.