Dr Neville Buch (ABN 86703686642)
MICE Philosopher
Business Office
18 Callendar Street, Sunnybank Hills 4109
AUSTRALIA
Dr Neil Peach
MICE Philosopher
Management Institute for Contributory Economy
PO Box 3898
South Brisbane, Q 4101 QLD 4101
AUSTRALIA
17 April 2025
Dear Neil,
Following our fruitful discussion this morning, I have ended up with another essay, post, and email to explain the insights of political theology and the fact that we have plural worlds, in slumber, unaware of being captive to the spiral historiography, where each repeats its (their) own old problems with old solutions in ‘new wineskins’; and too many decision-makers ignoring the wisdom of perennial philosophy (e.g. Karl Jaspers).
We were discussing the work of Amos Yong at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California, The United States of America.
My telling the story of Australian Evangelical histories has to include the extraordinary shift to American educational models in the last half century. One set of different models have come from Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California (documents 02.a, b). The researcher (presenter) had visited Fuller in February 2023 to have discussions with the Dean of the School of Mission and Theology, and Professor of Theology and Mission, Dr. Amos Yong, and Dr. Kisteen Kim, the Paul E. Pierson Chair in World Christianity and Associate Dean for The Center For Missiological Research.
What my Fuller paper offers today is a contemporaneous history. Amos Yong himself, though, does not fully align with the Buch 1995 ART thesis (document 03), but there is sufficient alignment with the general arguments on cultural Americanisation and also with Yong’s concerns on the Evangelical meltdown over ethnicity, race, and politics (document 04). The ideological work of Yong is extraordinary and I fear is underread in the pews.
At the larger scoping of global politics, Fuller in Australia is not a matter of global convergence but a matter of cultural Americanisation which remains largely undigested in evangelical church life. The objections from the evangelical congregations tend to be the ignorance of the global scoping. Furthermore, the ART gets alleged legitimatisation in congregational life with an argument that that such beliefs and practices have motivations in basic evangelical education. Critical sociology and historiography, however, resisted the false justifications that come with the references of David Bebbington’s quadrilateral definition without the knowledge of political theology. This is why Amos Yong’s mapping of political theologies from the 2009 Cadbury Lectures is so important.
The 2009 Cadbury Lectures became Yong’s In the Days of Caesar (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010).
The strength of Yong’s approach is his phenomenology, which is the first section of the Part I in the book, which includes looking at an alternative economy. Section 2 surveys the field of political theology, and section 3 looks at Pentecostal trajectories, and Part II is on performance and the Pentecostal Political Theology which covers the themes of models, civil society, and the concept of hope. “Chapter 2. Political Theology: Surveying the Field” is the basis on the thinking of Carl Schmitt (details in sub-chapter sections 2.3.1. and 4.2.1).
Martin William Mittelstadt’s assessment is Yong’s framework is as follows:
“First, Jesus the Savior provides salvation as deliverance from cosmic forces of evil; such Pentecostals, particularly from the global south, address principalities and powers as political forces. Jesus’ victory over these forces enables the church to function as a new and alternative cosmopolis. Second, those who strive to mirror Jesus as Sanctifier proclaim a church based upon one of two political possibilities. Either they live apart from the world and produce a people of God in stark contrast to the prevailing culture or they seek to reform/transform the existing society. Third, where proclamation of Jesus the Baptizer blazes in continuity with the early Pentecostal missiological thrust, these Pentecostals insist upon prophetic and counter-cultural deliberation of the gospel for a post-colonial, post-Western, and post-secular era of globalization. Fourth, Jesus as Healer extends not only to physical restoration but also to a multi-faceted prosperity expressed as shalom which creates individual and collective redemptive lift for the people of God and potentially for the society at large. Finally, where Jesus the Soon Coming King remains critical to proclamation, Yong acknowledges various Pentecostal eschatological stances based upon classical dispensationalism, but seeks rather to encourage a healthy already/not yet tension whereby the kingdom of God provides realized political hope while also waiting for full consummation.” (document 05)
My assessment is that Yong is being metaphorical in this Pentecostal Theology based on a literal reading of Carl Schmitt (i.e. a literal realpolitik), but the problem is that, apart from the doctrine of classical dispensationalism, there is no clarity as to the meaning of the metaphors. Classical dispensationalism is the belief that divine authority dispenses the historicality from one “age” to another, that is the historicism which says that each historical epoch operates under different and separate rules. For example, the Old Testament Age has passed and the New Testament Age rules. A more liberal interpretation would also that the Age of Miracles has passed and the Age of Science rules, but this is not a Pentecostal belief.
My suggestion is that you look at the other works of political theology. Daniel Liechty (document 06) stated:
“A lesson from my father I have never forgotten was his admonishment as I haphazardly threw things into my box at quitting time: ‘Dan, you can tell a lot about a man by how he treats his tools.’ By analogy, we can tell a lot about the times in which we live by the type of attention its theologians pay to the concept of political theology. The 1960s and 1970s were decades in which political theology was front and center of the cutting edge in theological discussion. While during the 1980s and 1990s political theology all but disappeared from book titles, widely read works by people such as Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus, and Peter L. Berger are clearly examples of political theology, reflecting the conservative and rightward drift of popular opinion in those years. Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in explicit political theology on the left-leaning side of the spectrum. Clayton Crockett’s book* is a prime example of this resurgence.”
*Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism (Columbia University Press: New York, 2011).
This is an old set of problems with old solutions which keep spiralling back in the historiography in new wine skins (Howard A Snyder, The Problem of Wineskins: Church Structure in a Technological Age, 1975). Spencer Jackson at The University of Queensland, demonstrates that this spiralling has been happening, at least, since Samuel Richardson’s second novel, Clarissa (1747-8) (document 07).
See The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (2004; document 09). But given your interest in Bernard Stiegler, perhaps Ben Turner (document 10) should have the final word:
“In the notes for The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge, Georges Bataille states that he draws on “the essentially atheist current of thought that has not renounced the wealth . . . of theology. An atheologism, in other words, a thought nourished by the experience of God” (Bataille 2001, 237). Stiegler repeats this gesture by claiming that “one must pass through the transcendental in order to get beyond the transcendental” (Stiegler 2007, 340). It is necessary to consider transcendental questions, such as the human origin, yet humans do so through capacities that are shaped by the accidental history of empirical technical objects. Within the a-transcendental perspective, regulatory transcendentals condition human existence, but they are deprived of any necessity beyond their role in a particular empirical context. While Stiegler did not fully work through the consequences of his oblique references to the a-transcendental, a clear statement of its implication for the relationship between the transcendental and the empirical can be found in the second volume of Technics and Time: “The transcendental field is thus a-transcendental—beyond empirical/ transcendental opposition, distinguishing them without placing them in opposition” (Stiegler 2009b, 222).2 Humanity’s origin is a non-totalizable aporia that demands a response, but in a manner that will never supersede the a-transcendental frame formed by technical objects.” (32)…
“Such an image of pharmacological judgment as care or cure is necessitated by the concept of the non-inhuman, precisely because it rests on the claim that there is no necessity underlying a particular technical situation: “To take care, to cultivate, is to dedicate oneself to a cult, to believe there is something better: the non-inhuman par excellence, both in its projection to the level of ideas (consistencies) and in that this ‘better’ must come” (Stiegler 2010e, 178–79). If they are to be curative, these caring projections cannot totalize without recognizing their contingency, for they are subject to a set of a-transcendental conditions that cannot be reduced to an “ ‘ontology’ or any theology” (Stiegler 2018a, 109). Curative judgment cannot be expressed in a way that totalizes the human or being in general, for to do so would be to neglect the pharmacological undecidability that underpins the quasi-causal nature of consistence.” (68).
Kind regards,
Neville Buch
Historian,
President, Sea of Faith in Australia (SOFiA)
Professional Historians Australia (Queensland)
Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society (ANZHES)
Convenor, Sociology of Education Thematic Group, The Australian Sociological Association (TASA).
Regular Philosopher, The Philosophy Cafe Brisbane Meet Up.
Director, Brisbane Southside History Network (BSHN).
MPHA (Qld), Ph.D. (History) UQ., Grad. Dip. Arts (Philosophy) Melb., Grad. Dip. (Education) UQ.
Call: 0416 046 429
ABN: 86703686642
References
- Buch, Neville (2025). Letter: Amos Yong (2010). In the Days of Caesar Pentecostalism and Political Theology, ABN: 86703686642.
02.a. Buch, Neville (2023). Fuller-view-for-Telling-the-Story-of-Australian-Evangelical-History-Presentation-Handout, ABN: 86703686642.
02.b. Buch, Neville (2023). Fuller view for Telling the Story of Australian Evangelical History (Full Paper), ABN: 86703686642.
- Buch, Neville (2023). Buch’s Ph.D. Preamble, ABN: 86703686642.
- Buch, Neville (2023). Amos Yong Appendices, ABN: 86703686642.
- Mittelstadt, Martin William (undated). Amos Yong (. In the Days of Caesar: Pentecostalism and Political Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), https://www.academia.edu/50756181/Review_In_the_Days_of_Caesar_by_Amos_Yong
- Daniel Liechty (2013). Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism, by Clayton Crockett, (Columbia University Press: New York, 2011, 202 pp. ISBN 978 0 231), Religion, 43:1, 108-111.
- Jackson, Spencer (2015). “Clarissa”‘s Political Theology and the Alternative Modernity of God, Death, and Writing, The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 56, No. 3 (FALL 2015), pp. 321-342.
- Becker, Matthew L. (2024). Fundamental Theology: A Protestant Perspective, UK: Bloomsbury T & T Clark.
- Scott, Peter and William T. Cavanaugh (2004). The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
- Turner, Ben (2023). Returning to Judgment Bernard Stiegler and Continental Political Theory, NY: Suny Press.
Neville Buch
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