The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion by Crockett Clayton Robbins Jeffrey W. Putt B. Keith

Author:Crockett, Clayton, Robbins, Jeffrey W., Putt, B. Keith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Christology and the Greco-Roman Imaginary

It was Rome that came to instantiate many of these Greek anxieties, establishing a stable, territorially unified currency and a centralized empire, managed with unprecedented bureaucracy.23 Hellenistic monarchies served as an important transition to this comparatively monolithic monetary economy. The Roman Empire, beginning with Augustus, realized (ideologically, if not in practice) the inaccessible ruler, masked in bureaucracy and military might. The Roman economy dramatically increased the monetization of the region, disseminating monetary habits. The imperial image was circulated on coinage, further shoring up the ideological matrix of sovereign reign and governance.24 Sovereign representation, monetization, bureaucratic management—these are key elements of the Greco-Roman context in which Christian theology developed.

Therefore Giorgio Agamben’s recent archaeology of the patristic notion of oikonomia is at once dazzling, necessary, and yet insufficient.25 It is important for it maps the ways in which formative ideas of God correlate to the Greco-Roman political context. Examining the tension between ideas of political sovereignty and reign, on one hand, and engaged governance, on the other, Agamben explores the manner in which emerging Christian ideas of the godhead appear to relate. In short, the Father designates the site of sovereign authority while the Son indicates the place of bureaucratic administration. What Agamben neglects is the critical role that monetization and economy proper play in conceptions of sovereignty and administration. Drawing this out would provide a linkage to the monetary language used to describe the identity and work of the incarnate Son.

As Agamben explains, oikonomia becomes crucial in patristic texts as a method of reconciling the Father’s relationship to the Son, making sense of the possibility of this duality (to which, of course, later is added the Spirit), of how God could be transcendent, reigning in heaven, as well as immanent, and embodied on earth. Oikonomia comes to denote this very relationship between Father and Son, as well as the process of incarnation and redemption. God is not simply sovereign king, transcendent and impassible. God is, in the Son, immanent and directly overseeing the redemption of creation. God manages such redemption, and this management reflects something about the inner nature of God as well.

What is significant about this development in patristic thought, says Agamben, is the reconciliation of two previously disparate strands of theopolitical thought. In Gnostic perspective, for instance, God, the One, is utterly transcendent and uninvolved with creation. Interaction with creation falls to the demiurge, since the originary ground and source of Being would not be sullied through interaction with the base materiality of the world. This parallels aspects of Greco-Roman political thought, in which the sovereign reigns as figurehead, as seat and center of power, while governance of a territory falls to bureaucratic administration. As Agamben notes, the old adage “the king reigns but does not govern” relates to this traditional separation between the sovereign and his bureaucracy. The novel Christian development seeks to unite these two distinct elements in one center, in the singular being of God, managed through the oikonomia of Trinitarian differentiation. Now God is posited as both sovereign lord and manager or overseer of his kingdom and its subjects.

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