On theology and international relations: World politics beyond the empty sky
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117813479985 |
| Author | Nicholas Rengger |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
International Relations
27(2) 141 –157
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117813479985
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On theology and international
relations: World politics
beyond the empty sky
Nicholas Rengger
St Andrews University
Abstract
In previous periods, scholarship about international relations often drew on writing in theology, as
well as more familiarly, history, law or philosophy. Some very influential scholars of international
relations – think of Rheinhold Niebuhr, Martin Wight and Herbert Butterfield – were extremely
widely read in theological topics, and their theological concerns influenced their understanding of
international relations. This article looks at some contemporary writing with overtly theological
concerns and asks how might contemporary international relations scholarship benefit from an
engagement with contemporary philosophical and political theology.
Keywords
history of ideas, international ethics, realism, theology
Nations meet under an empty sky from which the Gods have departed
Hans Morgenthau
For riseth up against realm and rod,
A thing forgotten, a thing downtrod,
The last lost giant, even God,
Is risen against the world’
G. K. Chesterton
It was not all that long ago that theological argument was relatively familiar in the gen-
eral discussion of international relations. In the United States, Rheinhold Niebuhr, per-
haps the most influential Protestant theologian of the century, was a noted influence on
scholarly and public discussion of international affairs, especially from a so-called realist
Corresponding author:
Nicholas Rengger, School of International Relations, St Andrews University, The Scores, St Andrews, KY16
9AX, UK.
Email: njr3@st-andrews.ac.uk
Article
142 International Relations 27(2)
point of view (the diplomat and Scholar George Kennan once supposedly called him the
‘Father of us all’),1 and in the United Kingdom, the founders of the British Committee
for the theory of international politics, Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight, were both
deeply devout Christians whose work on international relations was often overtly or
implicitly underpinned by theological claims. And Wight in particular was also influ-
enced strongly by a third member of the British Committee, the theologian Donald
Mackinnon, widely regarded as the most original and influential British theologian of the
last century.2 Influential theologians on both sides of the Atlantic would also regularly
write about international affairs for a wide audience.3 And if one looks beyond the
Anglosphere – which, of course, frequently monolingual Anglophone scholars are gener-
ally happy not to do – one can see the influence of various different theological positions
on debates about international relations; liberation theology is an obvious case in point,4
as would be the critical political theology of theologians like Johann Baptist-Metz,5 some
of the concerns of the nouvelle Theologie in France in the inter-war and immediate post-
war period,6 much of Catholic social thought and so on.
During the 1960s and 1970s, however, as the sterile aridity of behaviouralism began
to stultify the academic study of international relations, first in the United States and
then, to a lesser and rather more partial extent, elsewhere, the conversation between
theology and international relations began to dry up. Of course, there was movement
on both sides; the fault did not lie wholly with International Relations – academic
Theology is hardly without its own fads and fashions – but certainly what was a com-
monplace for Niebuhr and Wight became very quickly a fading memory: a ghost from
a forgotten world.
There are signs, however, that this is no longer true, and the conversation between
theology and international relations has begun to revive, to the benefit of both. All the
books considered in this essay speak to this, some more directly than others, and collec-
tively they display very well, I think, both why the conversation should be revived and
interesting and important wegmarken on how it might be developed. The books are not
all about the same thing, of course, and none of them are directly about international
relations – though two, those by Elshtain and Milbank, discuss international relations in
some depth – but all of them have implications for both international relations (in the
world) and International Relations (the academic study of that world) that we would do
well to ponder. The essay will try and show this and, along the way, will engage with
some of the specific arguments the books offer, sympathetically but also critically.
Origins
While they are not all about the same thing, they do all circle around certain common
themes, and I think it is perhaps appropriate to start with one such theme since it is
referred to, more or less explicitly, in all four books and which has a very direct implica-
tion for the history, and the study of the history, of international relations. We might call
this the ‘origins of modernity’ question, and it is most explicitly raised by Gillespie;
therefore, let us begin with his treatment of it. Gillespie’s argument essentially is that the
modern world – roughly the world from the seventeenth century onwards and which we
deem to be thoroughly secular and which is predicated on a rejection of the Theological
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