Nonviolent Politics and the Force of Hope: Christian Eschatology and Judith Butler’s Political Philosophy

This paper probes a potential alternative to the collusion of theology and “dehumanizing violence,” a term capturing socially mediated practices and institutions undermining human dignity. In making claims with universal aspirations, theology, especially pertaining to claims about humanity, smuggles in culturally contingent norms ascribed to certain kinds of bodies and is exemplified by the theological entanglement with categories such as race, gender, and ability. Such entanglements promote dehumanizing violence for those made an “other” to these culturally contingent norms posing as universally true.

As an alternative to theological collusions with dehumanizing violence, this paper integrates the recent work of philosopher Judith Butler into the theology of Edward Schillebeeckx to offer a critical intervention addressing the violence of Christian theological anthropology. Schillebeeckx frames theology through an eschatological horizon, promoting a futural account of humanity. For him, Christian discipleship incarnates God’s Reign by defending the humanum, the hoped-for humanity symbolized by the Reign of God, against threats to harm. Integrating Butler’s work on the problem of universalized norms and nonviolence promotes a theological method animated by hope, one that aspires to remake humanity over and against dehumanizing violence to anticipate God’s Reign within history. This paper thus argues that the framework of nonviolent worldbuilding, expressed as the force of hope, offers a methodological path forward for confronting theological collusions with dehumanizing violence.

Schillebeeckx’s theology confronts dehumanizing violence by foregrounding human suffering as central to theological method. Human knowledge production, for him, emerges through experiences of contrast. Contrasting experiences of suffering and violence evince a hope-filled response. Revelation names a hoped-for salvation found in God, which, for Schillebeeckx, is eternally new and positive. History is awash with meaninglessness and suffering, allowing only fragments of positivity to emerge within its wreckage amid a quest for a more humane world. The central symbol for the hope of God’s transformation of history takes place through Christ and culminates in the Reign of God. Experiences of contrast challenge epistemological frameworks promoting harm, compelling new theological and practical insights aiming to anticipate this Reign. Schillebeeckx orients theological method to hope, the practical task of incarnating God’s Reign. This method implements a dialectic between “mystical” and “political” theology. The “mystical” component necessitates the interrogation of theological concepts that motivate praxis, and the “political” necessitates an interrogation of the active life concerning experiences of altering concrete realities. The dialectic between the “mystical” and the “political” animates a Christian hope to anticipate God’s Reign. This “proleptic praxis” seeks to construct a more just and loving world in the defense of the humanum.

To act as a conversation partner for defending the humanum through hope, Butler’s work delineates how violence circumscribes subject formation. This earlier work details how human bodies materialize within socially inscribed norms that perpetuate dehumanizing violence to marginalized communities via enunciations of universal norms. Butler’s more recent work has explored solutions to this problem by examining the ways a world has been built and offers a trajectory for generating ones to help create livable lives. A “world” names the material embeddedness of bodies within their relational ontology. Butler’s nonviolent politics names the construction of worlds that honor those who are marginalized by dehumanizing violence. The question, in one of their more recent works, “What kind of world is this?” ponders how and why the social relations have been constituted and discerns how political coalitions can construct alternative, life-giving worlds. In posing such a question, their political focus on relational responsibility centers marginalized lives and dimensions of the world consigning many to a premature death.

For Butler, nonviolent politics ruptures violent frames, interpretive lenses for norms dictating what constitutes the human by creating new ways of being a human community. In contending with the problem of universalized norms, the heart of theology’s collusion with dehumanizing violence, Butler reformulates a nonviolent project as anticipating a future, one affirming the full humanity of those ostracized by universalized norms. Practices of nonviolence accompany a consistent interrogation of these norms, providing space for a convergence with the eschatologically driven, proleptic praxis aiming to defend the humanum and remake humanity in anticipating these new worlds.

In anticipating this future, nonviolent politics mobilize “force,” a term naming the creative and destructive capacities in making worlds. If a world is built to create dehumanizing violence, then it must be destroyed, reimagined, and remade. The force of nonviolence does not require conforming to the affective disposition of the “beautiful soul,” the kindly sainted martyr suffering from some contemporary ill, but a calculated aggression that acknowledges conflict within the practice of world building. The force of hope struggles the imagine a freedom beyond the harm created by dehumanizing violence. In Butler’s work, the “human” as a political project emerges from the hope-filled practical anticipation of a nonviolent world. Their politics promotes a solidarity with those who have been made an “other” due to their positionality to universalized norms. Schillebeeckx and Butler thus challenge theology to ignite the force of hope to reimagine the way the world has been built so the multitudinous array of the humanum might flourish within history.