Prolegomena to a Gloriological Political Theology: Irenaean Resources on Aesthetics and Transformation

In this paper, I propose an approach to a theology of social transformation in dialogue with Irenaeus’ thought and building on insights from his theological perspective. Specifically, I bring the aesthetic concept of glory—both divine and creaturely—into dialogue with a theo-political analysis of societal transformation. Irenaeus’ view of the power of divine glory to transform individual humans, and the human person (homo) as a collective unity, is a salvific end for him, but may also serve as a conceptually means for contemporary theologians seeking pathways toward sustainable systemic transformation. Although Irenaeus does not himself bring glory and social transformation into substantial thematic contact, he does provide much of the conceptual raw material that may lend itself to a constructive political theology and theo-political aesthetic.

Drawing from Irenaeus’ Adversus haereses, Epideixis, and letters preserved in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, I begin by sketching the theocentric character of Irenaeus’ understanding of politics and his embrace of symphonically-differentiated unity. I reflect on Thierry Scherrer’s work on glory as a theme in Irenaeus (La Gloire de Dieu Dans L’Oeuvre de Saint Irénée)—an important, but still understudied subfield within Irenaeus studies—and its political dimensions. Furthermore, I consider the potential socio-political implications of Irenaeus’ compelling juxtaposition of paradigmatic models of change—e.g., Christ’s radical work of recapitulation—and progressive models of growth—e.g., the Holy Spirit’s multivalent work of fostering spiritual “progress” in individual human lives, across the spectrum of the divine οἰκονομία and in the collective concept of the human person Irenaeus uses to tell a communal human story with a single protagonist.

These elements, among others implied in Irenaeus’ theology, may help address some conceptual and practical gaps in many contemporary theological approaches to social transformation. Pushing the driving center of understanding social transformation in an anthropocentric, rather than a theocentric, direction, these approaches effectively ground the efficient cause for expanded or chastened hope for transformation in creaturely, rather than divine, reality. Implying a contrastive notion of divine and human agency, at least when it comes to the social and political realm, such approaches tend to bracket divine agency in social transformation and, in so doing, fail to take seriously the sacramental immanence and transformative agency of God’s glory, in social as well as individual life.

To be fair, such approaches skirt the danger of identifying divine purpose with human inclination, a dangerous move given the many past and present deployments of theological justification for abuses of power and other evil deeds. Nevertheless, a reactionary move to extract God completely from the political realm and relegate the divine to strictly indirect agency results in less theologically coherent discourse about the God-creature relation, a quasi-Deistic bracketing of divine agency in human social affairs that succeeds neither in transforming theology into a social science that can produce action plans for social justice, nor in grounding Christian life robustly in the reality of the living and present God.  One begins to suspect that, when espousing these approaches, one is declaring that God is still dead, an absence rather than a presence behind the façade of a crucified God, an ontologically impoverished Christ, and an excruciatingly polite Spirit. Notably, in The Kingdom and the Glory, Giorgio Agamben holds up the image of the empty throne as the ultimate symbol both for Western political power and for the Christian theology that he sees funding it conceptually.  For Agamben, modern Western politics uses publicity and media to hide the absence at its core, just as Christian theology uses glory and the glorification of God to hide what he calls an “embarrassing” truth (162): “the unaccountable figure of divine inoperativity,” for which glory must be invented to “cover” the absence “with its splendor” (163) that “blinds those who try to penetrate majesty” (196).

An Irenaean theology of glory and transformation, however, cannot posit glory as a diversionary ruse, nor transformation as a self-indulgent exercise. It must, at the very least, take seriously the core of Irenaeus’ own theo-political aesthetic commitments: a dual emphasis on consistently grounding political realities in God and affirming a robust conception of human freedom, along with an insistence on differentiated unity and a theological imagination open to order without rigid hierarchy and diversity without incoherent chaos.