POLITICAL THEOLOGY: GENESIS OF THE CONCEPT

Abstract

Modern socio-political sciences associate «political theology» with the secularization of the social world. The sacralization and theologization of politics allow us to talk about the formation of a secular type of political religiosity, replacing the traditional religion in society. Political theology is understood as a way of thinking about the foundations of power in modern societies, whose symbolic structures, responsible for the foundation of social order and maintaining its coherence, are being destroyed and experiencing a crisis of legitimacy. The article attempts to trace the genesis of the concept of political theology, starting from Greco-Roman antiquity, by explicating key positions that influenced its internal semantic dynamics and conceptual development. As a result, the author concludes that all the key socio-political categories and oppositions underlying the structural and symbolic order of secular society are somehow connected with the theological and political issues. It is argued that all attempts to separate the political from the theological, and the theological from the political, or to subordinate one to the other are doomed to failure in advance, but it is this struggle between the political and the theological, that presupposes the «unity of opposites», that determines the functioning of the theological-political «machine» of Western society.