God against Messiah | 83contemporaneous political thought. Kingship of God addresses Schmitt’s favored
themes, from the state of emergency to the secularizing of political concepts,
although without naming him as interlocutor. In most cases, we find the Schmit-
tian theme inverted: the commissarial dictator protecting the human constitu-
tional order becomes the charismatic judge acting on God’s behalf; the secular-
ization of political concepts occurs with the very institution of human monarchy
claiming God’s authority rather than with the later transfer of that authority
from the sovereign to the people.
Buber dedicated Kingship of God to two friends who had passed away in the
1920s and whom he credited with “helping me to read the Scriptures”: one was
Franz Rosenzweig, with whom Buber began translating the Hebrew Bible into
German; the other was Florens Christian Rang, a conservative Lutheran theo-
logian. Rang, like Buber, began World War I as a strident nationalist but later
turned strongly against nationalism, perhaps influenced by his friend Walter
Benjamin in a similar trajectory to Landauer’s influence on Buber (all four were
affiliated with the Forte circle, and Benjamin had special respect for Rang). Rang
may have exemplified a noble and upright Christian path in Buber’s eyes, by con-
trast to that of Schmitt. At any rate, if kingship is the most common form of the
state, then to discuss kingship is to discuss the political. And to speak of God is
precisely to engage in theology. To study the kingship of God, then, is to enter the
sphere of political theology—or the theopolitical.
Origins of the Work: From Biblical Faith to Messianism in Israel
In the preface to the first edition of Kingship of God, Buber describes his original
plan for the work and its place in a projected broader scheme, which he later
abandoned.^6 First, he had planned together with Franz Rosenzweig “to combine
the results of many years of Bible studies in a theological commentary which
would have to treat Old Testament problems in the exact order of succession in
which the text presents them; since these were entirely... problems of faith, it
was to be called The Biblical Faith.”^7 Buber persisted in this plan for a year af-
ter Rosenzweig’s death but eventually realized that he would have to prioritize
“those subjects which seemed of special consequence to me and on which I would
soonest have something to say which would advance knowledge.” From this we
learn both that what we are about to read is urgent for Buber, and that here as
elsewhere Buber moves easily between “theological commentary” and work that
would “advance knowledge.” Indeed, it is questionable whether he allows for any
boundary between the two categories at all.^8
Buber names this newly foregrounded topic “the question of the origin of
‘messianism’ in Israel” and relates it to “another, concerning which I had begun,
more than twenty years ago, a slowly growing, subsequently postponed, essay-
project and which now... begged to be taken up again anew, the christological