294 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Another potential direction for fruitful thinking on Buber and theopolitics
involves comparative, collaborative work within and between the Abrahamic
traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), as well as between those traditions
and the secular public sphere.^7 A prominent trend in Anabaptist theology, and
other Christian streams, has long singled out the conversion of the Emperor
Constantine as the beginning of “Caesaropapism,” a project of “Christendom”
that pursued domination and forgot the teaching of Jesus that the church should
be separate from the world. Contemporary efforts to make Christianity into a
civil religion, united with patriotism and nationalism, are descended from Cae-
saropapism in this view, and thus err theologically as expressions of Christianity.
Meanwhile, the contemporary scene presents us with a wide variety of states pur-
porting to be Islamic, from Iran to Saudi Arabia, which Buber would no doubt
encourage us to think of as hierocracies rather than theocracies (although, since
Muslim ulama are not “priests,” alternative terminology might be appropriate).
These tight links between state and clergy, though often presented as typical of
some timeless and monolithic paradigm of Islamic governance, have certainly
also been questioned on Islamic grounds.^8 What might it mean, for thinkers com-
pelled by these traditions, to think together with Buber and his Jewish concep-
tion of how God’s own sovereignty relates to human institutions? Does depicting
God as a king necessarily eventuate in oppression on earth? Or can this image,
paradoxically, liberate human beings from bondage to other human beings?
One of the most important and insightful Jewish thinkers on political-
theological questions today is David Novak, who typically takes a positive at-
titude toward liberal democracies.^9 For Novak, it is plain that this type of govern-
ment has done the least harm to Jewish bodies and souls. Moreover, for Novak,
the liberal-democratic state is much less likely than the monarchy, the empire,
the fascist state, or the communist state to make itself into the object of idolatrous
worship. Thus, although Novak worries about the potential of such a state to en-
act discriminatory policies if its majorities are misguided, he advocates that Jews
be active and proud citizens of liberal democracies, and in this sense his views
are broadly characteristic of the Jewish mainstream. Buber’s theopolitics offers
a challenge to this view.^10 According to Buber, there is an original covenantal
model with which any Jewish theopolitics must reckon, which excludes the in-
stitutions of sovereign state, standing army, and private property (beyond a few
generations) on which liberal democracies in their current forms rely. One could
reply to Buber from a liberal standpoint that such institutions are desirable and
necessary, but he would insist that such a response forsakes something Jewishly
pivotal.^11 Keeping that core, then, may require a rethinking of the liberal con-
cerns with pluralism and diversity from a standpoint that does not depend on
the armed state to set and enforce the conditions under which that conversation
takes place. What exactly that rethinking might look like is for the future to tell.