72 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
framework, in which the political equates to violence, and therefore devalorizes
the political. In this case anarchism becomes proudly nonpolitical or antipo-
litical, standing with the “social” as opposed to politics. The second response
maintains the value of the political by asserting its irreducibility to Weber’s
terms. At one point or another, Buber, like Landauer himself in his writings
on anarchist “propaganda by the deed,” embraces both strategies, although the
antipolitical response does predominate.^47 No matter which rhetorical strategy
he chooses in a given essay, however, the underlying intent is the same: to cham-
pion Landauer’s assertion of the consonance of ends and means, against any
demand for their separation.
Buber’s most thorough explication of the theopolitical stance comes in King-
ship of God, a difficult work that presents itself as biblical scholarship. It is the
full explication, backed by evidence accumulated over the course of Buber’s bible
study during the 1920s, of the thesis of The Holy Way. And it can be read, in
many ways, as an oblique response to Schmitt’s ideas about dictatorship, emer-
gency, and secularization. Before addressing it, however, several sources from
the 1920s in which Buber deals more directly with the issues mentioned earlier,
and particularly with the relationship between religion and politics in light of the
question of ends and means, can illuminate how Buber considers these themes
in general and make for a better entrée into the specific context of the history of
ancient Israel.
In the early 1920s, between the death of Landauer and the beginning of the
work on the Bible translation, Buber’s publications—apart from I and Thou—
consisted largely of reissues of his older collections of mystical and Hasidic tales
and lectures on Judaism in new editions, as well as volumes of Landauer’s work
edited by Buber in accordance with his role as literary executor. Buber often ex-
plored his wide-ranging interests in lectures, many of which remain unpublished.
Kingship of God has its roots in a lecture course given in Frankfurt in 1924–1925,
and was updated for a small invited circle at Ponte Tresa in 1928.^48 The apparently
hodgepodge nature of Buber’s publication during these years makes it easy to
understand why I and Thou dominates the scholarship on his productivity at the
time. It is only in 1928 that the themes of theopolitics gain momentum in Buber’s
published work. Nonetheless, it is worth recalling Buber’s statement, in the es-
say in which he referred to the political theologian Wilhelm Stapel as “the most
perceptive of [the] antagonists [of our translation],” that Stapel had correctly per-
ceived “what danger to his conception of a ‘Christian statesman’—i.e., a sham
Christian offering religious sanction to all the violences of the state—would be
entailed among the German people by the dissemination of the actual Scriptures,
which demand the shaping of society on the basis of belief.”^49 Even the seem-
ingly nonpolitical, purely “religious” activity of the Bible translation receives a
theopolitical inflection here; the mere dissemination of the “actual” Scriptures
undermines the effort to theologically legitimate state violence.