Martin Buber's Theopolitics

The Serpent | 73

Of course, Buber contests the possibility of a purely religious sphere of life,
just as he contests the existence of a political sphere. In 1923, the same year that
I and Thou was published, Buber wrote that religion was “only the highest subli-
mation of the force that manifests itself in all life spheres in their cruder autono-
mization, in their tearing loose from the whole life and in the attempt, instead
of subsuming conditionally autonomous multiplicity under the one world law, to
allow a unity-blind being-a-law-unto-itself to dominate.” If religion is not to be
understood as the reality, then “it would be right promptly and completely to re-
place its rituals by art, its commands by ethics, its revelations by science.” Buber
praises his comrade Leonhard Ragaz for posing “the question of questions, that
concerning the kingdom,” since the proof of whether one really takes religion
seriously is provided by whether one takes it politically seriously.^50 Yet Buber rec-
ognizes that there are different ways of combining religion and politics and that
the predominant ones are uncongenial to his political and social aims. For the
particular way of combining religion and politics that he favors to prevail, Buber
needs to flesh out his description of what is at stake, and he seeks to do just this
over the course of the 1920s. By 1933, just after the Nazi rise to power, he arrives
at the following position:

It is not valid to pursue a special “messianic” politics. But there is a certain

manner of participation in public life by which in the midst of the interac-

tion with world and politics the glance can be kept directed to the kingdom

of God. There is no religious sanction for the setting of political aims. There

is no political party that can assert that only it is willed by God. But it is also

not so that one could say that before God it makes no difference whether this

or that is done.^51

Is this nuance, or simply confusion? A full answer would require a thorough
engagement with the categories of theopolitics as laid out in Kingship of God and
its subsequent biblical works, as that is where Buber considers and theorizes the
widest range of examples. However, there are a few texts of the late 1920s and
early 1930s that provide essential insights into the development of Buber’s view.
These focus for the most part on the theme of success and failure: if political se-
riousness is a litmus test for taking religion seriously in the whole of life and not
restricting it to a powerless, meaningless sphere, then the question of political
success or failure is the one on which the real commitment of real communities
is likely to turn. To be politically real, it would seem, religion has to be materi-
ally effective. Yet this is exactly what it so often seems to be unable to do while
remaining true to itself.
In “Biblisches Führertum” (Biblical Leadership, 1928), Buber sketches five
types of leader found in biblical texts. He excludes “figures who appear as con-
tinuators, all those who are not called, elected, appointed anew, as the Bible says,
directly by God, but who enter upon a task already begun without such personal