ABSTRACT
There is a good reason that nobody trusts theology. Nobody outside the confessional religions trusts theology and with good reason. The confessional theologies are insider games, and if you do not share the premises, the assumptions, the communal presuppositions, you cannot play the game and you are denounced as an infidel. It is only very occasionally that confessional theologians rise above these limits and gain a wider audience, and when they do, how they did it and what was going on there repays careful study. Nor is theology trusted by many people inside “religion”, where by religion I mean the “R” in the AAR, or in academic “departments of religion” (as opposed to seminaries or divinity schools), and for pretty much the same reason.1 The reason is, to make a long story short, that theology too often presents itself and cannot understand itself except as sovereign theology, imperial theology. A good many theologians adopt the same high handed, unilateral and imperial tones as sovereign states, which reserve the right to make an exception of themselves, according to Carl Schmidt’s famous definition of sovereign power. That is, they agree that everybody is human, everyone subject to the human condition, save themselves, who are themselves saved, having been in one way or another exempted from this condition and hard-wired up to God. But all too often it is from such salvation that the rest of us need to be saved.
