Whose Justice? What Political Theology?

This chapter contributes to scholarship that has suggested that a good deal of twentieth-century internationalism was faith-based, even if this remained tacit. It offers insights into religious attitudes underpinning twentieth-century internationalism and the formation of international legal concepts and institutions. It looks at how religiously framed matters and articles of faith were given a ‘secular’ reinterpretation during the early twentieth century, in the name of peace and a just international order, and offers an account of the political theology that this reconceptualization of ‘the sacred’ in terms of ‘the secular’ expressed. It shows that liberal theological thought, with an optimistic outlook on man and history, a progression narrative, and an attempt to mediate between theology and the epistemological demands of the positive sciences—inter alia through dismissal of traditional metaphysics and turning to ‘ethics’/value judgments and ‘vocation’—formed the framework within which internationalist Christian action in this period was to a large extent grounded.