Igrejas e Estado

Abstract

The aim of this study is to compare the long period of religious turbulence which marked the beginning of modernity, involving the Reformation and CounterReformation, with the current period, in which the relations between politics and religion have been redefined in another form. It will be shown that the greatest thinkers of modern political philosophy, from Machiavelli and Calvin to Hobbes and Milton, and from Spinoza and Bayle to Rousseau, had to decide on the relations between theology and politics. We will also examine the different politicotheological regimes discussed by Rousseau at the end of his Social Contract (1762), comparing them with the different regimes relating Church and State formulated by the theologian of resistance to Nazism, Karl Barth, in a 1937 text. Keywords: theology and politics; Rousseau; Karl Barth.The theological and political question, then Modernity, both in its theological and political versions, is constructed on the separation between the political and the religious. On the one hand, the Renaissance, prepared by the long work of nominalist reduction, and prolonged until the Enlightenment, expressed how philosophy descended from the heaven of ideas to occupy the positive sciences and the terrestrial powers,