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This chapter explores reconfigurations of the moral economy of village life through the concept of halal exchange. Halal exchange refers to an Islamic form of moral economy that is concerned with an ethics of care and generosity. The chapter introduces the practices of Islamic charity in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Subsequently, it introduces the idea of halal exchange as a form of moral reasoning that underlies multiple spheres of exchange in village life, and offers villagers a parallel logic of relating to each other in a situation of rising inequalities and monetization of what once used to be mutual help. It shows how the conception of halal exchange is established in the ritual of sacrifice and how this logic travels to other spheres of everyday life and spheres of exchange, ranging from mutual help, managing debts and money, to property relations.

The introduction positions the book’s argument in relation to the twentieth-century debate on political theology, with a particular emphasis on the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s recent revaluation of it. This revaluation, the introduction contends, necessitates an overhaul of the prevailing conceptual lexicon of political theology. The ensuing book will seek to delineate the specific technology of power whose forms and whose modalities become discernible only in the light of this overhaul.

This chapter anchors the book by examining Giorgio Agamben’s recent contribution to the study of political theology, which serves as its point of departure. In particular, it seeks to situate his recuperation of what he calls “economic theology” in relation to both its ancient and modern intellectual-historical contexts. In the first place, it locates in the context of the late Hellenistic debates concerning the nature of the gods. Against the Epicureans, on the one hand, who maintained that the gods are improvident and hence inactive, and the Stoics, on the other, who argued instead that they are provident and thus active, the Trinitarian oikonomia, in Agamben’s formulation, entails a god who is at once improvident and provident, at once inactive and active. It is this simultaneously inactive and active god—encompassing a father who reigns but does not govern and a son who governs but does not reign—which, in the second place, will be employed in order to intervene anew in the debate between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson regarding the possibility of a Christian political theology.

The article discusses post-politics in relation to the contemporary ‘return’ of religion. I start with considering some of the paradoxes that are visible in the horizon of post-political society. The pivot around which this discussion is organized is the sovereignty-governmentality-visibility nexus. In this context I am especially interested in the relationship between sovereignty and governmentality, which takes the form of a disjunctive synthesis. Then, to articulate the religious motives that are constitutive of this paradoxical relationship, I turn to political and economic theology. To end with, I discuss capitalism as religion, linking this back to the concept of post-politics.

Our approach is an ‘Archaic Anthropology’, a methodological combination of contemporary anthropological engagement with the historicisation of the present using genealogical methods, drawn from Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and Agamben, a contribution to the emergent paradigm of ‘economic theology’. Specifically this entails taking contemporary discourses – from social policy to job-seeking advice – as constitutive of the society it purports to describe. Thus, contemporary conceptualisations, whether created by academic disciplines or popular culture draw from existing cultural models, including theology, to make sense of complex social and economic experiences, from national recessions or growth to personal careers or unemployment. Thus, government is not simply evidence-based but incorporates medieval pastoral power – following Foucault, or the market reflects an invisible hand which is equally providential as it is economic – drawing on Agamben’s theological genealogy. By combining key ideas and figures from cultural sociology and governmentality studies, our approach allows us to trace the ‘production of meaning’ – how cultural models are deployed to decipher meaning in even arbitrary events, shape identities continuously and give direction and purpose to social and economic life.

Chapter 3 investigates the standing of the Word-Son in relation to God the Father. The first section explores the contours of Irenaeus’ doctrine of reciprocal immanence and identifies features left unexplained. The second section explains these features by studying the logic that appears in the earlier polemical arguments of Against Heresies 2. The third section continues examining the polemical arguments of AH 2, but now with a focus upon the comments Irenaeus makes about the production of a simple, spiritual substance—his comments about divine production. Taken together these sections further establish Irenaeus’ understanding of the intra-Trinitarian relationship of the Word-Son to the Father, including the nature and generation of the Word-Son. In contrast to characterizations of Irenaeus’ theology as economic or modalistic, we see that Irenaeus affirmed an eternal and distinct coexistence of the Word-Son with God the Father as the one God.

When it comes to the history of Christian thought, Irenaeus is most famous as the greatest opponent of Gnosticism in the early Church. For that reason his polemic has received considerable attention and at times his polemical significance has overshadowed his importance as a theologian. But a focus on his polemical significance was not the only thing that discouraged nuanced analysis of his theological account. For his theological ability and even intelligence have been impugned for generations. As a result central aspects of Irenaeus’ thought have gone unexplored—especially the metaphysical dimension of his theology. This Introduction locates this study within the scholarly conversation about Irenaeus that has taken place over the past two centuries, and then summarizes the themes and chapters that constitute the study proper.