CHS SPECIAL LECTURE
"The Disenchantment of Charisma: The Theological Origins of Secular Polity"
Robert A. Yelle
Professor for the Theory and Method of Religious Studies and Chair of the Interfaculty Program in Religious Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich
28th January 2019 , 12 pm, room number 326, CHS SSS 3, JNU
Almost a century after Max Weber, it has rarely been noted that his theory of the routinization of charisma closely resembles an earlier theological claim that miracles and other signs of grace (charismata) ceased in Apostolic times. A supersessionist narrative, which identified the Gospel as the final miracle and revelation, was dominant in English Protestantism already by 1600, although the debate over miracles lingered on into at least the mid-18th century. The narrative of a cessation of miracles and prophecy was connected with the idea of a decline from absolute sovereignty to an orderly, rule-governed sovereignty, as reflected in the Deist concept of a “watchmaker God” who, having presided over the miracle of creation, withdraws from intervening further. Weber’s ostensibly scientific account of disenchantment reflected his embrace of a particular position in a theological debate concerning how to reconcile God’s absolute and orderly powers. The theological genealogy of Weber’s theory confirms Schmitt’s famous contention, in Political Theology (1922), that the sovereign decision was proscribed together with the miracle under Deism.
Robert A. Yelle is, since 2014, Professor for the Theory and Method of Religious Studies and Chair of the Interfaculty Program in Religious Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. He studied at Harvard College (BA in Philosophy 1988), the University of California at Berkeley (JD 1993), and the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he received a PhD in the History of Religions (2002) based on research conducted in Calcutta, India, on a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship. Prior to arriving in Munich, Yelle was Associate Professor at the University of Memphis. He has received fellowships from the University of Toronto, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, New York University School of Law, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Yelle is presently Editor of the American Academy of Religion/ Oxford University Press book series Religion, Culture, and History, and was previously Executive Secretary of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (2007-2011). His monographs include Explaining Mantras (Routledge, 2003), The Language of Disenchantment (Oxford University Press, 2013), Semiotics of Religion (Bloomsbury, 2013), and Sovereignty and the Sacred(University of Chicago Press, 2019).
