Eberhard Jungel is one of the world's most creative Christian thinkers. This is his first explicit examination of the relationship between theology and politics, between the church and state or, as he himself puts it, of 'the political existence of the Christian'. One of the significant characteristic if this book is its concern to integrate the serious, academic commitment of theology in the service of truth with its necessary existential relationship to the pulpit. Without a coherent grasp of this the church degenerates into a 'characterless club for the cultivation of religion' while academic theology is reduced to a form f spineless irrelevance which shirks its responsibilities to the real work. Jungel's concern is to offer a theology in which rigorous theological commitment and the spiritual life of the church are integrated.