历史学家恩斯特·康托洛维茨以文学材料与法律材料为基础，重构了中世纪国王二身的喻说。这个喻说正是“政治神学”最有效的范例和工具。1922年，施密特在韦伯（其“祛魅”概念明显源于神学）的纪念文集中，提出了政治哲学的核心术语——政治神学。19世纪20年代，从瓦尔特·本雅明、汉娜·阿伦特，到雅克·德里达、乔治·阿甘本等诸多哲学家，围绕国家主权问题，就法律与政治学的神学基础展开持续讨论。遗憾的是，政治神学构想的方法论问题（包括从罗马帝国，经基督教的中世纪，到莎士比亚与霍布斯的现代早期）并未得到细致考察。但1966年汉斯·布鲁门伯格与施密特的论战，以及米歇尔·福柯的晚期作品，充分体现了方法论关切，并做了大量文学阐述。
The most effective example and instrument of“political theology”is the medieval allegory of the king's two bodies that was reconstructed by the historian Ernst Kantorowicz in 1957 from literary as well as legal sources.As a key term of political philosophy，political theology was introduced by Carl Schmitt in 1922 in his contribution to a Festschrift for Max Weber，whose concept of“Charisma”is clearly of theological origins.Centering around questions of state sovereignty，the ensuing debate on the theological foundations of law and politics since the 1920s included philosophers from Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt to Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben.Unfortunately，the methodological problems of the theological conception of the political—including the specific value of literary and legal sources from the Roman empire through the Christian middle ages to the early modernity of Shakespeare and Hobbes—has found little scrutiny，although Hans Blumenberg's refutation of Schmitt in 1966 and the late work of Michel Foucault gave ample opportunity for both methodological concern and literary elaboration.
