Abstract
The ‘philosophy of Christian materialism’ as proposed by Baker, James and Reader is based on two negations: the denial of transcendence and the rebuttal of human superiority over other beings. God, thus conceived within immanence, features as the ‘virtuality’, which is ‘a power that stirs within the only world there is’ (p. 81). Human beings, moreover, are seen as objects among other objects in a radically flat, hierarchy-free ontology.
The first of the book part examines Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou and Bruno Latour whose work is referred to as offering insight into how the contemporary world works. More specifically, the French philosophers are seen as offering categories with which to interpret the fluidity of contemporary religious practice. Two brief examples – of a Buddhist Christmas party and of a seeker-turned-priest-turned-guru – shed light on what the authors refer to as contemporary religious practice and what motivates them in their foray into Continental philosophy.
The second part of the book reinterprets classic theological doctrines in light of the findings of Part I. Eschewing transcendence, God is construed as the ‘volcanic powers’ (p. 95) within immanent objects. God is therefore ‘a property … of actual, material conditions in which objects interact in various and contingent ways’ (p. 90). Baker, James and Reader admit that there is a ‘glaring weakness’ in their attempts to inscribe the divine into the immanent plane, namely, that ‘one cannot serve such a God’ (p. 93). They therefore concede that they have to go beyond talking of God as virtuality, and refer to Christ as expressing the divine virtual. Nonetheless, they do not grant Christ a privileged place, since ‘the virtual is … able to be embodied in other places’ (p. 98).
The book’s construal of creation and anthropology (which is really an ‘object-ology’), moreover, emphasizes the reciprocal influences of human and non-human beings. Both are related in a mutual web of chaotic relationships (‘entangled fidelities’). This is relevant for the ‘contours of a new political imagination’, in which an ‘object-oriented ontology’ leads to the promotion of equality of all objects and their greater ‘democratic participation’ (p. 192). Such an imagination is fuelled by the hope that the ‘volcanic’ powers within objects guarantee that no mastery will be absolute, and that, consequently, ‘radical change on all levels of reality is always possible’ (p. 191).
Confusingly, ‘Christian materialism’ is used synonymously with ‘relational Christian realism’ throughout. Realism and materialism are, however, merely used to designate a commitment to supposedly ‘actual, empirical states of affairs’ (p. 109) and to a concomitant (typically liberal-theological) commitment to ‘non-theological sources of insight’ (p. 14). The authors fiercely reject any notion of theological tradition, which they presume is perforce authoritarian and imperialist. They moreover charge contemporary theologians who locate themselves within this tradition with fideism and detachedness from the ‘actual’ world. In light of their resistance to the normativity of orthodox Christianity, it seems curious, however, that they take Continental philosophy as an authoritative source for understanding the world and as normative standard for reshaping the Christian tradition, without subjecting its thought patterns to the same critique.