Abstract
The so-called ‘theological turn’ in contemporary Continental philosophy has been one of the most remarkable intellectual developments of recent years. This highly ambitious book explores some dimensions of this trend by engaging with two of its leading figures, John Caputo and Slavoj Žižek.
What distinguishes Katharine Sarah Moody’s contribution in this book is her stated intention to incorporate into her consideration of the impact of such discourse an account of lived religious experience. She sets out to elucidate how Caputo’s ‘theology of the event’ and Žižek’s a/theological materialist philosophy are influencing a contemporary movement known as emerging Christianity. This connection is explored via a discussion of the published works of two of its key voices, Peter Rollins and Kester Brewin. It is Moody’s contention that while emerging Christianity is often misunderstood as a branch of conventional ecclesiology – another brand of ‘Fresh Expressions’ – it is better understood in terms of a far more radical reworking that can trace its roots back to Nietzsche and the ‘death of God’ theologians. This signals a shift away from religion conceived as a question of metaphysics and ‘belief’ towards ‘religious practices as the site of philosophical signification’ (p. 1), and a focus on performative and praxis-oriented theologies.
As a particular example of this move, the emerging Christianity movement places its authenticity in the forging of right relations and the formation of communities of hospitality and justice, issuing a forthright critique of institutional complacency and doctrinal abstraction from that place of engagement.
The book falls organizationally and conceptually into two halves. Part I consists of an exhaustive discussion of Caputo and Žižek. Anyone wishing to find an in-depth introduction to their work will be well-served by Moody’s impeccable and meticulous grasp of this field, although at times it flounders under the punctilious detail of its own scholarship.
In Part II, Moody attempts to graft this discussion of materialist theology onto a study of emerging Christianity, in an attempt to show how Caputo and Žižek’s thought is having a tangible impact on a particular section of Christianity. This half of the book I found less convincing, insofar as a (similarly painstakingly comprehensive) analysis of Rollins’s and Brewin’s own published outputs is made to stand in for the practices of emerging Christianity. Yet for a work that stresses the primacy of the material and the praxeological over the discursive, there is little attention paid to any community of practice itself.
An alternative strategy for research into the immediacy of religious performance could have been to undertake an ethnographic study, using participant observation to provide sustained exposure to participants in the emergent Christianity networks in question. While any ethnography is never completely transparent and is always mediated through the perspective of the researcher, there is nevertheless the possibility for the reader to move beyond the philosophical literature and to gain a sense of the actual lived experience to which this book only gestures. Beyond Moody’s brief account of what it felt like to be present at a ritual event, however, the reader is offered no such opportunity to engage, however vicariously, with emergent Christianity as a lived, embodied and materialist phenomenon.
Moody’s book elegantly demonstrates that Rollins and Brewin have read their deconstructive and materialist theologies. However, it does not convincingly show that for its grass-roots membership emergent Christianity represents an intentional appropriation of Continental philosophy, rather than being simply a pragmatic response to the pressures of deinstitutionalization and detraditionalization within Western religion.
There are really two books here, and it is good that one of them – the introduction to Caputo and Žižek in Part I – is a tour de force. While Part II continues to demonstrate Moody’s exemplary command of the literature, it does not, ultimately deliver on its promise of showing how the specific traditions and trajectories of radical theologies are instantiated within emerging Christianity’s practices of faith. We may have seen a ‘theological turn’ in Continental philosophy of religion, but it seems a ‘practical turn’ is still some way off.