Abstract
In this fine book from Martin Koci, the significance of Christianity after Christendom is explored. Koci provides an account of how to think the ‘after’ of Christianity through dialogue with some seminal thinkers in contemporary philosophical theology. He follows in a lineage of earlier authors, such as Harvey Cox, Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas, who each in their different ways attempted to think the ‘after’ of Christendom in the context of contemporary thought. One of the main strengths of this book is its insightful engagement with some of the key contemporary continental philosophers who have recently turned their attention to the end of Christendom. Expository chapters on the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, Jan Patočka, Gianni Vattimo, John D. Caputo, Richard Kearney and Lieven Boeve are carefully worked through in order to reconstruct a conception of Christianity that is ‘shaken, but not stirred’. The ‘shakenness’ is formulated in such a way that it does not attempt, in a postmodern fashion, to radically reformulate Christianity (in other words, to stir it), but rather to reveal what it has always been. The Heideggerian theme of the ‘thrownness’ of being provides the conceptual landscape within which the ‘happening’ of Christianity, as the event of being always shaken to one’s foundations in the experience of finitude, is articulated.
Each of the various thinkers that Koci engages with provide valuable insights into the poverty of a faith which realizes the givenness of its own being. So, while the challenges of living in a post-Christendom context are not to be minimized, Koci elucidates, by means of an interesting consideration of the thought of the French phenomenologist Emmanuel Falque and the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka, that through an experience of human finitude one can appreciate the true givenness of being which is central to Christianity. So, rather than fleeing from the tragedy of finitude in self-indulgent pleasure seeking or adoring the ‘being-towards-death’ motif of Heidegger, Koci proposes the kenotic engagement with finitude as a truly Christian way of life. This is a way of life that inhabits the world with all its insecurity through an attitude of care. The care for others and oneself that arises through embracing finitude is kenotically transformed by Christianity in the enacting of church: the ‘solidarity of the shaken’, in Koci’s terms.
So, in a certain sense, the ‘after’ of Christianity is not a new turn in its history. Christianity has always been ‘after’ any attempt to flee the insecurities of finitude or the contemporary and indeed ancient attempts to embrace death as the grand finale of life. ‘Good riddance’ to Christendom is perhaps the take-home message from this interesting attempt to rethink the ‘after’ of Christianity in the light of contemporary thought. However, perhaps even more than announcing this clarion call, the book explores an ‘after’ which is also ‘after’ a certain Christendom-way of doing theology as the sovereign discourse of God that is neatly elucidated in a narrative structure. The theology of the ‘shaken’ is an impoverished theology. It needs to sit at the feet of the philosophers who dare not say God’s name, but who are transforming the concepts of Christendom-theology, such as faith, hope and charity, and God into semantic contents which the theologians of the ‘after’ of Christendom can now humbly work with to express a post-Christendom discourse of the ‘after’ of Christian existence.