Abstract
This issue of Critical Research on Religion deals with the question of “theology and treason.” These articles, after much elaboration, arose out of a conference at the University of Newcastle, Australia in October 2012. Entitled “Theology and treason,” it was an event organized by the international Religion and Radicalism Network. To set the context for the articles collected under this theme, let me outline what we mean by “theology and treason.” The “religions of the book” center on calls to personal and social transformation (Hebrew shuv, Greek metanoia, Arabic tawbah), giving rise to repeated radical movements and modes of thought in East and West. These movements challenge the “state” at many levels, whether that is the state as a political structure, the state of social collectives, or the psychological and physical state of individual lives. Examples include, among many others, the radical religio-political movements of the European Middle Ages, the Peasant Revolution with Thomas Müntzer in sixteenth century Germany, the Diggers with Gerrard Winstanley in the seventeenth century, and the Taiping Revolution in nineteenth century China, which was the first great Chinese revolution, only to be subdued by English gunboats. Obviously, I speak here of a left-wing type of religious radicalism, which Karl Kautsky famously saw as the “forerunners” of modern socialism (Kautsky, 1976a [1895−97], 1976b [1895−97]; Kautsky and Lafargue, 1977 [1922]). In this collection, the reader will find yet more, such as Chinese Christian materialism, the pastoral counter-conducts identified by Foucault, and the “Emerging Church” of the United States.
Yet, theology is also notorious for supporting the status quo (see Romans 13). Thus, religion is caught between political reaction and radicalism: the same theological system—whether Christian, Islamic, or Jewish—can foster support of an oppressive status quo and yet undermine that state. This tension is not one between core and betrayal, with one side representing the core truth and the other a misinterpretation, a bowdlerization of that truth. Instead, the very dynamics of these theological systems produce the possibility of both reaction and revolution. Here may be located the articles, in this issue, on Alain Badiou and his unwitting idealism when engaged with the Apostle Paul, and the proclivity for Carl Schmitt's approach to politics among a range of Chinese intellectuals.
Each of the articles explores different facets of this tension. I have already mentioned them briefly, but let me say a little here. For instance, Chin Kenpa's article, “The dwarf and the puppet,” presents and critiques the work of Chinese theologian, WT Wu. He was one of a number of Chinese Christians who sought to engage creatively with Marxism in the Chinese context in the early twentieth century. Wu was involved in the Christian Youth Student Fellowship in Shanghai and sought to develop a Christian materialism as a unique form of resistance to Western modernism. This study is part of larger project by Chin Kenpa concerning Chinese Christian materialism.
A very different but equally intriguing article is that by Mads Peter Karlsen on Alain Badiou, the focus of significant debate in recent years since his works have been translated into English. Here, too, is an engagement between Christian theology and Marxist philosophy, except that now the philosopher in question is not a believer but a materialist atheist. Karlsen's study is the first serious exegesis of Badiou's texts concerning the intersections between materialism, dialectics, and theology. The key for Karlsen is the distinction between idealist and materialist dialectics, first made by Badiou in his study of Hegel. This then sets up the focus on the resurrection in Badiou's later study of the Apostle Paul, where the emphasis on the resurrection of Christ (at the expense of his incarnation and death, as well as the doctrine of the Trinity) leads Badiou unwittingly to an idealist position. That this radical Marxist should end up here indicates how closely the revolutionary and reactionary dimensions of theology are entwined.
This tension also appears in the work of Michel Foucault, as Matthew Chrulew argues. Exploring Foucault's genealogy of Christianity (with its debts to Nietzsche), Chrulew seeks the various moments of resistance to the well-known category of pastoral power and its successor, governmental rationality. Against the pastorate and governmentality, Foucault identifies the “insurrections of conduct.” Chrulew designates these—eschatology, Scripture, mysticism, the community, and ascesis—as pastoral counter-conducts.
The article by Randall Reed is of a rather different hue, for it focuses on what appears on the surface to be a reactionary tendency from within evangelicalism in the United States. This is the “Emerging Church” movement, but it is anything but reactionary. Offering various challenges to the dominant ideological, political, and economic structures of the United States, the “Emerging Church” has yet to merge into an articulate force. Reed examines closely the activism of Shane Claiborne, Brian McLaren, and Peter Rollins, in order to discern the lineaments of radical treason from within evangelical Christianity.
I have not yet mentioned the first article in the issue, the one by Zhang Shuangli, from the Center for the Study of Contemporary Marxism Abroad, in Fudan University, Shanghai. This study is quite unique, although the internal logic of revolution and reaction is similar. She asks why the work of Carl Schmitt, the deeply conservative legal philosopher from the time of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, should have gained popularity in China. That is, why is this conservative thinker of the theological roots of modern politics important in the intellectual journey of a communist country? The context is clear: in the face of the crisis of modern politics and in the search for an alternative form of such politics in China, Schmitt seems to offer both a criticism of the project of Western modernity (by revealing its theological underpinnings) and a possible way out. Zhang reads this situation not as a solution but as a symptom, for Schmitt's proposals are deeply problematic. The symptom points to the restless urge to identify a clear alternative to the dead end of modern Western politics.
The issue contains five unique permutations on the troubled relations between theology and treason—between religion and radicalism. I trust that readers will enjoy and gain much from each.