On Roland Boer’s Marxism and theology

Abstract

This piece aims to provide a synoptic introduction to Boer’s claims in the five volumes of Marxism and Theology. Obviously, such an account must miss many important nuances across the host of critical readings Boer assembles, guided by his broadly Jamesonian manner of reading the texts with a view to their biblical and theological claims. Nevertheless, by aiming at a synoptic view of a truly compendious contribution to scholarship, it is hoped that the piece will provide assistance to readers, and encourage them to test their own intuitions and thoughts against the original texts. The final part of the article stands back from this “standing back”: and asks questions concerning Boer’s treatments of biblical criticism, with and/or against theology; and concerning the role of what might be called (even despite Boer’s own protests) a kind of “secularised” Calvinism in Boer’s work and its interest in a post-Marxian politics of grace.

Keywords

Marxism theology John Calvin criticism of heaven and earth

Abbreviations

Boer I CH: Volume I, Criticism of Heaven

Boer II CR: Volume II, Criticism of Religion

Boer III CT: Volume II, Criticism of Theology

Boer IV CE: Volume IV, Criticism of Earth

Boer V VT: Volume V, The Vale of Tears

Introducing Marxism and theology

We live in a period where there has been growing talk of a ‘return to religion.’¹ Often however, the phrase condenses strikingly different claims and phenomena: from the growth of forms of Pentecostalism in the global South, or the rise of militant forms of Islam, to the recondite claims of post-structuralist and post-Marxist academics. Roland Boer’s magisterial Criticisms of Heaven (I), Religion (II), Theology (III) and Earth (IV, on Marx and Engels), followed by the concluding Vale of Tears (V), represent a landmark in the analysis of this “post-secular” turn in academic theoretical discourse. Beginning in 2007 with Criticism of Heaven on Bloch, Benjamin, Lefebvre, Althusser, Gramsci, Žižek, Eagleton, and Adorno, Boer’s project soon grew into a series (Boer, 2007). A further nine, diverse thinkers are considered in Criticism of Religion (2009): Goldmann, Jameson, Kautsky, Luxembourg, Agamben, Badiou, Lukács, and Raymond Williams. Then, Boer’s Criticism of Theology appeared in 2011, with seven new (single and corporate) authorships being considered: Max Horkheimer, E.P. Thompson, G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, Roland Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, Michael Löwy and Antonio Negri. Criticism of Earth then rounded out the circle in the following year (together with Boer’s elective alphabet of twenty-six Marxist, para- or post-Marxist thinkers); in it Boer returned finally to Marx and Engels themselves.²

Boer’s broadly Jamesonian method (considered in more detail by Boucher in this symposium) is to search out, then intimately analyze and immanently criticize these thinkers’ engagements with the Bible, the Catholic or Protestant churches, or with theological, Christological, ecclesiological, eschatological, and messianic considerations. The result is that, for example, the reader can be surprised to find a very different, almost decisively Christian Alain Badiou through reading Boer, rather than the militant atheist he is more widely taken to be (Boer II CR: 155–179); an Althusser never quite over the Catholic Church (Boer I CH: 107–162); a Lefebvre who likewise ‘protesteth too much’ against the venerable and universal ekklesia of his childhood (Boer I CH: 162–214); a Negri wrestling with Job’s “why?” in response to the political defeats of the 1960s and 1970s (Boer III CT: 276); or a Frederic Jameson attracted despite his own theological scepticism to the utopian moment in eschatology (Boer II CR: 31–58)—and many more.

Marxism is often understood by advocates and critics as a godless affair. Marx himself, besides Nietzsche and Freud, has been widely positioned as one of the three great anti-Christian authors of the modern age. Yet, Boer’s volumes show, there is a large wealth of Marxist and post-Marxist theory on religious, biblical, or theological matters.³ In many cases, these theological or biblical engagements lie close to what is most hidden and valuable in their corpuses.

Several kinds of Boerian analyses can be analytically separated as we proceed through these texts.

In a first kind of study, Boer analyses sustained engagements with the Bible in Bloch, Benjamin and Eagleton which, far from being wholly critical, show how the Bible is anything but the wholly black book denounced by the New Atheists. In its pages, Bloch in particular finds stories of rebellion, political protest, and righteous critique of the reigning powers—from the prophets’ declamations against religious and worldly corruption through to the passion of Christ (cf. Boer I CH: 1–56). Terry Eagleton has similarly highlighted in works since the 1990s how the messianic heart of the “New Testament” is a man after all crucified as a political criminal by the Roman authorities who defiantly counter-poses what is God’s to what is Caesar’s, and who drew his followers from amongst the anawim or socially outcast (Boer I CH: 307). Boer also draws out those moments in Engels first, then later in Kautsky and Luxembourg, wherein these Marxists seek out antecedents to modern forms of socialism in in the apostolic texts and the wider annals of Christian history (notably in the early Church, then the Reformation and figures like Thomas Müntzer (Boer II CR: 59–119)).⁴

A second kind of chapter in the volumes of Marxism and Theology sees Boer going to some lengths to try to show how—even in those Marxist or post-Marxist thinkers ostensibly most critical or dismissive of all things religious—one can locate moments of equivocation. Boer’s founding exemplar here is Marx’s claim that “religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering but also the protest against real suffering” (Boer IV CE: 138–145, V VT: 64). But Boer shows, comparably, how Lefebvre’s strident opposition to the abstraction, social differentiation and priestly manipulation of popular credulities in Catholicism sits alongside an enduring fascination for the Cathar and other heresies (Boer I CH: 187–197). He highlights how E. P. Thompson remains fascinated with William Blake’s transcendent visions and the Muggletonian radicals, despite his denunciation of the “psychic terror” visited upon the English working classes by the Methodist Church (Boer III CT: 57–102). Even Frederic Jameson’s hostility to Christian apocalypticism does not prevent him from discerning in this legacy the fugitive longing for the kind of renewed human community that might form after the present age has passed away (Boer II CR: 49–58).

So, if the reader takes nothing else from this extraordinary series, she will take away a heightened sense of the complexity of the relationship between the modern, Marxian heritage and the West’s Biblical and theological traditions. Indeed, bringing out what he calls the “political ambivalence” of religion, and of Christianity in particular, lies at the heart of Boer’s achievement, and it is to this that we turn now.

The political ambivalence of Christianity

Boer is evidently aware of the proximity of moments in his text with the so-called “secularization thesis” articulated by thinkers such Carl Schmitt which is being widely revived today, including by ostensibly radical thinkers like Georgio Agamben (2011). As Boer puts this “thesis”:

with predictable frequency we come across variations on the argument that theology is the source of everything from the study of physics to the invention of the condom, or perhaps that the incarnation of Christ begins a tradition of ‘personalism’ that has its current perverse outcomes in everything from free expression, through sexual liberation and gender equality, to social mobility. The examples soon pile up: the ability to think of communal life must take account of the church and the sub-discipline of ecclesiology; freedom must be understood in terms of the paradox that true freedom comes only with subservience; or the very possibility of disenchanting the world (the one in which we supposedly live now) relies on an earlier, enchanted one. Theology used to be – goes the argument – the determining worldview of Western society until relatively recently, so it is no surprise that all we now take for granted should owe its originating impulse to theology … If we go back far enough or dig deep enough we will find that theology is our intellectual and social ancestor or perhaps the bedrock of nigh-on everything. (Boer V VT: 7)

Yet, as the hyperboles here indicate, Boer will have nothing—or nearly nothing (see below)—of this “secularization thesis.” Drawing on his extensive knowledge of the ancient world (Boer, 2015), indeed, Boer refreshingly denies this thesis’ underlying presumption of the absolute, originary status of Christian theological discourse. He advocates instead for what he calls a ‘relativization’ of theology, if it is to be dialectically comprehended by Marxist thought (Boer II CR: 203–204, V VT: 6–9).⁵ For Boer, Christian theology is “but one moment of much deeper traditions of thought and action” (Boer V VT: 8). He is also too much the Marxist to forget how Christianity has throughout its history furnished heavenly legitimations for active political oppression and economic exploitation (Boer V VT: 33). “A decent bout of anti-clericalism is always necessary and exceedingly satisfying, if not pleasurable,” Boer comments disarmingly (Boer V VT: 62):

I know the church and its small-minded bureaucrats only too well: the smarmy bishop who leans back, resplendent in his purple, and smiles broadly while quietly inserting the knife; the petty power brokers, who make secular government look tame in their efforts, gain control over church coffers; the clerical apologist for the church’s appropriation of the latest style of employer tactics, claiming that it will produce better conditions for all those who work for the church … After all, the church has had a good two millennia to refine its skills [etc.]. (Boer V VT: 63)

For Boer then, Christian theology is neither the beginning nor the inevitable horizon of modern political radicalism. A dialectical approach recognizes instead the great world religions to each be historically located, contingent, evolving, divided, and often political corrupt and compromised. Despite his critique of the contestable idealism of the “New Atheist’s” criticisms of religion (as if religious ideas were all that shaped human actions), then, Boer acknowledges the reasons justifying their kinds of indignation: such infamies as the crusades, the inquisitions, a Borgia Pope, Christian persecution of the Jews, the divine right of Kings, the Church’s complicity in feudalism, Luther’s savage calls for reprisals against the revolting peasants, the pious revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and so on (Boer V VT: 126–133). On the other side, however—and like Horkheimer, Benjamin, Bloch and several other Marxists he examines—Boer will not for all that give up on those passages in the Bible which give voice to political rebellion, outrage and the longing for justice or for grace. “For every text of resistance and liberation” in Paul as in many of the Biblical texts, Boer contends, “we can also find at least one of accommodation and oppression …” (Boer V VT: 179).

Boer’s acute sense of this political ambivalence of the Bible gives rise to some of Boer’s more powerful insights (Boer V VT: 125–170). The contrast between Boer’s reading of Saint Paul with those of Žižek, Badiou and Agamben is particularly illustrative in this connection (Boer II CR: 155–204). Whether, per Agamben, it is Paul’s messianism we wish to draw out; or those statements in Paul’s oeuvre which point to a rupture between Christianity and existing Jewish and Greek expectations, per Badiou, Boer stresses that there is another side that we should not forget to the man blinded by the light on the road to Damascus. This is the side to Paul which throughout the Christian era has allowed the Churches to lean on Paul’s ‘actuality’ to bolster repressive social relations, and continuing forms of discrimination against women. “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities … anyone who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed,” Paul declaims in Romans 13:1. The Saint then continues in a way which, as Boer comments, has “warm[ed] the heart of … conservatives … despots and megalomaniacs” (Boer V VT: 179) throughout the Christian era:

For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore … those who resist will incur judgement. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad … [Thus] if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. (see Titus 3:1; 1 Peter 2:13; 1 Timothy 2:1–2)

Yet, Boer does not quite stop at diagnosing or recalling the political ambivalence of Christian theology. For one further thread in the fabric of Boer’s Marxism and Theology, spun out of his reading of economic historian G. E. M. Ste. Croix’s work in particular (Boer II CR: 103–158) and reflecting his debts to Adorno, Jameson and others, involves a distinctly Marxian form of Biblical criticism. For this Boer, the textual ambivalences in the Bible and theological texts are read, boldly, as symptomatic reflections of the way these texts were the products less of infallible revelation of any kind, than of fallible men (almost always not women) in all-too-material economic, cultural, and historical contexts. In particular, Boer argues, we should read the Biblical texts as reflecting, and attempting to resolve, the underlying economic and political struggles in which their producers were participants. In some of his most critically incisive passages, Boer for instance questions the claims made on behalf of the early, “proto-socialist” Christian communist communities by Engels, Kautsky and Luxembourg. For Boer, this early Christian communism both was and is a Utopian myth. At the time of its enunciation, it concealed from believers the dependency of this redistributive agrarian community on the wider economic realities of Imperial Rome, nostalgically hearkening back to a period of simpler social relations decimated by the Roman imperium. More widely, Boer contends in Vale of Tears (and in the separate study, The Sacred Economy of Ancient Israel (2015)), first century CE Palestine was still reeling from the socio-political disruptions caused by Roman conquest over the previous century (Boer V VT: 179–204). In this context, argues Boer, Paul’s attempt to pose Christ as the theological resolution of all the oppositions his text proposes—man and woman, Jew and Greek, local and universal … —should be read less as a timeless political theology than as a theological attempt to resolve the political dilemmas facing the subject peoples of the Roman empire in a context of massive social destabilization and agrarian expropriations:

these same tensions are far too closely tied to the socio-economic tensions of his context – between an older and highly resistant system (sacred economy) and the brutal new system based on slavery – so much so that the old realities of law, works, gender, ethnicity and economy come back with a vengeance … From an economic perspective, try as he might, Paul was never going to resolve fundamental economic tensions at the level of thought. But in the effort to provide an ideological answer, in which the death and resurrection of Christ becomes a metaphor for the search for new life out of the destruction of the old economic world, Paul leaves open a range of ambivalent possibilities. (Boer V VT: 197–198)

The distance between this critical Boerian reading of Paul and those of better known, recent theoretical “Paulicians” is clear.

Theology, pessimism and grace

When it comes time in The Vale of Tears to reflect back upon the results of his extraordinary survey, Boer has recourse to a metaphor. “Marxism and theology rub up against one another,” he tells us. It is:

both a sensual rubbing, … guaranteed to get the juices flowing, and a frictional one, since Marxism and theology have often been a fractious couple, arguing, disagreeing, separating for a while in mutual recrimination. (Boer V VT: 5, 323)⁶

Like all metaphors, this thought is evocative (and its irreverence, incidentally, nicely reflects an impish side to Boer’s style). Yet, it raises perhaps as many questions as it resolves. With that thought in view, let me conclude this contribution with two of the questions that occurred to this reader, without wanting to steal the fire of the following two respondents.

First, on “theology” as opposed to Biblical criticism: it is arguably telling that Marxism and Theology is the title of Boer’s series, while Criticism of Theology names Volume III alone. This doubling of ‘theology’ as both genus and species, I suggest, reflects an ambivalence in Boer’s wider project. In a first, more Marxian position (reflected in Criticism of Theology being set apart from the wider series), the Bible and Biblical criticism are counter-posed favorably (by central recourse to Bloch) against theology. In this vein, Boer positions theology as a later development, closely aligned within Christianity with the Constantinian establishment of Christianity as a religion of Empire. In a second position, however, reflected in the series’ title, “theology” remains the over-arching universal naming not only itself, but also the Bible and Biblical criticism. Indeed, in a way that does suggest proximity with the “secularization thesis” despite himself, Boer at some moments can tell us that theology encompasses all the subject matters of what anthropology, cosmology, sociology, and the other modern disciplines now study, despite their ostensibly freeing since the 19th century from theological supervision:

it [theology] deals with the nature of mythology (the central stories with which theology deals), nature and the environment (creation), with the human condition (anthropology), why the world is the way it is (harmatology, or the doctrine of sin), the problem of suffering (theodicy), the nature of the human subject (via Christology), how human beings might live together (ecclesiology), and the nature of history and hopes for the future (eschatology) … (Boer V VT: 5)

Second, on Boer and Calvinism: perhaps I am mistaken, but it seems to me that if there is one specific kind of theology that Boer seems keenest to reanimate today, it is very much a theology in the Calvinist spirit. Certainly, just as if he were still wrestling with the theological heritage of his youth, Boer is most polemical in his criticisms when he deals with neo-Catholic figures like Terry Eagleton (Boer I CH: 283–334).⁷ By contrast, Boer treats Goldman’s engagement with Pascal’s Jansenism very warmly (Boer II CR: 1–30). Boer chastises Žižek for never satisfactorily differentiating grace from love (Boer I CH: 359–389).⁸ He criticizes Agamben for sidelining Charis to being merely “a placeholder of the void between faith and law.” (Boer II CR: 194)

What attracts Boer, despite all the critical hesitations about Calvin he registers in his book on Calvinism, Political Grace (2009), is how the Augustinian notion of grace—in categories Boer draws from Negri—is unmeasured and akairos. It:

does not compute, does not fit the expectations of priests obsessively poring over their holy books, does not meet the expectations of a people longing for military deliverance, makes no sense even to the closest of followers, bursts in without human agency or anticipation. (Boer V VT: 242)

In a way that suggests an unlikely proximity between Boer and (to take one thinker he does not examine) the post-structuralist Jacques Derrida’s religious turn, grace is attractive to Boer as a theological figuring of the miraculous intrusion of the radically other. Like a good Marxist revolution, it upsets all pre-established norms, laws, and conventions (Boer V VT: 240–244). Clearly, I cannot undertake here the kind of discussion, which Boer’s fascination with this theological notion of Charis asks.⁹ Let me say only that, in line with Boer’s wider critique, it seems to me that this theologeme also is politically ambivalent. The darker side of “grace,” in Calvinism above all, is an extremely pessimistic theological anthropology—one which can and has rationalized wealth differentials as hailing from the election of God, and which denounces all human beings as absolutely depraved and in need of divine redemption. Such a pessimistic vision of this vale of tears can surely be read as an extremely disempowering basis for this-worldly political action, as much as cause for revolutionary hope. Here, indeed, I would recall the earlier Horkheimer in his incisive analyses of the early modern “freedom movements,” including Savonarola and those of the Reformation (Horkheimer 1995, 52-82)—a remarkable text not dealt with by Boer. The valorization of unforeseeable salvific Events, as the flipside of a highly pessimistic anthropology, is arguably as much a reflex or symptom of the social destabilization global capitalism continues to visit upon us all today as it is a path to its political contestation.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biography

Matthew Sharpe teaches philosophy at Deakin University in Australia. He has been part of an ARC grant project on Religion and Political Thought.

References

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(2015) The Sacred Economy of Ancient Israel, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.

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(2013) ‘More things in heaven and earth…’: The theological Aufhebung of Roland Boer. Arena Journal 41/42: 28–58.