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Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/156920608X296079

Historical Materialism 16 (2008) 5984 www.brill.nl/hima

Te Returns to Religion: Messianism, Christianityand the Revolutionary radition.

Part I: Wakefulness to the Future

John RobertsUniversity of Wolverhampton

[email protected]

AbstractTe central strength of the Hegelian dialectical tradition is that reason is not divorced from its

own internal limits in the name of a reason free from ideological mediation and constraint. Tisarticle holds onto this insight in the examination of the recent (and widespread) returns toreligious categories in political philosophy and political theory (in particular Agamben, Badiou,Negri and iek). In this respect the article follows a two-fold logic. In the spirit of Hegel andMarx, it seeks to recover what is rational in religion; and, at the same time, examines thecontinuing entanglements of politics (and specifically revolutionary thinking) with religiouscategories. Tat this is an atheistic and materialist project is not in a sense strange or anomalous.On the contrary, it is precisely the secularisation of Judeo-Christian categories in Kant, Hegeland Marxs respective theorisation of history, that provides the dialectic ground of the atheistic

recovery and invocation of Judeo-Christian thought (in particular messianism, renunciation,and fidelity) in recent political philosophy. Consequently the discussion of religion, or religionbeyond religion, here, has very little to do with the spread of obscurantism and anti-rationalismin the global upsurge of reactionary Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms, neo-Paganmysticisms, and other retreats from the real, or with the left-liberal denunciation of religionin the recent writings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Rather, religion here,in its Judeo-Christian legacy, is that which embodies the memory or prospect of a universalemancipatory politics.

KeywordsChristianity, Judaism, messianism, eschatology, apocalypticism, anti-historicism, transcendentalism,dialectic

Te Hegelian Philosophy is the last magnificent attempt to restore Christianity,which was lost and wrecked, through philosophy.Ludwig Feuerbach1

1. Feuerbach 1986, p. 34.
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60 J. Roberts / Historical Materialism 16 (2008) 5984

Te return to religion in political philosophy, philosophical ethics andpolitical theory has taken various forms recently.2 Some of these positionsemerge from the Marxist tradition, some from avowedly post-Marxistpositions. But all draw on the ethical and political content of religion in orderto establish, or test, the possible links between the political subject and thesubject of religious passion and faith. However, this work is largely uninterested despite its antipathy to all forms of fundamentalism in subjecting religion toold-fashioned ideology-critique. Interestingly, it is left liberals in the naturalsciences, such as Richard Dawkins3 and Daniel Dennett, who have tended to

adopt this form of rationalism. As Dennett has argued in Breaking the Spell,religious adherents, put at risk what we[that is, rational liberals] hold dear.4Rather than drawing on any hermeneutical links between the political subjectand the subject of faith, the critique of religion, he insists, must be subject tomultidisciplinary scientific research. Indeed, religion now needs to be exposedto the same kind of natural-scientific scrutiny as other intoxicants such astobacco and alcohol. A good place to start, therefore, is the old evolutionary

scientific question: cui bono? What are the actual material costs and benefits ofreligion?

In evolutionary science, recognising the extensive investment by a species ina given practice or set of practices has to be balanced by an assessment of theimpact of these practices in the replication of the species. Tere has to be atrade-off that benefits the continued fitness of the species for reproduction. What is it about religion that promotes and sustains humans fitness for

reproduction? Is religion a form of mutualism (a practice of social self-medication, honed by thousands of years of experiment, to enhance humanculture); or is it a kind of parasite (extraneous, but invisible and deleterious inthe long run, and therefore needing to be eliminated)? Confidently, Dennettcomes down on the side of the latter. His atheism is vigorous and direct, andhas much to recommend in a repressively (and comically) quasi-theistic statelike the contemporary United States. But this is not the atheism of Marx and

the communist Left (despite the sorry history of Stalinist and Maoistdenunciations of religion in the twentieth century, exemplified at their mosttoxic by Enver Hoxhas rabidly anti-theistic Albania).

Marx and Engelss critique of religion was always accompanied by arecognition of, and sympathy towards, Christianitys eschatological and

2. Tanks to Benjamin Noys and Alberto oscano for their extensive comments on variousdrafts of this article.3. Dawkins 2006.4. Dennett 2006, p. 14.


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J. Roberts / Historical Materialism 16 (2008) 5984 61

apocalyptic content. As Marx declared in a letter to Arnold Ruge in 1843: theworld possesses something in a dream of which it need only become aware topossess it in truth.5 And, as Engels stressed in a similar vein in Te Peasant Warin Germany(1850), the chiliastic dream-visions of early Christianity offered avery convenient starting point for questioning the institutions and ideologiescommon to all class-based societies.6 Indeed, the later Engels was quite openabout the links between the early Christian church and the workers movement.Tere is a broader philosophical assessment of method at stake here: the linkbetween Marxs understanding in Capitalof capitalists as rational agents (on

the basis of their objective pursuit of profit) and the acceptance of religiousbelievers as rational agents (on the basis of their objective commitment to theperceived real benefits of religion). In other words, to begin the critique ofagency from the morally suspect character or irrationality of agents beliefs isto destroy the conflicted and contradictory basis of ideological interpellation,and therefore fail to show the needs that such beliefs fulfill for people.

As a philosopher of evolutionary science, rather than a social scientist,

Dennett, however, is not so convinced of the social and critical benefits of thisgenetic-critical position, insofar as it opens the door, he argues, to amisalignment of ethics with the denial of scientific materialism. Dennettcertainly has a few good arguments on his side here. Te indulgencedemonstrated by popular culture towards the unsupportable, anti-scientificclaims of various fundamentalist religious beliefs continues to drain secularculture of its confidence for instance, in the US, the shambles in the

media over the teaching of creationism. Explaining the cultural needs ofcreationists does nothing to enhance the claims of materialism or preventobscurantism.

Yet, despite the reality of these drawbacks, Dennetts rationalistic critique ofreligion is unrelentingly thin and, as such, antithetical to the wider philosophicaland critical struggles in which religious belief (and political commitments) findthemselves. In fact, Dennetts position severs what has remained most vital and

compelling about religion or at least Judeo-Christian thought for the(revolutionary) Left: the links between early Christianity and human beingsresistance to alienated finitude. In a spirited critique of Dawkinss Te GodDelusion, erry Eagleton makes this link explicit by insisting that the experienceof faith and redemption in Christianity is first and foremost practical andpolitical, that is active and unselfconscious, and as such unconstrained byecclesiastical language and religious ritual: Salvation for Christianity has to do

5. Marx 1975, p. 144.6. Engels 1978, p. 415.


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with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poorfrom the violence of the rich. It is not a religious affair at all . . ..7

In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s the last period of creative exchangebetween Marxism and religion for Marxists or Christianised Marxists whatwas at stake was the ethical status of the political act: revolutionary consciousnesswas not just a matter of knowing the enemy but of taking ones distance fromits phenomenal and material forms.8 And this is why, within this dialogue, therecovery of Hegels debt to Christianity, and Marxs own debt to Hegel, playedsuch a large part: what Hegel brought to Marxs understanding of human

emancipation was a notion of human beings as the bearers of a continuousoutpouring of transcendence.

Just as humans laboured on the labours of past generations, humans madeand remade the conditions of their own liberation, and this, for Hegel, wascontinuous with the ethical demands of Christianity.

Freedom in the State is preserved and established by Religion [liberal

Protestantism], since moral rectitude in the State is only the carrying out of thatwhich constitutes the fundamental principle of Religion. Te process displayedin History is only the manifestation of Religion as Human Reason theproduction of the religious principle, which dwells in the heart of man, under theform of Secular Freedom. Tus the discord between the inner life of the heart andthe actual world is removed.9

In this passage, Hegel takes over a theme of Saint Paul: the self-appropriation

of the self. Te overcoming of estrangement begins when men and womenbegin to recognise (and act on) their own self-estrangement. Marxistssympathetic to the Judeo-Christian continuities in Marxs writing in the lightof Marxs philosophical debt to German idealism, have tended then to seereligion and historical materialism in Hegelian terms, as sharing the sameends: the de-alienation of humanity and the struggle against dualism.10 Tis,in turn, has generated a political reading of Biblical eschatology within

Marxism: the principal objective of Christs ministry is the coming Kingdomand the relief of want, and not the love of the other in any abstract or ineffablesense. Tis view is central, for example, to Ernst Blochs writing on religion inthe 1930s and 1960s:

7. Eagleton 2006.8. See, for example, MacIntyre 1971 and Garaudy 1976.9. Hegel 1956, p. 335.

10. Garaudy 1976, p. 67.


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Christianity brought with it a resurgence of the attitude that no longer expectsanything from the world, and did so despite its notion that man had been crippled

by sin and was therefore unable any more to stand upright. It brought in atranscendere that was more than just internal, blasting a great hole through thefamous Stoic constancy in life and death, and making way for the beating ofwings of a glory which, though still hidden within us, was, in the intentionalorder, entirely indestructible.11

As such, a political reading of Christian transcendence as self-appropriationreveals the Bibles profound wakefulness to the future.12 Te Bible harbours

no crippling historicism and no over-abrupt Jacobinism, but simply theirrepressible sense of the awakening of meaning.13

Tis politicisation of Biblical eschatology has also been central to post-1950s radical theology in Germany (in particular Jrgen Moltmann andJohann Baptist Metz). As with Bloch, the Bibles profound wakefulness to thefuture is taken to mean a primary insistence on the indivisibilityof politicsand religion in the Gospels: there is no Christian faith outside of eschatology

as a political understanding of redemption and self-appropriation. Indeed, inthis writing, early Christianity is subject, in the spirit of Marx, to an explicitlyanti-statist reading. As Moltmann argues:

Te Christ of God was executed in the name of religiopolitical authority, anauthority established from above. Terefore, any justification of authority fromabove no longer is convincing to Christians. Political authority can only receiveits justification from below. Before the time of Christianity, all political theory

sought to confirm the status quo. Since Christianity all political theory shouldseek to criticise the nature, limits and purpose of the state.14

In other words, early Christianity de-sacralised, securalised and democratisedpolitics. But, it is also clear from the debates of the 1960s and 1970s that, forChristian theologians, there were real political and theological limits to whatthis indivisibility actually meant.

For the Protestant Moltmann, as much as for the Catholic theologians Metzand Hans Kng all equally well versed in Marx and critical theory and allsympathetic to some of their claims Christianity was not a revolutionaryprogramme or a potential left-inflected politics, despite the would-be successat the time of Tird-World liberationist theology. On the contrary, Christianity

11. Bloch 1972, p. 252.12. Bloch 1972, p. 2645.13. Bloch 1972, p. 265.14. Moltmann 1974, p. 40.


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was fundamentally the activation of the memory of Christ. And the memory ofChrists ministry was based not on that of a political revolutionary but on thatof the embodiment of the Holy Spirit, even if it was clear that his ministry hadhad an indisputable revolutionary impact on Judaic belief and culture. Tus,although the political theology of Moltmann and Metz is unambiguous in itscriticism of the apolitical pieties of the official Church drawing on WalterBenjamin and Jrgen Habermas for its left-radical tone its appeal to theradical leadership of Christs ministry is not to be mistaken for an activistpolitical doctrine. Te first ethical commitment of Christian activism is

certainly to the relief of the poor and lowly (in Eagletons sense), but thesepractical commitments cannot break the inclusiveness of Gods love.Consequently, Christian grace is not distributed in accordance with thedemands of particular (sectarian) political commitments and alliances; itspowers of dispensation are universal. As Kng puts it emphatically:

[Christs] message does not culminate in an appeal to being a better future by

force: anyone who takes up the sword will fall by the sword. He appeals forrenunciation of force: not to resist the evildoer, to do good to those who hate us,to bless those who curse us.15

Tis is why the ethical meeting between Christianity and Marxism on thenature of politics, and in particular, revolutionary politics, has always ended indissolution for the majority of Christian theologians. Christianity has nopractice or theory of revolutionary violence (although a good record on stateviolence as we know); it only has a practice and theory of love. Love is not onevirtue amongst other virtues; it is what is good and non-negotiable for allsituations.

Understandably, then, the wakefulness to the future remains in Christianpolitical theology, and for these writers, an essentially Pauline experience. Forit is precisely Saint Pauls separation of the notion of earthly struggle for GodsKingdom from the new life universally given through the resurrection-event

that turns the desacralised politics of the early Church into a new kindof political order: Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good(Rom. 12:21). Tis is why Moltmann, Metz and Kng all place the greatesttheological importance on the messianic and apocalyptic content of theresurrection-event.

Pauls emphasis on the resurrection-event as the source of unequivocal,universal love, transforms the individualisedredemption of the soul into an

15. Kng 1978, p. 190.


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event of cosmological proportions: the coming of the new age as a collectiveredemption. In line, then, with Pauls own separation from the teachings ofJesus, political theology is largely indifferent to the historical Jesus and themodern Jesus-tradition (whatever its left-leaning inflections). Tis is becauseit is only the resurrection-event that expresses the inner connection betweenthe redemption of the created order and the triumph of God, together withthe binding connection of politics to cosmological time; the historical Jesus issimply the vanishing mediator of this. As J. Christiaan Beker declares:

Pauls church is not an aggregate of justified sinners or a sacramental institute ora means for private self-sanctification but the avant-garde of the new creation ina hostile world, creating beachheads in the world of Gods dawning new worldand yearning for the days of Gods visible lordship over his creation, the generalresurrection of the dead.16

As such, there is a clear sense in this tradition where exactly a politicisedeschatology is to be found in the Bible. It is not to be found in the Gospels(Matthew, Mark, Luke, John), where the historical presence of Jesus is strong,but politicised Christian eschatology is weak, but in Pauls letters, where thehistorical presence of Jesus is essentially weak, but the apocalyptic andmessianic content of political eschatology is strong.

Tis is not to say that Pauline political theology has little interest in thewords and historical experience of Jesus, or seeks to separate the historicalJesus from the resurrection-event or even that it denies that the apocalyptic

and eschatological informed Jesuss thinking. Rather, the point of this politicaltheology is that the eschatological content of Christianity is not (and cannotbe) named as such in Jesuss own teachings without turning his ministry intoa form of empty and premature prophetism, particularly when so much textualevidence points to an essential (and foreseeable) ambiguity on this question.For example, in the Gospels in his exchange with Pilate and the High Priest,the words of Jesus are highly equivocal about his proclaimed status as the

Messiah. In response to the direct question: Are you the Messiah?, in Mark, Jesus says I am (Mark 14: 612); in Matthew, he says It is as you say(Mat. 26: 634); but in Luke, he says, It is you who say I am (Lu. 22: 6770).Tis ambiguity points, essentially, to an absence of self-conscious messianismin his thinking: were a preacher in the inter-estamental period to declarehimself as the Messiah, there certainly would be consistent evidence of hisplacement within the Davidic tradition of kingly redemption (the King

Messiah) the prevailing Judaic messianic tradition and the only messianic

16. Beker 1980, p. 155.


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teaching was socially grounded in the struggles of this local peasant class. Tisis not to say that these struggles defined his preaching, but there is a clearelision between the content of his thinking and the experiences of hispredominant peasant audience. Tis is why his use of rhetoric and adaptationof Greek and Jewish thinking is so radically different from other first-centuryJewish devouts and Hasidim.

Jesuss teaching does not rely on a language of judgement and casuistry, butfirst and foremost on qualities of empathy and emotional clarity and vividnessof argument, suggesting some familiarity on his part with Greek thought. As

in the Cynic tradition, what is held to be commonsensical and customary forinstance the supposedly incontestable virtues of the rich are reversed throughan unexpected image or anecdote.

Cynic itinerants and their rhetoric of confrontational reversal were commonin Galilee, part of the general flow of non-Pharisaic Greek thinking into thearea. Nevertheless, this rhetoric found few peasant adherents, since, in a worldof pressing hardship and poverty, its espousal of a general indifference to

society seemed more threatening than liberating. In order to define his ownanti-Pharisaic commitments, Jesus borrows much from the Cynic traditionsrhetorical forms, but reverses their general nihilistic polarity. As Burton L.Mack notes:

Te Jesus people were looking for something to put in the place of traditionalcultural codes that were no longer working in their unruly, fragmentary,multicultural world. Tey were searching for codes of mutual recognition.19

One way of doing this was linking the chreiai[reversals] of the Cynic-traditionto the possible revocation of the world as such. Tis produces a very differentsense of itinerancy amongst Jesus and his followers.

Instead of the nomadic cultivation of indifference to collective values, Jesusfocuses on the individual household as a place where disciples could engage insustained conversation, but also where practical acts could be performed, suchas healing and the preparation of food. Tus, by placing the fundamentalemphasis on the household as a place of free exchange, it was possible to offera different sense of community in the face of the destructiveness of localcustom (a Mediterranean system of patronage, clientage and honour-debts),and the perturbations of the local market economy. Te increasing dominanceof the market economy over the self-sufficiency of the extended household inHerodian Palestine was a major source of discontent for Galilean peasants,

19. Mack 1997, pp. 345.


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leading to widespread ruin and destitution. o confront such destitution witha different conception of faith then was one way of breaking with Pharisaichierarchy and the social indebtedness of the Law.

As Frayne puts it, when faced with the destruction of kinship values and thepossible loss of land, the emphasis on the imminence of the Kingdom of Godplays out in a very different way to being told that if you honour your bettersyou will eventually live like kings. Whereas the former accepts the currentsituation in order to claim to alleviate its worst effects in good time, the latteractually calls for envisioning the world differently.20

Such considerations place Jesuss talk of the imminence of Gods Kingdomin the realm of sharply contested practical arrangements and problems. It isdifficult, therefore, according to the Jesus-tradition, to imagine Christianbelief without recognising the earthly engagement of Jesus in the struggles ofthe oppressed. Yet it is also hard to imagine Jesus from this perspective assimply a benign leader of a large group of activists and social workers. Such adomesticated image diminishes the very real sense that his experimentation in

new forms of sociabilitybeginsthe imminent Kingdom of God. o defend thehistorical Jesus as engaged in practical struggles then is not to oppose Jesusssocial programme to his apocalyptic thinking. Rather, it indicates out howdifficult it is to locate the eschatological and apocalyptic content of Christianityin the Gospels with any textual certainty.

In this light, those who turn to the modern Jesus-tradition mainly wish toinvoke an image of Christianity rooted in action. Tis has appealed not only

to many de-churched Christians, but since the 1960s to many on the Left whosee in the reconstructions of the historical Christ something close to the spiritof authentic Christianity.21 But for all this traditions attempts to link Christianpraxis in a productive way to the apocalyptic, it has not been (and could never

20. Freyne 1997, p. 84. Of course, a lot of questions are begged here about who the historicalJesus was; a subject of massive dispute over the last 150 years. Just as many of the parables and

aphorisms of Jesus continue to be de-attributed as the work of later glosses and reinterpretations(mainly through the efforts of Robert Funks Jesus Seminar), the notion of Jesus as politicalradical in Freyne and others is fraught with all the problems of historical projection. Yet, in mostaccounts of the historical Jesus, it is not hard to see the wisdom of Jesus and the Jesus-traditionas egalitarian in character. At all times, Jesus places Gods law (the love of neighbour) over andabove written law. Tis is why Jesus called on his followers to renounce false gods andsupererogation (the attempt to gain spiritual favour through good works) through the rejectionof false righteousness: the pursuit of that which we believe is rightly due to ourselves. But, if Jesusplaces Gods law above the Law, this renunciation of good works does not imply non-combatancy

in the face of ones enemies: the demands of Christian patience and tolerance relate, rather, tothe injustice perpetrated on ones self. Love is onlyall-embracing at the time of Exodus or Advent.Before this, it is exclusively terrestrial and therefore subject to individual responsibility.

21. For a recent defence of this position, see Heller 2002.


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be) the centre of a politicised theology, because at no point do Jesus or hisdisciples ever reflect on Kingdom-Praxis as a set of principles beyond theirown experience. Tis is why Pauline theology looms so large over the historyof Christianity and Christian belief and the debate between Marxism andChristianity: for it philosophically separates the meaningof Christs death forChristian faith from the actuality of his historical commitments and beliefs.Tis is also why that even for a writer such as Bloch who is less disposed toPaul than Moltmann and Metz there is no political eschatology withoutPauls second Christ.22 In this sense, by fully transforming Jesus into the

Messiah, it is Paul, and Paul alone, who single-handedly produces the politicallanguage out of which the profound wakefulness to the future emerges.

Apocalypticism, messianism and eschatological time

In Pauline Christianity, messianic time is determined by the redemptive

relationship between the original coming of the Messiah and its completedrepetition in the second coming (the Parousia), leading to the dawn of newcreation and a new age. Eschatological time is the name given to the universalfulfilment in historical time of what has dawned in this messianic time.Underlying or intersecting with both of these times is apocalyptic time. Telatter rests on a profound sense of discrepancy between what is (the realm ofsuffering) and what should be (freedom from suffering). In the Jewishapocalyptic tradition, this is based on the tragic tension between faithfulnessto the orah and the apparent futility of this fidelity.

Apocalyptic time, in this respect, represents the pre-historical ground ofmessianic and eschatological time, insofar as messianic time and eschatologicaltime are both derived from the conflict in apocalypticism between the demandsof faith and the realities of the world. As such, Jewish apocalyptic time delivershumanity, for the first time, to the contingencies and sorrows of historicaltime. In the hope of redemption, human desire is grounded in worldlyendeavour rather than in mythic and Greek notions of eternal recurrence.

Tis is expressed most clearly in Exodus, where Gods people are setmarching through the world towards a better future. Indeed, the book ofExodus is the first description of revolutionary politics.23 But, for Paul, theinsertion of messianic time (the resurrection-event) into historical andeschatological time radically transforms how this gap is imagined and fulfilled

22. Te first faith is that of the historical Jesus. Te second faith is the faith in Jesus Christ.23. Walzer 1985, p. 134.


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in hope. Te Pauline messianic-event does not simply look to the future andthe end of time as the annihilation of this time, as in traditional Jewishapocalypticism; rather, it sees itself as an event at the end of history for thesake of historys transformation.24 Tis is because, although Pauls understandingof the future as a promise remains essentially Jewish, his understanding of theage to come as already having come transforms the expectations of what thispromise is. Paul is the first Jewish theorist of inaugurated eschatology asopposed to realised eschatology.25

Believers are still subject to the constraints and limitations of the present,

but their actions and faith belong to the coming age. Tis is because Godspromise to Abraham remains the same; what has changed is that Christ hasbeen born into the old age, thereby transforming the temporality of historicaltime irredeemably. In other words, Pauls reading of the resurrection-event asthe inauguration of a new creation radically transforms the event-of-faith.Christs Parousia not only ratifies the Abrahamic promise of the old time, butalso establishes a new (and imminent) time of hope in which the future is not

a future in history, of the end of history, but the future ofhistory.Te eschatological-historical space of Pauls messianism, therefore, is

profoundly non-linear in its understanding of the gap between what is and what is to come. Rather than focusing on an imagined and ever-distantfuture, the eschatological imagination remains in a continual state of expectantdisjunction with the present, making, as Moltmann puts it, every present aprovisional transcendence.26 In eschatological time, the future then is not a

continuation or prolongation ofthe present. Tis is because the prolongationor extension of present time can only reinforce present conditions of oppression,power, and ownership. Te present, rather, is the gateway through which thefuture is relieved of its continuity with the past, and made non-identicalwithitself (Gods kingdom to come).

For Moltmann, in this sense, there is no eschatological time and no promiseof justice without the authentic witness of those who experience the full force

of this historical non-identity: the poor and oppressed. Eschatological time, inother words, is the transcendent framework in which the atemporal messianic promise of historys transformation through the gateway of the present momentprevails. Yet, if this framework is congruent with (anti-historicist) revolutionarypractice and history, for eschatological Christian theologians such as Moltmannand Johann Baptist Metz, it is not to be confused with secular revolutionary

24. Beker 1980, p. 167.25. See Hooker 2003.26. Moltmann 1993, p. 134.


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history and practice. Tis is because the identification of secular revolutionaryhistory and practice with the eschatological character of freedom reduceshuman freedom to a form of anthropocentricism. Te disalienated return ofhumans to a realm of natural and collective spontaneity is not solely for thebenefit of humans, but for the glory of God. Eschatology, on this purelytheistic account, then presupposes a cosmological theocentrism.

Marx and Engelss legacy

Tis split between a modern politicised Jesus-tradition and a Paulinemessianism is not strictly translatable into a division between Left and Right;neither tradition is internally stable politically. But certainly today, it is thePauline tradition that has attracted the Left and is central to the return toreligion in political philosophy and theory. Tis is because, despite the widespread conservative reading of Pauline apocalypticism in orthodox

Christianity and Christian fundamentalism,27

Pauline Christianity imagines aradical, collective break with the prevailing order; the Jesus-tradition, incontrast, appears, for all its social engagement, ameliorative and consensual.

Marx and Engels were not scholars of Paul; neither did they have anythinglike a modern Jesus-tradition available to them.28 Yet, clearly, what attractedthem to the apocalyptic and eschatological content of early Christianity washow the notion of an impending Kingdom of God was so thoroughlypoliticised as a concept. Engels had the utmost respect for the great apocalypticChristian revolutionary Tomas Mnzer and his anti-Lutheran Biblecommunism.

By the Kingdom of God Mnzer meant a society with no class differences, noprivate property and no state authority independent of, and foreign to, themembers of society. All the existing authorities, insofar as they refused to submitand join the revolution, were to be overthrown, all work and all shared in

common, and complete equality introduced.29

27. Tis version of apocalypticism is essentially nihilistic and has thrived on the Right and farRight, for example, the rebarbative US-based Church of Christ. In the 1960s RudolfSchnackenberg summed up this position very well: this orthodox version of apocalyptic lies inits concealment from the multitude and its delivery to the wise . . . the pride of the elect and thecontempt for the mass damnata indeed the positive thirst for revenge and pleasure in thedestruction of the wicked. Schnackenberg 1963, p. 139.

28. Although something like the Jesus-tradition did inform the struggles between right-Hegelians and left-Hegelians in the 1820s, and fed indirectly into Marx and Engelss assessmentsof Christianity and philosophy. See Dickey 1993.

29. Engels 1978, p. 422.


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Indeed, the place of Bible communism within the history of workers andpeasants struggles was a recurring concern of Engels, particularly towards theend of his life.

In 1894, in On the History of Early Christianity, he talks in propheticlanguage about the future of Christianity lying in socialism.30 Tis is perhapsnot surprising. In a period of the growing state incorporation of the workersmovement, Engelss sympathetic comparison between early Christianity andworkers struggles draws on eschatological resources that both he and Marxsaw essentially as anti-statist. It is mostly Engels, though, who develops this

link; by the mid-1840s, Marx had taken a back seat on these questions.In his Berlin student days, when he was developing his critique of the

Christianised Prussian state, Marx rejected all Christian and theistic beliefs.Tere was no experience of Christianity in Prussia for Marx that did notappear to endorse the repressive and stupefying apparatuses of the state. Hencethe centrality in the early writing of one of his most famous dicta: the criticismof religion is the prerequisite of all criticism and the vehemence of his anti-

Christian sentiment.After a certain point, Marx thus had little interest in differentiating the

internal traditions and political struggles within Christianity and, consequently,used the broad generality Christianity without distinguishing in any detailbetween Protestant and Catholic, and Pauline and pre-Pauline legacies (Engelswas always more attuned and sensitive to these distinctions). Tis is largelybecause by the early 1840s after a decade of deflationary attacks on religion

by Strauss, Bauer and Feuerbach Marx believed the critique of Christianityand religion to be, in its fundamentals, mostly accomplished. Tus, from 1844onwards, it was the critique of political economy and state law, and the politicalorganisation of human society that overwhelmingly preoccupied him, and notthe development of a theory of ideology which could explain the persistenceof religion despite the spread of the sciences and the workers movement.

A contributory factor to this removal of religious belief from Marxs immediate

concerns was the fact that public adherence to Christianity in the second half ofthe nineteenth century in the newly industrialising European states appeared tobe largely confined to the bourgeoisie. For instance, the clergy in London in the1860s and 1870s was consistently worried about the unchurched character ofthe British working class.31 But if the working class in Britain was mostly church-shy, certain conservative Christian values of forbearance and piety played theirpart in shaping the ideological direction of the early workers movement, in

30. Engels 1987, pp. 44560.31. Ling 1980.


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particular Chartism. In fact, it was the apparent deepening of these values thateventually led to such frustration for Marx in London.

Te absence of a church-going working class may have worried the bourgeoisclergy, but there was nothing to suggest that this was atheism merelyindifference. Yet if Christianity and the prospect of a Christianised labourmovement began to haunt Marx in England, it was Engels who saw suchbeliefs as more than a contingent and conjunctural impediment to socialistrevolution; and it is these more nuanced reflections that are expressed in thelater writings.

We therefore see that the Christianity of that time, which was still unaware ofitself [in the first decades after Jesuss execution], was as different as heaven fromearth from the later dogmatically fixed universal religion of the Nicene Council;one cannot be recognised in the other. Here we have neither the dogma nor themorals of later Christianity but instead a feeling that one is struggling againstthe whole world and that the struggle will be a victorious one; an eagerness forthe struggle and a certainty of victory which are totally lacking in Christians

today and which are to be found in our time only at the other pole of society,among the Socialists.32

Tis is not, however, a post-Marx concession to a Christianised socialism;rather, it is a renewed recognition of the place of religious dissent anddisaffection in the continuum of class struggle.

In this, Engels recovers and recodifies those moments in both their joint

writing and Marxs own writing where religious anti-statism and disdain forthe positivistic realm of appearances, particularly in the form of religious-mysticism, plays a liberating role. Despite his general distance from thesedebates, Marx retained some sympathy for radical-prophetic thought in itsdissenting role againststate Protestantism. And it this voice that we hear in hisfamous encomium about religion-as-resistancein Contribution to the Critiqueof Hegels Philosophy of Law, and in the subsequent identification, in theHegelian Marxism of the 1950s and 60s, of Marxism with transcendent revolt:Religiousdistress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also theprotestagainst real distress.33

Tus, if it is quite easy to believe that Marx never sees any revolutionarypotential in Christianity,34 as John Schad puts it unambiguously, the quotefrom the Contribution and Engelss writings more generally disclose a wholehistory of links between Christian eschatology and communist eschatology

32. Engels 1987, p. 457.33. Marx 1975, p. 175.34. Schad 2004, p. 31.


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throughout their work. And it this link that Engels draws on in his laterwritings. Unlike Strauss, Bauer and Feuerbach, Engels (and Bloch) argue that what distinguishes Marx from his anti-religion peers and forebears is thatMarx is unwilling to see this eschatological content squandered through arationalist and undialectical critique of religion. 35

Te Engelsian problematic

Hope is able to inherit those features of religion which do not perish with thedeath of God.Ernst Bloch36

Te turn to religion in recent political philosophy, in many ways, fits thisEngelsian profile: religion is too important, too fertile, too full of usefulphilosophical materials, to be left to the religious, on the one hand, and to the

natural scientists and scientific-positivistic critics of religion, on the other.Christianity, in particular, provides philosophical and revolutionary resourcesthat can continue to redefine questions of agency, commitment and theconditions of belief, for in its core practices and beliefs, (early) Christianitydesignates the failure and insupportablenessof present reality. But, firstly, weneed to be clear about what this current turn to religion means precisely.

In recent ethical philosophy, political philosophy and political theory the

turn to religion is in no general sense a return to religion in any pre-Kantianconception thereof.37 Tere is no fundamental posing of positive religionagainst the religion of reason. Both theists and atheists submit themselves tothe Enlightenment critique of religious revelation and obscurantism. In this,all writers under consideration occupy a broadly Kantian space of reflecting[reflektierende] faith, insofar as they are all committed to the porous boundariesof faith and practical reason,38 and consequently to the fact that, by recognising

35. I say squandered, but, of course, the absent systematic discussion of religion in Marx andEngels produced an enormous hiatus in the Marxist tradition on the question of religion, onlypartially corrected by Bloch and Adorno. As Alexander Saxton puts it, Marxisms failure to comeup with an effective hypothesis for the origin of religion left a strategic gap in the secular(materialist) interpretation of history. Saxton 2006, p. 164. Tis unfulfilled project wouldcertainly have encouraged research into historical circumstances under which religions had

worked as liberating forces (p. 163).36. Bloch 1972, p. 266.37. For an overview of the philosophical terrain, see de Kesel and Hoens 2006.38. Kant 1996.


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that both philosophy and religion begin with a kind of faith . . . there is nopure reason.39

But if this makes for a shared recognition that our knowledge is embeddedin pre-reflective beliefs that operate behind our backs and, therefore, thatsuch beliefs take up a constitutive place in our theories without propositionalevidence, these writers differ sharply on the content of the critique of purereason and reflecting faith. Accordingly, we need to make a number ofdistinctions: between those writers who draw on the Engelsian continuitybetween Marxism and early Christian eschatology (principally Marxists);

those who identify philosophy with the limits of reason and see this as aninvitation to explore the intersection of philosophy and theology (Kantians,deconstructionists and theological phenomenologists); those who treatChristianity and other religions as an actual revolutionary critique andextension of Marxism as such (the Christian ontologists, and ecumenicallibertarians); and the post-Marxist or neo-Marxist revolutionary seculardefenders of Christian universalism. Te first category would include Slavoj

iek and imothy Bewes; the second Jacques Derrida, Hent de Vries andJean-Luc Marion; the third John Milbank, Philip Goodchild and Roy Bhaskar;and the fourth Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Antonio Negri.40

With the exception of Milbank, Goodchild, Marion and Bhaskar (perhaps),all are non-believers and, as such, it is the radical atheistic context of thereception and (re)translation of Christian categories that distinguishes this work in its immediate politically conjunctural sense. Tis calls for

reconsideration, therefore, of the other (and hidden) part of Engelss argument:in what sense does the statist assimilation of the workers movement representa crisisof politics and political subjectivity? And, in turn, in what sense might(radical) Christian commitments undermine or confront this real or imaginedprocess of crisis and assimilation?

In this way, the present turn/s to religion is/are undoubtedly fed by a senseof crisis in politics, just as Engelss reflections were in the 1880s and early

1890s. But, in this wide-ranging body of contemporary writing, the fact ofmere workers, assimilation, has after the Russian Revolution, the collapse ofthe Soviet Union, and the public destitution of Marxism and historicalmaterialism become a widespread crisis of political subjectivity itself underthe postmodern pacification and democratisation of the political process.Consequently, unlike the exchange between Marxists and Christianity in the

39. Faulconer 2003.40. See for example, iek 2000 and 2003; Bewes 2003; Derrida, 1995 and 1998; De Vries2002; Marion 1995; Milbank 2003 and 2005; Goodchild 2002; Bhaskar 2002a and 2002b;Badiou 2003; Agamben 2005; Negri 2003.


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fifties, sixties and seventies, the debate is not simply about using the seditiouspassion of Christian hope to attack Stalinisms mechanical materialism andutilitarian ethics. Rather, Christianity, for the likes of iek, Derrida, Bhaskar,Badiou, Agamben, and Negri is a means of testing and revisiting therenunciative, atemporal, self-violating conditions of political subjectivity. Inthis respect, the turn to Christianity reconnects to a less forgiving andaccommodating political space than the one associated with the presentglobalised liberal agenda one based on the demands of sacrifice, fidelity, faithand the (non-pious) vows of poverty.

Recently, I have discussed how this turn to the renunciative subject thesubject who walks away from heteronomy owes to a Christianised Kantianethics of conviction, or self-responsibility, despite the different political traditionsof these writers, and different emphases they place upon the renunciative.41 Inthis regard, the renunciative Christianised subject functions in a twofold way: asan ally of anticapitalism and as a critic of the commodification of religion itself(something that was certainly less evident in the 1950s and 60s).

Here, I want to focus more generally on the broader (Marxist andChristianised) questions of agency, history and temporality. In this respect, Iwant to concentrate specifically on the relations between my first category(Marxism and Christianity) and my fourth (post-Marxist or neo-Marxistatheistic Christianised universalism), as they come to be defined around thetranscendent; that is, specifically around the Pauline categories of themessianic, apocalyptic and eschatological. For it is in the writings of Badiou,

iek and Agamben, in particular, where this Engelsian crisis of politics onthe terrain of Marxism and of Pauline Christianitys wakefulness to the futureis at its most engaged and vivid. We are thus drawn into the very politicalheart of this return to religion and turn to Christianity: the relationshipbetween event, revolutionary consciousness and the end/ends of history/prehistory. Tis, in turn, enfolds us into a older and wider debate on historicismand teleology that has shaped the critique of orthodoxy in Marxism since the

1920s: in what sense is the revolutionary event an unanticipated call from thepast to the future, on the one hand, or the objective working class seizure ofthe unfolding maturation of the contradictions of capitalism, on the other?

Messianism and anti-historicism

Badiou, iek and Agamben are all anti-historicists in the sense that they all

identify their revolutionary politics with the rejection of the telos of

41. Roberts 2003.


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philosophical rationalism, substituting the ironies, ruses and contingencies ofthe historical process for any notion of proletarian reason embedded in history.But if this is precisely, at one level, the commonplace post-Hegelian space ofthe politics of our time, its anti-historicism is neither strictly Weberian norpostmodern. Far from identifying anti-historicism with an exit from Marx,revolutionary dialectic and its anticipatory logic essentially become the spaceof an immanent transcendence; that is, the future is already here, insofar as therevolutionary event can break through at any time. Far from being outside oftime, the messianic locates the future in the visible here and now.

Tis defence of an anti-historicist historical materialism has, of course,shaped the critique of orthodox Marxism since the twenties, since its founding(brief) messianic moment in Georg Lukcss History and Class Consciousness(1923). As Lukcs argued in his defence ofHistory and Class Consciousnessinailism and the Dialectic (1926), there can be no moment where . . . thepossibility of an activeinfluencing of the subjective moments is completelylacking.42 However, it is really only since the reception in the 1970s of

Benjamins explicit messianism, as exemplified by the Teses on the Philosophyof History,43 that it is possible to talk about an anti-historicist Marxism as atheoretically self-conscious if heterogeneous critical tradition.

Benjamins reception in the wake of the twin catastrophes of fascist andStalinist progress, allowed Marxs own scepticism about the sirens ofteleological development to be reinstalled in historical materialism as a practiceofdeflected progress. Indeed, it is at the high point of Benjamins reception that

Alvin Gouldner, for instance, introduced his (still useful) notional distinctionbetween Scientific Marxism (instrumental, positivist, managerial, technicist)and Critical Marxism (praxis-oriented, conjucturalist, culturalist), allowingmessianism to step out of the metaphysical shadows and become an anti-historicist resource for a theory of history.44

We need, therefore, to clarify what kind of theory of history is presupposedhere by the concept of deflected progress. o do this, it is possible to divide the

messianic event into various categories of historical understanding: (i) as abreak with and universal transformation of history as dead, flat or homogeneoustime; (ii) as a break with and universal transformation of human historyunderstood as a continuous process ofregression; (iii) as a break with, and laterre-absorption into, history as the eternal recurrence of the same the cyclical

42. Lukcs 2000, p. 62.43. Benjamin 1973.44. Gouldner 1980. Although Gouldner is not himself sympathetic to the messianic

tendencies in Marxism.


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birth, maturation and decay of the historical process; (iv) as a break with anduniversal transformation of a teleological andprogressivist conception of history;and (v) as a break with the historical process as a dialectical interruption ofhistory, understood as a form of deflected but directional progress.Fundamentalist and orthodox religious believers usually subscribe to pointsone through four, divided as many believers are across denominations andsecular political commitments between homogeneous, apocalyptic andevolutionary-progressivist conceptions of history. In this respect, all implicitlyadhere to an idealist redemption of history and, as such, all are profoundly

indifferent to the intersection between the messianic as interruption and thedynamics of secular progress.

It is only point five, therefore, that embeds the messianic break in aconception of history that is both non-teleological and progressive. Tat is, inrefusing to define the historical process as flat, regressive or unproblematicallyprogressive, the messianic event as the event that interrupts the commonsensetelos of historical progress becomes identifiable with, or more precisely

constitutive of, a revolutionary agency that stands in the moment and passageof the events interruption to redirect the historical process. It is this latterposition, then, that could be said to be compatible with Marxs critique of thephilosophy of history and defence of historical materialism as a non-historicisttheory of history.45

All three writers (Agamben, Badiou and iek) operate generally, if withdifferent philosophical materials, within this conception of the messianic.

Hence, although their anti-historicism is clearly the product of defeat, it is notthe product of a defeat ofhistorical progress tout court. One of the consequencesof this is that they all place renewed emphasis on politics and commitment, orpolitics ascommitment the move Gouldner sees as largely characteristic ofcritical Marxism.

As such, in a period of extended post-revolutionary defeat for the Left and,consequently, the retreat of communism as the real movement that abolishes

the present state of society, the legacy of Marxism here is identified broadlywith a recovery of praxis as a theory of revolutionary fidelity (a notion whichis, of course, central to Badious ethics).46 Tat is, after the collapse ofcommunism as the real movement that abolishes the present state of society,defending and thinking the Russian Revolution in the present as the keyuniversal moment within a process of deflected historical progress takes on not just a constitutive form for theory-as-praxis, but is the means whereby the

45. For a discussion of the distinction between the philosophy of history and the theory ofhistory in Marx and Marxism, see Callinicos 1995.

46. Badiou 2004.


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subject is cathected to the revolutionary tradition. As Gouldner explains, in adifferent context:

Critical Marxism has a closer affinity with Hegelian views, for the latter . . . is akind of secular Protestantism that stresses the importance of sectarian internalconviction and authentic belief, contrasting this invidiously with the positivityof churchly reliance upon institutional forms, i.e., mere behavioral conformity.47

In this sense, Agambens, Badious and ieks readings of Saint Paul all derive

from this gap, insofar all are indebted to the theological imagination orspace that Benjamins anti-linearity opened up for a reinvigoration ofrevolutionary conviction and revolutionary temporality, even though it is onlyAgambens work that openly espouses this debt to Benjamin. Badious anti-historicism perhaps owes more to Feuerbachs laicisation of the infinite48 andBlanchots open dialectic and the suppressed messianism of Merleau-Pontysadventures in the dialectic, when in the early 1950s Merleau-Ponty defended

Lukcs against Sartres ultra-Bolshevism (historical purification);

49

just as, foriek, it is Lukcs who is the primary mediating figure between Saint Pauland Badiou.

Yet the returns to religion and the legacy of Marxism here would not havethe valence they have without Benjamins messianic interpellation. Because itis precisely Benjamins Judaic reconfiguration of the absolute in the here andnow as the logic of a communist practice and vision set against a self-containedprogress, which establishes the political terrain whereupon the returns toreligion and the rereading of Paul from within Marxism are being contested.Tat is, as Benjaminian-type state-of-emergencytheories, Agambens, ieksand Badious political philosophies inherit a critical Marxism which thematisespraxis as presently and necessarily behind the historical process. But this stateof emergency in the current period is not a politics of the interregnum asunderstood by Benjamin or more loosely by Merleau-Ponty.

47. Gouldner 1980, p. 43.48. What Badiou shares with Feuerbach is that he refuses to submit the human essence to the

idea of the Other or One, by reversing the polarity of godly infinity and human finitude. InBadiou, this is grounded in the mathematisation of being the infinitely infinite multiplicity. InFeuerbach, it is done via the notion that the creativity of the human species is infinite preciselyas a result of its collective scientific powers and boundless collective and communal resources.Humanity has no need of any externalised notion of infinity, for infinity is immanent to humansown powers of becoming. Consequently, for both philosophers, all thinking that locates human

infinitude outsideof the human in the One is unreal and religious. See Feuerbach 1986. For adiscussion of Badiou and Feuerbach as essentially rationalist and anti-humanist philosophers, seealso Power 2005.

49. Merleau-Ponty 1973.


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Te impasse Merleau-Ponty famously proposed, in the spirit of Benjamin,in the 1950s it is impossible to be an anti-Communist and it is not possibleto be a Communist50 has been dissipated, for the moment at least. For it isclearly possible indeed, utterly to be expected that the political subject be ananti-communist subject today. Communism as praxis and ideal, then,according to these authors, has to be made from other historical, political andphilosophical materials than those already handed down to us in the name ofhistorical Communism, whether actual or imagined. Consequently, despite Agambens, ieks and Badious antipathy to the unrestrained synthetic

impulses of dialectical reason,51 their anti-historicism is not identifiable withits dominant post-historical form in postmodernism or compatible with theweak messianicity of deconstruction; that is, if they all take their distance fromthe apodictic claims of dialectical reason, this is not replaced by politics ofDerridean diffranceand undecidability. Derridas version of anti-historicismbecomes a useful point of ideological contrast with this kind of messianism,to the extent that as a strongmessianismm it allows anti-historicism to recover

a wakefulness to the future which is open to the transcendent move.

Te already, the not yet and the to come

Derridas antipathy to the possibility of the speculative transcendental movederives from a philosophy of the other fixated on politics as gap, interregnum,fissure, and trace. Te One and the All remain locked into process ofparticularist qualification and exchange, in which the production of a thirdterm (the revolutionary break) is always provisional, ephemeral (diffrance, thesupplement, thepharmakon). Tis is to subvert the third term as a move ofpremature synthesis or transcendent closure; the move to the transcendent isalways a move awayfrom the transcendent. Tis withholding or bracketing ofthe third term, by dint of the third terms emergent identity as not-One, givesDerridas politics, therefore, the character of a permanently delayed(melancholic) promise. Te third term enacts; it cannot found, thematise orstructure.

Yet, this is not to say that Derridas politics has no sense of the to come onthe basis of the already, or, indeed, that his writing lacks a concept ofproletarian revolution; but it is to say that it is narrow, weak and self-undermining the promise of the to come lies only in the preservation of the

50. Merleau-Ponty 1969, p. xxi.51. I borrow this phrase from Richard Wolin, in his discussion of Merleau-Ponty, Wolin

1985, p. 127.


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not-One.52 Hence, a fundamental conflict haunts deconstructive post-metaphysics: at the point of liberating reflection and meaning from the pre-ordinations of historicism and orthodox Marxist teleology, agency andmeaning are pushed back into finite actuality. Te effect of this absence of thestrong transcendent move (through the gateway of the eschatological andmessianic) is not so much openness to the direct and contingent demands ofthe Other, but the effective expunging of the possibility of radical othernessfrom the structures of reality itself. As imothy Bewes has put it, themetaphysical virtue of a strong messianic third term, mediating between

self and other, One and All, One and not-One, past and present, is thatit successfully preserves the possibility of radical alterity immanent tofinitude.53

Whereas deconstruction and other forms of anti-dialectical scepticismdissolve or weaken the absorption of the anxiety of self and other into atranscendent (emancipatory) horizon (the absolute, the Kingdom of God, theproletarian revolution), the metaphysics of dialectical or religious thinking

sustain the connection between self and other in this horizon by continuallyabsorbing self and other into a third and emergent space: a space that is neitherthat of the self nor other, but of their collective interpellation. It is not atheismthen that is the opposite of religious thought, but precisely unthinkabilityand undecidability. For such openness to the Other at the expense of thesynthesising move of the third term suppresses what cannot be contained bythe movement and endless succession of difference.

Te preservation of alterity in the finite and the call for a transcendent-immanentthird term is key to the turn to Christianised categories. Tus, whatconnects iek, Bhaskar, Badiou, Agamben and Negri is a striking recourse tothe temporal/atemporal triadic framework of Judeo-Christian transcendentalism:the already, the not yet and the to come. Tis is reflected in the widespreadreflection on Saint Pauls theology in this corpus of writing, with Badiou andAgamben producing extensive studies of his work, and iek producing an

extensive reading of Badiou on Saint Paul.Saint Paul is exemplary for these particular writers as for radical Christiantheologians generally precisely because in his articulation of the resurrectionas the key transforming event of Christs life, introducing into historical timethe prospect of humanitys universal liberation from the realm of death atChrists Parousia, the promise of infinitude is made afinite, daily act of faith,instruction and struggle.54 Te transcendent is figured, therefore, through the

52. Derrida 1994.53. Bewes 2002, p. 192.54. See also Breton 1988 and aubes 2004.


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Christian subjects fidelity in struggle to the actuality and repetition of theliving hope of the resurrection-event, and not through any abstract orsupernatural hope (the old apocalypticism). Tere is an irreducible mediationbetween transcendence and immanence. One presupposes the other.

Tis immanent understanding and grounding of the transcendent, then,has wider philosophical and political implications for these writers, particularlyBadiou, iek and Agamben.55 How do we recognise a significant and universalevent, and remain faithful to it in our finitude, rather than subject it simply to(localised) interpretation? How do we once we accept its universality

continue to produce and reproduce its universal address in the present? Whatis the nature of a universal event? And how does it produce in us the experienceof fidelity? Consequently, under what conditions, and with what means, dosubjects become agents of a commitment to a truth that is universallyauthentic? What does such an event actually interrupt, historically, subjectively?It is these three writers reading of Saint Paul that I want to concentrate on inPart II of this article.56 For what they have to say about Saint Paul allows us to

assess how the transcendent-immanent turn which is constitutive of the(atheistic) Christianised turn in political philosophy and political theory remains, or fails to remain, within a Marxist and Christian problematic.

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