Radical Theology is a rarefied taste. Between a relatively small proportion of believers who are interested in theology and the generality of nonbelievers who have no interest at all there is a rather esoteric coterie of non-believers who are interested in the subject. For such Radical Theology may be an exploration into the penumbra of doubt or a lingering addiction to things once believed, or merely as a goad to irritate the faithful. For those still within the ecclesiastical edifice its status is probably more akin to a gargoyle, occupying a remote buttress where it can quietly grimace out at the emptiness.
Whether the generality of people ever believed much in the first place is a moot point: think of the mobs that confronted Wesley, which did ‘seethe and surge’, or the folk the brothers Grimm met in the heart of Christian Europe, with their distinctly animistic view of the world. No doubt their rulers had more definite theological interests – if only as a means of coercion and control. But, this too has gradually been eroded over three centuries growth of secularism. The dramatis personae of this great cultural transformation – Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Marx, etc. – also occupy the earlier pages of Greenfield’s book (perhaps Hobbes and Spinoza might also have merited a mention).
Though this may well be a useful background it is not clear that this is Radical Theology. The ‘fulcrum’ of such radicalism, as Greenfield notes, comes rather with Nietzsche’s proclamation of ‘God’s death within a worldview that still find’s meaning and purpose in the Christian Gospel.’ It was almost another century before theologians in the USA – such as Cox, Van Buren, Altizer – began to explore the social, philosophical and theological issues of the so-called ‘Death of God’. This is the locus classicus of Radical Theology which has continued with the Sea of Faith movement. Greenfield gives a good summary of contemporary writings associated with this movement.
A useful distinction can be made – as Greenfield does – between ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’ theology. The former is predicated on individual experience and the attempt to accommodate belief to modernity. In doing so it concedes more and more leaving it nowhere to go. In turn it prompts a conservative backlash and a fundamentalism that simply dismisses what it doesn’t like. Those who have followed the trajectory of the post-Vatican-II Catholicism or the rise of American neo-conservatism will find ample evidence of this mentality. It has given rise to the curious contemporary phenomenon of the un-traditional traditionalist – such as the suicide jihadist.
In so far as theology was traditionally defined as faith seeking understanding, there is now less interest in understanding than the affirmation of certainty. What doesn’t fit in with belief is brazenly rejected, which may well include rationality.
What makes Radical Theology different for Greenfield is that it is a journey from certainty to uncertainty: ‘ultimately, the idea of absence brings with it not knowledge, but, rather silence and unknowing’. Greenfield sees a precedent for Radical Theology in the Wisdom Literature of the Bible, openly engaged with the world of multiculturalism and which ‘does not make claims for recognition on the basis of the tradition of election and cult, but, rather, it claims its truth to be grounded in the nature of the world.’ This form of radicalism shies away from the certainty of the death of God to a more nuanced recognition of the absence of God, allowing for further exploration.
There is the suggestion here of ‘a style of theology that sets out to prove the existence of another piece of existence’. By contrast the Death of God offers a finality, a sort of cleaning the slate ready to move on.
Not that anyone died – not that it was even an event.
There was merely a dawning recognition, a change in human perception of the way the world is, that cast an entire mode of thinking aside. The key question now is why humans become so possessed by belief in the first place.
This is not so much a theological as anthropological question: as Greenfield succinctly puts it, ‘Theology is anthropology writ large.
The Word is actually our word, our text, our language.’The illusion of theology – both radical and otherwise – is that it is about something. It is not. It is a perception, a way of seeing the world – perhaps, even, a prejudice. The irony is that people are not going to stop referring to God, whatever their understanding. It will go on being part of the human narrative – because that is how we are.
Dominic Kirkham is an interested follower of SoF and writes regularly for Renew (Catholics for a Changing Church).
Trevor Greenfield, An Introduction to Radical Theology, O Books (Winchester). 2006. £12.99. 208 pages. Pbk. ISBN: 1905047606