‘Hospitality’ at the End of Religion

Professor John C. McDowell

Morpeth Professor of Theology & Religious Studies

University of Newcastle, NSW

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‘Hospitality’ at the End of Religion

Preface

So much has been written about the theologian from central Europe Dietrich Bonhoeffer as prophet,

martyr, priest, that one of the challenges is to find something new and interesting to say about him.

Too much passes the lips of hagiographers again to be in any way valuable in its right, slipping into

an overextending of his life and work in what one might well call a hagiographic hubris – even a

hagiographic hamartia. For too much writing he is made banal and sentimental, tamed by the

emotivism that surrounds talk of him as something of a heroic white knight who rides in to save the

day as a deus ex machina when the darkness is about to fall.

Much commentators’ attention has been focused on “religionless Christianity”, a claim made

in the always enigmatic and usually allusive late Letters and Papers from Prison. Such claims tend to

give comfort to those who have moved post-institutionally in their Christianity, or who pay attention

to Christianity only from the perspective of being spiritually-minded ‘seekers’. In this regard,

Bonhoeffer’s claims might appear timely and provocative, a challenge to churches to move with the

spirit of the times. In many ways I want to deflate this understanding, or at least the ease of this use

of his work, one that has largely been the product of the reception of J.A.T. Robinson’s populist

Honest to God. By giving Bonhoeffer back his bite to a Christian environment slipping more and

more into trite and sentimental forms of spirituality might mean making him appear somewhat less

attractive initially, but such for Bonhoeffer would be the cost of identifying one’s way as a disciple.

The claim is that his theology performs an interrogation of personhood, providing a challenge that is

ontologically deep, with the effect of forming an ethic of persons-in-relation – in relation to God in

Christ, our Neighbour. Bonhoeffer’s primary value, then, may well lie not in his consoling words so

much as in his dislocating of us from modes of constructing personhood that are namable as

idolatrous. This is to locate Bonhoeffer, even at the end, very much in terms of the costliness of

witnessing to the Gospel of the crucified Saviour. In other words, to use a phrase from Matthew

Boulton, the healthy theological consideration of Bonhoeffer can function as part of “a kind of

spiritual detoxification process”, weaning us off our delusions of grandeur which effect unjust abuses

of others, or off the quietistic forms of endurance of highly contingent suffering and pathological

dependencies, and off our habituations to “fear, guilt, [and] selfish ambition”.1

My paper hopes to put Bonhoeffer into service, reflectively critical service, in that his work is

utilised to fruitfully bear on identifying certain contemporary conditions. The conditions are those of

the dis- and re-enchantment of the world, to use Max Weber’s scheme. Where Bonhoeffer may best

1 Matthew Boulton, God Against Religion, x. 2

help is in putting to us questions of value, desire and power by reconceiving the human as a

christically contoured performance of hospitable sociality.

Global Time at the End of History

According to Ulrich Beck: “Where there is no escape, people ultimately no longer want to think

about it. This eschatological ecofatalism allows the pendulum of private and political moods to swing

in any direction.”2 Beck’s claims announce a sense of entrapment which produces despair. However,

as Nicholas Lash recognises when pursuing reflections on the difficulty of meaningfully generating a

critical hope, not all the voices of the late twentieth-century have been so despondent. 3 For instance,

with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the impending collapse of Soviet Communism

and the Cold War, Francis Fukyama in “triumphalistic notes” confidently announced ‘the end of

history’.4 By this he did not mean that the process of change that we experience as time had come to

an end. Rather, following the early C19th German philosopher Hegel, he was thinking about the

‘meaning’ of things or the meaning of ‘history’. So he speaks of “history … as a single, coherent,

evolutionary process”, and it is this which has come to its end, its fulfilment, its goal at least in

ideological terms.5 According to Fukuyama, that goal is “the universalization of Western liberal

democracy as the final form of human government.”6 It is important to note that, for Fukuyama, “the

victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet

incomplete in the real world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will

govern the material world in the long run”.7 Fukuyama’s thesis is that while stable liberal

democracies do not yet exist worldwide, philosophically speaking, “liberal democracy remains the

only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe.” 8 And so,

2 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London, 1992), 37. 3 Nicholas Lash, ‘Beyond the End of History?’, Concilium 5 (1994), 47-56. 4 See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989); ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest (Summer 1989), 3-18, available at www.cla.wayne.edu/polisci/krause/Comparative/SOURCES/fukuyama.htm, consulted 05-01-01; and ‘The End of History: By Way of an Introduction’ (1992), www.csf.colorado.edu/mirrors/ma…t/philosophy/works/us/fukuyama.htm, consulted 05-01-01. Citation from Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterialistic Citizens (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009), 59. 5 Fukuyama, ‘The End of History: By Way of an Introduction’. 6 Francis Fukuyma, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest (Summer 1989), 3-18, available at www.cla.wayne.edu/polisci/krause/Comparative/SOURCES/fukuyama.htm, consulted 05-01-01. 7 Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’. 8 Fukuyama, ‘The End of History: By Way of an Introduction’, xiii. On the one hand Fukuyama wants to use empirical affairs by way of justifying his thesis. So, he claims, there has been a “move toward political freedom around the globe” which would have been everywhere accompanied, “sometimes followed, sometimes preceded” by “a liberal revolution in economic thought.” On the other hand, the “good news” remains at the level of regulating ideal that cannot be measured against any historical or empirical sets of affairs, a trans-historical ideal. Derrida complains, “Depending on how it works to his advantage and serves his thesis, Fukuyama defines liberal democracy here as an actual reality and there as a simple ideal. … Even as we take seriously the idea that a heralding sign or a pomise constitutes an irreducible event, we must nevertheless guard against confusing these two types of event. A thinking of the event is no doubt what is most lacking from such

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unconstrained by Soviet Communism the future would be characterised by the universal admission

and implementation of the superiority of liberal democratic politics and the global economy by

regimes throughout the world. “The next century, he insinuated, would be a time when individuals

the world over would be at last free to cultivate, express, and develop themselves as individuals and to

achieve the kind of recognition that authoritarian and totalitarian political structures since the

beginnings of history had denied them. ... [D]eadly conflict [was] at an end”.9

Yet not only did critics attack his optimism, but many argued that the types of liberal political

and economic values he promoted would actually serve to undermine the project of seeking a just

society. For instance, many critics decried “the social injustices wrought by the relentless march of

market economies and international corporate interests”.10 Others, like George Soros, argued that

free-market ideology in fact ironically threatens political democracy:

By promoting market values into a governing principle, market fundamentalism has undermined

our society. Representative democracy presupposes moral values, such as honesty and integrity,

particularly in our representatives. When success takes precedence over integrity, and politics is

dominated by money, the political process deteriorates.11

Crucially too, others maintain that procedural analyses fail to engage in the fundamental

consideration of “the most basic moral convictions that should govern the development of public

policies.”12 The skin-deepness of a polis without a substantive sense of ‘the good’ could be little more

than a thin peaceableness of ever further fracturing cultures.

Clashing Cultures, or Is There Hope for a Global Conversation?

Possibly the most powerful counter-thesis to Fukyama’s vision came not very long afterward with the

highly influential but equally controversial book entitled The Clash of Civilizations by American

political scientist of Harvard University, Samuel Huntingdon.13 The titular phrase had been alarmistly

coined by Bernard Lewis in 1957 in a prediction that by the end of the twentieth century Europe

would be Islamic. One significant matter that distinguishes Huntingdon’s book from Fukuyama’s is

the fact that religion features substantially in the political analysis. Reflecting the secularisation

a discourse.” [Derrida, 1994, 62f.] 9 Carl Raschke, Globochrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 15f. 10 Raschke, 17. 11 George Soros, cited in Marc Breslow, ‘George Soros: Beware Market Fundamentalism’ (1999), www.dollarsandsense.org/1999/221breslow.html, consulted 05-01-01. “I now fear that the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat” [Soros, ‘The Capitalist Threat’, Atlantic Monthly 279.2 (February 1997), 45-58, www.theatlantic.com/issues/97feb/capital/capital.htm, consulted 05-01-01]. 12 Ronald F. Thiemann, Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1996), 11. 13 Samuel P. Huntingdon, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

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theorists, Fukuyama earlier claimed that “Religion has thus been relegated to the sphere of private life

– exiled, it would seem, more or less permanently from European political life except on certain

narrow issues like abortion”.14 This analysis, even at the time, was somewhat odd given the

connections between neo-nationalisms and ethnic religiosities, the two decades of Christian political

influence in the United States, and of the burgeoning fervour of the Islamic regime in Iran. The fact

that Fukuyama specifically mentions the (western) European scene may mitigate the weakness, for as

Carl Raschke observes, “Christianity as a motivating cultural force in Western civilization, mainly in

Europe but also to a surprising degree in the United States, is largely spent.”15 Likewise, Charles

Taylor recognises that “the countries of western Europe have mainly become secular – even those

who retain the vestigial public reference to God in public space.”16

The reappearance of the religious in Huntingdon’s reflections, however, is nonetheless

troubling. He describes an impending clash of global value systems between the West and the Middle

East anchored in conflicting religious belief structures, particularly where Western versions are

politically domesticated products of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 whose polis is nationally

governed in a way that conflicts with Islamic theopolitics. According to Raschke, “What was at stake

was no longer [as with Fukuyama] economic prosperity but ultimate truth anchored in the claims of

faith.”17 Of course, what he has assumed is that there is something of a singular Islam that receives

and contests modernity, and Western modernity at that, in a uniform way; and equally he

problematically assumes that there is a single West, united behind a single understanding of truth,

meaning and purpose. Even the United States is politically fractured with regard to the determinative

identifying political myth of American exceptionalism. As Edward Said acknowledges, “Partly

because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid,

heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic.”18

Over the past decade Huntingdon’s book has generated further friction and tensions with

Islam in the West, suspicions that continue not to be deeply unwelcoming of the Muslim in the West:

according to Huntingdon in generalising “reductive and brutal” mood,19 “The underlying problem for

the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam.”20 This kind of claim strengthens the hand of 14 Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 271. A good definition of is usually meant here by the term ‘secularisation’ is provided by sociologist of religion Peter Berger: “for most purposes it can be defined quite simply as a process in which religion diminishes in importance both in society and in the consciousness of individuals. ... Put simply, the idea has been that the relation between modernity and religion is inverse – the more of the former, the less of the latter….” [Peter L. Berger, ‘Secularization and De-Secularization’, in Linda Woodhead, et al. (eds.), Religions in the Modern World (London & New York: Routledge, 2002), 291-8 (291)] According to Tasal Asad, secularism demands a distinction between private reason and public principle, with the locating of the ‘religious’ in the category of the private [Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2003), 8]. 15 Raschke, 24. 16 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass., and London: The Belknap Press, 2007), 2. 17 Raschke, 16. 18 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), xxix. 19 Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009), 143. 20 Huntingdon, 217.

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those secularising forces that now intensify their attempts to keep religious traditions out of the public

setting – whether that be the publics of politics, economics, or education. So John Rawls, for

example, argues that “religious, philosophical, and moral convictions ... are part of what we call ‘non-

public identity,’ matters that citizens may deal with in their ‘personal affairs.’” 21 Of course, that

refusal of religions to have public voices is complicated by the fact that many Western politicians, and

not only in the United States, appeal to religious traditions come time for electioneering or at

moments of national stress, such as the outpouring of grief over Lady Diana’s death. As Lash

observes, “Notwithstanding the best efforts of d’Hollbach or Feuerbach, however, people have not

ceased to ‘believe in God’. But belief has never been so dangerously ambivalent. Each US dollar bill

still bears the message ‘In God we trust’”.22 Equally, more self-reflective consideration of the nature

of ‘civil religion’ is required, of the national disciplining of desire which performs an ontological

function beyond the pragmatics of a realpolitik. Moreover, there remain notable pressures to continue

to maintain a particular kind of religious presence, largely a conservative Evangelical Christian one,

in the ‘secular’ public education-system in the Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales.

The Special Religious Education, or SRE for short, and the Chaplaincy programme both continue to

have some prominent and powerful political supporters.

The End of Religion and the Re-Enchantment of the West

Famously Bonhoeffer announced in the mid 1940s that man has come of age, and in that maturing is

losing the need for religion. Bonhoeffer admits, “Man has learnt to deal with himself in all questions

of importance without recourse to the ‘working hypothesis’ called ‘God’.”23 The Letters and Papers

from Prison are fragmentary, occasionalist, suggestive, allusive, and even elusive. It is not altogether

clear what was intended by his talk of “man come of age”. After all, sitting in a prison cell awaiting

possible execution, Bonhoeffer could hardly have entertained the notion that humanity had realised its

enlightened state and now could sing its own praises as having reached moral maturation. On the

other hand, it would appear likely that he alludes to the Kantian description of the Enlightenment in

order to develop his critique of religion. Having already learned from the second edition of Barth’s

Der Römerbrief of 1922,24 although with a less nuanced perspective on the matter than it, Bonhoeffer

came to regard religion as a temporary form of human life. Now he could speak of “the world’s

coming of age” so that “We are moving towards a completely religionless time”.25 In fact, his own

21 John Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 14.3 (1985), 241. 22 Nicholas Lash, Theology for Pilgrims (London: DLT, 2008), 40. 23 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison: The Enlarged Edition, ed. Eberhard Bethge (London: SCM, 1953), 325. 24 See Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 328. 25 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 279.

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hope was that he himself would not descend into homo religiosus given his intensifying “fear and

distrust of ‘religiosity’”.26

This set of statements combines theological and phenomenal claims, and it is as the former

that some of the enduring significance of Bonhoeffer as prophetic theologian in iconoclastic

confrontation remains, since as sociological description his assertions here are now largely

contextually specific and therefore antiquated. ‘Secularisation’ looks less sufficient as an explanatory

paradigm, and it needs to be substantially modified in the light of the fact that in most places,

especially in the non-West, religious traditions and practices remain strong, and if anything are

growing. So, for instance, argues Peter Berger, “The rapid spread of Charismatic Christianity around

the globe [and particularly in Latin America] in the twentieth century and beyond has confounded

secularization theory which had predicted the demise of religion at the level both of individual

practice and of social and political influence.”27 Moreover, Berger continues, “resurgent Islam is the

most vital, vibrant and growing form of religion in the world today.”28 But not only is this true of the

non-West. While Europe continues to be something of the exceptional case, according to Grace

Davie, since it still powerfully exhibits the presence of secularisation, there are also signs of

something quite different emerging –29 what commentators are calling “the re-enchantment of the

[Western] world”.30 Consequently, religion scholar Malory Nye observes that

The contemporary world is shaped by religions: the ‘war on terror’, intelligent design, abortion

clinic killings, Waco, conflicts and wars in the Middle East, India, former Yugoslavia, Northern

Ireland, the Jonestown mass suicides, environmental summits, peace demonstrations – the list

goes on. Hardly a day goes by when there is not some manifestation of religion (religious

identity, religious practice, religious conflict) reported on the TV or in newspapers. To

understand the contemporary world, as well as the past, we need a sophisticated understanding of

religion.31

On the one hand, for example, identifiably religious themes saturate the popular media, and

not merely in the more explicitly religious, such as with Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ and The

Da Vinci Code, but in shows like The Simpsons, the Harry Potter series, the Star Wars saga, the

rebooted Battlestar Galactica, the re-imagining of vampire mythology, the appeal of the magical and

even the superhero popularity, and so on. On the other, the West is also witnessing to rise of what

George Steiner calls “the nostalgia for the absolute”32 in the form of assertive forms of religious

fundamentalisms, Christian, Hindu and Islamic. According to Cox, “Paradoxically, by some

26 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 329, 135. 27 Berger, 293. 28 Berger, 293. 29 Grace Davie, Europe: The Exceptional Case. Parameters of Faith and the Modern World (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2000). 30 Graham Ward, True Religion (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 130f. 31 Malory Nye, Religion: The Basics, 2nd edn. (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 1. 32 Citation from the title of George Steiner, The Nostalgia for the Absolute (Toronto: Ananasi, 1974).

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standards the world may be even less secular at the end of the twentieth century than it was at the

beginning. ... In many places [even] in Europe today one gets the distinct impression that although the

institutional forms of religions may be weaker than they once were, religion still plays a strong role in

public culture.”33

American ethicists Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon regard the changes as signs of

hope and opportunity.34 They indicate a spiritual hunger among people in the West, indicating

dissatisfaction with the rationalist story that has dominated the modern imagination. It is precisely in

and through the religious traditions that Richard Roberts entertains his own “emancipatory” hope for

drawing on resources capable of offering political resistance and visions for change.35 To cite Ward’s

critical response to Huntingdon, “religion may be the hope for the making of a new world order rather

than the dry tinder awaiting ignition”.36 Roberts for his part laments the privatisation of religion, the

vacation of the public spaces and the retreat into uncritical and conservative sentimentalities or

nostalgic fantasies for ages past. For this reason he launches vibrantly acrimonious, occasionally even

acerbic, critiques of Karl Barth and John Milbank for doing just that with their totalitarian voices.37 It

is in a tone of celebration that Roberts announces that “Religion returns from the theoretical and

cultural periphery (a marginalisation promoted by traditional secularisation theory) into a close

relation to the core issues of our time.”38 However, although a paper of 1998 suggests that the

conditioning of ‘embodiment’ is vitally important to his sensibilities, Roberts criticises these thinkers

not from the standpoint of someone conscious of his own traditionedness.39 Moreover, his detection

of certain resources for a counter-cultural response to the political abuses of globlisation, indeed

“possibly one of the few remaining means … of outflanking globalized and totalizing power”, come

from his sense of religion in a global form.40

The phrase ‘globalised religion’ is a tautology, however, since to speak of ‘religion’ is already

to succumb, in a very real sense, to a global nomination of those religious particulars in the cast of the

single entity ‘religion’. In other words, any discourse about ‘religion’ will itself be totalising by

reading the various particularities in a way that reduces them to some banal common-denominator

that loses the sense of the contextualities of speaking, and Procrusteanly becomes selective in 33 Harvey Cox, ‘The Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rise and Fall of “Secularization”’, in Gregory Baum (ed.), The Twentieth Century: A Theological Overview (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1999), 135-143 (136, 138). 34 Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989). 35 Richard H. Roberts, Religion, Theology and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), citation from 249. 36 Ward, The Politics of Discipleship, 144. 37 On Roberts’ assessment of Milbank, see ‘Theology and the Social Sciences’, in David F. Ford (ed.), The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Twentieth Century, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 700-719, especially 709-711. 38 Roberts, Religion, Theology and the Human Sciences, 250. 39 See Richard H. Roberts, ‘The Embodied Trinity’, unpublished paper presented at the Society for the Study of Theology (1998). 40 Richard Roberts, in Robin Gill (ed.), Theology and Sociology: A Reader (London and New York: Cassell, 1996), 474, a section taken from Richard H. Roberts, ‘Globalised Religion? The “Parliament of the World’s Religions” (Chicago 1993) in Theoretical Perspective’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 10 (1995), 121-137.

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choosing the criteria for assessing what counts as religion. John Hick’s religious pluralism is a

notorious culprit of this, turning out to be, as several critics have noted, a modern mythologisation

that illegitimately slips from a particularised perspective into a contextless one. The irony is that for

all the ethical worry about the imperialist pretensions of religious exclusivisms, as Kenneth Surin

observes,

the pluralist … speaks well of the other but never to the other, and indeed cannot do otherwise

because there really is no intractable other for the pluralist. Constitutive features of the pluralist

position serve to decompose or obscure that radical particularity which is constitutive of the truly

other. … The inevitable outcome has been a sheer inattentiveness on the part of these thinkers to

the intricacies and complexities and political configurations which circumscribe their [own]

reflections.41

Unlike Hick’s, Roberts’ agenda though is less that of one seeking to promote inter-religious

dialogue, even if that be at the expense of unmarking distinguishing expansive particularities, than

that of attempting to encourage theologians and the various religious practitioners to engage in public

conversation, and a highly critical one at that, with societies that have marginalised and largely

silenced their voices in the public domain.

While keen not to miss points of incommensurability, he discovers that there is enough

commonality to stress that what it can particularly do is offer a means of confronting some of the

more extreme fragmentations of postmodernity. ‘Global religion’ represents a crucial tension

between universal and particular without, presumably, succumbing to the universalisation of what

Roberts calls, “contemporary orgies of collective tribal power”, or to the manipulation of

consciousness for its interests.42 It, in short, “celebrates diversity whilst honouring and seeking to

articulate universal exigencies” through promoting ‘identity’ as “a self-transcending identity” of

“subversive emancipation”.43

On the one hand, I would not want at least at this stage to question Roberts’ assessment of the

ethically and politically significant commonalities, especially given his hesitancy to speak about these

in the context of a hegemonic pluralist hermeneutic that seeks consensus at the metaphysical level.

Roberts is no imposing politics of ‘the religious’. On the other, however, it is worthwhile, if the

discussion is not to remain too abstract and therefore still largely unusable, to press for greater

attentiveness to the sheer diversity of human experience, and therefore examine more carefully

religions’ specificities and differences (differences that may even make the word ‘religion’ itself

virtually unusable). Even if one does not want to go so far as to specify in a moment of metanarration

the incommensurability of the languages, discourses, and narratives that make and sustain people, it is

41 Kenneth Surin, ‘A “Politics of Speech”’, in Gavin D’Costa (ed.), Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (New York: Orbis, 1990), 192-212, (200, 202). 42 Roberts, ‘Theology and the Social Sciences’, 714. 43 Roberts, in Gill, 478, 714, 715.

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unduly disingenuous to continue to speak of a sharing of values and vision and of a global religion as

if of a genus without doing considerably more demanding ‘translation’ work and conversing. It may

be possible, for example, that convergence on a certain theme and/or practice may be justified in

immeasurably different ways, and that those ways themselves may lead to serious divergence over

another significant theme and/or practice. Consensus is not necessarily either ‘natural’ or to be

expected, but ad hoc and to be hoped for. For Ward, for example, it is in the negativity of resistance

that overlaps and co-operation are most pronounced: “what unites the faithful communities of these

different religious traditions is a common enemy – the godlessness of cultures driven by secular

ideals, capitalist rapaciousness, decadent levels of wastage, and a hypocrisy that points to the abuse of

human rights abroad and closes its eyes to the inadequate provision for the socially vulnerable at

home.”44 Terms like ‘globalised religion’, then, may distractingly serve to be unproductive and

distract from this contextuality of religious discourse. Each particular religious locality, and even that

is a very fluid entity and one that is dialectically related to the global (as with the ‘world’ religions),

may provide resources that ask certain questions of the values and practices of globalisation.45

Problematising Religionfullness / Responsibility-liteness

Crucially, there is something significant in Bonhoeffer’s references to a “religionless Christianity”

that offers a further resistance to the shape of Roberts’ hope, while simultaneously offering critical

repair. There remains considerable critical potential here, when contextualised, for an interrogation of

our deepest senses of selfhood. Accordingly, Bonhoeffer’s enduring theological value may lie in

keeping us alert to the pressures for the aggrandisement of the self, projects of the existential that

transcend, dislocate or even fracture notions of the ethical self as “an other”, to use Paul Ricoeur’s

terms.46 To put the point bluntly, Bonhoeffer’s perspective can help suggest that not all that passes for

‘religion’ may be in a good position to generate and sustain a healthy emancipatory hope. The

attention of the interrogative mood of theology has to be on the misshaping of human desire within

religion.

A clue to what is in mind here can be found in some reflections on current religious

conditions made by Harvey Cox. For Cox these conditions of contemporary religious and spiritual

pluralism raise a considerable number of deep intellectual and practical questions of any and every

religious tradition involved. So he argues that “The fact is that atheism and rationalism no longer

constitute (if they ever really did) the major challenge to ... theology today. The challenge comes not

44 Ward, The Politics of Discipleship, 144f. 45 Garrett Green: “As cultural anthropologists have shown us, religions are symbolic systems that are implicated in culture in complex and unpredictable ways, not mere systems of thought that can be abstracted from their cultural context.” [Theology, Hermeneutics and Imagination: The Case of Interpretation at the End of Modernity (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 47] 46 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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from the death of God but from the ‘re-birth of the gods’ (and the goddesses!).”47 The most important

challenge for Cox is, then, the pluralistic religious environment. However, the challenges for the so-

called traditional religious faiths in the contemporary post-secular condition is perhaps more

significant than merely having to contend with multiple religions. After all, Islam, Judaism and

Christianity were all born into the religious syncretisms of the Arabian Peninsula, the Fertile Crescent,

and the Hellenised Roman Empire respectively. One of the particular difficulties is suggested by

Christian theologian Tom Frame’s reflections on Australian religiosity.

the culturally compliant strain of Christianity promoted in Australia does not compel people to

grapple with ideas that will expand their horizons, nor does it oblige them to embrace lifestyle

choices that might involve discomfort. Much of what purports to be Christianity in this country is

a form of religious therapy whose aim is to make people fell better about themselves or help them

gain more enjoyment out of life.48

Much of the ‘liquid’ spirituality or religiosity in the West today largely takes place outside of

religious institutions and is pathologically consumerist in spirit while designated as a genuine option

for a tolerant age – it involves an eclectic blend of religious stories and practices, diffusely

constructed around the individual’s needs or desires for satisfaction, or for the palliative effect of

soothing of a beleaguered soul, or the expression of boredom with fractured forms of living.

[T]here is what Robert Wuthnow has called ‘patchwork religion’. In one study after another in …

[the West] one finds people who put together an individualized religion, taking bits and pieces

from different traditions, and coming up with a religious profile that does not fit easily into any of

the organized denominations. Many of them assert that they are not ‘religious’ at all, but are

pursuing a quest for ‘spirituality’. Very similar data come up in European research. Hervieu-

Léger uses Claude Levi-Strauss’s term bricolage to describe this form of religiosity – people

putting together a religion of their own like children tinkering with a lego set, picking and

choosing from the available religious ‘material’.49

So in demythologising mode Ward argues that “what we are witnessing is not a return [of

religion] but a new religiousness that is hybrid, fluid, and commercialized.”50 This customised and

bourgeois form of religiosity is, he continues, a ‘liquid’ spirituality narcissistically customised for a

life-style role for those accustomed to the culturally bombarding propaganda of ‘choosing’ their

leisure and entertainment. Similarly Cox claims that this is not the “resacralization” of the Western

world, or the return of the religions, so much as “a fascinating transformation of religion, a creative

series of self-adaptations by religions to the new conditions created by the modernity some of them

47 Cox, 140. 48 Tom Frame, Losing My Religion: Unbelief in Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009), 15; cf. 166. 49 Berger, 295f. 50 Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship, 131.

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helped to spawn.”51 In other words, Roberts’ (as well as Hauerwas and Willimon’s) assessment of the

situation is rather glib. The contemporary situation may well challenge the dominance of the secular

paradigm, but it presents a number of significant difficulties for those seeking to live within and to

promote the so-called ‘traditional’ religious faiths, those for whom their tradition is a ‘way of life’

rather than the politically innocuous chosen religious lifestyle.

Firstly, it is worth asking whether these new forms of religiosity have a depth beyond the

intensified ecstasy or provision of entertainment for a post-industrial set of socio-economic

arrangements characterised by leisure, narcissistically therapeutic self-satisfaction and frivolous

entertainment or as ways of communicatively connecting. Non-demanding forms of faith are

reflections of a constructivistic self that intensifies and legitimates the values of the modern

individualism that sustains the socially fracturing market and the hegemonies of corporate power and

their culturally sustaining technocracy. So Terry Eagleton speaks of contemporary neo-forms of

religion as being offering “a refuge from the world, not a mission to transform it. ... less the opium of

the people than their crack cocaine.”52 This, for one such as Bonhoeffer, would be an indication of a

therapy gone awry. So in his lectures on creation he makes theological claims designed to disturb the

reduction of God to believers’ comfort and psychic security: “God shows himself in temptation not as

the gracious, the near one, who furnishes us with all the gifts of the Spirit; on the contrary, he forsakes

us, he is quite distant from us; we are in the wilderness.”53 Whatever else it involves this religiosity

subverts the Gospel’s commitment to the redemptive sufferings of God in Christ, and the sense of the

divine abandonment of persons “in the face of temptation ... which must be incomprehensible to all

human-ethical-religious thinking.”54 Secondly, these religiosities cannot but be self-incurved and

arbitrary, since in their instantaneity they lack the time for kind of substance and extrinsic

referentiality involved in the social memory of the religious traditions, beyond their reduction to

spiritual platitudes, like Islam, Judaism and Christianity. As Bonhoeffer, in contrast, observes about

the early Christian practice of obedience to Jesus Christ, “It did not give way to the modern pretence

that this mystery could only be felt or experienced, for it knew the corruption and self-deception of all

human feeling and experience.”55 Thirdly, without that substantial memory and attention to their own

metaphysics, religion is reduced to the frivolity of something without substance, something kitsch that

cannot be reasoned, argued about, and studied because it is ultimately about nothing more important

or extensive than the recreation of a good meal, or a gym membership. Fourthly given that such

spiritualities are individualist in form, centered on the spiritual consumer self-as-chooser, they cannot

51 Cox, 139. 52 Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 41, 42. 53 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Temptation (London: SCM, 1966), 103. 54 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Temptation, 103. With Bonhoeffer’s appeal to “suffering” one needs to carefully supplement it not with “endurance”, since only Jesus’ sufferings have a redemptive quality [citations from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (London: SCM Press, 1948), 45, 46]. 55 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, True Patriotism: Letters, Lectures and Notes 1939-45 (London: Collins, 1973), 29.

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in any way transcend the individual to practically imagine and encourage the making of a society of

justice is done and compassion. Any possibility for consideration of common life or the Good and the

radicality of commitment to otherness has hereby been drastically curtailed. In contrast, for

Bonhoeffer, responsibility to the God of Jesus Christ entails, among other things, a “protest against

suffering insofar as, in doing so, he protests against the devil and asserts his own innocence.” 56

Fifthly, there is therefore little sense in which they can imagine a form of transcendence that can ask

critical questions about the character and performance of the spiritual self. Arguably, something more

is required in critical response to maximal secularism, what Bonhoeffer commentator Tom Greggs

claims contests “forms a singular and universal voice, which will not allow others to speak, and which

drowns out public religious speech in its belief that its self-created category of ‘the religious’ belongs

only to the private realm. Thereby, secularism becomes detached from the pluralism it was designed

to mediate. Rather than being a political tool, it becomes a political agenda.” 57 It becomes, then, a

politically significant therapy that cures us of the ailment of revolutionary discontentment.

The Strangeness of Deep Responsibility as Hospitality

While religion and spirituality are now seen to be more prominent in the lives of people at the end of

the C20th and the beginning of the C21st, the type of religiosity now directing the popular

imagination is largely consumerist in ethos. Accordingly, it is intensely inhospitable to community’s

engaging in learning together, to responsibility and care for justice, to intensively deep and self-

critical reading of the religious traditions, and to disciplined practices. So according to Ward,

“Postmodernity’s religion is not about discipline, sacrifice, obedience, and the development of virtue”

or the demands of a good character good action.58 This will prove to be no less of a challenge to those

whose ways and practices seek to make public deep commitments to the religious traditions than did

the more secular environment that has characterised much of the setting of the modern West. What it

is that is re-enchanting the world is of crucial concern to all who are committed to taking

responsibility, in some shape or form, for the flourishing of our near and distant neighbours

It is here in consideration of why the question of human flourishing remains an important one,

and what it might look like, that Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity” still has teeth. His ‘secular’

or ‘worldly’ Christianity involves an appeal to Christ as the transformer of all things in the image of

the peaceable Giver of life, the unmaker of the binarisms that both reduce the range of, or secure the

existence of, Christian presence in the world.59 One might describe the potential for a counter-praxis

as the responsible life given in theologically ordered identity-determinative practices of embodied

56 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Temptation, 120. 57 Tom Greggs, Theology Against Religion: Constructive Dialogues with Bonhoeffer and Barth (New York and London: T&T Clark, 2011), 149. 58 Ward, The Politics of Discipleship, 157. 59 One of Bonhoeffer’s moments of approval for his luminary Karl Barth was in the latter’s resistance to the “mistake … of leaving clear a space for religion in the world or against the world.” [Letters and Papers from Prison, 328]

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hospitality to the stranger in the Abrahamic traditions that “shatters the fiction that the subject, the

performer, of all ethical conduct is the isolated individual.”60

David Ford, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, reflects on among other things the

ethical challenge of the idea of personhood as involving an hospitable self. What impressed Ford

most about some of his own theological teachers was less the obvious depth of their erudition and the

unquestionable impressiveness of the range of their theological imaginations than their hospitality, a

“hospitality undreamt of”.61 This may seem to be a world away from matters of systematic theology,

theology proper as one prominent theologian once described it to me. But Ford suggests that there is

something theologically at stake here.62 What I think Ford was testifying to was not something about

the surface structure of presentation or apologetics – ‘be nice and people will be more inclined to

listen to you and believe what you say’ – but rather something about theology as a lived performance

– the life reflecting the theology, and the theology articulating and grounding the life lived before the

faces of others. This would be a reflection of the peace-making designs of God for the justice or well-

being of all people who are the product of the lavish compassion of God’s creative hand.

In another paper, Ford connects the theme of hospitality with the practice of conversation

between Jews, Christians and Muslims in their irreducible particularities as they engage one another

in reading each others’ sacred scriptures. He cites Jewish scholar Steven Kepnes’ work on Hagar and

Ishmael from the Torah’s Genesis tradition in order to encourage Jews and Christians to engage in

fruitful conversation with Muslims. According to Kepnes, texts such as Gen. 16:7-14 significantly

are

a warrant for Jews and Christians to take Islam seriously, not only as the third monotheism, but as

a tradition that is rooted in Genesis and whose origin and destiny is intertwined with Israel ….

Jews and Christians have a warrant in their scriptures to engage with the Muslims not as strange

Others but as long lost members of the great family whose destiny is to be a light of truth and

healing to all the nations of the earth.63

There is an ancient Abrahamic tradition which implies that the very way we treat the stranger

is revealing of who we are, and indeed of the expressiveness of the very will of God. By instinct we

are inclined to self-protection and protection of our nearest and dearest, in other words, those like us

in sharing something of who we are (our genes, interests and desires, common history, and so on).

60 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (London: Collins, 1964), 195. 61 David F. Ford, ‘Hosting a Dialogue: Jüngel and Levinas on God, Self and Language’, in John Webster (ed.), The Possibilities of Theology: Studies in the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel in His Sixtieth Year (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 23-59 (23). Here Ford is speaking specifically of his time in Tübingen with Eberhard Jüngel. 62 Ford claims that the lavish generosity of Jüngel “was the ideal preparation for the past twenty years of savouring his thought.” 63 Steven Kepnes, ‘Islam as Our Other, Islam as Ourselves’, in Basit Bilal Koshul and Steven Kepnes (eds.), Scripture, Reason, and the Contemporary Islam-West Encounter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 109, cited in David F. Ford, Shaping Theology: Engagements in a Religious and Secular World (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 75.

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Encountering the alien, in contrast, is a whole new affair. As Hans Boersma claims, “Hospitality

rejects the violence of a totalizing imposition of oneself on the other, the violence that forces the other

to be shaped into one’s own image.”64 In the 18th chapter of the Hebrew text of Genesis there is

related a story from the mists of the patriarchal formations of the Hebrew consciousness.

Abraham/Ibrahim, saw three men standing nearby his pitched tent. His response was to prostrate

himself before them in an act of humble submission, offering himself in service to them, and

subsequently lavishing the extravagance of his hospitality upon them. And so the text indicates that it

was the fine flour that was used for the bread [v6] and a tender calf [v7], and so on, images of an

abundant welcome through the gift of his best provisions. The image here is one of effusive

generosity, and it contrasts acutely with the account of the reception of two strangers by the

townspeople of Sodom that follows in chapter 19. The hospitality of Lot, Abraham/Ibrahim’s

nephew, was not shared by the town’s other inhabitants. So we read in v4 that the people surround

Lot’s house, a sign of an act of aggression; in v5 they assert that they will perform what was in the

Ancient Near Eastern world an act of ritual humiliation of an enemy; and when in v9 Lot defends the

honour of his two guests the people dismiss him as an “alien” and therefore unable to overrule or

avoid their law.

In making claims about conversation as a form of hospitality one must notice what Ford is not

claiming. He is not declaring that conversation is about consensus – it is not a way of lazily claiming

that the three ‘Abrahamic traditions’ are all essentially the same, and that at heart their differences do

not matter. What he resists, then, is for conversationalists to meet on ‘neutral ground’.

Neutral ground is what a secular society or institution often claims to provide in matters of

religion. A problem is that the conditions for entering it are usually secular in the sense of

requiring particular religious identities to be left behind: norms, concepts and methods have to be

justifiable in non-religious terms.65

Universities and public schools frequently are shaped by such a ‘neutral ground’, and as Ford

recognises,

They do not on the whole educate people to engage intelligently in this multi-faith and secular

world, nor do they foster the high-quality religion-related study and debate across disciplines

necessary to make thoughtful critical and constructive contributions to the public sphere or its

various dimensions (political, economic, cultural, technological, religious).66

‘Neutral ground’ refuses to reduce differences as if they do not matter, and in this regard they

demonstrate a lack of “respect [for] the integrity of all participants and [dis]encourage them to

64 Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 26. 65 David F. Ford, Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), 279. 66 Ford, Christian Wisdom, 279.

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contribute from the riches of their traditions.” That, of course, is not hospitality at all but a form of

violence against the things that make us who we are, the things that make us particular, and thus

against the identity of different persons and their religious traditions. In contrast, Ford’s notion of

hospitality refuses to reduce conversants to the common ground of neutral space, and instead he offers

the intensive notion of ‘mutual ground’ as the place to meet in order to listen and understand

strangers, discuss and argue with one another, and develop a deeper understanding of one’s own

sacred texts and traditions of interpretation.

Mutual ground is owned by none of the participants but is a place of mutual hospitality, with each

able to be host and guest at the same place. … Mutual ground does not have to require prior

agreement on fundamentals: the point is to have a space where differing fundamentals can be

discussed. … [I]t is where there can be critical, affirmative and collaborative engagement.67

So for Muslims, Jews and Christians

this is three-way mutual hospitality: each is host to the others and guest to the others as each

welcomes the other two to their ‘home’ scripture and its traditions of interpretation. As in any

form of hospitality, joint study is helped by observing certain customs and guidelines that have

been developed through experience over time.68

In fact, the very conditions of Ford’s move into mutuality is built upon the placing of the self

in a sociality of givenness, of the face-to-face relationality of accountability and responsibility that

one finds oneself in as this is intensively presented by the grounding of the facing in the face of the

abundantly giving God in Jesus Christ. It is here that Ford learns much from Bonhoeffer. For the

German theologian, engaging the other person in Christ is a self-dispossessive, other-embracive,

particularising, radically re-orienting act since “It is the image Jesus Christ has formed and wants to

form in all people.”69 To draw on language of John Milbank, the appeal to Christ is not that of “the

fetishization of the particular”, but rather than “the very constitution of the Christian mode of

universality and the Christian social project.”70 Ford comments that “One name, Jesus Christ,

indicates the face at the heart of this vision of salvation. Yet that face is understood to be turned to all

human beings and in that sense to be universal.”71 In contrast to Roberts’ grand and abstract claims

about “global religion”, it is instead the deeply-rooted traditions of hospitality as the expression of

creative meaning and the end of relations within the calculations of instrumenalised reason that offers

“a means ... of outflanking globalised and totalising power.”72 For Karl Barth’s part, while “The

67 Ford, Shaping Theology, 86. 68 Ford, Christian Wisdom, 279. 69 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 5: Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible, ed. Gerhard Ludwig Müller and Albrecht Schönherr (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 44. 70 John Milbank, ‘The End of Dialogue’, in D’Costa, 174-191 (174). 71 David F. Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2. 72 Citation from Roberts, Religion, Theology and the Human Sciences, 260.

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Christian faith is not an authority which we are in a position to quote against others ... it is the basis

for the mutual conversation between them and us”.73 This ethical sense of con-versatio is highlighted

by Martin Buber who maintains that “We should … live towards the other man”.74 It is to know that

the O/other has made a claim on me to speak, to be responsible as Buber observes.75 To speak in

these terms is to imagine a conversation in risk and vulnerability for the sake of the healing of the

world, or as Lash puts it, for an “‘utterance’ of God ... which grounds the possibility of every human

utterance, and hence of the possibility of common conversation between the fractured and

disputatious peoples of the world; that utterance which underlies the possibility of fostering the global

imagination which we so desperately need.”76 In God in Christ, Bonhoeffer announces, the loves due

to God and neighbour cannot be separated.77 The latter involves a proper humanising bodying forth of

the former in the proper worldliness of the Gospel, or the integration that emerges from the

transformative transcendental act of being an historical, contextual or embodied creature in the

redemptive life of God given for the healing of all things.78

It is in his section entitled ‘Flourishings’, Ford finds in Bonhoeffer theological resources for

what he terms from a letter of Bonhoeffer to Bethge in 1944 “polyphonic living”.79 “Christian life is

participation in the encounter of Christ with the world.”80 And that is an utterly immersive event of

radical, because participating in the theo-logical economy of the excessively abundant hospitality of

God, judgment and the grace of transformation for the well-being of all things. This is more radical

than Roberts’ sense of emancipation since it is not merely one form of globality against another, but

more specifically the responsiveness to the extravagantly inexhaustible Gift which pits a universality

of divine Self-giving against a hegemonic globality. Haddon Willmer comments that Bonhoeffer

construed the Gospel’s opposition to Nazism to be a contrast of discipleships and lordships. “His

[viz., Jesus’] way was different from Hitler’s because Jesus Christ was, in Bonhoeffer’s exposition

and practice, evidently quite a different Lord.”81 In other words, the concrete values and the thick

description of them matter to the shape of human living. Bonhoeffer’s ‘Who am I?’ is answered

within an overarching and determinatively liberating response to the identifiability of the life-making

performance of the Christian response to ‘Who is God in Jesus Christ?’ So in his fragments published

as Ethics he declares that

73 Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, trans. Brian Cozens and John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 2001), 14. 74 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (London: Collins, 1961), 47. 75 Buber, 31f. 76 Nicholas Lash, Theology for Pilgrims (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2008), 163. 77 See Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship, 81. 78 See Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 372f.; 501. 79 Ford, Self and Salvation, 241, taken from Bonhoeffer, Letter and Papers from Prison, 303. 80 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 133. 81 Haddon Willmer, ‘Costly Discipleship’, in John W. de Gruchy (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 173-189 (188).

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Jesus, life, our life, lived in deputyship for us as the incarnate Son of God, and that is why through

Him all human life is in essence a life of deputyship. Jesus was not the individual, desiring to

achieve a perfection of his own, but He lived only as the one who has taken up into Himself and

who bears within Himself the selves of all men. All His living, His action and His dying was

deputyship. In Him there is fulfilled what the living, the action and the suffering of men ought to

be. In this real deputyship which constitutes His human existence He is the responsible person

par excellence. Because He is life all life is determined by Him to be deputyship.82

Concluding Reflections

What this theo-logical sense of being ontologically contoured in and from divine gratuity learned in

and through Bonhoeffer’s theology can do, then, is open up a theologically grounded sense of

mutuality, performed as an act of responsible, non-dominating and self-dispossessive hospitality to

the stranger, an act transcorporealising the circumscriptions of ethnicity, gender, culture and class, and

the identity-binding of national citizenship. As Lash argues, “To be human is to be able to speak. But

to be able to speak is to be ‘answerable’, ‘response-able’ to and for each other and to the mystery of

God.”83 For Christians at least, appropriate conversation between traditions, then, is an important

ongoing form of hospitality that expresses the welcome and compassion of those who maximally live

in obedience to the God who embraces us as guests at Emmaus. The responsibility is unconditioned

and absolute in that it is a theological responsibility, and therefore in the radicality of its infinity it is

unevadable and risky (since, as Jacques Derrida recognises, “the newcomer [either] may be a good

person, or may be the devil”).84 According to the work of Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas, “the

other facing me makes me responsible for him/her, and this responsibility has no limits.” 85 In this,

Christians should fruitfully engage with Jews, Muslims and others in order to practically re-imagine

what human flourishing in such a fragmented and pathologically self-interested political context

might be like. According to Lash, “In the light of Easter we are given the possibility and hence the

duty, even in Gethsemane, of keeping conversation alive.”86 In that parabolic performance of the

coming of God’s consummating rule there is reason to hope that God will not remain a stranger or

One domesticable in what Gustavo Gutierrez calls “utilitarian religion” or what Paul Ricoeur terms

82 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 195. 83 Lash, Holiness, Speech and Silence, 65. 84 Jacques Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (ed.), Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1999), 65-83 (70). 85 Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1993), 22. 86 Nicholas Lash, ‘Conversation in Gethsemane’, in Werner G. Jeanrond and Jennifer L. Rike (eds.), Radical Pluralism and Truth: David Tracy and the Hermeneutics of Religion (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1991), 51-61 (52).

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religion as a system of “consolation” or what Bonhoeffer famously describes as “cheap grace”, as

tends to be the case in Western societies.87

87 Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987), 5; Paul Ricoeur, ‘Religion, Atheism and Faith’, in Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 59-98 (88). The late American theologian William C. Placher has written an instructive book on this entitled The Domestication of Transcendence, the subtitle of which is revealingly How Modern Thinking About God Went Wrong [Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996]. ‘Domestication’, of course, refers to making homely, and particularly suggestive is the definition of it as bringing or keeping (wild animals or plants) under control, a taming. Placher’s thesis is deceptively simple: something has happened to theology since the Enlightenment to, firstly, the very nature of intellectual life; secondly, the agenda of theologians; and thirdly, to the content of theology itself. And the effect has not been good, theologically speaking, not true to ways of speaking about God as faithfully and truthfully as possible. Transcendence was domesticated by becoming predicated as a definable property God possesses, and God became an object of reason that could, when no longer required to provide a causal explanation of affairs in the world could be dispensed with – hence the birth of modern atheism. What Placher is suggesting can be explained by his book’s subtitle: How Modern Thinking About God Went Wrong, and this mistaken move is a necessary implication of the very Enlightenment approach itself. Ch 5 articulates the fact that the concept of ‘God’ itself was domesticated in the modern age.

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