Abstract
Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey Robbins describe a number of the intellectual developments and movements that preceded and influenced radical theology. They pay special attention to the hermeneutics of suspicion of Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche; the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty; and the linguistic structuralism of Saussure. Crockett and Robbins pay close attention to the role of Derrida’s lecture, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in 1966 before moving on to the Death of God movement. They emphasize the way Tillich’s thought was radicalized by G. Vahanian, Altizer, Daly, and others in combination with Tillich’s theology of culture and existential theology and Bonhoeffer’s influence on the early Death of God thinkers. Finally, Crockett and Robbins discuss radical theology’s hybridization with deconstruction in the work of Raschke, Mark C. Taylor, and Winquist and hybridizing RT with deconstruction.
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Notes
- 1.
See Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey Robbins , Religion, Politics, and the Earth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), esp. ch. 2, from which this introduction largely draws.
- 2.
Catherine Keller, Political Theology of Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
- 3.
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. G. Eliot (Amherst: Prometheus, 1989), xxi (emph. orig.).
- 4.
Ibid., 12.
- 5.
Ibid., 26.
- 6.
Feuerbach, 33.
- 7.
Van Harvey, Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 136.
- 8.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion (Atlanta: Scholars, 1964), 224.
- 9.
Harvey, 136.
- 10.
Ibid., 41.
- 11.
“Theses on Feuerbach,” in Marx and Engels, On Religion, 69 (emph. orig.).
- 12.
Ibid., 71.
- 13.
Ibid. (emphasis in original).
- 14.
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Marx and Engels, On Religion, 42.
- 15.
Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3 (New York: Basic, 1957), 351.
- 16.
Daniel Pals, Eight Theories of Religion, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 64.
- 17.
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 6, 8.
- 18.
Ibid., 26–27.
- 19.
Ibid., 24–25.
- 20.
Ibid., 40, 38.
- 21.
Ibid., 47.
- 22.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1954), 486.
- 23.
See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. R. Harris (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1986).
- 24.
Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278.
- 25.
Thomas Altizer, Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966), 10.
- 26.
Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 49.
- 27.
Gabriel Vahanian, Death of God (New York: Braziller, 1961), 226–227. In this early book Vahanian laments the loss of the reality of God, but he later develops a robust and affirmative secular theology. See also Vahanian, Anonymous God (Aurora, CO: Davies, 2002).
- 28.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2010), 168–169.
- 29.
See Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968). This book was dedicated to the memory of Paul Tillich.
- 30.
Mike Grimshaw, “Did God Die in The Christian Century?”, Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 6.3 (2005), 11.
- 31.
James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011), 160.
- 32.
Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon, 1972), 127.
- 33.
Christopher Rodkey , “The Nemesis Hex,” Retrieving the Radical Tillich, ed. R. Re Manning (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 66.
- 34.
Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology (London: Routledge, 2000), 88.
- 35.
Raschke , “The Deconstruction of God,” 3.
- 36.
See Mark C. Taylor, Erring (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
- 37.
See Clayton Crockett, Radical Political Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), and Jeffrey Robbins , Radical Democracy and Political Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
- 38.
Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep (London: Routledge, 2003), 293.
- 39.
Ibid., 3.
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Crockett, C., Robbins, J.W. (2018). Background. In: Rodkey, C., Miller, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96595-6_2
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