Some Reviews of Bloch's "Atheism in Christianity"

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The following review of Ernst Bloch's Atheism in Christianity comes to us from Dr. William Keenan, who is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University ...

... For Bloch, scripture is soaked through with hope-filled narratives of transgression that challenge the cold moralistic pieties and hot consumer excessess of the modern world driven by the Puritan ethic and its capitalist manifestations. Not only were Amos, Jeremiah and the psalmists of yore wont to sound war trumpets against greed and godlessness, Christ's life was a continual battle against systematic brutalization, exploitation and hubris, whether incarnated in, for instance, temple-franchised money lenders, pharasaical pride, or denial of the human rights of widows, prostitutes, lepers and the anawim of the earth. Before liberation theology, Bloch was. Before feminists picked up the revolution power in the peasant girl Mary's prayer, the Magnificat, with its promise that the Almighty will 'cast down the mighty from their seats … exalt the humble … send the rich away empty', Bloch was affirming the capacity, inbuilt within humanity since the Creation, to create Kingdom-life now, on earth ...

Perhaps discursive modes, even thought styles, have moved on apace since the post-war period in which Bloch embarked on his courageous adventure to put the best fruits of Christianity and Marxism in the same basket. Though an Index would have been a useful resource in a book of such range and intricacy, the republication of this sparkling study is timely and sure to launch a new wave of interest in bridge-building – or bridge-destruction - either side of the religion-atheism gulf war. Bloch's approach is literary, elusive, lyrical and, at times, a tad, it must be said, lugubrious and long-winded. He does not provide a clear map of a road to reconciliation between Atheism and Christianity, the two great roaring beasts of the modern jungle. But that is not Bloch's intention in any case. Nor does his book necessarily help us re-examine the role of Marxism in the postmodern era. As a 'classic' it is too time bound for that. We need to read it in context. It is maybe a tract more for its times than ours ...

http://churchandpomo.typepad.com/conversation/2009/08/ernst-blochs-atheism-in-christianity-a-review.html

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1. The world turned upside down

* Nicholas Lezard
* The Guardian, Saturday 25 July 2009

... the argument between the believers and the non-believers in religion has, for the most part, struck me as depressingly rudimentary, a kind of yah-boo call and counter-call which doesn't really persuade anyone away from whatever they hold to be the case already ...

But Atheism in Christianity is not at all a torture to read. Written, amazingly, in his 83rd year, if my calculations are correct, it is, instead, exhilarating to read, even if you're not entirely sure you like this kind of thing. Take, for example, the beginning of Chapter 19, "How Restless Men Are": "We in our turn have never emerged from ourselves, and we are where we are. But we are still dark in ourselves; and not only because of the nearness, the immediacy of the Here-and-now in which we, as all things, have our being. No - it is because we tear at each other, as no beasts do: secretly we are dangerous." This is resonant with urgency, recalling the sonorous, aphoristic qualities of Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, in whose tradition he follows.

This is, in short, biblical philosophy, or, rather, theodicy, which can be defined as the attempt to justify God's ways to man. As anyone who has ever thought about this subject properly should know, this is an extremely hard task. Bloch's central obsession was with utopia, which here manifests itself not as a prescriptive idea but as an inquiry into what the very existence of religion implies regarding the oppressive nature of society, and existence.

What we get here is so far removed from the traditional pieties of pulpit or homily that you can at times feel as if the world has been turned upside down. His reading of the book of Job is itself almost revolutionary: the Hebrew word which has been translated as "redeemer", as in "I know that my Redeemer liveth", should really be translated as "avenger", which casts quite a different gloss on the passage. For Bloch, the book of Job is actually a withering indictment of God, and his reconciliation with God at the end merely tacked on by the author in order to make the venting of his heresy acceptable. And you suspect that Bloch has some sympathy with the Ophites, who "interpreted the serpent of Genesis ... not only as the principle of life, but also as world-shattering reason itself," and considered that "the real original sin would have been to not have wanted to be like God at all." "Thought-provoking" hardly begins to cover it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/25/review-atheism-christianity-ernest-bloch

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2. Owen Hatherley sings the praises of Ernst Bloch, the prophet of serious atheism

The very title of this book is a challenge to our current, increasingly caricatured “God debate”. Its central thesis, that Christianity has atheism at its very heart, was typically audacious for Ernst Bloch. Unlike his comrades and contemporaries such as Walter Benjamin or Theodor Adorno, this German leftist thinker rarely finds himself on syllabuses, and he is seldom read today. His first book, 1918’s Spirit of Utopia, helps explain why – a pile-up of apocalyptic theology, modernist poetics and political agitation that caught the fervent mood of the revolutions that followed the First World War.

After this explosive but impenetrable debut, Bloch’s work on politics, art and theology became somewhat calmer, although always retaining the angularity and force of Expressionism, a movement in painting which he famously championed in a debate with his fellow Marxist critic Gyorgy Lukacs, for whom this art was a mere symptom of a chaotic society – for Bloch, its ferocity and intensity pointed to a way out of that society. Bloch favoured the kind of unskilled, untutored creativity that would later be called “outsider art” and attempted to uncover the latent revolutionary, utopian content of everything from folk tales to Beethoven, while retaining a strident socialism that unsurprisingly led to exile from Germany in the 1930s.

After that Bloch spent time in the USA, then returned to (East) Germany – which he left within a whisker of being trapped there by the Berlin Wall. Atheism in Christianity was published in 1968 by an octogenarian Bloch, and is a fine introduction to his work – by this point he’d become a coherent, lucid writer, although the intensity still fairly burns off the page.

The first thing you notice is that the cosy certainties of our current debates are thrown into disarray. The Bible is full of “fairy stories”? For Bloch, that’s exactly the source of its power. For him, fairytales are a repository of proletarian wisdom, explicitly opposed to the wisdom of the powerful - “to speak in a modern way, most fairytales have something Chaplinesque in them”. The fairytale is a story that comes from “the people”, against “the feudalism of the saga and the despotism of the myth” – and so too with the Bible. Bloch was adept at finding latent utopianism in the most unexpected places. The Bible’s structure of beginning, middle and end, derided as a consolatory bedtime story, becomes an example of its profound humanism, a claim that history is mutable and changeable – history is “no longer the simple ebb and flow of eternally repeated incidents, as even the Greek historians thought of it”, but something in which man can intervene. And rather than being a spiteful fantasy of burning unbelievers and the ascending faithful, it is the notion of apocalypse that is the Bible’s most important gift to history, giving us a conception of futurity, urgency and the possibility of a world transfigured – “a profound wakefulness to the future” rather than an opiated sleep is its subversive heart ...

http://newhumanist.org.uk/2151/atheism-in-christianity-by-ernst-bloch

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3. Book Review by Gareth Jenkins, September 2009

Why republish a book that first appeared in 1972? The answer has to do with the current attack on religion by such writers as evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins and right wing political commentator Christopher Hitchens. Bloch, on the other hand, argues that there are liberatory, "atheist" elements within Christianity with which socialists should make common cause.

His starting point is Marx's. Religion is not a delusion to be overcome by "superior" ideas. It can only be superseded if the material roots (deprivation, alienation, oppression) that make religion the "heart of a heartless world" are themselves superseded. Thus it is not the main enemy (whatever Hitchens et al say). Those who fight injustice under its banner can be our allies.

Much of the book involves patient detective work among biblical texts to unearth the traces of rebellion and heresy that challenge received notions of god. Bloch is often difficult to follow, but the direction of the argument is clear enough. When human beings challenge god as an external power to whom obedience is due as a condition of their creation (the Genesis myth), they begin to see themselves as having "god" within them (particularly, in New Testament terms, the Jesus who is "the Son of Man"). So, instead of looking back to a lost paradise, they look forward to some future state in which the "god"-like power within them can be realised.

However, there is a problem .... Bloch seems to want to find the "true", revolutionary Jesus (as opposed to the official church version), without understanding that Christianity necessarily combines a Jesus that can appeal to the poor (while reconciling them with their lot) and a Jesus that can appeal to their rulers (while putting pressure on them to do something for the poor) ...

http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=10942

[Jim__]

4. I certainly agree that bridge-building between theism and atheism would be a good thing.

At this point in human history we should all recognize that we are mostly ignorant. And that discussion with people who see things differently can help us to see some of our own errors.

But I am curious about something. The article cited in the OP contains this:

Marx's own dialectical understanding of religiosity, captured well in his open-minded insight into 'the opium of the masses, the heart of the heartless world' pervades Bloch's 'detective work', as he himself called it, on the emancipatory – for which, read 'heretical', a favourite Blochian trope – potential within Christianity. Bloch's exegesis of the Bible is an insider's hermeneutic, unlike that verstehen-free religion-cynical spleen of Hitchens, Dawkins, Gray and other high priests of resurgent Darwinism.

Do you know who the Gray is that it refers to? Specifically, is it referring to John N Gray? I'm curious because while Gray is an atheist, he has clearly stepped away from Hitchens and Dawkins and their opinions about religion. For example:

Zealous atheism renews some of the worst features of Christianity and Islam. Just as much as these religions, it is a project of universal conversion. Evangelical atheists never doubt that human life can be transformed if everyone accepts their view of things, and they are certain that one way of living - their own, suitably embellished - is right for everybody. To be sure, atheism need not be a missionary creed of this kind. It is entirely reasonable to have no religious beliefs, and yet be friendly to religion. It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when they demonise religion.

A curious feature of this kind of atheism is that some of its most fervent missionaries are philosophers. Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon claims to sketch a general theory of religion. In fact, it is mostly a polemic against American Christianity. This parochial focus is reflected in Dennett's view of religion, which for him means the belief that some kind of supernatural agency (whose approval believers seek) is needed to explain the way things are in the world. For Dennett, religions are efforts at doing something science does better - they are rudimentary or abortive theories, or else nonsense. "The proposition that God exists," he writes severely, "is not even a theory." But religions do not consist of propositions struggling to become theories. The incomprehensibility of the divine is at the heart of Eastern Christianity, while in Orthodox Judaism practice tends to have priority over doctrine. Buddhism has always recognised that in spiritual matters truth is ineffable, as do Sufi traditions in Islam. Hinduism has never defined itself by anything as simplistic as a creed. It is only some western Christian traditions, under the influence of Greek philosophy, which have tried to turn religion into an explanatory theory.

[struggle4progress]

5. Dunno, but I might guess that the reference was to John Gray, whom I have not read but

who has somewhat of a reputation as a misanthropic cynic:


Humanity and other animals
o Terry Eagleton
o The Guardian, Saturday 7 September 2002
John Gray's political vision has been steadily darkening. Once a swashbuckling free-marketeer, he has, in his recent studies, become increasingly despondent about the state of the world. With the crankish, unbalanced Straw Dogs, he emerges as a full-blooded apocalyptic nihilist. He has passed from Thatcherite zest to virulent misanthropy ... Nihilism for Gray suggests the world needs to be redeemed from meaninglessness, a claim he regards as meaningless. Instead, we must just accept that progress is a myth, freedom a fantasy, selfhood a delusion, morality a kind of sickness, justice a mere matter of custom and illusion our natural condition. Technology cannot be controlled, and human beings are entirely helpless. Political tyrannies will be the norm for the future, if we have any future at all. It isn't the best motivation for getting out of bed ... Gray does not want to hear of human value, which would wreck his sensationalist case. He wants to hear that human beings are garbage, plague and poison, a rapacious species that is "not obviously worth preserving". Straw Dogs, like all the ugly rightwing ecology for which humanity is just an excrescence, is shot through with a kind of intellectual equivalent of genocide ... Gray, the gloom-ridden guru, is just the free-marketeer fallen on hard times. The iron determinism of this book is the flipside of its author's previous love affair with freedom ... http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/07/highereducation.news2

[Jim__]

6. Having read "Straw Dogs", I disagree with Eagleton's characterization.

It's been a while since I read it, and Gray does see very little hope in our current path. But, IIRC, he does offer some alternatives to our current path that he sees as desirable.

But, no matter how one interprets Straw Dogs, it certainly doesn't put him in the Dawkins, Hitchens camp with respect to his views on religion.

[struggle4progress]

7. Not being familiar with Gray, I'd have to defer to you on that point. My primary interest here

is a particular discussion of Christianity by Marxists and a related discussion between Marxists and Christians. Bloch's name is associated with some early 20th century aspects of this discussion and reappears here in the late 60s