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Marxist Science and Christian Theology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Brian Wicker
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Francis Barker’s refreshing contribution to the New Blackfriars debate on Marxism leads me to pursue my own thoughts a little further. Barker and Eagleton have both accused me of idealism: it is part of my purpose to show that this accusation is false. On the contrary, if Marxism can claim to be scientific, so too (I maintain) can Christian theology. Indeed, Marxism will only become completely scientific, i.e. have shed all residual elements of deforming ideology when, ceasing to need to incorporate within itself a systematic misrepresentation of Christianity, it can be said to have become identical with it. But that is a matter for the distant future.

To begin with, it is agreed I think that we are discussing questions of theory: the relative claims to scientific status of certain forms of discourse. Neither side is likely to deny that at the level of actual praxis, there is an enormous amount of ideological distortion around. But what we are talking about is what Althusser calls ‘theoretical practice’. And it is my contention that what I shall call ‘scientific theology’ is scientific in the sense that, like Marxist science, it claims to be able to provide a ‘symptomatic reading’ of ideologies. Such a theology will consist of concepts and rules whereby not only the Christian ideology (that is, the Christian religion as a lived praxis) but also the ideological elements in Marxism, can be critically distinguished and dealt with.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 58 , Issue 681 , February 1977 , pp. 85 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 September, 1976

2 October, 1975

3 A ‘body politic’ here may denote a whole society or ‘nation’, or merely some segment of it (class, group etc.) I should further emphasise that the analogy between ‘ideology’ and ‘unhealthiness’ is here used solely to illustrate a logical point about the sorts of predicate which may be applied to the term ‘ideology’ and the logical consequences of confusion between them. I am not suggesting that ideology is simply the systematic manifestation of some inexplicable ‘visitation’ or ‘infection’ in the social formation; on the contrary it is a strictly explicable product of social formation.

4 Cf. Eagleton, , Marxism and Literary Criticism, London 1976, p.17Google Scholar.

5 Cf. above, p. 88

6 Whether there could be a ‘scientific theology’ of other religions depends on whether other religions make truth claims which are valid or not. This is a question I have no space or competence to enter into: I merely confine myself to the Christian case in this discussion.

7 Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London, 1971, p. 23Google Scholar

8 Reading Capital, p. 59

9 For Marx, London, 1969, p. 167Google Scholar. Althusser's theory that scientific knowledge is produced by the application of intellectual labour to certain raw materials, in the form of concepts and facts, is deeply obscure. Its purpose is to emphasise that knowledge is a productive process, and not simply a matter of ‘taking a look’ at either things or sense data or whatever. Yet, in the absence of any alternative example of how this process works, it is difficult for the reader to interpret this notion in any but the most rigorously empiricist sense. Thus, to take an example from the Communist Manifesto, the knowledge that ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ is presumable produced by the application of intellectual labour to such ‘concepts as “history”, ‘class ‘, ‘society’ etc. This labour as it were re‐orders the relations between these elements, or raw materials, to produce a new product: namely the above proposition, which embodies the true relation between these elements (replacing the more or less false relations between them mat had hitherto prevailed among bourgeois historians). But if we are to take this theory as anything more than a metaphorical way of emphasising the ‘produced’ nature of knowledge, then we must include such essential concepts as ‘all’ and ‘hitherto’ as bits of the raw material along with ‘class', ‘society’ etc. The only theory I know of which seriously takes such concepts as these as objects of acquaintance which can be ‘re‐ordered’ by the mind to produce new knowledge, is that of the notorious empiricist Bertrand Russell. (See for example, Problems of Philosophy pp. 199ff.) Russell's theory rests upon the thesis that knowing the meaning of a word is acquaintance with an object that the word stands for — a thesis which, as Geach has shown, is self‐contradictory in application. (See Peter Geach, Mental Acts p. 48). It seems to me inescapable that Althussei's theory, if taken seriously, entails just the same notions and is open to just the same objections, as Russell's.

10 for Marx, loc. cit.

11 Works, ed. F. Jodl, 2nd Ed. (Stuttgart Vol vi p.41, quoted in Copleston, History of Philosophy. Vol vii pp. 296–97.

12 Barker (loc cit) seeks to show that in religion, terms such as ‘because’ are used ‘para‐digmatically’ and not ‘syntagmaticatty’ as in science. For an argument that this is the exact opposite of how ‘cause’ is used in scientific theology, see my The Story‐Shaped World, Part I passim. (Athlone Press, London, 1975)Google Scholar

13 Idea of a University, Discourse 2:9

14 Newman gives seven tests for distinguishing true from false developments in doctrine. These are tests of content or form: but his thesis also requires for its own internal consistency, as a minimum I think, that the science of theology observes the following rules: a) ‘God’ is used as a common noun (‘nomen naturae’), not as a proper name. b) God is understood as first cause of the world. c) ‘Cause’ is understood in a transitive sense: cause is not a Humean correlation, but an agent aserting itself. d) All terms predicated of God must be used analogically (except where they are used metaphorically). (See my The Story‐Shaped World, Part I).

15 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (ed. Cameron, J.M., Penguin Books, 1974)Google Scholar Ch. IV: i, p. 244.

16 But see Machovec, Milan: A Marxist Looks at Jesus (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1976)Google Scholar, reviewed in New Blackfriars Nov. 1976, and also a number of Marxist works on early Christianity reviewed in New Blackfriars Vol 57 No 672 (May, 1976) pp.234 ff. for recent works in this field.

17 On the failure of Marxism to ‘develop’ its theory about religion to any notable extent, see Adrian Cunningham, Marx and Religion The Ethnological Notebooks 1880–82 in Religion, Vol 6 (Spring, 1976) pp. 99–114.

18 op. cit. p. 33

19 in Die Mensch ohne Alternative, Munich 1964, p. 248Google Scholar, quoted in Machovec, op. cit. p. 12

20 Machovec, op. cit. p. 21

21 see Barker, in New Blackfriars Vol 57 No 676 (September, 1976) p.413 discussing the slogan ‘Torture is wrong’.

22 op.cit. p. 412–13

23 'Decentering God' inNew Blackfriars Vol 57 No 671 (August, 1976) p. 150Google Scholar

24 New Blackfriars, Vol 56 No 655 (October, 1975) p. 470