In the western world, at least, socialism is in crisis as a political force. But it is also in crisis as an intellectual creed, and it is this crisis that concerns the present article. Nevertheless, the practical and the theoretical crises are very closely allied; the real political problem for contemporary socialism may be that, increasingly, people no longer know, or have forgotten, why one should be a socialist.

One might want to re-express this as ‘people no longer see any reasons to be a socialist’. And the practical response might be to urge us, once again, to convince people that socialism is the truly reasonable path. And yet, I am going to argue that in certain crucial senses there simply are no ‘reasons’ for being socialist in the way that we have tended to imagine in the past. If, I shall suggest, we can overcome the lingering suggestion that socialism is a matter of science, of historical diagnosis, or of universally valid reason, then we shall actually be able to recover the most authentic core of the socialist tradition, and the Christian socialist tradition in particular. In the course of this argument I shall first of all establish a contrast between old-style Christian socialism and new-style Christian Marxism, and then go on to show that Christian socialism is in certain ways more in tune with a ‘post Marxist’ or ‘post modernist’ radicalism. Finally, I shall suggest how Christian socialism nonetheless moves beyond the ambiguity of the post-modern critique of capitalist society.

Religious syncretism is a currently fashionable topic, both among anthropologists and theologians. To the anthropologist, syncretism offers not only fascinating field material, but also important theoretical questions. Supposing two or more world religions are present in the same culture, as is the case with the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka. Will the internal logic of the world religion oblige its adherents to reinterpret the culture? Or will the common culture eventually obliterate the boundaries between the religions? For theologians the boundary between Christian and merely Christian-influenced is both extremely difficult to draw and extremely necessary. Whom do we admit to the local council of churches? Where does liturgical inculturation end and repaganization begin? What about the survival of pagan attitudes-devotion, for instance, to Mammon or Mars—to be found among the ultra-orthodox? Some contemporary theologians, for instance Robert Schreiter in his Constructing Local Theologies, have found it possible to take a rather sympathetic view of syncretism, but this seems to go with a certain sociological naivety, since syncretism is usually the product of systems of domination in which there is a wide gap between the religions of the dominators and the dominated.

There is a story of a famous medical scientist who used to tell his students, ‘These, gentlemen, are the symptoms of typhoid fever, but you will find all the cases are different.’ The same surely applies to syncretism. We need to look at particular cases, before we generalize about syncretism. In this article, I am looking at two studies of syncretising religious situations published by anthropologists in this decade, Jon P. Kirby’s God, Shrines and Problem-Solving among the Anufo of Northern Ghana, and James W. Fernandez’ Bwiti, which deals with a new religion among the Fang of the Gabon.

The alarming resurgence of biblical speculation by the nuclear war-lords of the West in the last few years has drawn peace-movement Christians to sober biblical scholarship. New Blackfriars writers have pioneered the reclamation of ‘the most symbolically-rich eschatological language of the Bible, from Isaiah to Revelation, ... captured by abstentionist sects and a politically hostile movement’ and made ‘virtually unavailable to Christians who do not share those views about politics and God’s action in the world’.

The question I would like to explore here is: how, if at all, can this kind of investigation, which draws on academic exegesis but clearly goes beyond it, also help us to reclaim and wrestle with symbols and stories which superficially appear to be of a different kind, namely, the symbols and stories which speak of our earliest beginnings? With the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel? This might be termed the ‘pop’ culture of the Bible, not being seen as belonging to the specialist or to any political faction with a biblical axe to grind, but as the mythic heritage of all—timeless, beloved of Hollywood as the stuff of Epic spectacle. It is, however, the area which has long been of interest to the Western Women’s Movement, because it has come to reckon with the power of these foundational myths over our culture’s perceptions of gender. Feminists see these myths as captured and distorted by patriarchal religion and hence by patriarchal power in general.

The work of scientists has in the last half-century brought humanity face to face with two major menaces to its survival and created a situation without precedent in human history. This twofold threat has been posed by the development of nuclear fission for civilian or military purposes and the more recent development of biotechnology or genetic engineering. We live, all of us, all of Creation, in the ominous shadow of nuclear technology. We live also in what is potentially a no less chilling shadow—the darkening shadow of biotechnology, an industry which, according to the Times of India, is ‘the fastest growing industry in the world today’.

It is more than a decade since the distinguished Austro-American biochemist Erwin Chargaff commented that these two immense and fateful scientific discoveries, ‘the splitting of the atom (and) the recognition of the chemistry of heredity and its subsequent manipulation’, both involved the mistreatment of a nucleus—that of the atom and that of the cell. He added—and it was a comment whose prophetic vision was largely ignored at the time—‘In both cases do I have the feeling that science has transgressed a barrier that should have remained inviolate.’