Dear Mihail, Thanks for your news and photos – I envy you that snow, no sign of a real winter here. We are still in London as before. N is back at work part-time while I alternate between book and baby. That was a great paper and a good read too.
You say that Christian theologians do not read enough religious studies and that this makes them poor conversation partners in the university. But I think that Christian theologians should engage, not with religious studies, but with all studies. Religious studies has no greater claim on our attention than any other discipline. I think that the university is most basically a conversation between Plato and Christ, so Christian theologians should therefore engage with Plato – and through him with the whole wonderful array of sciences and human sciences. In my view, the discipline we have most to do with is politics (and its history). Religious studies is just a form of politics that denies it is political.
I think we should cut Kant out and speak straight to Plato, the master. Why? Because Kant is not honest: he wants to have two roles at once. He wants to be our interlocutor, which is the same status that we and everybody else has round the table, and a member of the university, the round table of knowledge. But he also wants to be chairman and referee, so he can blow his little whistle and rule certain speeches and certain discourse out. So one question we have to ask Kant is: are you in this discourse and dialogue, or are you above it? Do you concede the discipline of this discourse, with the rest of us, or are you certain that you have nothing to learn, that your knowledge is uniquely from some source of your own, so that you are above us? Kant believes that he has no need to submit himself to the university, in which theology is one among many disciplines. He denies that his views are a tradition, one tradition amongst others, that they have a history, which might have been, and could still be, different.
You don’t query what Kant has done, Mihail. He has disguised from us that these are all decisions that someone (the political philosophical tradition) has taken for us, and they are political (ie open to our revision and change), not religious (above challenge). ‘Religion’ can only be politics that is not honest about being political. ‘Religion’ is just that politics which the elite has decided is stupid and unacceptable. Kant, Hobbes, Spinoza and company are trying to get the proles to shut up, by ruling out all their rights to participate in the discussion of what is true and good.
So I think that the real ‘other’ and dialogue partner of Christianity is not the ‘religion’ of some ethnicity from some other continent (Asia or Africa), but our very own secular-worldly tradition, which we must examine through its pagan, Greek, Roman history. It is we whom the Christian tradition is addressing, us with all our Greco-Roman baggage. You have not queried the secular-sacred distinction at all. The Christian gospel is addressing our total, and that means our everyday and secular, being. Christianity does not observe the sacred-secular distinction on which religious studies is premised: it refuses this secular distinction, because it claims the world and this present age (saeculum) as every other age.
But you are right. Theologians don’t read widely enough, and so are poor conversation-partners in the university. But theologians shouldn’t just read Eliade and disciplines ancillary to religious studies (anthropology, psychology), but politics and economics, and history and literature – all your own favourites. But that is small beer beside the real criticism which must be made of us, that we are Scripturally-illiterate, hard of hearing and ourselves hardly receive the gospel we have to pass on. Anyway a great paper. Send us another.
