Christianity is politics done slowly. It is politics with memory and imagination, that understands the past as resource from which a future may perhaps come into being constructed. It is the politics of the promise of God.
It is a deep-seated assumption of the tradition as we have inherited it that the past is gone and has no further impact on us. But the past does not disappear. It is still entirely with us. It is just that we have no awareness of it. This is the nominalism (we are entirely to free to make up names for things, after which they will be what we have named them), or the voluntarism (things are what we will them to be) or antinomianism (there is no law or tradition or givens for us to come to terms with) of the Western tradition. We do not see it as a tradition, that is as somthing passed to us, or see it as one tradition, but instead see it simply as everything, our field of view being filled by it.
The Western tradition is a kind of forgetfulness. We are not at in charge of the machine we have inherited. The machine wants to give us the impression that we are entirely in charge: it does not even tell us that we are astride a machine. It wants us to believe that we are entirely free agents, able to choose what to do just as impulsively and unconstrainedly as children. We are up on the bridge of an ocean liner, throwing the wheel this way and that, unaware that the ship is only able to react very slowly, so each of our instructions cancels out the previous one, while the great ship of the Western intellectual tradition ploughs on.
But Christianity allows us to see that the Western intellectual tradition – ‘modernity’ – is one tradition, because Christianity is another tradition. Christianity is a distinct tradition because the world is unable to absorb the church so that the distinction between disappears.
The Western tradition think it knows Christianity and has seen through it. But Christianity is preserved as a tradition, and as an alternative to the Western tradition, by the freedom of God. It is God who keeps Christianity out of our reach, this unknown, ungraspable mystery, which alone secures for us the possibility of a future.
