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Atheism in Christianity ATHEISM IN CHRISTIANITY The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom ERNST BLOCH With an introduction by Peter Thompson Translated by J. T. Swann V VERSO London ■ New York First published b y Herder and Herder, N ew York 1972 © Herder and Herder 1972 Introduction © Peter Thompson This new edition pu b lished b y Verso 2009 © Vetso 2009 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have b een asserted 1357910 8642 Verso U K : 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brook lyn, N Y 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-394-0 fpbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-371-1 (hbk) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library library of Congress Cataloging-m-Fublication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Contents Introduction by Peter Thompson ix ROUND THE CORNER 1. Against the Goad 1 2. Glance at Slave-Talk 2 SCANDAL AND FOLLY 3. No Longer So Submissive 5 4. From Sighing to Murmuring 5 5. Renunciation and the Semi-Disillusioned 7 6. The Strange Ubiquity of the Bible and Its Language 10 7. Whose Bible? 13 PROMETHEUS A MYTH TOO 8. From Murmuring to Contention 17 9. “The Lord Has Said that He Would Dwell in Thick Darkness” 18 10. Contrary Principles in the Bible: Creation and Apocalypse 19 11. Discernment of Myths 24 12. Marxism and Religion 46 13. Bible Criticism as Detective Work 57 EXODUS IN THE CONCEPT OF YAHWEH 14. An Unheard-of Saying of Jesus’: Departure-in-Full 71 vi ATHEISM IN CHRISTIANITY 15. Early Traces of the Break-Away: First Thoughts about the Serpent 72 16. Breakthrough in the Theocratic Concept ofYahweh: First Thoughts about the Exodus-Light (Ex. 13. 21) 76 17. Nazirites and Prophets—Yahweh’s Exodus into Universal Moral Providence; Pre-Vision 82 18. The Bounds of Patience 92 AUT CAESAR AUT CHRISTUS? 19. How Restless Men Are 109 20. Mildness and the “Light of His Fury” (William Blake) 110 21. Jesus’ Exodus into Yahweh 111 22. Christ’s Secret Name Is Son of Man, Not Son of God; The “Mystery of the Kingdom” 130 23. The Diminishing Greatness of the Son of Man— The “Smallness” of the Kingdom 140 24. The Title “Son of Man” Is Eschatological, the Later Tide “Kyrios-Christos” Wholly Cultic 145 25. The Total Christocentricity ofjohn 17, the “Key to the Gospel” 150 26. Paul’s So-Called Patience of the Cross. His Appeal to Resurrection and Life 155 27. Resurrection, Ascension, and Parousia: Wish-Mysterium in Spite of Sacrifical Death 162 28. Second Thoughts about the Serpent: The Ophites 167 29. Second Thoughts about the Exodus-Light: Marcion’s Gospel of an Alien God Without This World 173 AUT LOGOS AUT COSMOS? 30. The Call Before the Door 181 31. Orpheus 181 32. Exodus and Cosmos in the Stoics and in Gnosticism 183 33. Astral-Myth in the Bible 186 34. Logos-Myth Again: Man and Spirit, Feuerbach, Christian Mysticism 192 CONTENTS vii 35. Further Consequences of the Logos-Myth: Pentecost: Veni Creator Spiritus, Not Nature But Kingdom 199 36. This-Worldliness in the Astral-Myth 208 37. The Strange, Stricdy Non-Parallel Breakthrough of Both Man-Centered and Materialistic Systems Into the “Divine Transcendence,” Which They Replace 213 SOURCES OF LIFE-FORCE 38. The Only Safe Handhold: Openness 219 39. True Enlightenment Is Neither Trivial Nor Shallow 221 40. Enlightenment and Atheism Do Not Overthrow the “Satanic” with the God-Hypostasis 225 41. Moral, and Final, Sources of Life-Force 233 42. Sources of Possible Death-Force: Departure 240 43. Hunger, “Something in a Dream,” “God of Hope, ” Thing-For-Us 248 44. Conclusion: Marx and the End of Alienation 251 To think is to step over, to overstep. The best thing about religion is that it makes for heretics. Religion is re-ligio, binding back. It binds its adherents back, first and foremost, to a mythical God of the Beginning, a Creator-God, So, rightly understood, adherence to the Exodus- figure called “I will be what I will be,” and to the Christianity of the Son of Man and of the Eschaton, is no longer religion. Only an atheist can be a good Christian; only a Christian can be a good atheist. What is decisive: to transcend without transcendence. Dies septimus nos ipsi erimus. — Augustine Ernst Bloch and the Quantum Mechanics of Hope Dies septimus nos ipsi erimus1 These are times when competing caliphates—both religious and secular—dominate the intellectual and political realms. We are passing through one such era at present, and the evidence of this is manifold. The rise of popular and radical Islam on the one hand and the rediscovery of Christian evangelism on the other; the flight into New Age spirituality or New Atheist rationalism; the slow beating pulse of the Church of England, quickened by debates on sexuality and gender; against a background of unbelief, the re-emergence of faith in China, either in the form of traditional Confucianism, Taoism or Buddhism, or the new Christians and the Falun Gong. The list is endless and points to new levels of contradiction and tension in the ideological make-up of the world today. What all of these things show, however, is that religion as both debate and way of life has not crumbled in the face of an apparendy inexorable rationalist, scientific, modernising Enlightenment and the globalisation of the market economy, but retains a potency and strength which remains far in excess of its ability to explain. If the current economic crisis and the profligate years which preceded and gave rise to it have shown us anything, it is that the 1 We ourselves shall be that seventh day. x INTRODUCTION relationship between the social relations of production and the way we understand those relations remain as strained and as inseparable as ever. In the forum of religious belief, therefore, theists and atheists battle it out, each convinced they are on the back foot, each fighting against what they see as a combined tide of muddle-headedness, dogmatism and irrationality, threatening to overwhelm us with theocracies, technocracies, sterile democracies, faithless scientism, value-free liberality and fundamentalist regimes and movements. We seem to be trapped in a dualistic but essentially static way of thinking about the relationship between religion and science. As Derrida and Vattimo put it, “We are constantly trying to think the interconnectedness, albeit otherwise, of knowledge and faith, technoscience and religious belief, calculation and the sacrosanct. In the process, however, we have not ceased to encounter the alliance, holy or not, of the calculable and the incalculable.”2 Put another way, in words which Bloch might have used, the' dualistic sterility of the “either/or” position disables our critical faculties and our ability to recognise that the contradictions within a situation carry within them the potential solution of that situation and that the surplus of one carries over into the corpus of the other. The way to overcome the limitations of religion is not simply to rush at them head on in the hope that exposure to reason will destroy them, but to find within religion its own insuperable dualistic contradictions and to sublate them into the next stage of the dialectic. Bloch was thus concerned to search for the materialist base within the metaphysical apprehension of the religious worldview. As he puts it, “The question here is not of giving the death-blow to fantasy as such, but of destroying and saving the myth in a single dialectical process, by shedding light upon it. What is really swept away is real superstition.”3 In Atheism and Christianity, Bloch sees biblical exegesis and his new reading of the Bible and of the Judaeo-Christian tradition as a whole as “detective work,” whose purpose is to unmask 2 Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, Religion, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, 54. 3 This volume, henceforward denoted AC, 37. INTRODUCTION xi and illuminate the contradictions within the religious message.4 Although, as Vincent Geoghegan points out,5 this is Bloch’s only full book-length study of Christianity itself, the understanding of religion in its social role is the central concern of all of his work, from the expressionist The Spirit of Utopia (1918) and Thomas Miinzer as Theologian of the Revolution (1921)ito the more considered Atheism in Christianity (1968) and Expefimentum Mundi (1975). However, it would b e a mistake to break his work down into late and early Bloch. Certainly there are differences of approach in the two periods; but there is no clear break. For example, we find in his very earliest writings (1907) the opening lines "The Am is as yet unmediated, not there. That is why we have to start there. It is precisely the Thing of its Something which is missing (genau das Was seines Etwas fehlt)”6; and Experimentum Mundi, almost seventy years later, opens with “I am. But I do not yet possess myself. Thus we must become. Therefore we do not know what we are, and too much is full of Something which is missing.”7 In Bloch, however, there is no cut between these two insights, merely a transition in which the concerns of the former are complemented by and taken up into those of the latter. It is the search for the “Something” of human existence which drives us on, Bloch maintains, and we will find it wherever we can.
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