As a former seminarian, practicing Episcopalian, and sometime theologian, I am occasionally asked why or how I continue to use tools and insights I have learned from the mature social and historical theory of Karl Marx. And, obviously, I also am asked by social theorists and historians how or why I continue to practice Christianity.
There is plenty here and in my other writings (see Max Weber and the Persistence of Religion: Capitalism, Social Theory, and the Sublime London: Routledge, 2006) to answer these questions. Yet, in a preliminary way, I can say that from my vantage point since there is only a shade of difference from the Tanakh to Mark or Paul to the Church mothers and fathers to Saint Thomas, etc., there is also only a shade from these worldly writers to other worldly writers, including Karl Marx, all of whom are trying to grasp something important about us in the world.
More specifically, however, a half dozen or so methodological distinctions recommend Mr Marx. First, if I am correct and if capitalism as a social, not an economic, form is responsible for practically isolating abstract value from its material form of appearance in the fourteenth century, then this indicates the point where we can also begin to address the multiple bifurcations and splittings that differentiate modern theology and its unique problems from classical theology and its problems (e.g., Jesus’ wounds, Mary’s breasts, the Real Presence, Faith and Works, the status of the Body, the status of the institutional Church, etc.). Second, this also marks the point, obliquely referenced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but openly in the eighteenth, where the hiatus irrationalis becomes an overwhelming problem for commentators. Much theology, tragically, from that point forward becomes mired in the subject-object dilemma and therefore reduces itself to epistemology, which, in my view, is unfortunate, since the community of faith ought, it strikes me, to be focused principally upon the body, which, in any concrete way, is lost to the Church from this point forward. Even where it is not fully elaborated, as, for example, in I Kant’s first critique, or when, as in GFW Hegel’s Phaenomenologie, thought on its own attempts to heal the temporal breach, the practical isolation of abstract value from its material form of appearance is all too painfully evident. I do not agree with, e.g., J Moltmann, that this problem can be collapsed into the similar problem of God’s death or God’s Body. But I do believe that each of these related problems sheds light on the other. K Marx, principally in the Grundrisse, but also in his Thesen über Feuerbach, does not heal this breach, but instead exposes its historical and social production, therein inviting readers to reflect critically on its practical supercession. Third, and related, by illuminating the social and historical production of the sublime value form of the commodity, K Marx also casts light on the real, historical, and social being of the Weltgeist, which GFW Hegel mistook for divine being unfolding in time, but which we can now recognize as Capital, which all too often also forms the heart and soul and mind of the community of faith, not only or even primarily in its beliefs and theology, but far more tragically in its practice and experience of God and the World. Fourth, by identifying the social and historical character of the breach between abstract value and its material form of appearance, K Marx also sheds light retrospectively upon the wonderful confluence and delightful mutual shaping of spirit and flesh evident in so much liturgy and iconography, as well as practice, prior to the fourteenth century. Since he stands at the crossroads of this transition, wrestling to preserve what is about to be lost, Saint Thomas, in TPQ73, “Of the Sacrament of the Eucharist,” perhaps best epitomizes what is at stake. Fifth, it strikes me that there is an implicit invitation in First Corinthians 1-2, to grasp the mystery of divine being and intention immanently, an invitation first and most visibly extended in Creation itself, but also therefore throughout the entire liturgical calendar, concluding with Triduum and Easter. But sixth, this could suggest that the hermeneutical error we are trying to expose should be ascribed less to K Marx than to the community of faith that appears eager, again and again, to isolate the body and the Body from its spirit and from its Spirit.