When I suggested that the Christian tradition is to be identified primarily with its central ‘works’—the Bible and the liturgy—and that it is something analogous to literary criticism which can most easily make available its meanings and values, I denied that Christianity can be identified with politics. That Christianity has implications which are political, in the fullest sense, needn’t be insisted on in these pages. The nature of any identity, however, is something which still needs to be queried, especially in the light of the simplification of human affairs which it invariably threatens to introduce. It isn’t merely a liberal equivocation which prompts this questioning; an active spirit of criticism demands it, if the values which are invoked aren’t, in the end, to be betrayed. Terry Eagleton’s ‘Faith and Revolution’ is a case in point, and since it is explicitly offered as a contribution to the debate about ‘the points of theoretical convergence between Christianity and Marxism’ no better example need be looked for.

Eagleton is particularly concerned to examine the ‘point of divergence’ which appears once this convergence has been established, and he wants to locate the distinguishing characteristics of Christianity without opting either for ‘a merely theoretical divergence’ or for ‘some specifically “Christian” revolutionary practice’: