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Sincerity, Authenticity and God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Brian Wicker
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I regard this article as part of a continuing debate in New Blackfriars concerning the relations of Christianity and Marxism. But it is also an attempt, within that context, to ask and answer the question why we should continue to believe in God. I raise the question here because, it seems to me, that most of the effort expended by earlier contributors, particularly Denys Turner has been towards showing that it is possible, and even necessary for a Christian to be a Marxist. Obviously, if a Christian must be a Marxist, as Denys Turner argues, then the question whether he can, or should, continue to believe in God is raised at once. For it is a pretty widely accepted opinion among Marxists that belief in God is incompatible with their own view of things, and that anyone who is a Marxist and believes in God is something of an oddity, a man with a private religious hang-up, and quite probably an unreliable ally. Denys Turner rightly affirms that, in holding to this view of religious belief, Marxists are themselves merely hanging on to a private opinion that has nothing to do with their Marxism as such. But a Christian cannot be content with remaining there. What the Christian needs to be able to show is that, if he ought to be a Marxist just in order to be a complete Christian, it is equally the case that the Marxist ought to be a Christian just in order to be a complete Marxist. Nothing short of this will do, from a Christian standpoint: to pretend otherwise is to connive at a sell-out. I believe that at the present stage of the game there is a real danger of just such a sell-out. For example, to say, as the editorial committee responsible for Crossleft do, that ‘there can be no question today ... of Christian modification of Marxist praxis’ (which, if it means anything, means that being a Christian Marxist makes no difference at all to what, as a Marxist you are prepared to do): or that ‘the Church is basically on the side of the oppressor’ (what else, strictly speaking, can ‘basically’ mean here but ‘from the very foundation’?)—to say things like this suggests to me a readiness for just such a sell-out as I have indicated.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 57 , Issue 672 , May 1976 , pp. 196 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 See New Blackfriars, February and March 1973 and June 1975.

2 See Crossleft, Newsletter of Christians for Socialism in Britain, No. 1, p. 1 (Editorial address: Combe Lea, Cliftonville, Dorking, Surrey).

3 For a discussion of the history of the term in Western culture see Trilling, Lionel: Sincerity and Authenticity (O.U.P., 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim. Trilling's complex and subtle account of the rise and fall of ‘sincerity’ in post‐renaissance culture, and of the tendency for its replacement by ‘authenticity’ in this century, is too long to summarise here. Suffice it to say that he does not discuss authenticity in quite the sense I use it here, nor does he consider in any detail its contemporary political implications.

4 Terry Eagleton, in New Blackfriars, October 1975, p. 467.

5 English version printed in Crossleft, No. 1, pp. 3‐7.

6 New Blackfriars, 1975, p. 65.

7 Grundrisse, translated with a foreword by Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Books, 1973, pp. 14‐15.

8 This sort of language will be unintelligible 10 many Marxists: perhaps it may be made clearer by pointing out that talk about a sacramental reality is talk about a contiguity. The entry of Christ, the incarnate God. into history meant that the world of secular experience was actually ‘touched’ by the divine and the eternal, the present and the future have come into contact with each other. The resurrection of Christ, his ascension to the Father and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon men, means that this contiguitv of the secular and the divine has been made a permanent feature of all subsequent history. For a development of the idea that theological language (what the scholastics called analogical language) is essentially a matter of contiguity, and is therefore given a new intelligibility by the notion of contiguity as it is to be found in structural linguistics. see my recent book The Story‐Shaped World (Athlone Press, 1975)Google Scholar, Part 1, pussim.

9 This may seem, especially to those with little direct contact with the life of the Church today, to be mere assertion. But those with experience as Christians will be able to think of many ways in which Christ's presence is made manifest, at least to those with eyes to see or ears to hear. For my own part, I would say that many of the things that are happening within the Catholic Charismatic Renewal are outstanding examples of what I have in mind.