Francis Barker’s argument to prove that Christianity is always ideological, and never scientific, won’t do. Since the reason for this is of some general theoretical importance, it is perhaps worth pointing out what is wrong with it.

Barker’s thesis is that being tautological is a mark of the ideological. (‘all ideological discourse is ... strictly speaking tautological’ p. 476). But he also wants to argue that not every utterance within an ideological discourse has to be tautological: some of them may be just false. Fair enough so far. So ‘God exists’ is not tautological after all, but just false. But this, he says, doesn’t stop Christian discourse in general from being tautological—i.e. from being set within a framework of tautology. Barker’s reason for saying this is that in Christian discourse, words like ‘because’ and ‘therefore’ are not used (as in science) in a diachronic way, but merely to ‘conjugate’ or ‘spatialise’ the optative paradigm. This dark saying is then illustrated by an argument that purports to show that ‘God made the world’ certainly is tautological. The reason for choosing this example is presumably that it is the fundamental case of a Christian discourse in which the use of ‘because’ is crucial. For ‘God made the world’ can be construed as equivalent to ‘the world exists because God made it’; and presumably in this sentence, according to Barker, the ‘because’ is simply ‘paradigmatic’. Now I think it is a fairly simple matter to show that this is quite wrong: pace Barker, ‘because’ in this sentence is used in just the same way as it is commonly used in ‘science’.

The argument / have with Barker is by now played out, at any rate over “Can a Christian be a Marxist?” (New Blackfriars, June 1975). From the start I knew that that article had its shortcomings. But it is, essentially, corrigible. I think I know what I wanted to say in it, though I acknowledge that what I wrote did not always say it. Barker, however, has a habit of regarding what I write as just a very extended parapraxis, all the surface deficiencies being but symptoms of the fact that what I want to say is, literally, unspeakable. The very fact that I should want to put down these deficiencies of formulation to subjective conditions of production would itself be symptomatic of the degree to which I am held in thrall by the ideology which is the true author of what I wrote— the ideology according to which “subjects” (e.g. Denys Turner) are the authors of, among other things, texts. All this would be by the way were it not that, in Barker’s view, it is its captivation by the ideology of “the subject” which is the chief ideological element in Christianity and the chief reason why Marxist science cannot debate Christianity. For the ideological nature of Christianity makes it the (potential) object of Marxist science, not a discourse it can debate with on equal but different terms.

I have no objection in principle to this apparently high-handed procedure, analogous as it is to the Freudian habit of giving Freudian explanations of the critics of Freudian theory. After all I myself argued (“Marxism, Christianity and Morality”, New Blackfriars, April 1977, p. 191), that the mark of any science is its capacity not merely to explain what ideology fails to explain but also to explain why ideology cannot explain what it fails to explain.

The first volume of Les “Senders Escarpes” de Karl Marx, by Paul-Dominique Dognin, Editions du Cerf (vol I 47F; vol II 35F) contains the German text of the original (first edition) version of Chapter I of Capital and of its appendix, as well as French translations of them, together with the fourth edition version (in French translation only). Dognin’s own critical commentary on these texts makes up the second volume of his book.

The first edition version of Chapter I differs considerably from the fourth, and from the standard French and English translations. The differences relate especially to the presentation of the distinction between “value” and “exchange-value”. Dognin argues that these changes are symptomatic of fundamental difficulties in Marx’s theory of value, difficulties which he analyses at length in his commentary. Although there is little that is original in Dognin’s criticisms—they will be familiar to anyone acquainted with Bohm-Bawerk’s critique —I think he is right to highlight the importance of the value/exchange-value distinction. In my view, however, Marx’s distinction is symptomatic, not of contradictions within his theory of value, but of contradictions between that theory and that of classical economics: by means of this distinction, Marx makes a definite break with classical economics and inaugurates a new science of his own. Seen in this light, the value/ exchange-value distinction is the key to Marx’s value theory as a whole, and hence is much more important than the use-value/exchange-value distinction to which so much attention is usually given. It is, indeed, Dognin’s failure to grasp the nature of the value/exchange-value distinction which vitiates his critique of Marx, a critique which is, however, quite standard in the neoclassical tradition. Let us, then, look at the distinction itself in some detail.

The past decade has seen a quickening of intellectual life among Italian Dominicans of the Roman Province, leading to certain initiatives and achievements which deserve to be better known than they are to Dominicans outside Italy and to others interested in the work of the Order. I refer to the activities of the group of friars, whose centre of operations is the splendid old “studium” of their Province at Pistoia, near Florence, who produce the excellent bi-monthly review Vita Sociale and have revived and wonderfully transformed the old historical journal of the Italian Dominicans, Memorie Domenicane. It is to this latter production that I want, in these brief notes, to draw attention; and along with it, to two important books from the same Pistoian workshop dealing-in; very different ways and in one case, it is true, only indirectly-with that same turning-point in the history of Catholicism, and indeed of western culture as a whole, on which the historical research that has gone into the new Memorie Domenicane (= M.D.) has tended to concentrate—the turning-point indicated in phrases like ‘the rise of humanism’, where this term is taken to signify a typically non-medieval outlook expressed in a new form of culture whose ‘rise’ coincided inter alia with the decline of medieval scholasticism. It need hardly be said that such a use of terms begs many questions, but that it answers to some historical reality needn’t be doubted; it being surely unquestionable that Petrarch and Erasmus, though separated by nearly two centuries, were ‘humanists’ in very much the same sense, and that this entailed in both of them a strongly critical attitude to the scholastic culture and mentality.

Fundamentalism clearly is some kind of literalism, especially in biblical interpretation, a literalism sustained (for what are taken to be religious reasons) in the face of liberal amd critical reconstructions and reinterpretations of the text. In fact, of course, the critical reconstructions are often undertaken for equally religious motives. Fundamentalism expresses and exploits the worries of believers; the residually Christian popular audience takes the passion-play literalism of Zefirelli’s television film with the same uncommitted tolerance as the modernist musicals “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar”. Fundamentalism is widely influential among some theologians too. From the time of the Modernist crisis to the run-up to Vatican II, the Biblical Commission and the Holy Office imposed something very like fundamentalism on Catholic biblical studies. Professor Barr’s book does not study such phenomena in detail, he is concerned with a Protestant fundamentalism of a more systematic kind, self-designated as conservative evangelicalism. But there is enough of a family likeness between the fundamentalisms for Barr’s critique to be serviceable in coming to terms with the recent past of Catholic biblical work, dead but not yet entirely prone.

There are three marks of the fundamentalism Barr has between his sights: the inerrancy of Scripture as an article of faith and necessary test of the orthodoxy of otherwise acceptable Protestantisms; sharp hostility to modern theology and biblical criticism; and exclusion of those who fail the inerrancy test from the ranks of true Christians, (p 1) Rightly, one begins to suspect that Barr has little sympathy for his subject, regarding it as a mistake in theology and a resistance to known critical truths. Barr has no hope of persuading fundamentalists to change their minds, though he does hope to help students make theirs up in more intelligent and deliberate fashion.