Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom

by Ernst Bloch, J.T. Swann (Translator), Peter Thompson (Contributor)

In the twenty-first century, religion has come under determined attack from secular progressives in documentaries, opinion pieces and international bestsellers. Combative atheists have denounced faiths of every stripe, resulting in a crude intellectual polarization in which religious convictions and heritage must be rejected or accepted wholesale.

In the long unavailable Atheism in Christianity , Ernst Bloch provides a way out from this either/or debate. He examines the origins of Christianity in an attempt to find its social roots, pursuing a detailed study of the Bible and its fascination for ‘ordinary and unimportant’ people. In the biblical promise of utopia and the scriptures’ antagonism to authority, Bloch locates Christianity’s appeal to the oppressed. Through a lyrical yet close and nuanced analysis, he explores the tensions within the Bible that promote atheism as a counter to the authoritarian metaphysical theism imposed by clerical exegesis. At the Bible’s heart he finds a heretical core and the concealed message that, paradoxically, a good Christian must necessarily be a good atheist.This new edition includes an introduction by Peter Thompson, the Director of the Centre for Enrst Bloch Studies at the University of Sheffield.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Theology, Nonfiction, Christianity, History, Atheism

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Ernst Bloch was one of the great philosophers and political intellectuals of twentieth-century Germany. Among his works to have appeared in English are The Spirit of Utopia (Stanford University Press, 2000), Literary Essays (Stanford University Press, 1998), The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (1987), and The Principle of Hope (1986).

Reviews

[Nikos Tsentemeidis · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Μόνο ένας άθεος μπορεί να είναι ένας καλός χριστιανός, μόνο ένας χριστιανός μπορεί να είναι ένας καλός άθεος.» - Αυγουστίνος

Αυτό το βιβλίο είναι τρία πράγματα τουλάχιστον. Είναι μια μελέτη της Παλαιάς και της Καινής διαθήκης (μόλις ένα τμήμα της οποίας είναι ο τίτλος του), είναι μια φιλοσοφία της θρησκείας και μια φιλοσοφία γενικότερη.

Η Βίβλος «μιλάει» σε πολλούς ανθρώπους, γιατί μεγάλωσαν με αυτήν, όπως ακριβώς με τα παραμύθια. Πάντα οι μύθοι είχαν κάτι το οποίο, εντός της κοινωνίας διαδιδόταν πολύ εύκολα, έτσι και οι μύθοι της Βίβλου. Ο Bloch μιλάει για αρχέτυπα, όπως έκανε και ο Jung (ο κορυφαίος ψυχαναλυτής μαζί με τον Freud). Σαν μαρξιστής φιλόσοφος, κάνει κάποιες αναγωγές στον 20ό αιώνα και μιλάει για «αρχέγονες» κομμούνες και «αντικαπιταλιστικά» κηρύγματα. Μεγάλο ενδιαφέρον έχουν οι αναλύσεις σε μύθους όπως αυτός του Ιώβ (Βιβλίο του Ιώβ – παλαιά διαθήκη) που φυσικά τον συγκρίνει με τον Φάουστ του Γκαίτε. Συγκεκριμένα στον Ιώβ κάνει και συγκρίσεις με τις συγγενείς θρησκείες: τον ιουδαϊσμό και τον ισλαμισμό.

Μετά τις βιβλικές μελέτες, κάνει μια αναφορά στο έργο νεότερων φιλοσόφων που ασχολήθηκαν στα γραπτά τους με τη θρησκεία, όπως Φόϋερμπαχ, Μαρξ, Σέλινγκ, Χέγκελ, Καντ, Νίτσε, αλλά και θεολόγους όπως Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann, Rudolf Bultmann, Johannes Weiss, Michael Walzer, οι οποίοι είναι όλοι τους Γερμανοί, εκτός από τον τελευταίο (Αμερικάνος). Εδώ φαίνεται πως ο Bloch είναι πολύ διαβασμένος και γενικά έχει εξαιρετικό εύρος γνώσεων, ώστε να συμπεριλάβει τόσα πολλά πράγματα σε ένα τέτοιο βιβλίο, το οποίο, αν και πυκνογραμμένο και αρκετά απαιτητικό, σε αποζημιώνει αν έχεις υπομονή. Χρειάζεται βέβαια κάποιο υπόβαθρο σχετικών γνώσεων, το οποίο εγώ δεν είχα, παρόλα αυτά μαθαίνεις πολλά.

[Peter Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote the Introduction. If anyone wants to discuss it, please get in touch.
Peter

[Rita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely speculative yet thought-provoking!

This is a very dense book that I feel I cannot do justice to in one short goodreads review, but let me just say that this has got me thinking a lot about the necessity for positive conceptions in Marxism. (I also love a good ol' shoutout to revolutionary tendencies in the Middle Ages.)

Certainly a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the dream for liberation as situated in a western cultural context.

[David Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

For Bloch, scripture is soaked through with hope-filled narratives of transgression that challenge the cold moralistic pieties and hot consumer excesses of the modern world driven by the Puritan ethic and its capitalist manifestations. Not only were Amos, Jeremiah and the psalmists of yore wont to sound war trumpets against greed and godlessness, Christ's life was a continual battle against systematic brutalization, exploitation and hubris, whether incarnated in, for instance, temple-franchised money lenders, pharasaical pride, or denial of the human rights of widows, prostitutes, lepers and the anawim of the earth. Before liberation theology, Bloch was. Before feminists picked up the revolution power in the peasant girl Mary's prayer, the Magnificat, with its promise that the Almighty will 'cast down the mighty from their seats … exalt the humble … send the rich away empty', Bloch was affirming the capacity, inbuilt within humanity since the Creation, to create Kingdom-life now, on earth.

As a thought mode, atheism is commonly understood to be radically different in domain assumptions from 'religion'. '(C)ompeting caliphates', Peter Thompson calls them (xiv). Bloch's approach is deeply imbued with his strong humanistic Marxist conviction that dogmatic forms of both atheism and church-orientated Christianity simply talk past each other in a dialogue of the deaf. His 'utopia of the light', as Bloch refers to it (p. 231), is, to borrow a Habermasian expresison, the 'ideal speech community' of the Enlightenment, not in the 'half-baked' (p. 7) compromised version found in 'rationalistic bourgeoise' (p. 8) contexts that fall short of his messianic vision of full-blooded participatory democracy in which all voices, including religious ones, might be heard and respected. He writes (p. 10): 'The Enlightenment, therefore, will be all the more radical when it does not pour equal scorn on the Bible's all-pervading healthy insight into man.'

Setting aside the somewhat outmoded sexist language in Bloch's expression here and leaving the matter of biblical 'health' to one side, an 'Amen' to that tolerant sentiment seems theologically and politically appropriate when pursuing a sense of atheism in a multi-faith world that would not take the form of an anti-religious knee-jerk reflex. Nevertheless, as we might expect of a believer but not a belonger, Bloch's nuanced analysis imports a pervasive anti-institutional religion refrain: 'the Church is the institution least founded on enlightenment' (p. 9).

Excerpt from a review by Dr. William Keenan, who is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University. You can access the full review here:

http://churchandpomo.typepad.com/conv...

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

First off a huge shoutout to my homie Drew who gifted this book to me. Outside of Marx’s own writings on religion, this is undoubtedly the most sophisticated and nuanced Marxist account of Christianity out there (that I’ve encountered at least).

Love the Fredric Jameson quote on the back, “Bloch is not so much a Marxist philosopher, he is rather a theologian of the revolution.” Really nails it.

Bloch gets to the heart of Marx’s understanding of religion as both innervating and liberating- as both the “opium of the masses” and yet simultaneously the “sigh of the oppressed, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions” (the almost universally forgotten half of Marx’s famous quote in his Intro to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right). In that way, Bloch, like Marx, overcomes the sterile binary of nihilistic and mechanistic atheisms that reject religious belief and uncritical servile acceptance of religious metaphysical claims. On his ability to account for liberating and innervating streams- I was pretty astounded actually at Bloch’s knowledge of and synthesis of quite a large swatch of historical biblical scholarship on source/redaction criticism- much of which helps him differentiate various political strains within Jewish and Christian texts. At the end of the day Bloch argues for a non-mystified, immanently transcendent form of hope rooted in a processual (as opposed to mechanistic or teleological) account of future utopia and respective of the ways this is already found prefiguratively in religious traditions. There’s a lot more that could be said about that- but you gotta read it to see what that looks like!

“Atheism (that is neither nihilistic nor positivist) is the presupposition of any concrete Utopia, but concrete Utopia is also the remorseless consequence of atheism. Atheism-with-concrete-Utopia is at one and the same time the annihilation of religion and the realization of its heretical hope, now set on human feet.”

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Greek mythology was not only the arsenal of Greek art but its very ground." But science does not lack a supreme sort of mythical memory, either, wherever "qualities" and "forms" still stand within its ken. Its memory is not of blind faith, of course, nor of supposed revelations from on high, but of a world in which qualities, and even objective beauty, were not necessarily beyond discussion from the very start. Kepler with his age-old "Hen kai pan" had an extremely aesthetic, musical cosmology with very definite echoes of Pythagorean myth; one might have thought he was no longer operating in an exact sector of nature at all. And going even further, the Romantic philosophy of nature stemming from Paracelsus and Böhme and reaching its climax with Schelling (or, in a different way, with Baader, and also to some extent with Hegel), behaved as if the mythical picture of nature with its primitive analogies had not yet lost its relevance. Which was often highly suspicious, though sometimes it scented the fire, like Faust in the cave.
Even in this last point, then, the fairy tale showed itself again in some of these myths of the "different" sort-not standing yet with Prometheus, but still standing with Orpheus, whispering the spell "Fount, pain, quality." 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; nor is this given any time to save itself in the Hic Rhodus, hic salta of some merely outwardly demythologized theo-dicy or theo-logy.”

“To put it in modern terms, the infinite greatness of a creative Beginning is lost now, with this future-facing Veni creator spiritus, in the infinite smallness of a Beginning which is no more than a beginning, a state of pure need. Nor is this new Beginning any once-and-for-all, mythical, pre-earthly creation of the universe, leaving room only for beings which are in themselves complete. It is, rather, a simple X, an Alpha present in all being.
Incomplete and unobjective in itself, it draws man on through the transient darkness of each moment in the Way of the World. It is the Not-there of each present Moment, which, still veiled to itself and seeking itself, truly "evolves" into being in and through World-process and its experimental forms, for it is their primary stimulus and driving-force. Its place in human history is at the decisive front of the Experimentum mundi, where man lies equally open to everything and nothing, to fulfillment and to ruin, and where the world is in high labor as the Laboratorium possibilis salutis. The topos of Way and, even more so, End-is this same endless forward-looking openness, not the closed topos of the astral myth with its
"eternal, iron laws"; it is the great topos of the Future, still full of objective and really available possibilities for birth, development and experimental forms of fulfillment; the topos where the X of the Beginning runs ever onward in the still immediate, unmediated, unobjectified, unmanifested Here-and-now of each present moment. Here alone, in this closest closeness and most immanent immanence, lies hidden the mystery, hidden even to itself, that there is a world, whatever may be its reason and its End.
This Mystery of man's being, along with its still unfulfilled solution, has its place, therefore, not in some distant pre- and supra-earthly transcendence high-above, but in the ferment of the undiscovered moment, in its most immanent immanence. Its unawareness of itself is the driving force which lies behind the phenomenon of the world, and is also the high, Utopian torment in which the matter of the world wells forth-the Fount and Pain and Quality of world-matter. The true world is here still uncreated, it has its being in newness which is quite the opposite of the antiquarian mythology of Deus creator and of an utterly complete, fulfilled Beginning.
"The real Genesis is not at the
Beginning but at the End"; and it is only when the Where-to and the What-for have at last found adequate expression within us that the Where-from begins to flicker into the focus of our sights. "In this way there comes into the world something which casts light on every childhood, somewhere where no one yet has been: it is called Home" (The Principle of Hope). Item: Creatio est exodus, non est restitutio in integrum.”

“Nineteenth-century positivism and naturalism did not help it here, for though they excluded transcendence they also excluded one of the life-principles of Marxism: its forward-looking transcendere, its process. This process can be described as the possible liberation and identification of the history-making subject, and, as such, it contains archetypes of freedom more ultimate than the old religious ones; or, rather, these same religious archetypes are now the really ultimate ones, but in a different sense that of the ultimate aim they can now reflect.
…The chief fruits by which, today as always, the good news can be known are those of genuine socialist upheaval. But not even the tree which bears that fruit need nowadays grow on the traditional religious ground. It grows, rather, in the garden of the Nay-sayer, in the land of atheism, where the subject lives who has thrown out of his house not only the fear but the whole chimera of transcendence, including its hypostasized patriarchalism.
That does not mean, however, that the tree in question now grows in the soil of triviality, which so often follows from a fixed and static enlightenment. Nor does it tower up into a sky of nihilism rather than one of transcendence the sort of nihilism which can spread so dangerously from an atheism that has no implications, no contact with the freedom movement among men and its fundamental stake in the realm of hope. Triviality is the miserable result, and nihilism the diabolical one, when a disillusioned transcendence at the same time removes the transcendere that is grounded in the Utopian depths of man and world. Triviality can do away with fear, but only at the price of general atrophy - and with nihilism the price is the even higher one of despair. Concrete disillusionment, however, ends more in bewilderment than in triviality: bewilderment before the Not-yet-being of what no man has seen or understood. And, rather than in nihilism, it ends up in the not unfounded hope that that particular philosophy will not have the last word after all. Nihilism was an infection of the decaying bourgeoisie, but apart from possessing the reflexes of that downfall it undoubtedly had premisses in the cosmological purposelessness of mechanistic materialism. Being is senseless, however, if it is merely the circular motion of matter; the very absoluteness of this form of disillusionment brings it to its knees in a heap of atoms.
As opposed to nihilism, dialectical materialism (with the notice above its door: No mechanists allowed) admits into its system a whole series of starting-points and factors in human productivity, apart from purely physico-chemical ones: cells, for instance, and individual productivity, and the thoroughly qualitative interlocking of infra-structure and super-structure. When it comes to explaining the world in terms of the world, it can call on the process of a continuous shift from quantity to quality. And above all it is aware of the effective problem of a Kingdom of Freedom that is qualified as human. All of this is an antidote to triviality and nihilism; it is the activation of religion's non-opiate, non-oppressive elements.
For when dialectical materialism hears and grasps the import of the mighty voice of tendency in this world which it has made its own, and when it calls on men to work for the goal revealed by that voice, it shows decisively that it has taken hold of the living soul of a dead religion, the transcendere without transcendence, the subject-object of a well-founded hope. That is what lives on when the opium, the fool's paradise of the Other-world, has been burnt away to ashes. That remains as a call, signalling the way to the fulfilled This-world of a new earth.
And when the gods of taboo and fear have been abolished there is room for the advent of a mystery that is adequate to the fearless man. Respect before this mystery now takes the place of fear: respect, so foreign to triviality and nihilism, reflecting within itself the fearless acceptance of the strange and sinister, the fully human acceptance of the unthinkable. With respect there also comes nobility, bringing with it a first breath of future freedom.
For nobility is proper to a transcendere in which there is no self-alienation, and to its correlative, the latent power of a hoped-for resurrection. There is no refuge here for fear and ignorance this is the territory of hope and of its strong will and ability to know. Messianism is the burning mystery of all revolutionary, all fulfilled enlightenment. When man is called upon to act morally, heaven becomes an empty, distant thing even in its capacity as guaranty-fund for the reward of otherwise motiveless good deeds. If he is to maintain his grip on the only enduring Summum bonum of human finality, man must be able to see the Kingdom of heavenly freedom as his geo-graphical Utopia too. Atheism is the presupposition of any concrete Utopia, but concrete Utopia is also the remorseless consequence of atheism. Atheism-with-concrete-Utopia is at one and the same time the annihilation of religion and the realization of its heretical hope, now set on human feet. Concrete Utopia is in its turn the philosophy and praxis of the tendency latent in the world-latent in matter which has been qualified with ultimate direction.
This is small enough to allow no room for self-alienation and large enough-Omega enough to give some remote sense of possible this-worldly reality to the boldest of Utopian schemes.
These ideas belong to the frontiers of Messianism but, rightly understood, they imply the drive to surpass itself and achieve totality which is immanent in the work of human liberation.

“How, then, did this dilemma affect the a-theism of the Enlightenment, its most brilliant blow for freedom? Blind fear was now, for the first time, deposed, and with it went all the scandalous obscurantism which had served the divinely established authorities of feudalism so well. The Lord-God hypostasis was over-thrown, and men could now see and criticize their own immaturity and their self-alienation. This humanistic, de-theocratizing function of atheism was so far-reaching and clear, and so different from the equally staggering potentialities of optimism when it comes to the emancipation of the satanic, that even when, as with Nietzsche, the atheist became confused with the Antichrist, the innate power of atheism to break all encapsulating boundaries, including those of the inferno, could still force its way to the top. The result of this, in Nietzsche, was an atheism whose bold Utopian tone was due precisely to the death of faith in God: "We are, perhaps, still too close to the immediate consequences of this event— and, contrary to what one might think, these consequences, its consequences for us, are not at all sad and gloomy. They are, in fact, like a new sort of light that is difficult to describe; they are like a new sort of happiness, relief, light-heartedness, encouragement, dawn ... In the event, we philosophers and 'free spirits' feel ourselves bathed in the warm rays of a new dawn; when we hear the news that
'the old God is dead" our hearts overflow with thankfulness and astonishment, with premonition and expectation. The horizon may not be bright, but it does at last seem free; our ships can sail out again to face danger; every risk of knowledge is now once more allowed; the sea, our sea lies open before us again-perhaps there has never been such an 'open sea' before" (Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom).
But, with this statement, Nietzsche (and even more so all abstract atheism) shows to an astonishing, thought-provoking extent, something of the same precarious minimalization which characterized the Enlightenment's attitude to everything it wanted to deny whether this was hanging on to the satanic or to the theistic plank, or had jumped from one to the other. For where in this simple eradication of the God-hypostasis was there still room for its use as an apologia for every sort of tutelage, every sort of hierarchy, every sort of static master-serf relationship? And where, above all, was there still room for the great Opponent, the Zeus-archetype of lordship who, though veiled in transcendence and myth, was never thought of as a merely optional extra, for without him Prometheus (and, mutatis mutandis, Job) would never have been able to make his archetypal rebellion at all. It is in fact quite clear that the simple, optimistic denial of evil in the world can find a ready-made refuge in a certain type of atheism-the atheism that will also place beyond all discussion (not just beyond purely mythological discussion) the question) the question of evil within the concept of God and its transcendent hypostasization.
The result of this is a general loss of depth on the part of the Negative, even in metaphysics. And metaphysics, far from having any interests in myth (or its hypostasization), goes straight to the foundations of fear and salvation which lie in the depths behind and beyond the world. There is no room here for any exageration of
isolation in the treatment of evil, as was the fashion in the all too elevated cult of despair, or in Adorno's jargon about the "non-actuality of the good." And metaphysics also goes much further than the mere grumbling and grousing we have spoken about, with its purely negative dialectics which both Marx and Hegel were forced to relativize, so far removed was it from the real class-struggle, so remote from being so much as an "algebra of revolution." Personified despair is useless here, but so is its opposite, the personified trust purveyed throughout the ages by authority both ecclesiastical and civil, with its thoroughly conformist "Be comforted." The power of this pre-ordained confidence manifests itself within the clerical apparatus in the hierarchy of ownership and the ownership of the hierarchy, and this has precisely the same effects as defeatism-the revolution is suppressed. Neither of the two exaggerations, however the one stemming from idle negativity, the other from guaranteed positivity, leaves the narrow confines of a space which, for Nietzsche, had been burst asunder by atheism. In fact the contrary is true, even when all static systems are verbally rejected. And although both despair and confidence are prepared to pay verbal homage to the openness of a hope that is dedicated to the struggle, they view it on the one hand as a mere decoration, a sort of weak but delicate perfume, and on the other hand as a sort of gilt-edged picture of providence tacked for purely contemplative purposes to the end of the traditional sermon. In contrast with this, and because it does not see its premises as already agreed with (as do both depair and confidence), hope itself concentrates its attention on the realm of the Not-yet-achieved, on the Not-yet of the achieved, and does so precisely for the sake of the struggle for the sake of winning the historical process. All really tested hope, therefore, and all really militant optimism, must go through the ever more searching and destructive experience of the historical process, brought about by the powers of anti-Utopia ranged against those of the Utopia of light. And the darkly pondering, ever-searching earth joins forces here with our non-contemplative activity in the constant quest for salvation.

“True Marxism has no time for all that, but takes true Christianity seriously— too seriously for just another grey and compromising dialog. When Christians are really concerned with the emancipation of those who labor and are heavy-laden, and when Marxists retain the depths of the Kingdom of Freedom as the real content of revolutionary consciousness on the road to becoming true substance, the alliance between revolution and Christianity founded in the Peasant Wars may live again this time with success. Florian Geyer, the great fighter of those wars, is reputed to have had the words "Nulla crux, nulla corona" scratched on the blade of his sword. That could be the motto of a Christianity free, at last, from alienation. And the far-reaching, inexhaustible depths of emancipation in those words could also serve as a motto for a Marxism aware of its depths.
Vivant sequentes. Marxism, and the dream of the unconditioned, follow the same path and the same plan of campaign.”

“In the end, for Bloch, the point of religion is that, within its fables and mythologies, its inconsistencies and its dangerously irrational tendencies, it contains a kernel of truth which is about the fulfillment of the dream of Utopia. The world will be what it will be and it will be what we make it. The uptake of an Aristotelian dynámei on -a being-in-possibility— into the Christian doctrine via the eschatology of the Pauline "Event" of the resurrection is thus the recognition of the need for an eschatology of earthly insurrection in which a nihilstic fear of death can lose its sting.”

[5greenway · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank goodness this perked up again towards the end. Around 100 pages from the finish, it got bogged down in stodge and became a real chore. Up until that point, it had been punchy and thought-provoking. Some pretty sharp insights that I'll be going back to. Lack of an index was a pain in the arse.

[Michel Van Goethem · Rating 5 out of 5]

L'athéisme dans le christianisme. La religion de l'exode et du royaume
[Atheismus im Christentum]
Trad. de l'allemand par Éliane Kaufholz et Gérard Raulet

Notes de Gérard Raulet
Collection Bibliothèque de Philosophie, Gallimard
Parution : 23-01-1979
L'athéisme dans le christianisme pourrait se comprendre, dans le cadre de l'œuvre-système d'Ernst Bloch, comme une philosophie de la religion. Mais pour le marxiste Bloch, qui s'attache à penser les conséquences pratiques du renversement de Hegel par Marx, le système n'est plus qu'une méthode dialectique d'investigation du réel.

Il en va de même de sa «philosophie» de la religion. Herméneutique non conformiste de la sphère religieuse, le livre vise à une véritable herméneutique de la subversion, débusquant et réactivant les intentions de révolte qui traversent la Bible et y ont été parfois étouffées par les clercs. Pour Ernst Bloch comme pour Marx «la misère religieuse est tout à la fois l'expression de la misère réelle et la protestation contre la misère réelle. La critique de la religion est donc en germe la critique de la vallée de larmes dont la religion est l'auréole.»
Ici, la dialectique d'un héritage actif des potentialités critique de la religion se substitue au simple «dialogue». L'opposition ne se trace plus entre les fronts mais dans la pensée critique du marxisme, qui ne saurait «liquider» la religion sans en hériter, et dans la religion. C'est pourquoi Ernst Bloch affirme : «Seul un vrai chrétien peut être un bon athée, seul un véritable athée peut être un bon chrétien.»

[Musaadalhamidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

الإلحاد المسيحي هو شكل من أشكال الإلحاد الذي يتبنى التعاليم أو الروايات أو الرموز أو الممارسات أو المجتمعات المرتبطة بالمسيحية دون قبول الوجود الحرفي لله.
يتخذ الإلحاد المسيحي أشكالًا عديدة، وقد يشمل نظامًا أخلاقيًا، وجوانب من الثقافة المسيحية، ومجموعة متنوعة من المواقف اللاهوتية المسيحية. من بين المفكرين الملحدين المسيحيين البارزين توماس جي جي ألتيزر (قائد في لاهوت موت الرب)، وجون د. كابوتو (سلف "اللاهوت الضعيف" الذي يقول "الله غير موجود؛ الله يصر")، وويليام هاميلتون (الذي دعا إلى اتباع ما يلي: يسوع في عالم ملحد، على غرار اليسوعية)، وسلافوي جيجيك (الذي يقول "الطريقة الوحيدة لتكون ملحدًا هي من خلال المسيحية")، وبيتر رولينز (الذي يرفض الأنظمة الدينية التي تدعي حل الشك والقلق).
هناك مدارس فكرية مختلفة بين الملحدين المسيحيين. لكن توماس أوجليتري، أستاذ فريدريك ماركاند للأخلاق والدراسات الدينية في مدرسة اللاهوت بجامعة ييل، يسرد المؤلف هذه المعتقدات الأربعة الشائعة.

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 5 out of 5]

About how, especially since Luther, Christianity has actively erased any scripture that justified grumbling and revolution. Or that at the very least fascism appropriated the anti- grumbling verses. Notably, apparently, the whole “opiate of the masses” thing of Marx was apparently taken out of context by some. Annoying though how he propped up Gnosticism as a legitimate branch. And he probably started the whole calling your opponent Moloch. But yeah. Where was this when I was in undergrad?

[Patricia Castro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Necesario para todos aquellos que intuimos que hay ciertas máximas universales dentro de la religión cristiana y aun así despreciamos el papel histórico de la Iglesia y la sangre derramada en nombre de Dios.

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

His readings of key Bible passages and stories are great, erudite and interesting. However, his analysis of the historic impact of the Bible seems riddled with inconsistencies.

4/5 because they good parts are great.

[Amos Browne]

Setting this aside for now. The prose is much harder to follow than other Bloch I've read. More allusive and meandering. I suspect this might be a feature of this particular translation rather than the original (a new edition has just been published---I don't know if it has a new translation).

[Florian Gruyeur · Rating 3 out of 5]

The constant puns in latin were a little trying but Bloch presents a Christianity set in pretty radical contrast to the reductions of the faith in The Church and of the other breed of neocon shills: militant atheists like Hitchens and Harris.

[Thanasis Stylianopoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Δύσκολο βιβλίο που απαιτεί κόπο και εξοικείωση με τους όρους που χρησιμοποιούνται, όμως μέσα από αυτό ο Μπλοχ αναπτύσσει ένα σκεπτικό που καθιστά το βιβλίο ιδιαίτερα σημαντικό. Είναι μια ανάγνωση των βιβλικών κειμένων που πρέπει να λαμβάνεται υπόψη από κάθε σοβαρό μελετητή.