Marginal Christianity

NYTimes.com no longer supports Internet Explorer 9 or earlier. Please upgrade your browser. LEARN MORE » By DAVID BENTLEY HART NOV. 4, 2017 It was in 1983 that I heard the distinguished Greek Orthodox historian Aristeides Papadakis casually remark in a lecture at the University of Maryland that the earliest Christians were “communists.” In those days, the Cold War was still casting its great glacial shadow across the cultural landscape, and so enough of a murmur of consternation rippled through the room that Professor Papadakis — who always spoke with severe precision — felt obliged to explain that he meant this in the barest technical sense: They lived a common life and voluntarily enjoyed a community of possessions. The murmur subsided, though not necessarily the disquiet. Not that anyone should have been surprised. If the communism of the apostolic church is a secret, it is a startlingly open one. Vaguer terms like “communalist” or “communitarian” might make the facts soun...

   http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/anomalous-communismanarchism/ Posted by larvalsubjects under Uncategorized     Scattered thoughts that will probably get me in trouble, but here goes.  In preparation for the three-part GCAS course on Atheology I’ll be teaching in the coming months, I’ve found myself reading Schmitt’s Political Theology .  One of the things I hope to do with this course is show how theism is far more pervasive in thought than figures like the work of the vulgar new atheists would suggest.  This is a point I’ve made for a long time, beginning with my first published article “The Politics of the Virtual”, throughout my work on masculine sexuation in Lacan’s graph of sexuation, and in my discussion of flat ontology in the final chapter of The Democracy of Objects .  “Flat ontology ” is basically synonymous with “atheism”, “naturalism”, and “materialism”.  The point is that theism is not simply the thesis ...