Radical Theology

A Vision for Change

Jeffrey W. Robbins

Narrated by Gordon Greenhill

Available from Audible

Book published by Indiana University Press

"Radical theology" and "political theology" are terms that have gained a lot of currency among philosophers of religion today. In this visionary new book, Jeffrey W. Robbins explores the contemporary direction of these movements as he charts a course for their future. Robbins claims that radical theology is no longer bound by earlier thinking about God and that it must be conceived of as postsecular and postliberal. As he engages with themes of liberation, gender, and race, Robbins moves beyond the usual canon of death-of-God thinkers, thinking "against" them as much as "with" them. He presents revolutionary thinking in the face of changing theological concepts, from reformation to transformation, transcendence to immanence, messianism to metamorphosis, and from the proclamation of the death of God to the notion of God’s plasticity.

Jeffrey W. Robbins is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Lebanon Valley College. He is editor of The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion and author of Radical Democracy and Political Theology.

REVIEWS:

“In these exciting and insightful pages, which include a masterful survey of the movement and its principal figures from the 1960s to the present, radical theology is radically rethought, re-envisaged and re-inscribed in history as a fully engaged political theology, as ontologically reawakened, ecologically sensitive, and racially mindful. For Robbins, radical theology, which thinks deeply and without reserve, putting everything on the table, has for too long been safely ensconced behind white male Christian confessional lines. So Robbins here outlines a program which changes everything by thinking theology in terms of change. With his characteristic clarity and comprehensiveness, Jeff Robbins envisions here a future for radical theology.”

—John D. Caputo, Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritu

“Radical theology has famously re-emerged in this century, and Robbins is on the leading edge of this renewal. In Radical Theology, he offers resources not only for understanding this tradition, but for pushing it further, to change radical theology into what it might and should become. Read it and be transformed.”

—Clayton Crockett, University of Central Arkansas

“Radical Theology successfully lays out the theoretical footing and philosophical heritage for radical theology in the same way that historical-critical scholarship has opened up new, entirely legitimate understandings of the message and person of Jesus.”

—Ethics and Early Christianity