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International Review of Theological Publications

Scouring today’s theological landscape, it is a rare joy to discover books which ably combine meticulous erudition with truly revolutionary proposals. Nathan Kerr’s Christ, History and Apocalyptic is just such a book. In this his first book, Kerr delivers a monograph that will undoubtedly be noted as a landmark book in systematic and political theology for years to come. Kerr’s argument is centered fundamentally in an attempt to reimagine and articulate a properly christological account of how theological inquiry ought to fund Christian thought and mission under the conditions of modernity. As such, Kerr’s argument is largely a genealogical one, diagnosing the theological challenges posed to a proper articulation of Christology and missional ecclesiology against the backdrop of the philosophical and political conditions of the modern West. This problem is, as Kerr intimates throughout, an utterly theological problem at its very roots. And, as Kerr argues, the nexus of theology’s problems with modernity lies in what he refers to as the problem of “modern philosophical historicism” (pp. 4–5). What Kerr has in mind under the rubric of modern historicism is a particular nexus of ideas, particularly centered on the theological-philosophical, intellectual currents that define and denote the trajectory of modern philosophy regarding the nature of history and its relation to what could crudely be termed ideology. Indeed, as Kerr points out in the opening pages of his book, his project is essentially an “exercise in ideology critique” (p. vii). What is at the root of Kerr’s theological dispute with modern historicism is precisely ideology, both at the political and theological levels. Indeed, the true nature of the conflict that Kerr identifies in the course of his book revolves around two alternative theological accounts of history: modern philosophical historicism and Kerr’s preferred account referred to as “apocalyptic historicism” (pp. 5–6). The former notion – modern historicism – is primarily defined in relation to its “politically ideological function.” The crisis of modern historicism is inescapably an issue of the way in which the flow of historical events comes to be the bearer of “political authority.” In modernity, history assumes this ideological, authoritative function in that “history becomes the artifice which produces, and thus protects and encourages the endurance of that institution which alone guarantees the attainment of freedom: the nation state” (p. 3). What is distinctive about the crisis of modern historicism, from a theological point of view, involves the way in which history is invested immanently with transcendental meaning. The course of the history of the nation state is invested with theological significance as the relativities of history are read within a teleo-eschatological framework “as a way of navigating the unresolved tension between the relativities of historical immanentism and the intrahistoricaldevelopment towards a rational, subjectively, and universally realized telos” (p. 5). In other words, the crisis of modern historicism is precisely an eschatological problem. It is constituted by a universalist logic that reads all historical particulars in light of an overarching eschatological framework that imbues the political path of the nation state with theological significance, positing its history as the outworking of the future to which it is destined and toward which it immanently moves. Put differently, the crisis of modern historicism is the crisis of a Hegelian philosophy of history come of age which proceeds to wear ideological clothing. All of this is countered by Kerr’s own proposal of an apocalyptic historicism as a mode of response to the theological challenge of modernity. Kerr notes that modern historicism responds to the difficulties posed by history