ABSTRACT
Towards the end of the last chapter we were beginning to identify some of the key
ways in which mainstream Christian Realism was beginning to fragment into
interesting new directions following the collapse of the Liberal/Enlightenment
consensus and the main economic and political foundations on which it was built.
We identified some the outcomes of these foundations: ideals of a common good,
the welfare state, macroeconomic policy, representative democracy and top-down
planning, as well universalizing metanarratives associated with progress, justice,
science and technology, multiculturalism. According to Atherton’s typology of
‘ages’, we have since the late 1960s been moving ever faster into a Post-liberal Age,
characterized by the need to promote reconciliation by working in creative
partnerships with a wide variety of other partners. The ‘reconciliation’ envisaged by
Atherton is not a grand project with a single identifiable outcome (like the ‘common’
good). Rather, it is a more akin to a process, which is flexible but focused enough to
deal in a multidisciplinary way with multi-causal problems associated with global
capitalism, urbanization and ever-increasing issues of sustainability. Thus, for
example, his reformulated Christian Political Economy is a dynamic, interdisciplinary
process involving the interplay of at least six different elements, ranging from the
empirical to the narrative, the heretical to the mainstream. The purpose of this chapter
is to continue the momentum generated by Atherton’s thinking to push further and
bring in other key elements which, I argue, will be required for the transition from a
mainstream to a radical Christian Realism.
