ABSTRACT
The theme of this chapter is the recovery of the secular in the biblical tradition as a necessary vehicle for understanding the import of the theological content of the Bible, which has been a crucial, if neglected, part of Christian intellectual history. The chapter concerns two proponents of secular theology, Gerrard Winstanley and William Blake, which arguably anticipates elements of postsecularity today (Rowland 1988, 2010, 2014, 2017a). While some have referred to a ‘postsecular sensibility’ (Blanton et al. 2016; see Chapter 1), what Winstanley and Blake are doing in their work is better described as indicative of the necessarily secular character of Christian incarnational theology rather than ‘crossover narratives’ of postsecularity (Habermas 2010; Beaumont and Baker 2011; Cloke and Beaumont 2013; Cloke et al. 2019). Their work exemplifies the impact of religious language as the primary content of secular and human worlds.
