Abstract
Words such as ‘bold’, ‘audacious’ and ‘brave’ are, when applied to academic texts, usually not complimentary. They communicate that an author is insufficiently equipped to fulfil their ambitions, or that their argument lacks rigour or is intellectually incoherent. So let me be clear that Theology for the End of the World is bold, audacious and brave in the best, most compelling ways.
Some parts of the book contain a more popular version of the thesis in Rose’s 2019 monograph A Theology of Failure, though thankfully (for this reader) with much less Žižek. The book also reworks earlier versions of Rose’s extant articles on sex work and Jesus’ genealogy, Christianity’s complicity in the racialized construction of innocence, and money and Anglican social theology.
Rose’s central argument here is that Christianity, notably its white and Western expressions, has been instrumental in constructing and repeating discourses of racial hierarchy, the innocence of slavery, colonization, sexism, and fear-based accounts of sexuality and family. These are not aberrations, or abrogation of Christianity’s true nature, Rose suggests, but rather inescapably there in its DNA. Christianity has not been universally good news, having inflicted harm as much as healing. White and Western Christians have been slow to recognize that blustering in trying to solve the world’s ills betrays their self-centring hero-complex tendencies. Christianity must, rather, resist its need to impose narratives of itself as solution, and its continued self-understanding as fundamentally benign. The best answer to the question ‘But what can we do?’ will sometimes be ‘Nothing’.
Is this unsettling? Decidedly so. Yet Rose holds that Christianity’s models of sin and salvation have most often benefited those who already had the political and economic upper hand. Redemption is a concept grounded in scarcity economics; appeals to reform tend to shore up and perpetuate moribund structures. Sometimes abolition is what is needed. Just as unsettling – and necessary – is Rose’s demurral to return to an uplifting story about redemption at the end of the book (even if hope has slightly longer fingers in the Conclusion than were manifest earlier on), recognizing the inadequacy of solutionism and the problem of justificatory theodicy.
Rose is influenced by, and amplifies, the penal-abolitionist insistence that one does not have to have perfect substitutes for broken systems already fully outworked before one begins to deconstruct old ones. Abolitionist and anti-racist literatures are bedrock for Rose’s work. Rose is also conversant with scholarship in political philosophy, queer theory, anti-capitalist economics and beyond, making for wide-ranging and theoretically grounded work bound together by a confronting conceit.
The book is deliberately partial, demonstrating impartiality’s impossibility. It is rhetorical in places, and sometimes sermonic (though never sermonizing). That the tradition helps provide its own self-critique is part of the answer to why one might bother to continue wrestling with it. Abolitionism is not, Rose acknowledges, the only possible response to our current reality, but nonetheless it is ‘one thing we can do with the materials we have inherited from Christianity’s long and complicated history’ (p. 195). Quod me nutrit me destruit.