The Social Imagination of Radical Christianity

Abstract

This article reviews Gary Dorrien's Reconstructing the Common Good and Christopher Rowland's Radical Christianity. Dorrien aims to retrieve Christian socialism as a central and vital tradition of Christian social theology and practice. Rowland endeavours to show that despite, or because of, its historically marginalised position vis à vis the institutional churches, radical apocalypticism is anything but heretical. Christian hope represents a life-affirming disposition for a humanity confronting the possibility of its own collective death. If hope is to be prophetic, however, its witnesses must stipulate in what they hope and for whom. The constructive imagining of social order implies the need of a theological anthropology and social theory and ethics as well.