I just finished reading a book by Robert Inchausti called Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise. It is a surface scan of twenty-five Christian intellectuals who stood against the forces of the modernist era:
William Blake, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Soren Kierkegaard, G. K. Chesterton, Nikolai Berdyaev, Fydor Dostoyevsky, Boris Pasternak, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Jack Kerouac, Walker Percy, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Jr., E. F. Schumacher, Wendell Berry, Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye, Jaques Ellul, Ivan Illich, and Rene Girard.
Inchausti gave a summary of what he thought these thinkers had in mind toward the end of the book:
Christian thinkers, of the kind I am examining here, aren’t all that interested in defending their faith, so much as seizing upon revealed reality in its highest expectation and tension toward the future. Their thinking is not strictly “apologetics” but something more engaged—and attempt to “say” what the world looks like as seen through eyes transformed by the living God. In other words, Christian scholarship is witness – not necessarily of doctrinal or dogmatic truths but of concrete realities made visible through a belief in them. It is the product of sensibility detached from worldly ambitions and nurtured by an intellectual freedom that grows out of the gratuitousness of love.
For them, the kingdom has already come, so the shadow side of things – injustices, the perversity, indeed the implacable reality of sin in all its endless variations – is not something to be particularly worried about or capitulated to. Theirs is not a “warrior politics” or a “pagan ethos” like the kind advocated by Robert D. Kaplan, who sees nothing wrong with exploiting others’ weaknesses in order to accomplish “great things.” Like their prophetic and Romantic precursors, “the orthodox avant-garde” want to give hope to the hopeless and pause to the proud. Yet they are also radically suspicious of their own motives and assumptions, suspecting themselves almost as much as their adversaries, loving their crooked neighbor with their own crooked hearts. (181-182)
The book does not cover any one person in depth but gives just enough to whet your appetite and let you see the broad landscape of those who resisted the forces of modernization. I found it very useful and wanted to recommend it to anyone interested in Christian intellectuals.
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