In 1844 Karl Marx stated, “the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.” Over the following 150 years, the self-expressions of modernity seem to have been primarily engaged in carrying out Marx's injunction. It is important to note that this critique occurs both about religion and increasingly from within religion. The often overlooked self-critique occurs from within religious communities and thinkers seeking to locate a place for religion within the variations of modernity.

In the light of these moves, it has become noticeable over the past decade that an inter-textual hermeneutic is developing between cultural criticism and what could be broadly termed religious studies. In particular, cultural criticism and religion are increasingly underpinning debates of the politics of location and the self. These debates, however, have been primarily within the field of cultural criticism. It is fascinating and instructive to engage with secular critics using religious ideas, texts and metaphors (more specifically those from the Judeo-Christian narratives and tradition) to both underwrite and extrapolate their thesis. Little, however, has been attempted to replicate this trend within the Judeo-Christian source. Partly this state of affairs has been due to the type of language used. Historians, philosophers and those working in religious studies are prone to refer to the need to integrate Christianity with culture. From their perspective, theology often appears wary of allowing itself to be remade and rearticulated with the same degree of openness that cultural criticism shows to theological/religious tropes.

This text is a radically different one to that which I first set out to write, itself an example of what is involved in the disruption and dis-location of undertaking flanerie knowledge. The text is also different from the one envisaged when I actually began writing. All texts, of course, take on their own internal dialectic and hermeneutic, and my work has sharply raised the question for me as to what degree this process is constrained by what the author desires to express.

Originally, this text was going to follow a well-worn formula. It was to be an engagement with the biblical material that configures with the ideas under consideration (in this case texts referring to tourism, travel, exile), followed by a history of tourism, travel and exile in Christianity, focusing amongst other things on the desert abbas and ammas, and on pilgrimage. I intended to follow this with a re-reading of tourism, travel, and exile from a postmodern perspective As I said, this was the original intention and yet obviously this has not been what you have read, as my studies forced me into new directions, pushing into areas I had initially attempted to keep peripheral. In fact, initially peripheral thought became central.

One key shift in focus related to the claims of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This was not only a response to his well-known calls for a religionless Christianity in his Letters and Papers from Prison, but also, perhaps even more centrally, a response to his dialectic Christology.

Mike Crimshaw has come at the business of constructing a cross-cultural theology from a very different angle. His provocative text is written out of an experience of self-confessed marginality. That is not especially unusual. It is not uncommon for those who construct a cross-cultural or diasporic theology to feel as if they are on the edge of the received mainline discourse and inhabit a position of liminality. Where Crimshaw differs is his interest in a cross-cultural dialectic that is western and secular.

Some of Crimshaw's language is familiar enough to the stock run of theologians: there is plenty of talk about Cod and Christology. There is reference to Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to neo-orthodoxy and death of Cod theologians. But then there is a line of difference. For those of us who are familiar with various movements of theological modernism, Crimshaw's use of the term may well seem idiosyncratic and perhaps jar – until it is recognized that his use of modernism comes not from theology but from architecture. Here is a sign of an alternative method and concern. Crimshaw draws upon secular texts to explore what a secular theology might look like in a world variously described as pre-modern, modern, postmodern and modern again after postmodernity. For the sake of his cross-cultural theology there is no sideways glance to current scholars working in this territory – and part of the reason for this preference lies in his interesting strategy of making use of literature to do with art and travel.

At the end of the previous chapter an important question was raised, concerning the pursuit of the real, or rather, the pursuit of what is perceived and deemed to be the real. This chapter examines whether the pursuit of the real is the central question raised by the traveller. In other words, does the traveller, in an act of self-definition against the tourist, pursue what is claimed to be the real?

Jan Morris' claims for the traveller combine the superiority of the outsider with the necessity of writing first and foremost for herself. Such a claim serves to position the pursuit, encounter and observation of the real as that which can only be truly undertaken by modern, atomized individuals. Such individuals will locate themselves as outsiders not only to where they venture, but also, more implicitly, as outsiders to their home location. Such dispositioning occurs as part of the self-reflexivity that is one of the central, base standards of modernity and the modern person (as individual). Self-reflexivity is here directed not only against the new context viewed by the traveller, but also against the home society that forced the move away towards the new, “other other.”

This move can be seen as part of the secularization of modernity and identity. Traditionally the individual's identity was located in relation(ship) to the other who is God. In this case, we could say that the relationship was traditionally perceived as a vertical one (where God is traditionally located in the heavens).

In this chapter I want to further develop the inter-textual theological tropes by engaging with the trope of the Exile. More specifically, I wish to do this by connecting the trope of the exile with the trope of the postmodern theologian. To perform this task I will continue with the particular reading strategy I have followed. This method can probably be best described as a secular re-theologizing hermeneutic. Building on the centrality of the Logos-logos dialectic, allied with the continual undercurrent of lightening flashes and short-circuits, I want to wrestle with the considerable body of texts on Exile. This wrestling is designed to open these writings up to the possibility of being theological texts. The underlying assumption is that the Logos behind the logos sits within all texts enabling a theological hermeneutic to occur.

Gianni Vattimo has talked of Christianity entering an age of interpretation which he views as “the development and maturation of the Christian message.” What his claim signals is a future for theology that is not a case of belief in but rather that of response to and interpretation of “a historical message of salvation.” Vattimo's locating of a response which situates itself against authoritarianism can be viewed as extending into such a project as is followed in this text To retreat into authoritative statements of belief as final truth that sets prescribed limits to interpretation is to make statements of belief into the locations of authoritarian oppositions.

Introducing Tourists

For thousands of years the combination of shrines, relics and pilgrimage have created a symbiotic relationship between religion and what could, in modern terminology, be termed tourism. People have travelled to partake in the supposed efficacy of sacred sites (places) and sacred sights (relics) as both a substitution and augmentation for what was available at home. The history of the world's religions is often presented as a history of travel to “the sacred,” “the transcendent,” “the holy” and such catchphrases of “the numinous” – itself another catchphrase. In a similar fashion, travel has often been justified as undertaken in the pursuit of such intangibles as wisdom or enlightenment.

Over the past two hundred years, following the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, these experiences have been coalesced by the Western seeker. Following the turn against religion in the West, a new form of religious travel has occurred. The experiences dismissed and marginalized in the modern West are viewed as still located and experienced in other religious traditions. The aim of the Western seeker is to relocate and participate in what has been lost. This relocation takes two forms. She can experience by her participation in a religious tradition that has relocated to the West. Alternatively, rather than participating in ‘the exotic’ in her home location her relocation is often a physical one from the West to what is viewed as the host culture. Both relocations occur as part of what could be termed the traditional reading of religion and tourism.