A good deal has been written, in the pages of New Blackfriars and elsewhere, about the points of theoretical convergence between Christianity and Marxism: their shared practical-materialist humanism and historicity, their common goal of an eschatological liberation from alienation through powers embodied in the dispossessed and so on. The question I want briefly to raise in this article is where, given all this, the two perspectives diverge.

To enumerate a series of doctrines held by the Christian and rejected by the Marxist is clearly no answer in itself to this problem. Marxists manifestly differ from Christians in rejecting God, the Virgin Mary, the eucharist, hell and any number of other such beliefs, but this can’t in itself constitute the decisive point of divergence, for the simple reason that a Christian is not a humanist who subscribes simultaneously to a set of transcendental propositions. No doctrinal difference can in itself supply the point of divergence, since Christian faith isn’t an intellectualist affair; if faith is to mean more than a subscription to certain categories which can be tacked on to the Marxist perspective as a kind of surplus value, it must manifest itself in a praxis peculiar, in some sense, to Christians.

Most current attempts to distinguish Christianity from Marxism by virtue of the Church’s commitment to a transcendental perspective which cuts below and beyond the Marxist’s perspective seem to run this risk of emptying faith to an intellectual extra. Unless that transcendental perspective can be realistically ‘cashed’ in a qualitative difference of life-style and historical practice, it remains a redundant category, a merely theoretical divergence which can be contemplated but not appropriated.