Radical Theology and the “Weakening” of Bourgeois Institutions

Radical theology offers a different way to interrogate and critique bourgeois capitalist society and its institutions. Almost always institutional in location and focus, radical theology recognizes that the traditional religious underpinnings of liberal bourgeois society and its institutions no longer continue to operate nor offer a workable foundational basis. We could say, contra Habermas, that there is more than “the awareness” of what is missing; rather, what is missing is what is necessarily missing because “the what” of God is dead. The crisis of contemporary institutions is that, founded implicitly or explicitly on bourgeois religion and its God, they now find themselves with an ontological crisis most do not even recognize. Or rather, they recognize there is a crisis of meaning and purpose but are unsure or unwilling or even unable to engage with its foundational causes. Drawing on the weak thought of Gianni Vattimo, radical theology is empoyed as a way of rethinking institutions from within, against both their foundations and their current expressions, articulating a set of “weak possibilities” for ways forward.