Background
pp. 15-32
in: Christopher D. Rodkey, Jordan E. Miller (eds), The Palgrave handbook of radical theology, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey Robbins describe a number of the intellectual developments and movements that preceded and influenced radical theology. They pay special attention to the hermeneutics of suspicion of Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche; the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty; and the linguistic structuralism of Saussure. Crockett and Robbins pay close attention to the role of Derrida's lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in 1966 before moving on to the Death of God movement. They emphasize the way Tillich's thought was radicalized by G. Vahanian, Altizer, Daly, and others in combination with Tillich's theology of culture and existential theology and Bonhoeffer's influence on the early Death of God thinkers. Finally, Crockett and Robbins discuss radical theology's hybridization with deconstruction in the work of Raschke, Mark C. Taylor, and Winquist and hybridizing RT with deconstruction.
