Deleuze, Guattari and the Machine in Early Christianity

Expanding the impact of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's philosophy on Christian theology, this original study makes the case for understanding early Christianity through key Deleuzioguattarian ideas about machines and multiplicity, using the theoretical tool of schizoanalysis to do so.

The reconstruction of the historical emergence of early Christianity, Bradley H. McLean argues, is constrained by traditional assumptions about the social, cultural and religious structures of the Greco-Roman world, which deny the genesis, change and transformation that characterises early Christianity in the first and second centuries CE. To capture this dynamic period, McLean pinpoints Guattari's concept of 'machinic processes' as ripe for application to the origins of early Christianity. Arguing that machines are both an unnoticed dimension of early Christianity, and a major analytical tool for the discipline, McLean highlights the potential to challenge and reconfigure not just our knowledge of early Christianity, but aspects of Hellenistic Judaism, the Greco-Roman world itself, and the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

By theorising a way to resist any one totalizing voice in Christian formation and theology, the potential to facilitate new forms of dialogue and cooperation between Christians and co-religionists is realised in a dynamic application of the 'machinic process' and the schizoanalytic approach.