Category Archives: Radical Orthodoxy

McCarraher on Radical Orthodoxy

Posted by on February 1, 2010 35 comments

By popular request, here is Gene McCarraher’s biting critique of Radical Orthodoxy. Right on the money as far as I’m concerned.

Like a lot of Christian intellectuals over the last two decades, I quaffed a bit of the Kool-Aid served up by those in the RO constellation. Well, if I can extend the Kool-Aid metaphor a bit, drinking from the cistern of RO was refreshing and stimulating, particularly the idea that theology can be a distinct and compelling form of social and cultural criticism—of all the literature on that score, I think Graham Ward’s Cities of God is a real milestone. But as I’ve watched how some of this has played out or not played out over the last decade, I’ve concluded that the theological renaissance these figures embodied not only has waned, but also has encouraged some very bad mental and political habits. For one thing, I’m tired of hearing “modernity” and “liberalism” treated as though they were the spawn of Satan. Along with the other usual suspects—instrumental reason, science, universal rights, cosmopolitanism, “the Enlightenment project”—modernity and liberalism get hauled into the docket and found guilty, usually after a perfunctory trial, of the Judeocide, ecological catastrophe, capitalism, nuclear war, abortion, et cetera, ad nauseam. Give me a frigging break. When modernity and liberalism are this all-encompassing, they’ve become nothing more than verbal ciphers, containers for everything the writer doesn’t like, bestowing license to utter all manner of grandiose and stupid pontifications. With a lot of these people, liberalism equals nihilism, which equals the lowest circle of the inferno. The theological problem with this view is that it tends to completely strip the created world of its goodness. Can’t liberal modernity mediate grace or partake of beatitude in some fashion? Since when did Gothic architecture and the like become the only sanctioned media of Trinitarian love? Since when did Brave New World become the final word on modernity? So if you want to deride instrumental reason and technology, fine, but just remember all that when you have a toothache, or if the specialist discovers a tumor in time, or if your wife needs emergency assistance during childbirth. If you want to curse cosmopolitanism, fine, but just stop jetting across the oceans and using the Internet to do it, all the while lecturing the rest of us about nestling in the homespun joys of localism.

I’ve noticed that among RO’s American avatars there seems to be something of a Wendell Berry cult. You’d never know it from the way that they talk about him that the agrarian proprietary ideal is also what fueled Indian genocide and segregation. So enough already about rural life from disaffected suburbanites.

Like all intellectual laziness, that of RO has political implications that are debilitating and even insidious. I’ve long thought that what I’ve called the ecclesial fetishism of the movement is a problem. As Eric Gregory reminds us, the kingdom is much bigger than the church. By the same token, the movement’s portrait of church is sociologically unreal; it certainly doesn’t correspond to any church I know. If they want to say that their conception of church is an ideal, I wish they’d put the adjective eschatological in front of the word; but then, come the eschaton, there will be no church, only the kingdom. Like all fetishes, the church comes to bear an imaginative and political weight that it just can’t bear. Meanwhile, the insistence on the church as a political community can have theocratic implications to which I strongly object. I’m not the first person to point out that Milbank’s ecclesiology would seem to commit him inexorably to some kind of theocracy. He often employs all manner of bluster and circumlocution to avoid addressing this issue squarely—his response to Ben Suriano’s question about this in The Other Journal a few years back is utterly incoherent. But then, Milbank and others in RO can be too ill-tempered and dismissive to converse with anyone outside the cognoscenti; Chuck Mathewes has deftly pointed out that Milbank can’t talk to his opponents, only about them.

Milbank’s Christian socialism has a lot that’s attractive: decentralization, attention to technology as a moral and aesthetic realm, a call on unions and professional associations to become more guild-like and demand control over the means of production. But from what I’ve seen so far, he seems to favor in practice a distributism of the Chesterbelloc variety: small farms, small workshops, and local proprietary enterprise, all with a neomedievalist glaze over everything. Sorry, but this sounds like petty bourgeois capitalism decked out in Tolkienesque drag, a Rotary Club of the Shire. The decentralist tradition of Peter Kropotkin, Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Goodman is much better informed historically about cities, ecology, and the history of technology. Milbank knows little or nothing of these people, but then it’s kind of an open secret that his reading of the historical record is selective, if not downright tendentious—he writes about John Ruskin, for instance, as if Ruskin was the only critic of industrial capitalism in Britain in the nineteenth century. Nothing about William Morris, Patrick Geddes, or Ebenezer Howard. Oh, that’s right; they weren’t Christians, so they couldn’t possibly have gotten anything right.

Milbank on Scientism, Sex, and Personhood

Posted by on June 5, 2008 8 comments

The latest issue of The Other Journal has a fascinating interview with John Milbank on contemporary atheism.  In the process a whole mess of things get talked about, including the sexualization of contemporary culture in contrast with the sort of inverted totalitarianism that obtains in regard to all other forms of freedom.  Here’s just one snippet:

“Science is the freedom to know and is Faustian. Beyond this is the right to choose one’s lifestyle. But of course one can’t interfere with the freedom or happiness of others nor the power of the State. The really crucial thing here which the left has missed is that sexual freedoms have increased exponentially while all other freedoms have declined.

Today in Great Britain you scarcely have the right to demonstrate and a higher proportion of the population is in prison than are in China. The boy at the shop counter with no customers is not allowed to read a book to improve himself all day, but who cares what he gets up to with sex and drink after the shop closes? Of course there’s also a double think about sex—its all OK, male sexuality is nearly always exploitative, etc… But in general it would seem that, as Adorno and Horkheimer predicted, sexualization is intended to keep us all quiet: neurotic, hysterical, frustrated and unhappy but still ‘looking’. With sex divided from procreation, science and sexual freedom come together.

So by supporting the total disjuncture of sex and procreation, the left is really supporting a new mode of fascism. ‘Women’ are lined up with science and choice in order to produce a new kind of ideal human subjectivity—male and autonomous and yet pliant in ‘female’ manner. The newly envisaged female body is the final site of the coming together of scientific objectivity and absolute freedom of choice. Perhaps one could even speak here of a new racism of the human race as such—it’s to be made the object of an endless ‘objective’ improvement and expression of a will to freedom/will to power. Of course this also means that the specific phenomenology of the female body is destroyed. It’s denied that this body is inherently linked both to the male body (as also vice-versa) and to another body that is itself and yet becomes not itself—the baby. Having denied the link of babies to men and also to women save as objects of their (‘male’) choice, babies thereby become pure consumer objects and all human personhood is abandoned.”

–Ben Suriano, “Three Questions on Modern Atheism: An Interview with John Milbank“, The Other Journal June 4 (2008)

The Ubiquity of the Theological

Posted by on April 14, 2008 11 comments

One of the greatest insights of much recent theology is the insistence that there is no non-theological sphere.  All forms of discourse, in one way or another are theological.  This I take to be the central insight of John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory and the Radical Orthodoxy movement as a whole.  The question that this raises, though is what the ubiquity of the theological means for the shape of theological engagements with culture.  In other words, I wonder if recognizing the ubiquity of the theological inevitably casts theology into an agonistic mode.  Does recognizing the ubiquity of the theological mean that all our discussions with other communities and cultures must be conducting solely in the mode of undermining and exposing the theological foundations of all non-Christian thought? 

Put differently, does exposing the theological roots of all discourse require us to engaging in the sort of thermo-nuclear theological assault on everything outside of the Christian faith that is embodied in project’s like Milbank’s?  Does the ubiquity of the theological mean that the sole mode of Christian discourse with those outside is monological and deconstructive?

Karl Barth Blog Conference 2008: Update

Posted by on January 28, 2008 Comments Off

As it turns out my own proposal for a plenary paper for this year’s Karl Barth Blog Conference will be published on day three of the conference.  The title for my piece is “A Still Greater Historicity:  Hegel, Jüngel, and the Historicization of God’s Being”.  This paper will exmine  the role of Hegel in Jüngel’s trinitarianism (with special reference to God’s Being is in Becoming) in dialogue with recent discussions about the relationship between the economic and immanent trinities, particularly the question of how Jesus is indispensable to an account of the immanent Trinity.

Here is one of the important quotes from Jüngel’s God’s Being is in Becoming on this issue:

“God’s being in person is in a spcifict way a free event in so far as it is not only ‘being . . . moved in itself and therefore motivating being’, but ‘being which is self-moved’.  That means that, as event, the being of God posesses the freedom of decision.  Decision does not belong to the being of God as somthing supplementary to this being; rather as event, God’s being is his own decision. ‘The fact that God’s being is event, the event of God’s act, necessarily . . . means that it is His own consicous, willed, and executed decision.’  What was already worked out in the doctrine of the Trinity is now confirmed from working out a concept of being apprpriate to God: God’s being is constuted through historicality.  For in its ‘decision, and therefore personal being’ God’s being ‘is the being of God in the nature of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’ in which ‘God live from and by Himself’.” (p. 80-81)

One of the things that his quote shows very well is, not only Jüngel’s superb exposition of Barth’s actualistic and historicist doctrine of God, but the way in which Barth’s doctrine of God establishes a properly theological construal of being.  In contrast to John Milbank’s accusation, that Barth’s work ultimately fails “to redefine being and knowledge theologically” (Radical Orthodoxy, p. 22), Jüngel shows how Barth’s Christocentric theology of election grounds and is grounded in a properly theological ontology.  For Barth and Jüngel, to be is to be included in God’s primal decision to be God-for-humanity.  And, as revealed in Christ, this decision is not something extraneous to God, but is rather identical with God’s very being (for Jesus is “very God of very God”).  God’s decision to be God for us is the very decision by which God is God.  As Jüngel points out, “the decision about God’s being is not to be understood only as a decision for God, but also – precisly as a decision for God – as a decision for humanity” (p. 81).  Therefore, being is theologically defined as that which is included in the event of the triune God’s election of the world in Jesus, which includes all things, leaving nothing out.  In contrast to Milbank and others who see the triumph of a sort of post-Kantian philosophy in Barth’s thought, when he is read rightly, as Jüngel exemplfies, his theology offers a profoundly robust theological ontology that is at once Christological, historical, actualistic, and participatory.  It is this ontology that I will be exploring in the upcoming Karl Barth conference, with special reference to the doctrine of the Trinity. 

Radical Orthodoxy meets South Park

Posted by on October 9, 2007 1 comment

Lee over at the Smithy has produced an awesome post on Radical Orthodoxy in which he likens it to what is probably my favorite cartoon and guilty pleasure, South Park.

Here’s a bit of what he said:

I don’t know if any of my gentle readers recall the early Southpark episode where Tweak is out of his mind due to his constant coffee drinking and thinks he sees little gnomes stealing his underpants. It turns out he was right all along, and that there was a gnome civilization living in the sewers (next to Mr. Hankey the Christmas poo I presume).

The other day I was reading some more Radical Orthodoxy. Milbank was faulting Scotus for arguing for the Immaculate Conception because it meant he could not appreciate fully the christmas carol “o felix culpa.” …

Reflecting upon these matters, I was struck by the similarity to the Underpants gnomes. When the children ask the gnomes why they steal people’s underpants, they respond in their cute high-pitched voices, “stage 1: steal underpants. Stage 2: ? Stage 3: Profit!!” Radical Orthodoxy’s method works very much the same way. Stage 1: Scotus says something that Aquinas does not. Stage 2: ? stage 3: Modernity! Holocaust of Nihilism! For the “?” one must imagine the little gnome shrugging his shoulders and making a questioning, wordless, utterance.

Lee, you can be assured that I remember that episode as I have watched them all religously and repeatedly.  However, I never thought of all the connections I could make between South Park and Radical Orthodoxy, and so for that, I thank you.  If nothing else, this great post has made me throw my inhibitions about discussing South Park in theological posts to the wind.  Y’all can look for that in the future.

Theological Parodies…a good time to be had by all

Posted by on August 6, 2007 3 comments

The other night a couple of friends and I were enjoying some beers at the local English pub, the Horse Brass (about as authentic as they get outside of the UK) and were having fun rhapsody-ing on about all things theological.  In the course of the evening we came up with our own, purely comedic version of Radical Orthodoxy, which as you may know, I have lamooned on this blog several times before, with various responses.  But, regardless we have come up with an excellent new book series proposal that I think all RO-minded thinkers would find captivating:

“Radical Mythology: Repristinating the Pre-Modern without Apology”

Forthcoming titles include:

Methexis & Metanoia: Reclaiming the Humors in Christian Bioethics

Theological Alchemy after the End of History

Leechcraft and the Christological: The New Debate

Lest You Fall Away: Living on Flat Earth amongst Nihilistic Spheres

Divine Creationality: On Reclaiming Ptolemaic Cosmology

Tiamet Reconsidered: Demononological Strivings and/as Origin of the Cosmos

In Defense of the Crusades, Or, Why Islam is Nihilism

Phileo and Fellatio: An Augustinian Theology of Orgasms

The Erotics of Redemption: Temple Prostitutes Vindicated!

J.P. Moreland & the Psychoses of Evangelical Cultural Engagement

Posted by on July 25, 2007 27 comments

I recently did something that I make it a point to never, ever, ever do.  I picked up a copy of a book by J.P. Moreland, Kingdom Triangle.  I was wrong to do it and I should have stuck to my guns and just put the book on the shelves after cataloging it at work.  But alas, I did not.  Instead I skimmed through the whole thing and am now thoroughly convinced of one important theological point: the only difference between Radical Orthodoxy and contemporary evangelicalism is that RO has more rhetorical flourish and has read some western literature and continental philosophy.  Other than that, they are the same.  Both of them consist of asserting that the contemporary cultural zeitgeist is inherently nihilistic, irrational, barbaric, and stupid and the Christian worldview, or metanarrative (which they understand with absolute perfection) is the only solution to the world’s woes.  Or, more specifically, the only solution to the infinite nihilism and vicious solipsism of the horrifyingly secular world is for the Christian worldview/metanarrative to take over the world with the church regaining cultural dominance and power.  In short, they are both so terrified of modernity that Christendom sounds super wonderful and awesome.  So let’s do that!

I’ve already wrote enough on RO about this for the time being, so evangelicalism, and particularly Moreland are really in my crosshairs right now.  His book opens with this following statement:

The year 1974 was declared the Year of the Evangelical.  Apparently no one was listening.  The year came and went as our culture continued slouching towards Gomorrah.  Fast forward to 2007.  Islamic terrorism threatens our borders, our political discourse is shrill and spoken in sound bites, and an epidemic of pornography addiction threatens the very possibility of healthy relationships between men and women.  People have to think twice about whether saving aborted babies or snail darters are more important.  We can’t agree about the sexual makeup of a healthy family. (p. 12)

Moreland goes on to say that the reason evangelicals didn’t rise to the occasion in 1974 is because the cultural revolution of the 60′s was still so recent that we hadn’t yet reached the bowels of Gomorrah and seen the fullness of horrors that has resulted from our culture’s rejection of the “Judeo-Christian worldview”.  However, now that we have seen all those aforesaid horrors, we must now rise to the occasion:

Since the mid 1800s, there has never been a greater window of opportunity for us to seize the moment and, by our lives and thought, to show our culture the way forward.  Now is the time for us to stop being thirty years behind the times.  Now is the time for us to gather our confidence and lead. (p. 12)

Yes!  Absolutely!  Christians must take over the world for God!  Here is the quintessentially nostalgic contemporary evangelical battle cry.  We must regain control of the world and save it with our better worldview.  Moreland goes on to argue in his book that the two principle opponents of Christianity today are “naturalism” and “postmodernism” which yield a “thin” and “meaningless” world.  The solution is his “kingdom triangle” which is to 1) recover the Christian mind (aka analytic philosophy and foundationalism), 2) to renovate the soul (aka spiritual formation in the vein of Dallas Willard), and finally 3) to restore the Spirit’s power (aka to recognize that there are still miracles going on á la Jack Deere – I guess Moreland’s some kind of neocharismatic now).

I could continue to supply a litany of references from this book that reveal its totally nostalgic, fear-driven, and power-grabbing thrust.  Moreland wants evangelicals to run the world for God.  The “we” of his book is always Christians in America, and America is the subject of his hoped for Christian takeover.  His uncritically Americanized cultural polemic immediately assumes that Christians have a stake in making America work and that America somehow has a special claim on Christian’s loyalty.  This of course has everything to do with Moreland’s hopes for an Amerianized Christendom where conservative family values run the world.

However, his hopes for how this wonderous world of American Christendom  are to be realized are utterly pelagianistic and hinge on Christians having the most unassailably brilliant philosophy and strategy that we will sweep away those damn secularists and postmodernists and finally get things back to the way they were in the good old mid 1800s.  I could go on a tirade about this forever, so let me just give two main points of critique.

 First, Moreland’s proposals for cultural engagement are Pelagian and driven by an utter lack of trust in the Triune God.  The inside flap on the front cover of this book states that “the biblical worldview [is] the only hope for the world”.  Maybe this is just a faux pas on Moreland’s part, but a statement such as that is not simply wrong, it is heretical.  The only hope for the world is not a worldview, but a person, Jesus Christ.  However, I think this statement much more than a faux pas, but rather the thrust of the entire book.  Moreland’s whole agenda is for the church to save the world that is “slouching toward Gomorrah“.  There is no sense of trust and hope in the transcendent power of the Triune God to transform the world, or more accurately that in Christ the transformation of the world has already happened.  Rather, for Moreland it is our job to get God’s work done by saving the world. 

This is nowhere more evident than in his third element of the “kingdom triangle” that we are to “restore the Spirit’s power”.  What could be more pretentious and heretical than the idea that it is up to us to be restoring the Spirit’s power?  Moreland’s book seems so terrified by how culture has fallen away from his particular understanding of conservative politics and values (his “Judeo-Christian worldview”, which by the way is an abstraction, but that’s another discussion) that instead of faith in God being proclaimed, instead we are thrown back upon ourselves to renew our minds, renovate our souls and restore the power of the Spirit.  However, in the Bible it is the Spirit who blows where he wishes and now one knows where he is going or coming from (Jn. 3:8).  Likewise it is not we who transform ourselves by renewing our minds, but God in Christ who conforms us to the image of the beloved Son (Rom. 8:29, 12:2).  Moreland seems to think that these activities are not the works of the Triune God extra nos, rather we are thrown back upon ourselves to accomplish these tasks, thereby saving the world, at least in a provisional sense.  This is functional Pelagianism at best.  The irony is that Moreland hails from a Calvinistic and dispensational premillennialist school and is here advancing a proposal that is Pelagian and postmillennial.

 Second, Moreland’s critiques of contemporary culture are a bunch of bourgeois, affluent, western platitudes driven by a typically American conservativism.  Just glance at the above quote on Moreland’s litany of what’s wrong with our hellish culture.  For Moreland the symptoms of our culture’s descent into Gomorrah are evidenced by Islamic terrorists, political rhetoric(read: liberals), pornography, abortion, and homosexuality.  Now let me be clear, I don’t think any of those things are good at all.  If you’ve read this blog much you know I’m pretty conservative on sexual ethics and I think abortion is a terrible reality in our society.  That said, what does it mean when these are the issues that define what Moreland is against?  His snide comment about saving darter snails just makes light of Christians who think we should be concerned about the environment. And where is poverty?  Globalization? Consumer capitalism?  I shouldn’t even mention that racism never appears in Moreland’s field of vision – though, since he is so nostalgic about the mid 1800s maybe we better not bring that one up?  I don’t know how anyone but a white Christian could make so stupid a statement as Moreland’s implication that the 19th century was the golden age of Christianity.

This agenda is a typical conservative one.  It is bourgeois and elitist to the core.  Only someone how has never had to go hungry or been unable to afford clean water has time to sit around and imagine that the gay family next door and internet porn are the biggest problems with our culture.  In a world where ethnic cleansings and genocides (which have everything to do with global capitalism and the conditions it creates) are ignored because they aren’t being perpetrated on people in the western hemisphere, if the only cultural critique Christians are able to produce is rants about sexual morality and abortion, then Christianity is in a sad state indeed.  It is self-righteous and immoral for Christians to parade agendas like Moreland’s while ignoring the “weightier matters of the law” (Matt. 23:23).  And that is exactly what this book does.

Believe it or not, I really am trying not to be too shrill with this critique, but I find Moreland’s perspective on culture to be so asinine and militant that I’m sure I get a little too revved up about it.  I hope that won’t alienate all readers.  But regardless, I think books like this and thinkers like Moreland are far more dangerous to the church than nutty atheists like Richard Dawkins.  It is the militants like Moreland who polarize Christians and cripple our authentic witness as they try to grab cultural and political power for the church.  It has nothing to do with cross and resurrection and everything to do with crossing the Rubicon.  Christians should be horrified by such a theological and political agenda.

Outnarrating Nihilism?

Posted by on July 3, 2007 15 comments

One of the central elements of the project of Radical Orthodoxy is based on the conception of Christian theology “outnarrating” all other metanarratives. A central claim of Radical Orthodoxy is that all other narratives or systems of thought tend inevitably toward nihilism because the only true basis for the peaceable negotiation of difference is on the basis of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in which infinite difference (namely the difference between the Father and Son, and the “second difference” of the Holy Spirit from the Son and the Father) is expressed, not in conflict, but in infinite peace and overabundant gift-giving. Thus, according to John Milbank, Christianity is “the coding of transcendental difference as peace” (TST, 6).

This idea is almost exactly right. Radical Orthodoxy is right to state that all discourses are ultimately theological and that there is no autonomous philosophical reflection. Where they are wrong is in the idea that it is Christian theology (or, particularly “Christianity/Neoplatonism”) which is required to overcome nihilism. As Colin Gunton observed, in a somewhat prescient review of the initial Radical Orthodoxy volume, if the Triune God is truly the creator of the world, then nihilism is ultimately not a real possibility. However, for Radical Orthodoxy it is less important that the Triune God is the creator of the world than that the church narrate the claim that since the church believes that Triune God is the creator of the world, it has the answer to the nihilism allegedly inherent in all other discourses.

This is wrong, not because it sees that the transcendental peace of the Trinity is the answer to nihilism, death, and non-being but because it insists that it is the church’s narration of this “counter-history” that ultimately overcomes and situates all other dialogues and discursive practices. The right answer is not to locate the power of God’s Triune peace in the church’s narration, but rather in God himself. The sublimation of nihilism is not actualized by the church’s outnarration of the modernity, but by the creative and redemptive activity of the Triune God in the economy of salvation. And what the Triune God does in redeeming the world is not to “outnarrate” all competing claims about the world, but rather to enter into them in such a way that they all find themselves located within the narrative of God’s own life as Trinity. Nihilism is not outnarrated by a more compelling ecclesial narrative, but by the actual self-giving of the Triune God in Christ which unites persons of all narratives, cultures, and nations in one Catholic body in which difference exists as communio.

The instinct of Radical Orthodoxy is right. It realizes that all other discourses must ultimately be related to the reality of the Triune Creator. However, it does not realize that it is God’s actual activity in the world in Christ that does in fact relate all created logoi to the one logos. There is no realm of “pure nature” (de Lubac) which descends into nihilism unless outnarrated by theology. By virtue of the ubiquity of Triune grace, all narratives are included by God in the work of Christ. There is no need for the church to outnarrate modernity because the narratives of modernity only exist within the narrative of God’s life as Trinity. As such, theology does not need to (violently) outnarrate all other competing narratives in order for the reality of ontological peace to become real in our world. All of humanity’s competing narratives, whatever violence or nihilism there may be inherent within them because of sin are always-already included in the reconciling story of the Triune God’s self-giving embrace of the world in Christ. God’s covenantal ‘Yes’ to the world subsumes and nonviolently embraces any and every ‘No’ from any discourse that would attempt to posit the world without God.

As such, the church’s theological task is not the outnarration and overcoming of other narratives, but rather faithful witness to the self-giving love of God in Christ. The church exists as the witness to the reality of God’s own story in which all created persons find themselves. The story of God in Christ does not outnarrate the stories of the world, but rather enflames and enfolds them within the ardor of the Pentecostal Spirit of Triune Love. The transcendental difference of the Triune God is pure, noncompetitive harmony which unites all things in Christ, as fellow members of one body. It is God’s action of overabundant self-outpouring in Christ, not our theological narrations about God which place all human discourses in their right order. Nihilism is overcome, not by anything we do, but is in fact always-already overcome because God is Triune. Radical Orthodoxy is wrong ultimately, because there is, in fact nothing that needs to be outnarrated. All narratives exist and find their closure, their coherence, and their fitting end in the resurrection of Christ from the dead. Only if Christ’s resurrection is the outcome of all narratives is the reality of violence forever mitigated. And that is what the doctrine of the Trinity proclaims.

More Radical Orthodoxy

Posted by on July 1, 2007 2 comments

For another excellent list of “theses” about Radical Orthodoxy, one by the authors of the inital RO volume (probably) and another lampooning it, see the most recent post by Rev. Sam at Elizaphanian.

 Also, for an earlier, more nascent critique that I wrot on RO, see my 6 Theses on Ecclesial Social Engagement.

In other related news, I highly recommend D.W. Congdon’s latest contribution to his ‘The Spirit of the Lord’ series on political pacifism.  It is precisely this kind of theopolitical “radicalism” that RO cannot really stomach, given its bourgouis sensibilities.

Propositions On Radical Orthodoxy

Posted by on June 29, 2007 16 comments

Since Radical Orthodoxy has recently come up in a few discussions, I thought I’d post a few of my own basic thoughts about what’s really wrong with this particular theological movement.

  1. Radical Orthodoxy purports to be a theological theology.  It begins with a perfect theological instinct and aim: to show that all thought is fundamentally theological.  The theological is ubiquitous and there is no non-theological frame of reference for interpreting the world.  The question is if Radical Orthodoxy is in fact theological enough.
  2. Radical Orthodoxy is a neoplatonic theology. This point is directly related to the previous one. While Radical Orthodoxy purports to be radically theologically, it is in fact radically bound to the philosohpy of antiquity. Specifically, it is premised upon the proposition that the neoplatonic ontology of participation (methexis) is the necessary presupposition for a Christian ontology of particiaption (koinonia).  In fact it claims that the two are the same thing.  Thus, neoplatonic metaphysics establishes the conditions necessary for the incarnation, and the doctrine of the Trinity rather than the incarnation and the Trinity issuing in a distinctly Christian metaphysic.
  3. Radical Orthodoxy is a nostalgic theology.  It’s fixation on “Christianity/Platonism” as the to-be repristinated answer to all of modernity’s woes marks Radical Orthodoxy as an extremely nostalgic enterprise.  It longs for the time (real or imagined) when their particular metaphysic of participation ruled the philosophical imagination and when all aspects of life in church, state, and market were under the integrating rule of “the sacred”.
  4. Radical Orthodoxy is a bourgeois theology.  Those who are actually movers and shakers in this “movement” are aristocratic, wealthy, and western.  Their thought is forged in the academy, not in any sort of concrete ecclesial or political praxis.  This is not do demean rigorous academic theology, quite the opposite in fact.  Radical Orthodoxy tends to overdose on abstraction and jargon, and who is being quoted is far more important to it that what is being said.  As such, this movement as no real interest in the actual life of the church(es) in the world.  It is theology by a new brand of Cambridge Platonists written for their own inner circle.  As Rodney Clapp has observed, “You can’t just tell people to go to church and be better neoplatonists.”
  5. Radical Orthodoxy is a militant theology.  The fundamental desire of Radical Orthodoxy is to win.  It claims that only the Christian narrative is capable of narrating a world in which difference can exist nonviolently.  All other narratives lead to violence are as such are nihilistic.  The Christian narrative alone can outnarrate all other narratives and bring about “The path of peaceful flight…” (John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 434)
  6. Ironically, Radical Orthodoxy is thus an inherently violent theology.  It does not claim that the Triune God is the answer to the threat of nihilism, but rather that the answer is found in trinitarian theology.  Specifically in their own brand of gingerly platonised trinitarianism, that has more to do with abstractions about “exchange” and “gift” than about the actual missions and relations of the Triune persons as revealed in the economy of salavation (See in contrast D.B. Hart’s treatment of “gift” in The Beauty of the Infinite, 236ff).  Radical Orthodoxy claims that it is our theological narration of the sacred which will save the world from secular nihilism, death, and non-being.  As such it is both violent and Pelagian.
  7. Radical Orthodoxy is a revisonary theology.  It is based on a grand appropriation and revisionist readings of key figures in Christian history, such as Augustine and Aquinas.  The readings offered by Radical Orthodoxy of these figures are idiosyncratic and generally wrong.  Even from within their own movement, their revisionist readings of the Medievals have been strongly challenged (see James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy).
  8. Radical Orthodoxy is an erotic theology.  Any perusal of the literature by the major authors in the Radical Orthodoxy series will show their fascination with speculative theologies of sexuality, gender, and the body.  This is yet another example of the theological faddishness of this movement.  The bodies that are the obsession of thinkers like Gerard Loughlin, Eugene Rogers, and John Milbank are always and inevitably coupling bodies, not emaciated, battered, or mutilated ones.  Radical Orthodoxy offers and unembodied theology of the body that seems to think that the height of bodiliness is orgasm.  As such, Radical Orthodoxy is really doing nothing more for a theology of the body and sexuality than reproducing the sex-obssessed zeitgeist of our age.
  9. Radical Orthodoxy is a varied theology.  A distinction must be made between European and American contributors to the Radical Orthodoxy series and other theologians commonly associated with the movement.  Thinkers like William T. Cavanaugh, Daniel M. Bell, Jr., D.B. Hart, J. Kameron Carter, and James K.A. Smith stand quite apart from folks like John Milbank, Graham Ward, Catherine Pickstock, and Gerard Loughlin.  The orientation of nearly all American contributors to Radical Orthodoxy is based in praxis, is more strongly ecclesial, and more thoroughly pacifist.  As such the American contribution (by authors who are all associated with the Ekklesia Project) represents a far more valuable contribution to contemporary theology.

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