Is “Radical Orthodoxy” Like “Jumbo Shrimp”?

An Introduction

The Promise and Perils of Post-Secular Theology

A Little Background

• My introduction to Postmodernity

Primary Questions

• How Radical is Radical Orthodoxy?• How Orthodox is Radical Orthodoxy?• Is the emphasis on Radical or Orthodoxy?• What are the promises and the perils of Radical

Orthodoxy?

Radical Orthodox Theologians

• John Milbank: Theology and Social Theory• Catherine Pickstock• Graham Ward• William Cavanaugh• James K. A. Smith

What is it?

• Radically Post-modern• Brazenly Theological• Unapologetically Confessional• Aggressively Social

I. Radically Post-Modern

“Weird for the sake of Weird”

Pre-Modernity

Reason

Revelation

Reason

Modernity

Phenomena

Noumena

The Wrong Turn of Modernity

• Foundationalist Epistemology• Quest for Rational Certainty• Loss of participatory ontology• Loss of the historical (time)• Loss of the catholic (universal)

Leads to…

• Fragmentation of society• Breakdown of communication• Loss of wonder and beauty• Textual nihilism • Individualistic narcissism• Rejection of dogmatic/confessional theology• Results in a “Religion Without Religion” (Derrida)

Jean-Francois Lyotard

Postmodernism: “incredulity towards

Metanarratives”

Jacques Derrida

There is Nothing Outside the Text!

Michel Foucault

Power is Knowledge

The Primary Culprits: The Rejection of Revelation and the Loss of Participatory Ontology

Duns Scotus’ Knowledge by Abstraction versus Augustine’s Knowledge by Illumination

Example of the End of Modernity: Pruitt-Igoe Housing Demolition

II. Brazenly Theological

• Post-Secular: All theory (social, political, economic, philosophical) is confessional/theological

• “All thought which brackets out God is ultimately nihilistic”

• Christian theology returns to being the queen of the disciplines

• Theology must be non-accommodationist

Christian theology now offers a discourse able to position and overcome nihilism itself. This is why it is so important to reassert theology as a master discourse; theology, alone, remains the discourse of non-mastery.

— John Milbank

Recovering Metaphysics

• Plato• Augustine• Aquinas

III. Rigorously Confessional

A new ad fontes: Ressourcement

“Abandoning all scholastic attempts to graft faith onto a universal base of reason [Radical Orthodoxy] instead turns to the church Fathers.”

— Milbank

IV. Aggressively Social

• “Not simply returning in nostalgia to the premodern, it visits sites in which secularism has invested heavily — aesthetics, politics, sex, the body, personhood, visibility, space — and resituates them from a Christian standpoint; that is, in terms of the Trinity, Christology, the Church and the Eucharist.” — Radical Orthodoxy

The Church as Polis

• Augustine’s City of God• The church is the only

authentic polis, because

it eschews individualism

“The church IS a social ethic”

The Promise of Radical Orthodoxy

• Returns theology to public discourse• Points out the “confessional” nature of

secularism• Challenges faith/reason dichotomy• Challenges sacred/secular dualism• Emphasizes the role of the church in the world• Attempts a rigorous confessional Christianity

within a pluralist, post-secular context

The Perils of Radical Orthodoxy

• Limits potential for interdisciplinary dialogue(?)• Lacks clear criterion for Ressourcement? (which

theologian? Which tradition?)• Undermines the constructive promise of

contextual theology (voices from the margins)• Is it desconstructive enough? Is it reconstructive

enough?• Metaphysics potentially over-rides biblical and

systematic theology– Sophia as warning