(8:57 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Radical Orthodoxy Article

The lovely Adam Smith, Scottish moral philosopher, political economist, and former roommate of the present writer, sent me this article on the new, hip Radical Orthodoxy movement in contemporary theology. One thing is for certain: they don't mean "radical" in the Marxist sense, but in the Ninja Turtles sense. "Tubular Orthodoxy" would therefore also work. Their quest is similar to mine in my post "Hegel can suck it": to become familiar with what the cool kids are reading so that they can point out the many ways in which they are better than the cool kids. Here are a couple quotes:

Milbank et al. use the prevailing vocabulary and verbal techniques of cultural and literary studies to expose the dark emptiness of secular postmodernism, hoisting it on its own petard. If Radical Orthodoxy is any sign of the future, tomorrow’s academy will see countless theses on the subversive power, not of transsexuality, but of the Eucharist—in all, a welcome development.

Although I didn't quite catch it while reading some of the Radical Orthodox figures reviewed in this article, apparently their goal is to provide a philosophical rationale for Catholic sexual morality:

Out of this central claim comes the brutally political nature of the postmodern moral agenda. If power defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman, then power can change that definition. Not coincidentally, postmodern theoreticians are eager to exert power: to urge the judiciary to bring to bear the force of the state, to compel curricular changes, to enforce codes of speech. With enough redirection of power, they assume that marriage can come to mean the union of any two persons. A blow was struck in one direction; a blow can be struck in another. The arbitrary violence of conventional meanings is met by the new violence of postmodern revision. So professors denounce traditional understandings of marriage, scholars distort and willfully misrepresent the role of homosexuality in antiquity, and the entire university tries to shame the recalcitrant into conformity.

By contrast, the real scholars from the Radical Orthodox movement would take a different approach (emphasis on the "would," since again, I'm not sure this sexual thing is all that present in the actual Radical Orthodox thinkers -- in fact, Graham Ward is not convinced there are just two genders, for example):

For example, we can study the history of marriage and observe that Christianity substantively changed its meaning by assimilating the relation of men and women to the relation of Jesus Christ and the Church. Yet we need not conclude that such change resulted from a contest of power. Things can be understood and inhabited across change and difference without submission to power and dominion.

How can we tell it's not based on power and domination? Why, we can just see the word Jesus and know! Why is this?

Christian theology counters the Nietzschean nihilism of foundational violence (in the language Radical Orthodoxy borrows from postmodernism) by advancing a participatory framework, an analogical poetics, a semiosis of peace, a metanarrative that does not require the postulate of original violence. Put more simply, Radical Orthodoxy hopes to recover Neoplatonic metaphysics as an explanation for the glue that holds the world together. Something can be what it is—a unit of semantic identity or meaning, a person, a social practice—and at the same time depend upon and reach toward something else. Or more strongly, something is real only in and through this constitutive dependence and fecundity. For the Neoplatonist, you, or I, or the value of my moral acts, or the meaning of this essay, are as emanating from and returning to the One.

Notice the not-so-subtle shift from Christianity to Neoplatonism. One of the key hobbies of postmodern theorists is to insist that the Platonic worldview is itself originated in a violent imposition, and to my mind, they manage to do that very convincingly. If this author is any indication, the best answer the Radical Orthodox have to this accusation is: "No it's not."

I mean, Augustine is cool and everything, but the last time we had a "return to Augustine," the Reformation happened. Thankfully, now academic theology is virtually irrelevant to most of the world, including most churches, so we can't really expect this to have much effect on the world. I say this as an aspiring academic theologian, although one who often has "doubts." But before we go, one last quote, which should remind you of the quote on the nihilist theorists who impose their broader definition of marriage on us:

One of the tragedies of modern theology has been its systematic renunciation of this ambition [to recover and reconstitute a comprehensive Christian vision]. The deep end of "truth" has been ceded to science, while theology swims in the shallow end of "meaning." Aesthetic expression has been relinquished to the cult of original self–expression and "what–it–means–for–me." Morality becomes a subset of utility, or a creation of private conscience, and Christians are reduced to "sharing their values." An impoverished realm of "spirituality" or "transcendence" remains the rightful property of Christian reflection, and running on these slight fumes, theology drives toward relevance in a world over which it has renounced its authority. Radical Orthodoxy is nothing if not intensely opposed to this renunciation; for its adherents the whole world is fit for absorption into a theological framework. Christian theology should shape the way we talk about everything.

So how are they different from the postmoderns again? Oh yeah, Jesus.

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