Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology

Theology Today, Oct 2000 by Bullock, Jeffrey L

Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology

Edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward

New York, Routledge, 1999. 283 pp. $25.99.

Since John Milbank's tour de force, Theology and Social Theory, was published, Milbank and his colleagues have broadly challenged theological conventions with their radical claims. These claims are radical indeed, for Milbank and his colleagues do not attempt just to unseat modernist theological claims; they go so far as to claim that nearly all of modern thinking is a "violent" parody of Christian traditions. Some readers have been taken aback by the Continental use of the term, violence, but, in the most radical or rooted fashion, Milbank, Pickstock, Ward, and the other authors all insist that politics, sociology, economics, and the other modernist disciplines have unseated theology and driven its essential irenic message to the sidelines of human life. Representing Anglo-catholic and Roman Catholic interests alike, these authors struggle to restore the Trinity, and the peaceful relations among the figures of the Trinity, as the Platonic image of what we as humanity are called to be.

While the essays are always challenging with their erudition and learning, their topics can be quite earthy and pungent. Gerald Loughlin writes of "God's sex" in his essay; he has not erroneously confused the term sex with gender, but actually pursues the theme of God's sexual relation with the creation. Indeed the collection of the essays, "Desire," "Friendship," "Bodies," "The City," "Music," and more, gathers up the diverse strands of human life and shows how the establishment of the peaceful foundation of Christian tradition can restore us to the peaceful order for which we were made.

Several of the authors, including Milbank, roundly condemn the nihilism of philosophy and theology that goes ungrounded in faith, trusting only in a kind of reason easily confused for fate and strung up over a "void" that includes an untethered relativism. William Cavanaugh picks up where he left off from his masterful but too little-known essay, "A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House" (Modern Theology 11 [1995], 397-420), and shows how the notion of the modem state has been founded on a false report that the state in its various forms has rescued us from the intractable conflict of the so-called Religious Wars. Cavanaugh contends that these trumped-up charges against the church only disguised the extension of control that characterizes the modern state.

Members and clergy of the local church may wonder at the value of this very intellectual book and how it might nourish their faith. Rest assured, if you are prepared to have your most fundamental convictions challenged, you may discover those convictions as troubling as the essayists in this book find them. Cavanaugh challenges that we move towards "eucharistic anarchism," yet he does not so much "propose chaos" but "that [eucharistic anarchism] challenges the false order of the state." In an age where so much of the church has been led into a Babylonian captivity of church marketing, capitalistic goal-seeking evangelism, and competitive strategies for neighborhood dominance, does not Milbank and company's peaceful insistence on Christian radicalism sound important? Does not the faithful enterprise of the church appear to have been marginalized as they claim?

Do Milbank and the others succeed? I think they do, though one longs for these same essays to be recast into more broadly accessible language. Surely the message that the peaceful church and its traditions must be returned to center stage may strike many readers as at the least odd, if not dangerous in this age of pluralistic theism. Challenge yourself; considering the very boldness of their claim that theology, "not philosophy," has the grammatical last word challenges us to ask ourselves to what transcendence do we give allegiance? While the editors' plangent cry for a Platonic and fundamental truth may not strike a chord for everyone, they have at least-caused the church to reenter the contemporary contest for meanings on its own faithful terms.

JEFFREY L. BULLOCK

St. Barnabas on the Desert Episcopal Church

Scottsdale, AZ