The Radical Orthodoxy Reader

by John Milbank (Editor), Simon Oliver (Editor)

The Radical Orthodoxy Reader presents a selection of key readings in the field of Radical Orthodoxy, the most influential theological movement in contemporary academic theology. Radical Orthodoxy draws on pre-Enlightenment theology and philosophy to engage critically with the assumption and priorities of secularism, modernity, postmodernity, and associated theologies. In doing so it explores a wide and exciting range of music, language, society, the body, the city, power, motion, space, time, personhood, sex and gender. As such it is both controversial and extremely stimulating; provoking much fruitful debate amongst contemporary theologians. To assist those encountering Radical Orthodoxy for the first time, each section has an introductory commentary, related reading and helpful questions to encourage in-depth understanding and further study.

Genres: Theology, Philosophy

430 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 2009

About the author

Professor John Milbank is Professor in Religion, Politics and Ethics and the Director of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. He has previously taught at the Universities of Lancaster, Cambridge and Virginia. He is the author of several books of which the most well-known is Theology and Social Theory and the most recent Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon. He is one of the editors of the Radical Orthodoxy collection of essays which occasioned much debate. In general he has endeavoured in his work to resist the idea that secular norms of understanding should set the agenda for theology and has tried to promote the sense that Christianity offers a rich and viable account of the whole of reality.

Reviews

[Christopher Gow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to rate because some of the ideas are shocking and brilliant but the book is mostly unreadable. Not sure why RO attracts people who write in a way that is so difficult to understand.. The saving grace here is Simon Oliver: his interpretations and explanations of Milbank and Pickstock are incredible (push my rating up from 3 to 4 stars).

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume is a genuinely interesting collection of book chapters and papers from a (let's face it) marginalised discourse. I found it bracing to read Christian theology with a bit of p*ss and vinegar, when the front of intelligent Christianity is usually feeble and conciliatory (a la Rowan Williams).

Radical Orthodoxy is basically a vision shared by a number of thinkers, which is usually taken to involve two main theses: that secular, liberal society is vacuous and intellectually incoherent, and that orthodox Christianity is the answer to modernity's ills. The volume follows this pattern with savage attacks on modernity coupled with loving riffs on the wisdom of Christian doctrine. Although such a brash manifesto might remind you of fundamentalist rhetoric, the vision is cashed out in very subtle arguments. Milbank's chapter from his book "Theology and Social Theory", for instance, offers a deconstruction of secularity, arguing that what presents itself as a neutral public space where religious differences are set aside is in fact anything but. It gets really interesting when Milbank makes connections between the texts at the intellectual roots of secularity and Christian doctrine (gone wrong). At one point he even says that the liberal man was first imagined in the image of a heterodox Christian God.

There are other excellent essays, my favourite is probably Catherine Pickstock's loving meditation on the eucharist taken from her "After Writing". Pickstock argues that the church's practice of the eucharist outwits both post-modern scepticism and reductive positivism; both the position that there is nothing behind appearances and that there is nothing but appearances. There is divinity behind the wafer and the wine, but it's not something you can see or pin down. Pickstock thinks that, in this way, the logic of the eucharist offers a way for language to have meaning.

I should also say that the essays are, for the most part, painfully difficult. This difficulty is for good and bad reasons. It is partly due to the subtlety of the arguments, but also just because of the style in which they are written. This is less true of Graham Ward, William Cavanaugh and to an extent Pickstock, but Milbank's essays are torture. Critics say Milbank is showing off to his postmodern buddies, but in his defence the problem is largely to his habit of cramming a new idea or two into every sentence.

In short, this volume shows interesting Christian theology is being written (yes, it is out there). If meditations on topics like the implications of invoking the eucharist for post-structural language theory interest you, then you'll find this book challenging and imaginative.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A VERY HELPUL COLLECTION OF ESSAYS ABOUT THIS NEW THEOLOGICAL MOVEMENT

The Introductory section of this 2009 collection of essays explains, “It is now more than ten years since the publication of the first collection of essays under the title ‘Radical Orthodoxy.’ The original series of twelve books has since led to many more publications covering an extremely broad range of subjects, from work to the nature of the university and the craft of reading theologically… The literature which lies beneath the wide umbrella of Radical Orthodoxy is therefore very extensive and there is a large body of works which engages thoroughly with Radical Orthodoxy’s key themes in more or less critical ways. This Reader offers a combination of writings which seek to introduce Radical Orthodoxy alongside some of this sensibility’s signature texts---those which have been most influential, definitive, enduring, and provocative… it is hoped that this volume will provide a convenient quick point of reference for specialists and a guide for students.” (Pg. x)

Simon Oliver refers in his essay to “Radical Orthodoxy’s refusal to admit the autonomy of any discourse, including philosophy, from theology… it is NOT the case that Radical Orthodoxy has thereby turned everything into theology under different guises. The refusal of the language of autonomy is instead the refusal of the possibility of indifference to the transcendent. In other words, it is the refusal of the idea that God is in any way irrelevant to the truth of anything… [This] also mirrors radical Orthodoxy’s claim that faith and reason are inextricably intertwined, and that at no point does one enter a realm of faith having kicked away the ladder of reason. Why? Because having maintained that one cannot be indifferent to the transcendent---to God---one must equally maintain that one cannot be indifferent to immanence and our created nature to which belongs the reason that is peculiar to our nature…. Thus theology does not sit in pristine isolation from other human discourses, particularly and most obviously… philosophy. The consequence of this view of the nature of theology is its constant and critical engagement with other disciplines… It is Radical Orthodoxy’s contention… that in its peculiarly modern guise theology has become just another discipline alongside others.” (Pg. 20)

Rupert Shortt states [in a conversation with John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward and others], “Close to the heart of Radical Orthodoxy lies the immodest, but… vital, belief that Christian thought has to give a plausible and self-confident account of the whole world. You are saying that unless theology can evoke a coherent universe in which other things fit, then it becomes a dreary kind of ecclesiastical housekeeping or settles down into what Donald MacKinnon used to call ‘ecclesiological fundamentalism.’ One just talks about the Church. And although Radical Orthodoxy is sometimes thought of as a very Church-dominated or in-house discourse, it could be argued that the opposite is true.” (Pg. 28)

He notes some of the criticisms made of Radical Orthodoxy: “The unease… centres on the audacity of painting with so broad a brush… the painstaking engagement with difficult and uncooperative detail can be absent from your canvases… Another perception is that you don’t allow enough for … ‘the sinfulness, the provisionality and the muddle of the Church…’ … In other words, the idea that authority has to defend itself, has to argue, isn’t a bad idea in itself… others are a bit skeptical of the idea that there was just one great theological fall in the Middle Ages…” (Pg. 39)

In this conversation, Simon Oliver explains, “the notion of knowledge as illumination is increasingly important for Radical Orthodoxy. Our knowledge is corrigible… because it’s illuminated, but only to a certain degree. So our knowledge is always partial: it’s dimmer or brighter, and in the end it’s always illuminated from a single source. Critically, there’s only one guarantee of truth---only one source of light---which is God’s own knowledge.” (Pg. 43)

The Introduction to an essay by John Milbank notes, “Radical Orthodoxy is clearly committed to the view that faith and reason are intimately and always intertwined. There is no ‘dualism’; that is, there is no sense in which there are two orders of knowing standing over and against each other, one based on faith, the other on reason. Of course, there is a tendency to associate ‘faith’ with the discourse of theology, and ‘reason’ with philosophy. As faith and reason are intertwined, so too are theology and philosophy.” (Pg. 65)

In a later essay, John Milbank argues, “The Gospels present us with a very confusing and complex account… Given this strange account, the overwhelming response of modern New Testament scholars is to doubt its veracity, to such a degree that little of the Passion narrative is now seen as plausibly historical… I want to suggest a perspective from which the very strangeness of the features I have mentioned may in fact present some warrant of verisimilitude (at the very least). But at the same time this new ground for historical plausibility casts light upon the universal significance of Christ’s death, as claimed by the first Christians.” (Pg. 205)

Graham Ward says, “What I am suggesting is that Christian theologians might rethink this figure in terms of Jesus as the Christ---viewing Christology as concerned with trading and understanding the operations of Christ. I make such a proposal on the basis of trying to recover something of the ‘otherness’ of Christ for contemporary Christology. If Christ reveals to us what it is to be human, we cannot simply project our images of being human only the figure of Christ. We have then to wrestle with and deconstruct the language and the categories we use to speak about this incarnate one… There might then be theological value in examining further this schizo Christ who produces, through his unique operations, the deterritorialized Church---which, if not exactly a body without organs, might… be understood as a body in which the differences between organs are only epiphenomenal… A schizo Christology, already announcing a theological anthropology, would lead then to a schizo ecclesiology: a true ‘socias.’ But that is another essay.” (Pg. 250-251)

Catherine Pickstock points out, “So, by stressing the ecclesial and relational context of the Eucharist, and its character as linguistic and signatory ACTION rather than extra-linguistic presence, one can start to overcome the logic of the secular Derridean sign. But in doing so, one finds that one has---almost by default---defended an account of transubstantiation. For it is when the Eucharist is hypostasized as wither a thing or a sign in separation from ecclesial and ecstatic action that it becomes truly decadent.” (Pg. 270)

John Milbank notes, “So, if today there is a problem of the recrudescence of intolerant religion, this is not a problem that liberalism can resolve, but rather a problem that liberalism tends to engender. We cannot oppose it in the name of liberal human rights, because this notion also revolves in a futile circle: these rights are supposedly natural, yet inert uncreated nature has never heard of them. They only exist when the State proclaims them, yet the State alone cannot legitimate them, else they cease to be natural and so general and objective.” (Pg. 356)

Milbank explains in his Afterword, “Radical Orthodoxy sees its task of philosophical/theological synthesis as taking forwards the Renaissance/Romantic rethinking of authentic Christian tradition. This is one aspect of the ‘radicalism’ of its orthodoxy… Radical Orthodoxy seeks to integrate into a metaphysically realist perspective a greater attention to 1. Sign, 2. Aspect and 3, Number. In the first case it regards the linguistic turn as fundamentally correct, but does not read this in a quasi-transcentalist way… The Radical Orthodoxy critique of the secular… postmodern is, in essence, that it sometimes obfuscates the metaphysically optional character of its nihilistic vision, presenting it as the ineluctable outcome of theoretical rigor.” (Pg. 388) Later, he adds, “just what is it that makes Radical Orthodoxy radical? The answer is that… the combination works in paradoxically different ways. On the one hand, what is meant is the radicalism of orthodoxy as such… In this sense a ‘radical’ orthodoxy means a militant orthodoxy in the sense of a proper integrity… However, ‘radical orthodoxy’ ALSO implies a radicalization of orthodoxy.” (Pg. 393)

This book is the most useful “overview” of this new theological trend that I have yet found. Other helpful books are 'Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology and 'Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology]].