Radical Orthodoxy may be a health hazard

Here is my second extract from Elizabeth Smith’s ‘Radical Orthodoxy for Dummies’:

The Fine Print:  Radical Orthodoxy May Be a Health Hazard

Now, a word of caution to the would-be Radically Orthodox. If one or more of the following apply to you, you may not be cut out for a career in this branch of theological endeavour. 

1. Your interest in sex as a subject for theological reflection still carries a concern for the practical and social and spiritual liberation of women. Radical Orthodoxy seems to be better at problematising the gender of Christ than it is at deproblematising the economic and political downside of the gender of actual women. However, if you are a woman theologian who is happy to continue speaking of “God himself,” you will probably be fine.  
2. You think think that theology is fun to do, but it still matters to you that it’s fun for anyone else to read. Radical Orthodoxy seems to have jettisoned clarity of English syntax in favour of bandwagon vocabulary. However, if a sentence like the following appeals to you, you will most likely do well in Radical Orthodoxy: “Perhaps unsurprisingly, this search for the universal and the ‘superhuman’ reveals itself as a hopeless and ultimately nihilistic account of form and essence, since it maintains that forms can appear apart from what they inform, and universality upholds only its self-depiction and has no necessary or obvious regard for the particulars it could instantiate.”  (Phillip Blond, “Perception:  From modern painting to the vision in Christ,” in Millbank, Pickstock, and Ward, eds, Radical Orthodoxy:  A New Theology , p. 229.)
3. You quite enjoy reading and interpreting the bible. Radical Orthodoxy hasn’t quite worked its way back past Augustine to scripture as a source of inspiration, let alone as a major primary contributor to theology. However, there is probably another rediscovery of patristic biblical hermeneutics waiting to happen, and possibly yet another a re-appreciation of the bible as artful verbiage (“literature”) worthy of some attention in its own right, so if you want to help inspire the Radically Orthodox to reappropriate the word “biblical” the way they’re reappropriating “platonic,” by all means go for it.
4. You are a sacramental theologian or liturgical theologian. Radical Orthodoxy is acting rather as if it had invented, with a little help from its postmodern and platonic friends, the entire concept of an “outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible reality,” while you and your mates have been exploring this very field of endeavour for decades already.  You may feel a trifle resentful that Radical Orthodoxy does not give due credit to the liturgical life of the church for persevering with an environment that is rich in metaphor, visual image, sensory input and embodied prayer, while all around were foundering in the sterility of metaphysics and rationality.  However, if with Prince Charles you suspect that the last 50 years of liturgical renewal have been a bad mistake and a waste of time, or if you think liturgists are really terrorists who can’t be trusted with real theology, you may well find a way to enjoy Radical Orthodoxy.
5. You can’t muster up much theological nostalgia. Perhaps you think that the best and most fruitful theology is yet to come and your energy is best directed into constructive rather than deconstructive projects. Perhaps you get exhausted just thinking about the embedded patriarchal assumptions in 99.5 per cent of theology to date, and despite your genuine admiration for Aquinas you would rather put your hand to the plough and not look back. 

If you still want to become Radically Orthodox, dodging, embracing or transforming the issues described above, you may find you can do it even without footnotes to Hans Urs von Balthasar.

How to become radically orthodox

About twenty years ago, I came across ‘Radical Orthodoxy for Dummies’ by Elizabeth Smith poking fun at the theological movement known as Radical Orthodoxy. Sadly, it has long since vanished from the Internet. So I have decided to post a couple of extracts here for your amusement.

This first piece is called ‘How To Become Radically Orthodox: A Beginner’s Guide’:

First, it will help if you start out Radically Privileged, have learnt at least one classical language before you hit university, and are not beset by family members asking why you haven’t gone in for something like Accountancy or Marketing that will guarantee you a well-paying job. A good general grounding in classical and enlightenment philosophy is also necessary, so that you do not embarrassingly mix your epistemology and your ontology, your realists, idealists, nihilists and so on. Then you need to go deeply into the work of a theologian or philosopher who may well be totally out of fashion. At this point you may become discouraged because no one else seems to be interested in your chosen writer, but please persevere. 

By now you will also have friends who are studying subjects other than classical philosophy and what used to be called “patristics.” Eventually you will notice that they are having great fun playing with Structuralism and Post-structuralism and Psychoanalytic Theory and Queer Theory, not to mention the whole gamut of Feminisms and Post-Colonialisms, and all sorts of other exciting tools of fin-de-millennium scholarship, and you will wonder if it might not be fun to play with some of the same things in your own field. 

All this time, you will have been faithfully attending church services. You should take care to participate in the type of liturgy that is aesthetically rich, in a visually stunning building with marvellous music, ministers in fabulous vestments, services that go on unhurriedly in imitation of the Liturgy of Heaven, and the kind of sermon that has sometimes been unkindly characterised as “three points and a poem” (the poem usually being many times richer and deeper than the three points, due to its having been written by someone other than the preacher). Steep yourself in the liturgical world of metaphor, symbol, and palpable transcendence, for here has been preserved (or, if we are to be honest, reinvented in 19th century Anglicanism) the flavour of piety and imagination that we are about to inject, along with a cocktail of postmodern methodological stimulants, into the veins of the historical theological figure you have so diligently and hitherto thanklessly been studying. 

Now you need to find a group of like-minded scholars with whom you can share hints on how to get Lacan and Derrida into footnotes where a generation ago Schleiermacher and Barth cast much longer shadows. You need to grit your teeth and read North American contemporary criticism and not just British and European sources. Then, at last, you need to find a hot topic in current social or ecclesial life, and find a way for your antique hero to appear to make a contribution to the debate. Only a cynic would suggest that in fact the debate is making a contribution to the faded aura surrounding your antique hero. As for suitable debates, sex, politics, and art are always good value for a controversy guaranteed to get the juices of academic interest flowing.

Engaging Deconstructive Theology

A review of Ronald T. Michener, Engaging Deconstructive Theology, Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies Series (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)

‘If Christians are to continue to communicate and incarnate the gospel in a world with postmodern assumptions, then they must seek to understand their culture and seek relevancy’ (p. 7). This is Ronald Michener’s starting point for an exploration of what he calls deconstructive theology with a view to developing insights that might make Christian apologetics more relevant to postmodern culture.

In his introduction, Michener acknowledges the intellectual and cultural diversity of the postmodern phenomenon. Clearly it would be impossible to treat the entire spectrum of postmodernism adequately in a single volume. He opts instead to focus on what he sees as the most radical intellectual strand of postmodernism: deconstructionism. Having set the boundaries of his study, he proceeds in Chapter 2 to offer a very sketchy outline of the historical context of deconstructionism, focusing on its intellectual forebears from Francis Bacon to Claude Lévi-Strauss, before offering a brief introduction to the deconstructionist programme.

Part II of the book offers an account of the ‘holy trinity’ of deconstructionism: Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault. The three chapters in this part provide useful but inevitably brief introductions to their thought. Michener’s main aim here is to identify themes in their work that are relevant to the task he has set himself. Among the themes he highlights are Lyotard’s scepticism with respect to metanarratives and Foucault’s rejection of the Enlightenment self. But most of the space in this part is devoted to Derrida. Picking up on hints in Derrida’s work, he suggests that deconstruction does not amount to the destruction of theology. Rather Derrida’s goal is destabilize or subvert the traditional metaphysics that is so closely wedded to Western theology. Thus deconstruction can be seen as a new via negativa. Michener is even prepared to recontextualize Derrida’s notion of the ‘messianic’.

Parts III and IV turn to the effect of this on two American academics (Mark Taylor and Richard Rorty) and one British theologian (Don Cupitt) whose writings have had an impact on recent theology in the English-speaking world. These chapters follow the same pattern as those in Part II: a brief introduction to their thought followed by a teasing out of various themes that are relevant to the challenge of developing a Christian apologetic for a postmodern context. Again he finds concepts that can be appropriated by a postmodern Christian theology, for example, Taylor’s notion of ‘mazing grace’ and Cupitt’s ‘solar living’ and ‘poetical theology’.

With Part V we arrive at the real heart of the book: the development of an apologetic methodology in view of the deconstructionist concerns highlighted in Parts II to IV. Chapter 9 deals with some methodological preliminaries, highlighting the inadequacy of some current apologetic methodologies and indicating what those deconstructionist concerns require of a postmodern apologetic. Specifically, such an apologetic must be post-individualistic, post-rationalistic, post-dualistic, and post-noeticentric (by which he means shifting away from knowledge to wisdom). In the next chapter he turns to Scripture, with an examination of the beginnings of Christianity in the book of Acts in the light of deconstructionist concerns. Michener is concerned to present the gospel as a non-totalizing metanarrative (i.e. one that does not fall foul of postmodern scepticism). The early Christian community as it appears in Acts is heterogeneous: open, multicultural, and pluralistic. And St Paul provides us with an apologetic model that majors on listening and dialogue.

That last point is developed further in Chapter 11, ‘Apologetic Engagement and Dialogue’. Michener stresses the importance of being a good listener. He is even prepared to speak of atheism as being ‘prophetic’ for those prepared to listen well. This leads him in to a discussion of what is involved in a critical reappropriation of deconstructionist concerns, providing the theoretical underpinning for the examples of reappropriation earlier in the book.

If Michener were to stop at this point, his contribution would be just one more rationalistic approach to apologetics. However, he is not content to leave it here and moves on in Chapter 12 to explore the ‘Apologetic Imagination’. It is his contention that imagination, myth, and story have a powerful role to play in apologetic dialogue. His role model for this change in apologetic strategy is the literary scholar and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, perhaps a surprising choice given his intention to engage with deconstructionism/postmodernity. In this chapter, he also explores the place of hope in Christian apologetics.

Finally, Michener takes up the question of foundationalism. Postmodernism is notoriously resistant to any suggestion that our beliefs can have any indubitable grounding. By contrast, much Christian apologetics (at least since the Enlightenment) has taken such foundations for granted. Is it possible to develop a Christian apologetic that can engage constructively with the anti-foundationalism of the deconstructionists? Michener proposes what he describes as a soft foundationalism: he accepts the postmodern critique of classical foundationalism but does not want to give in to complete scepticism. Certainty about religious beliefs is not possible, but neither is it necessary. He wants to speak instead of provisional beliefs, which cohere together into a ‘belief mosaic’ that is open to continual testing, reinterpretation, and recontextualization. Furthermore, this gathering of truth is eschatologically based, rather than foundationally based.

I must admit that, as I read through the book, I could not shake off the nagging question of whether the French deconstructionists were the most appropriate dialogue partners for a Christian apologist seeking to engage with postmodern culture. Nevertheless, there is a lot of interesting and thought-provoking material here, and, for the most part, it is presented in a clear and approachable manner.