What’s radical about Radical Orthodoxy?
I do a fair amount of searching on the internet for info regarding Radical Orthodoxy, largely because I’m trying to find doctoral programs in the U.S. that are amenable to the project. In so doing I regularly come across blog entries with the above title: what’s so radical about Radical Orthodoxy? These entries then detail three are four points, one of which is always RO’s resistance to bifurcative thinking.
Relative to these entries, it will perhaps be more helpful to identify the kernel of the movement that in fact makes it radical. In this vein, a lengthy quote from Rowan William’s Arius will prove relevant. Here Williams makes use of Fabian’s Time and Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. Describing Fabian’s argument, WIlliams writes:
[T]he creation and imposition of ‘normative’ time [in western academic anthropology] is a device for avoiding the relativation of one’s own position (and thus the possibility of change): because – surely – our past is decisively and undeniably notwhere we now stand, what can be relegated to the past is not to be listened to seriously. Against this, Fabian asserts: “Tradition and modernity are not ‘opposed’ (except semiotically) … What are opposed … are not the same societies at different stages of development, but different societies facing each other at the same time.”
This seems to have substantial bearing on Milbank’s entire approach in Theology and Social Theory and thus RO as a whole. Milbank begins the piece by describing creation’s current locus as the saeculeum, not a stable “sphere” capable of sustaining meaning, but as the (temporary) period after the incarnation and beforethe eschaton, that is, as a basically relative reality insofar as it is only adequately recognized in its relation to the activity of God.
Furthermore, for Milbank and company the contemporary moment is not only historically relative to God, it is metaphysically relative to God. Since all that is is via its participation in God, all being is necessarily oriented to God, morally, spiritually, and in any other way one can think of. We are always answerable to God because we exist in God and were created in order that we might participate in the divine life of the Blessed Trinity.
Indeed, what some find so offensive, crass, and naïve in Milbank’s approach is not unlike that which horrifies the popular culture in the less sophisticated rhetoric of some conservative Evangelical preachers (at least here in the States). Their beliefs that God functions as the efficient cause of natural disasters and wars in response to social sin are ridiculous in the public discourse precisely because they construe grave, sacred events (9/ll, Hurricane Katrina, etc. …) as relative to the will of God. This horrifies liberal society because within the popular discourse events like 9/11 (or at least the orthodox understanding of such events) actually constitute and limit the social discourse. That is, they are the relativizers, not the relativizees. To involve these events in our being answerable to God is to misunderstand the cosmic pecking order as determined by liberal society. 9/11, for example, may tell us who God is (American, angry at terrorists, etc…) but God will certainly not tell us what 9/11 was.
I will utilize two recent cases sensationalized by the American media to hopefully illustrate what I would like to convey (in an admittedly roundabout way). The authorities of the state of Texas recently seized somewhere around 400 children from a conservative sect that understand themselves to be the true embodiment of the Mormon religion. Various arguments were constructed for the removal of these children from their homes, all referencing their being in grave danger of child abuse, however, the arguments were so thin and their methods so illegal that two Texas courts ordered the return of the children a day or two back.
I am no fan of Mormonism or polygamy, and statistically it seems hard to believe that some of the relevant children have not suffered from abuse of some kind or another, but my point in bringing up this example is its relation to something I saw on TV the same night I was watching the “Polygamy story” unfold (at least his is how it was characterized by CNN). On MTV’s Real World a young woman proceeded to perform oral sex on a fellow house-mate and then tell her boyfriend (also a housemate) that the entire event had never occurred (it would be a bit absurd to assume she and her boyfriend were not also sexually involved). Is this illegal? No, actually it is entertainment. Much of the sexual encounter was shown on TV (blurred a bit) and who knows how many thousands of people around the world did not blink an eye.
Relative to the polygamy debacle this made me think: what about swingers? Is what they do legal? What if they swing with regular partners, that is, they have sex with multiple adults on a regular basis (much like the polygamist male)?
This is of course all a bunch of moralizing silliness within the dominant discourse. Polygamy is disgusting and dangerous. Don’t ask why. It just is. That’s why there are laws against it. Swinging may be a bit eccentric but its not a social evil worthy of legislative action. Were I wealthy enough to be a gambler I would wager a hefty sum that any news commentator on any of the popular American cable new outlets (CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc…) who raised a single of the above issues would at best receive a prompt warning from her network and colleagues and at worst find herself unemplyed. The entire matter cannot be discussed. The standards of liberal society’s discourse, however arbitrary to the unititiated, cannot be criticized because no one is allowed to admit that they exist (I believe Hauerwas calls this an “especially pernicious” quality of liberalism). This enables a sort of thorough tyranny that is only possible when a matter is not allowed to be discussed, only decided upon unanimously.
Secondly, and more obviously relevant to the point raised above by Rowan Williams, is Barak Obama’s just-announced withdrawal of membership from Trinity United Methodist Church in Chicago, Illinois. Of course, the entire event began when clips of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright were played repeatedly by the American Media. The most notorious of these clips showed a frantic Wright screaming into a microphone “God Damn America! God Damn America etc…”
For those who actually listen to more substantial segments of the sermon at issue something will become immediately clear. There is a sharp divide between the American narrative as told by Rev. Wright and that told (and believed) by most Americans. This divide is not adequately understood by a simple comparison of the sentiments involved in pronouncing America’s damnation versus its blessedness.
Rather, Wright operates on the presumption that America is actually answerable to God. Events that the rest of the society never understood (or quickly forgot) thus register as significant signs of America’s character for Wright. Immediately before the “God Damn America” clip, for example, Wright provides a litany of American abuses, the vast majority of which are simply part of the historical record (our support of tyrannies throughout S. America, our bombing of civilians in S. America and the Middle East, our military support of the murderous Israeli IDF, etc. … . Now of course one would want to add our bombing of Afghan and Iraqi civilians and especially our use of chemical weapons in Fallujah). If America is in fact not answerable to God then these events do not matter: those to whom they did/do necessarily matter are either dead, dying, or otherwised silenced and they have worked out well as means to secure American “vital interests” (with the likely exception of the current Iraq war). If America is answerable to God, however, these events cannot be so quickly forgotten. If American people are oriented toward God in the very constitution of our being, if all powers function properly only when seeking the good of all of creation, then the severity and regularity of American cruelty is frighteningly significant. Indeed, if all of this is true and one finds oneself preaching in the prophets on a given Sunday, “God Damn America” seems to be a rather fitting refrain.
Returning to Williams and Milbank, the crime RO commits (alongside West Virginia evangelicals and elite urbanites like Rev. Wright) is that it refuses to avoid the relativization of the contemporary moment in relation to the historical and metaphysical orientation of all reality to God. This is what makes it radical, all else stems from this needed move.
