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“The pathos of modern theology is its false humility.” This sentence launches and sets the tone for John Milbank’s 1993 book Theology and Social Theory, and it remains one of its most readable sentences. When I first encountered this four hundred page manifesto of the Radical Orthodoxy movement, I read it in an upper division theology seminar with my mentor from seminary and with eight bright, motivated students reading alongside me and engaging the book’s ideas with me for three hours a week. Left to my own devices, I never would have finished the first chapter, much less become as impressed as I am with this bold, vital movement in contemporary theology.
Because Radical Orthodoxy (RO hereafter) stands to edify so many in our fellowship of the faithful, James K.A. Smith’s Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology stands to become quite an important book to those of us attempting to articulate the gospel of Jesus Christ in a manner fitting our callings and our contexts. Smith, writing from the Reformed tradition (think Calvin, Kuyper, and their intellectual descendents), brings the more Catholic RO project into dialogue with his own rigorous Protestantism, and the resulting encounters open doors for exciting theological work yet to be done.
RO calls itself a critical Augustinian movement, and much of their theoretical and political critique picks up where Augustine’s City of God left off, taking on Nietzchean and post-Nietzschean philosophy, international capitalism, and the modern nation-state in the same manner that Augustine took on Rome and her many gods and philosophers. Theology and Social Theory begins by with the claim that social theories that call themselves secular are most often either heretical versions of Christian theological claims or paganism disguised in the language of science. Subsequent books in the RO tradition expand on these claims in the arenas of city planning, economics, linguistic theories, the national security state, and several other fields that demand both practical insight and theoretical acuity.
Such claims might seem outlandish, but Smith details the moves made by Milbank, Pickstock, Ward, Cavanaugh, and others in compelling manners, revealing the intellectual power and rigor of confessional theology without the impenetrable sentences. Although Smith himself is as versed in Continental philosophy as Milbank himself, his style in Introducing Radical Orthodoxy clarifies what Milbank’s prose obscures, allowing his readers to engage the controversial content of Christian theology without having to diagram each passage so as to locate the main verb. Moreover, Smith engages Milbank’s critics among historians of theology as well as Derridean, Kantian, and other critics, noting both their valid concerns and those critiques that reveal more about the critic than about the project criticized. Introducing Radical Orthodoxy also lends help to those of us in many American contexts by engaging fundamentalism as an intellectual movement, noting RO’s implicit critiques and staging his own, Reformed critique along RO’s lines.
RO’s central claim is that theology ought to be a metadiscourse, not simply one tradition among academic traditions that stands to be located by other metadiscourses. Every account of things presupposes a metaphysical framework, and Christians ought to be equipped to confront the “flat” metaphysics that reduce everything to the material and ignore or deny the transcendent. In other words, again returning to Augustine, we believe in order to understand, and that applies not only to those who praise rightly (orthodox) but to those who, perhaps unknowingly, sing the praises of lesser gods. Christians ought to be able to give an account not only of the peaceful Trinitarian God and the original and promised shalom of that God’s creation but also of the language that would elevate violence to the primary reality in the universe as does the philosophy of Nietzsche. We should be able to name allegiances to the nation-state as idolatrous when they would presume to govern our bodies in manners that only the Eucharist should make us a body. We should show the world that the “secular salvation” offered by secular economics are at best parodies of the Reign of God. Smith’s book points to all of these projects within RO and offers an extensive bibliography for any who would seek to delve deeper.
Smith believes that a strong, systematic theological tradition can only help us to articulate the good news of Jesus Christ in our hypermodern cities and towns. Calling on Christians not to concede the naming of the social to the secular academy, Smith lays groundwork for more confessional theorizing on matters of politics, economics, and a number of fields, and he is working now on one such effort, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: A Radical Orthodoxy for the Emerging Church. If his venture into McLaren’s and Sweet’s territory yields as much fruit as his intrusions into Milbank’s and Pickstock’s, Smith stands especially to edify the emerging.
Amazon.com's entry on this book
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