When Radical Orthodoxy is Neither
by John W. Wright
Professor of Theology and Christian Scriptures
Point Loma Nazarene University

Through the past several years, I have read a type of theological program called “Radical Orthodoxy”. Some of the books are rather obtuse and exotic, though always intriguing. They’ve been spurs for thought as I’ve recognized that the Christian tradition needs an adequate ontology to sustain the witness of the church within the Life of God the Father Who will fully restore creation through the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. One review of my edited volume Conflicting Allegiances rightfully recognized the overlap between some of those involved in the project of rethinking the Christian university in the book and what came to be called Radical Orthodoxy.

Yet I have been dis-eased with some of the writings by those identified with this “programme”. It seemed to me that several different agendas are at work amidst the various writers within the book series. The phrase “Radical Orthodoxy” itself seems almost a clever public relations ploy for an edited volume of various articles and a book series, much more marketable phrase than John Milbank’s original “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism” with which he first “labeled” his programme. As a result, readers have tended to merge similar but divergent agendas together. I want to offer some tentative thoughts about a difference that I find within the series.

While the divergence is technical and seems minor, it has massive implications in the repetition of Christian thought, and thus, the distinctive witness of the church through the ages. I’d like to put together the thought of Hans Frei in Types of Christian Theology with some observations from James K. A. Smith’s volume in the Radical Orthodoxy Series, Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation.

Before his death, Hans Frei was working on a project to develop a typology of the relationship of Christian theological thought with philosophy – hey, he taught at Yale and developing typologies are what Yale theologians did in the 20th century! Frei’s students published these fragmentary grant applications and texts in a book, Types of Christian Theology.

Frei argued for a fivefold typology on the relationship of theology with philosophy within Christian thought. Interestingly, Frei placed Schliermacher (Type III) and Barth (Type IV) in adjacent categories, highlighting their similarity when compared to other approaches. Type III thought correlates theological and philosophical language so that universal philosophical categories provide the concepts to express the particular concrete self-description of the Christian community. Type IV insists upon the priority of internal Christian self-description for appropriate theological categories, yet can use the “outside” philosophical analysis in an ad hoc manner to clarify and express what the church already affirms.

In certain areas of reflection, language, and practice, the difference between these types become very minimal. For instance, both Schliermacher and Barth argue for the indispensability of the church as a ‘community’ for the writing of theology. Both see the indispensability of Christian theology as a means of ecclesial self-description. It seems to me, however, that the difference comes very crucial when one turns to Christology. In Type III, Jesus Christ (or to wax Tillichian, Jesus as the Christ or the “New Being”) become “representative” of what is directly accessible through other means. He may be seen as uniquely representative, or fully representative, or normatively representative, but Jesus reveals something about God or about the God-human relationship or about humanity; Jesus is not the Revelation of God. The knowledge that Jesus gives is available elsewhere from which one can then turn to understand Jesus in these terms. Liberation theology often exhibits this tendency. The Nicene Creed becomes an “expression” stated within Hellenistic philosophical thought that needs to be updated by a newer, more modern philosophical conceptuality. Salvation comes through Jesus, not necessarily in Him.

In Type IV, however, Jesus Christ fulfills no category found outside his own life, death, and resurrection as the Revelation of God. Jesus represents God in revelation because Jesus is unsubstitutably God in this one person. Jesus does not represent the “God-Human” relationship; Jesus IS the God-Human relationship, the full revelation of the true God and the full revelation of the true human. All philosophical categories fail to predict and cannot define the nature of this Revelation, and Revelation of God is found directly only through Christ by the Spirit. That is not to say that one cannot see the Revelation of God elsewhere – but it is always indirect, a knowledge mediated through Christ. The Nicene Creed is not determined by Hellenistic conceptuality, but as biblical revelation in light of the Revelation of God in Jesus that sets normatively for all times the relationship between the Word of God and God the Father as Light from Light, God from God, begotten not created. The Creed defines the fundamental difference between God and creation, whereby God is not a Being among beings, but Wholly Other than creation. Within this ontological grammar, the Word of God is eternally one with God as God. Therefore, Jesus is constitutive of God’s revelation, not merely representative. Salvation comes both through and in Jesus.

If this analysis holds (and I’m open to correction), it seems to me that the distinction between Frei’s Type III and IV is also a distinction between non-orthodoxy and orthodoxy, despite the close affinities, between a sophisticated Arian faith and an orthodox confession – which shows how close to orthodoxy Arius was. It also MAY (emphasis on the possibility) describe two profound differences in Radical Orthodoxy, a difference between a “materialistic Platonic trajectory” and an “Incarnational trajectory”. Here Jamie Smith makes relevant observations in his book in comparing his retrieval of Kierkegaard and Augustine with Catherine Pickstock’s retrieval of Plato.

Both Smith and Pickstock desire to “suspend the particular from transcendence.” Both argue that we must find the Transcendent (God) in the particular, rather than abstracting the Transcendent outside the material (and thus devaluing the particular and the material). Polemically against certain post-modern thinkers, they persuasively argue that the particular loses its particularity in indistinguishable pure immanence unless one understands the particular in light of the Transcendent.

Yet the (non)foundation for this account of the Transcendent found in the particular differs radically depending on whether one (un)grounds this in the philosophical concepts of a type of Platonism or in the unique, unsubstitutable body of Jesus. Smith writes “in contrast to Augustine (and yet, in the name of Augustine), who saw the logic of the Incarnation as that which distinguished Christianity from Platonism, these proponents of Radical Orthodoxy (particularly Milbank and Pickstock) wish to see this as the site of their communion” (p. 170). The incarnation of transcendence is seen in the particular of all materiality, including the materiality of Jesus, for these thinkers through a creative repetition of Augustine’s neo-Platonism. Smith recognizes that the “proposal for a ‘sacramental’ and ‘doxological’ account of language – by which the transcendent is ‘revealed’ in immanence – bears deep structural affinities with what I have been describing as an incarnational logic” (p. 175). Yet subtly and ironically, incarnation itself here becomes an abstraction, a concept separated from the body of Jesus. Jesus represents what is found philosophically elsewhere. For such supposed “Radically Orthodox” thinkers, the Word made flesh in Jesus represents the incarnational logic that one finds throughout creation by positing that Jesus (and Christ’s presence in the Eucharist) exemplify the materiality of the form found in the Transcendent throughout creation.

Smith rightfully has reservations “which stem from a more fundamental reservation about the supposed continuities between theurgical Neoplatonism and Christian ‘incarnational’ or ‘creational’ accounts of being-in-the-world” (p. 175). In the end Smith recognizes, though he does not develop the theological importance of the observation, that it is not because of an incarnational logic that we can avoid not speaking; rather “it is because of the Incarnation that we avoid not speaking” (p. 176), and thus, must develop an “incarnational logic.” Jesus does not merely represent a type of logic, He is the Logos made flesh, fully human and fully Divine in one person – insubstitutably so. One cannot correlate a type of Platonism with Christian affirmations concerning Jesus; one must start with the unique, particular body of Jesus and think about the relationship between God and creation through and in Him. If a certain reading of Plato might help us clarify these commitments, then we might use them. But we can’t craft Christian discourse to fit into this pre-existent scheme. For Christians, pre-existence is found in Christ, the visible image of the invisible God, not in philosophical concepts.

It seems to me that this has important philosophical, not merely theological, implications. Radical Orthodoxy has become significant by arguing that the post-modern, which attempts to focus sustain the importance of the particular by critiquing all transcendence, cannot sustain its emphasis on the particular by collapsing all [the nihil] into pure immanence. Radical Orthodox thinkers have responded by a vigorous “incarnational logic” to assert the significance of the transcendent to sustain the emphasis on the particular. Yet if this logic is not (un)grounded in the unique, unsubstitutable, particular bloody and resurrected body of Jesus but in a philosophical notion such as theurgic Platonism or the concept of “the gift,” then particularity itself becomes undercut through itself being made an abstraction. Derrida’s critique of “logocentrism” looms devastatingly large. The Good, the True, the Beautiful become constructs of social control, Feurbachian projections to ground various and conflicting political agendas in the world.

But if we understand the significance of all particular in and through THE PARTICULAR, Jesus Christ, if we develop our understanding of gift through THE GIFT, if we understand the unity of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the very particular body of Jesus that cannot be separated from the kingdom that Jesus taught and embodied and for which He was crucified under Pontius Pilate and resurrected by God the Father, to be lived in the similarly particular body of Christ, the church, as it witnesses to this kingdom through its engagement in the works of mercy in the very particular bodies of those who are poor, those to whom the kingdom belongs.

Distinctions made by Frei help us to see that some currents within “radical orthodoxy” are neither sufficiently radical nor orthodox. This is seen in the constant realm of abstraction that Milbank’s, Pickstock’s or Ward’s texts remain when compared, for instance, to the texts of Daniel Bell or William Cavanaugh or Michael Hanby or Tracey Rowland or Steve Long. The abstraction of the “theurgic Platonic” thinkers in Radical Orthodoxy that many find irritating is inherent within their thought that abstracts the incarnation into a principle away from the person of Jesus. We will not find our beginning and end in philosophical concepts, not even concepts that might be as conducive to correlation with Christian thought as a ‘theurgic Platonism’. It is the body of Christ, then, a very particular body that lives in and through the repetition of the unsubstitutable body of Jesus, in which we find the beginning and end of our very particular lives.