It was in 1990 that John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory hit certain theology circles like a bombshell.
When he wrote it, Milbank was a young theologian at Lancaster University in England, and part of the reason the book had such impact was his Anglican background. Founded as a "middle way" between Lutheranism and Puritanism, Anglicanism favors tolerance and inclusiveness and is unnerved by prophets; it has been congenial to theologians who want to shed the burden of orthodoxy and accommodate the latest trends in thought without giving up the comforts of ecclesiastical life. In Milbank, it found an interlocutor of disconcerting energy and conviction.
Milbank contends that for Christians, orthodoxy, not contemporary secular thought, must provide the "organizing logic" for reflection. "Once theology surrenders its claim" to be the most fundamental discourse, he writes, "it cannot any longer articulate the word of the creator God, but is bound to turn into the oracular voice of some finite idol." Milbank's suggestion that many of his colleagues were prophets of an idol was not calculated to win friends in English academia. Posing this stark antithesis seemed distinctly uncivil and un-Anglican.
Outside his own church, Milbank's pointed critique of theologians' use of social science hit a variety of targets. From the far left of Latin American liberation theologians to the far right of American conservatives, modern theological thinkers have attempted to discover correlations between Christianity and the findings of the social sciences. Milbank will have none of it. Secular social science is "actually constituted in its secularity by 'heresy' in relation to orthodox Christianity, or else a rejection of Christianity that is more 'neo-pagan' than simply anti-religious." In short, "'scientific' social theories are themselves theologies or anti-theologies in disguise." A synthesis of Christianity and social science is no more possible than a synthesis of belief and unbelief.
While vigorously challenging much of mainstream theology, Milbank creatively wove together threads from several theological and philosophical movements. Philosophically, he finds inspiration in both "conservative postmodernists" like Alasdair MacIntyre and the radical postmodernists of French philosophy. Several developments in recent American theology have similarly left their mark on Milbank's work. In the mid-1980s, what came to be known as the "Yale School," led by George Lindbeck and Hans Frei, formulated a "postliberal" theology. Postliberals reject the Enlightenment notion that all religions are a manifestation of a generic experience of "religion-in-general," and stress instead Christian particularity. Along similar lines, Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University insists that Christian ethics has a specific shape that emerges from the story of Jesus -- and thus necessarily different from any non-Christian ethics.
And yet, while riding the crest of this "postliberalism" in theology, Milbank's Theology and Social Theory also expanded the postliberal agenda. Where the Yale School focused much of its attention on theological method and ecumenical concerns, Milbank attempted a larger project. His book was an effort to put theology into the ring with social science and philosophy, and he was eager to show that Christianity could address cultural and political concerns in a highly sophisticated way: Milbank's program was nothing less than to restore the Triune God to the center of Western intellectual, cultural, and political life.
Since Theology and Social Theory, Milbank has produced a steady stream of books and articles. He has published his doctoral dissertation on the Renaissance philosopher Giambattista Vico, and in 1997 he released a collection of essays entitled The Word Made Strange. His collection of poems, The Mercurial Wood: Sites, Tales, Qualities, also appeared in 1997. Much of his influence comes from essays published in journals, especially Modern Theology. His intellectual energy and brilliance are widely admired. Milbank has described himself as a "theologian and philosopher, and therefore interested in everything." His achievement, according to Hauerwas, is largely sui generis, the product of an "extraordinary intellectual vitality."
But not everyone finds Milbank congenial, with his unapologetic confidence in the Christian tradition and his scorn for the defensive "false humility" of modern theology. In person, Milbank combines the distracted rumpledness of a stereotypical English academic with the look of a middle-aged choir boy: short and pudgy, with wire-rimmed glasses pressed tightly against a round face, head topped by a tousle of graying hair. In print and debate, however, the choir boy vanishes. Pugnacious and even abrasive, Milbank is considered a prima donna by many colleagues, "intellectually ruthless" according to one theologian, with a tendency to be "dismissive" of opposing viewpoints -- the sort of intellectual who inspires loyalty and loathing in equal measure.
And the sort of intellectual with whom other intellectuals feel compelled to engage. "Milbank studies" has become a growth industry in academic theology. Virtually every issue of Modern Theology includes an article by Milbank or one that deals with his theology. A number of recent books, such as David Toole's Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, include lengthy evaluations of his work.
By the mid-1990s, inspired by Milbank, a circle of Anglican and Roman Catholic theologians and graduate students had clustered at the University of Cambridge, where Milbank had become a fellow at Peterhouse. Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock form the core of the loosely affiliated Milbankian group. Several American theologians, including Frederick Bauerschmidt of Loyola College in Maryland and William Cavanaugh of St. Thomas University, are more distant fellow travelers.
In the past year, several members of the group have left Cambridge, beginning with Milbank, who was given a premier position at the University of Virginia, which included a chair in theology for himself and a job teaching nineteenth-century English literature for his wife. Ward now holds a professorship at the University of Manchester, while Pickstock remains in Cambridge, a fellow in religious studies at Emmanuel College.
On many specific issues in theology and politics, this circle -- which has adopted the rubric "Radical Orthodoxy" to describe its agenda -- is diverse. Pickstock insists that the group "has many different emphases, approaches and styles and inspirations." What the members share, however, is agreement with Milbank's insistence that the tradition of orthodox Christianity is a viable and even radical alternative to postmodernism.
Earlier this year, Milbank, Pickstock, and Ward edited Radical Orthodoxy, a manifesto for their movement and the first volume in a proposed series. They define their "new theology" as "orthodox" in its "commitment to credal Christianity" and especially to the full expression of Christianity that developed in medieval Europe. By "radical," they mean "a return to patristic and medieval roots" and an effort to use their restored Christian vision "to criticise modern society, culture, politics, art, science and philosophy with an unprecedented boldness."
The essays in Radical Orthodoxy range from epistemology to linguistic philosophy, from sex to aesthetics, from modern politics to medieval music. Nonetheless, several straightforward themes hold the essays together. Above all, Radical Orthodoxy is an attempt to break out of the confines to which theology has been assigned in modern intellectual and academic circles.
Western intellectual history since the middle ages is the story of the deposing of theology from its position as the "queen of the sciences" and the (sometimes savage) warfare for her vacated throne. One of the central claims of Radical Orthodoxy is that theologians themselves contributed to their decline by trying to build theological systems out of philosophy, the physical sciences, or sociology. Meanwhile, those erstwhile handmaidens to theology were setting up kingdoms of their own. As a result of a quite literal "treason of the clerks," what Milbank calls "secular reason" holds the intellectual field.
Secularism claimed to emphasize the significant issues of the "here and now" while dismissing as irrelevant the theologians off contemplating the "there and then." But Radical Orthodoxy argues that theology alone can actually embrace the material world; only theology can affirm the "density" of the material world, because only theology insists that "behind this density resides an even greater density." Secularism offered to liberate sex and the body, but the members of Radical Orthodoxy argue that outside a theologically grounded vision, sex turns to hedonistic manipulation and bodies are subjected to control and violence. Secular economics promised the abundant life, but the West's astonishing material wealth coexists with a social and moral wasteland. Far from constructing a city of life and abundance, Pickstock argues, the modern world is a "necropolis," a city founded on the love of death. Modernity made an idol of this world; and this idol, like all idols, fails to deliver.
For Radical Orthodoxy, secularism's obvious failure makes the moment ripe for a resurgence of theology. Modern thought has exhausted itself in skepticism and nihilism, and people are looking for alternatives. Attempts to conserve modernity are no help, since postmodernism has exposed the fact that the Enlightenment was nihilistic from the beginning. Western civilization thus stands at a crossroads -- forced to choose, in Milbank's words, between "philosophy . . . or theology, Herod or the magi, Pilate or the God-Man."
The rejection of modernity and embrace of the medieval by Radical Orthodoxy is not nostalgic. Members of the group have in fact developed some of the key ideas of postmodernism within a theological framework. Pickstock offers a critique of deconstructionist Jacques Derrida in her 1998 volume After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, but she accepts the postmodern stress on language and on the indeterminacy of meaning. She agrees with Derrida, for example, that humans cannot exhaustively determine the meaning of anything; any final, all-encompassing grasp of the world is, as Derrida insists, forever "deferred." But we do not have to comprehend the world exhaustively if we live by faith. For those in Radical Orthodoxy, theology marks a path beyond postmodernism, not back to premodernism.
The members of Radical Orthodoxy have so far concentrated on the fight against secularism in Western intellectual life. As Milbank puts it, the first battle is to reestablish the intellectual stature of Christian theology. The theologians involved, however, insist that their agenda cannot be confined to the intellectual arena. Eventually, they hope to liberate theology from its second confinement -- the confinement of Christian faith and practice to the sphere of private devotion and worship. Radical Orthodoxy seeks a theology that is inherently political and social.
Reasserting the political role of theology requires a reassessment of the reasons for restricting theology in the first place. According to the traditional understanding of historians, theology was driven from public life to end the religious wars of the early modern period. With people killing each other over doctrine, the only way to achieve peace was to make sure that, however loudly Christians might thunder in the pulpit, in the open air they would be allowed to speak, if at all, in hushed and tolerant tones. As William Cavanaugh puts it in one of the best essays in Radical Orthodoxy, serious public religion "is perhaps the primary thing from which the modern state is meant to save us." Privatized religion is the price of social peace.
In this account, the secular state plays the role of savior: The prince ensures that Protestant lions will lie peaceably with Catholic lambs. Cavanaugh does not believe this, arguing that in reality the idea of "religion" as a set of privately held opinions or private devotional practices was invented in the early modern period -- with the help of theologians. Christianity necessarily has a public and social form, and, though the church does not run society, it necessarily has a political cutting edge.
Exactly what practical effect the Radical Orthodoxy movement might have on public life is unclear, even to members of the group. Politically, the members of the group tend to be leftish -- though not all of them, and none of them on every issue. Milbank himself is a self-described "Christian socialist," yet components of his brand of leftishness resonate with parts of the American right: decentralization of political power, suspicion of the modern state, and so on.
Despite these qualifications, two general features of the movement's political outlook are clear. First, whatever the specific positions taken, Radical Orthodoxy demands that political and economic questions be treated as theological questions, examined in the light of Scripture and Christian tradition. Arguments from economic or political efficiency might have some weight, but they are subordinate to moral and religious concerns. In keeping with this, many of the practical proposals represent efforts to reintegrate religious, social, and political life into a coherent whole. According to Pickstock, one of the inspirations for Radical Orthodoxy's political program is the "arts and crafts movement," the attempt led by Conrad Noel in the 1920s and 1930s to give liturgical and sacramental shape to social life in the slums of London.
Second, Radical Orthodoxy rejects Western democratic capitalism, calling it a product of secularism. Thus, the movement's members are reluctant to provide policy prescriptions, but instead offer proposals about how Christians can bypass the logic of capitalism. Milbank has suggested that for Christians, material gain should never be the sole motive of economic production or exchange. Christians must always consider the social and moral dimensions of what they make, buy, and sell. At a more general level, considerations of economic efficiency should be subordinate to the common good, defined theologically. For Milbank at least, this means a revival of the medieval "just price," which Milbank envisions would be formulated and enforced by boards composed of businessmen and government officials. Radical Orthodoxy also seeks to revive the idea of production as "craftsmanship," and Milbank advocates a restoration of a guild system to ensure that businesses are operated in a socially responsible way.
Radical Orthodoxy is very young, and this fact should enter into any evaluation of its political agenda. But even so, the absence of specifics is worrying. Christianity, as Milbank rightly argues, does in fact condemn in the strongest terms any economics that genuflects before Mammon. But prophetic warnings against the idolatry of materialism get us only so far. Without policy specifics, Milbank's economic proposals degenerate into little more than anticapitalist sloganizing.
Were Milbank's proposals for regulating prices implemented, for example, producers would be less efficient in delivering goods and services where they are needed, and the total volume of goods and services would be affected. Economics, of course, is about tradeoffs, and Milbank expects that in a Christian system both producers and consumers would be willing to accept a lower standard of living as the price of a more cooperative and cohesive society. Or, better, the pedagogy of his "Christian socialist order" would train people not to define standard of living in terms of median incomes and GDP.
This is fair enough, but it is not clear how Milbank calculates a trade-off between sheer material well-being and more nebulous social goods, or how he thinks a just price is to be determined. Along similar lines, a guild system could be used to suppress innovation that would benefit society at large, and guild decisions could be guided by politics or passion. Policy questions arise, in short, even when economics is treated as a theological enterprise.
The lack of specifics also leaves Radical Orthodoxy vulnerable to manipulation in the charged climate of church politics. R. R. Reno, who teaches theology at Creighton University and is active in the American Episcopal Church, worries that the slogans of Radical Orthodoxy might be used to promote destructive agendas in the mainline churches. "Harmony of difference," a central theme in Milbank's work that describes the relation of the Persons of the Trinity, could, Reno envisions, adorn banners of gay rights groups. From the other end of the political and ecclesiastical spectrum, Radical Orthodoxy's attack on secular society could serve as the basis for a theocratic agenda. The fact that it is not altogether clear how members of Radical Orthodoxy would respond to these developments illustrates the size of the gap they need to fill.
A more fundamental danger is that, contrary to Radical Orthodoxy's stated intentions, intellectual and cultural forces outside theology could master theology. This is largely a question about the Bible's role in Radical Orthodoxy. Bauerschmidt has expressed concern about the inattention to Scripture in Milbank's work, and Reno points out that Milbank often takes Derrida or Hegel, rather than Christian texts, as his starting point. This method gives Milbank a hearing within the academy, but it carries dangers of its own.
In this respect, it is instructive to compare the Cambridge-based Radical Orthodoxy with the work of Oliver O'Donovan at Oxford. O'Donovan is as insistent as Milbank that Christianity be incarnated in social and political order, but fully half of O'Donovan's recent The Desire of Nations is an effort to tease political concepts from the Bible. With Milbank, even as one marvels at his erudition, one wonders where his ideas are coming from and how they are rooted in fundamental Christian texts.
Radical Orthodoxy may well avoid these pitfalls, for it is impossible to tell in what direction the movement will ultimately grow. Whatever the group's future, Radical Orthodoxy at leasts deserves credit for attempting to release theology from its modern imprisonment by reminding us forcefully that, as Stanley Hauerwas once put it, "Christian theology is about how the world is."
Peter J. Leithart is a fellow in theology and literature at New St. Andrews College.