Or “RadOx” as AKMA refers to it at the disseminary. Eric is taking a course of intense reading and discussion form his pastor (John Wright) called, oddly enough, Radical Orthodoxy. I have read of Milbank in Hauerwas’ writings, and it seems as though I may yet get interested in this dude , too.
AKMA, at disseminary.org, links to the site below for info on Radical Orthodoxy
KtB – God’s Own Knowledge, page one
In describing John Milbank, considered one of if not THE original RadOx (he has a book , Radical Orthodoxy, and Theology and Social Theory ):
Milbank, on the other hand, doesn’t seem in person radical, or orthodox, or like a man who delights in a bit of chaos. But insofar as there’s an earthly creator of Radical Orthodoxy, it’s this sandy-haired, red-faced, British professor sipping cranberry juice in a coffeehouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the air is much too humid for his taste, and where an Anglican church worthy of the name can hardly be found.
He takes the word “radical” for what it means—back to the roots. Those carry him toward orthodoxy. The Gospels. Holy Ghost power. Milbank, who teaches at the University of Virginia, scoffs at anthropological readings of Jesus that reduce the resurrection to nothing but a metaphor for Freudian longings. Christ died for your sins, he insists, and then he rose from the dead. Angels move among us. Satan is real.
But that’s where his agreement with fundamentalism ends. “Fundamentalism reduces Christianity to a tight set of propositions,” he said, dismissing his Bible-thumping American brethren. “Fundamentalists tend not to think there’s a strong connection between the way you put things and the content.” For Radical Orthodoxy, “the message and the means are indivisible.”
A little more:
Milbank began reading the French theorists of postmodernism. To him, the worldview of the medieval church and that of postmodernism looked an awful lot alike. Both denied the primacy of fact. Both considered symbols—those of the liturgy or those of pop culture—just as real as that which they stood for.
But postmodernism leads to nihilism: What, it asks, can really be known? Premodernism offered an answer, but one it insisted was radically unknowable: God. If God is the root of everything, the thinking goes, God is beyond definition. To define God would be to use terms God created to explain their creator. As postmodern theory, an unknowable entity that precedes existence reduces all being to self-reference. But as faith, just the contemplation of such an idea reveals at least a small part of a chain of interconnected ideas and things—an infinitely vast outline of the divine.
James K.A. Smith has also written a book, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping A Post-secular Theology