Is Smith saying then, that there is no such thing as “speaking TO modernity”? How, then, do we “engage” that type of thinking? Are we justified in presenting our alternative views on the nature of reality first and foremeost as an attack on the assumptions they have made? There certainly IS a place for confrontation , but how does one “invite them to the table” instead of growling at them when they come near?

If the church’s call is to BE the church, then how do we do any kind of convincing prior to the ultimate and eventual neccessity of the modernist pilgrim (or “prisoner”) to actually experience what church is by throwing one’s hat in the ring and getting into the living of that story with that community? How do we convince them to “come near”? Smith’s critique of Wallis as “being content to give a ‘moral’ civics lesson” is also a little contemptuous sounding; speaking as one who considers Wallis to be one of my own “cloud of witnesses”.

There is a sense in which I take this critique with a kind of “damned if you do, damed if you don’t” type of exasperation. It seems a bit much to be overly insistent on immediately changing all of our language at the drop of a hat. After all, Wallis’ big service, I think, to the American Church is that he has indeed challenged , in an “accessible” way (as JKA Smith has done for the RO movement as a more accessible-than-Milbank interpreter and cartographer of the landscape) the Constantinian characteristics of the American Church. I would MUCH rather have Wallis out there telling us about Constantine and empire than for the Amnerican church to simply go merrily on its way with no word of rebuke, and have the majority of Americans as never having heard of such a thing as “progressive-thinking Christians”.

Sure, I am more than willing (even excited and eager) to travel with Smith as he exposes some modernity for me, and how theologians have adopted this, and which ones (like Hauerwas) have have challenged it and suggested alternatives. I don’t think I would have even been to a place where I could even hear Smith’s challenge, much less understand it, if it were not for the likes of Clarence Jordan, Tony Campolo, and Jim Wallis. I think there are would not be as many who have come to the RO table (including me) to sit at the feet of these new teachers if were not for these “Constantinians of the left” like Wallis who have articulated the possibilities for a radically altrernative Christianity (and as it is was always intended to be).