Some summaries and quotes from Chapter One in defining and describing “What is RO?”
While RO may have a program, we should not therefore conclude that it has a singular agenda built “on a discrete edifice that purports to be a stronghold”. Rather RO describes a certain spirit that is “a call to look again at things one has too often assumed”. As such, it is not a system, method , or formula but “a hermeneutic disposition and a style of metaphysical vision”.
quoted phrases from Pickstock’s Radical Orthodoxy and the Meditations of Time
It is orthodox insofar as it seeks to be unapologetically confesisonal anbd Christian; it is radical insofar as it seeks to critically retrieve premodern roots.
I would also ad that it is radical becuase it is totally “other”; different from the mainstream; often “unknowable” in any substantial way by the uninitiated, a nd certainly unintelligible or “foolishness” to them. So radical is less for me “pre-modern” and much more so “of a different order, such as Milbank’s postulation of an “ontology of peace”.
Smith says that Catherine Pickstock, as well as Milbank and Graham Ward (who also has been quoted saying some intriguing things –intriguing in a good way, not a “curious” or “suspect” way—-)
all are “wary of designating RO as a school or movement in any kind of institutional sense.
Pickstock emphasizes that “radical orthodoxy has never been seen itself as an exclusive movement, but rather as a loose tendency”
Ward describes it as “a certain theological sensibility, as sensibility shared to a greater or lesser degree with several other contemporary theologians”
Smith summarizes it as: “A “hermeneutic disposition and a style of metaphysical vision; it is not so much a thing or place as a task”
Smith concludes:
Basically, RO can be taken as potentially embracing all those who espouse a basically orthodox theology, but do not regard themselves as simply ecclesiastical or political traditionalists. The point, however , is to work out just what this position involves in the face of modern and postmodern thought.
The label Radical Orthodoxy is effective in naming a certain spirit of theologically driven cultural engagement.
Introducing RO, p.67
Chapter Two looks like I may have several more comments to make, as it promises to explore what the engagements look like.
This is a great summary post. Thanks for reminding me about the “tendency,” because it now reminds me of how David Bentley Hart’s book, The Beauty of the Infinite, very well fits into RO thought not because it has the “Radical Orthodoxy series” thing at the top (it actually doesn’t), but because he writes about the same things (and he writes rather beautifully, at that!).
I’m still only on page 140 or so of Milbank’s Theology & Social Theory, so I hope to better understand this stuff in the next couple of weeks when I catch up on reading (even though the class actually ends next week).
I think I might put off my post on univocity of being until after I read Genealogy of Nihilism because that is what that book is all about as it traces much of this univocal system back to John Duns Scotus.
I was quite humbled when Pastor John mentioned to me last night that he hopped over to my blog and saw my post on Milbank and told me that I totally “got it” … so, oddly, I guess it is possible to understand what Milbank is saying without understanding completely all of his esoteric-ness and namedropping.