This question, asked as a prelude to dialogue, engagement, or often confrontation between modes of thought and ontologies, is a good way to describe what much of my journey through the first two chapters of Introducing Radical Orthodoxy

Movable Theoblogical: The Church IS a cultural critique

I want to return to the previous post (linked above) , and especially to the comments where Eric responded (who was one of those whose reading of IRO and linking to the interview of Smith was a big factor in my becoming attracted to RO) about my concerns over Smith’s polemic in criticism of Jim Wallis.

Today as I read in chapter two, I came across this footnote in note 80 on p.83), citing his frustration with Michael Horton on his polemics against Frei, Lindbeck, and Hauerwas. It seems that here is an excellent parallel to my own feelings on his own critiques of Wallis. He says:

Me thinks he doth protest too much, because , on the one hand, he senses how close his proposal is to their project but, on the other hand, feels some need to say that he is not one of them.

Bingo! I can relate, big time. I , too, sense how close my “proposal” or “approach” is to the RO project and to Smith’s narrative on it, and yet, Smith feels some need to say that Wallis is “not one of us”. Further, the latter part of chapter 2, Smith makes a case for the conversation between Reformed Traditions and RO, saying that “RO can profit from an engagment with the Reformed” and also going as far to say “The Reformed traditon has a long history of reflection on a number of themes on which RO has only begun to reflect”. Bingo again. So too, has Sojourners had a long history (including their forebearers in earlier “social movements of grace” a reference to his phrase “socialsim by grace” on p.80, just before his discussion on the Reformed tradition’s contributions).

I will be posting more on this—- I also want to explore the role of apologetic in RO as Smith sees it. I tend to see more from Milbank that tends more toward an appreciation of (what do we now call “secular” in this discussion?) …. the “non-religious(?)” or “non-overtly religious(?)” society, particularly those who have what I would call a “less selfish” concept of justice; IOW, ones who see some merit in considering the “other”, and thus have a keen sense of injustice done to groups of people, in the name of the “common good”; or “some concept of what it means to “do unto others AS YOU WOULD HAVE them do unto you”. What would RO’s engagement with people such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn be like? I see much conguency in RO with the attention Zinn pays to “alternative readings” of history and the recognition of the forces that “Manufacturing Consent” that Chomsky narrates.

But even more than this, the question that is the title of this post is the one with which I read RO, for it is those sensibilities that I have gained from the likes of Sojourners that I first heard in Smith’s articulations* of what RO is attempting to do that have brought me to the RO table to see what lies within that communion of saints.

And so there is a dialectic that can also be found between the movements like Sojourners, and the conversations with theology and its “distinctively Christian” view of the world chaaracteristic of Radical Orthodoxy.

I am trying to identify what longer tradition is that to which Sojourners woudl find its lineage. Wallis often has said that he is a 19th century evangelical, born in the wrong century (referring to how many early ebangelicals were among the church-base for some siginificant social revolutions, such as abolition (Finney) and Civil Rights (MLK). In contrast, God’s Politics came about as a response and a critique of American churches and their “Constantinian” tendencies (the fact that Smith seems was wanting to put Wallis in that category is one matter in which I still have much to say by way of response, and call for clarification). GP was also a critique of the severely truncated “values” concept being trumpteted about by the Religious Right. Wallis also expalined how his oppostion to a “Religious Right” does not then make him a proponent of a “Religious Left”. Wallis is NOT a theological liberal. While he is identified in the media as a “social liberal”, this is not the way he ultimately sees himself. He sees himself as much more of a “truly orthodox” Christian which involves a radical questioning of the entire system of economics and militarism, and the injustices and inequities that cuases, and fights against these and FOR a radical reading of the Kingdom of God.

I also see an affinity in RO AND in Sojourners for a theology very much like that of Matthew Fox’s Creation Spirituality, and its emphases upon the pre-Western mystics and on historical and contemporary eco-theologians suach as the Rhineland mystics and present day folks such as Wendell Berry (a theme also shown deep respect and adoption by Tony Campolo and Brian McLaren).

I am hoping Tony Campolo is not out of the theology writing loop for too much longer. I am much indebted to him as well for his Sociology of Chriastianity (he doesn’t have a book on that but he touches and expounds upon such themes in all of his books and most of his apeeches and even many of his sermons).

*also becuase of what Eric has derived from it that he has hared with us in the blogosphere, as well as Jonathon Norman (who happens to live right here in Nashville — I’m gonna have to look up the dude)