I have been struggling for months with how to articulate my unease with some of the critiques levelled by the RO camp against the “progressives” within the church. It began with James KA Smith’s polemics against Jim Wallis, which took my surprise when I read it, coming as it did on the heels of a blog post I read from JKA about the student protest against Bush at Calvin College. I had just been introduced to some of the basic assumptions of RO (if one can speak of RO thought at all with a term like “basic”) via my friend Eric Lee and from Jonathan Norman (who since has also become a friend whose church I have visited) via his blog interview with JKA. Before I made the connection between Jamie of the blog Fors Clavigera and James KA Smith, the author of Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, I read an earlier post from the Calvin College protest post’s author that severely criticized Jim Wallis. I began reading the book, and then I discovered that the book author and the blog author were the same.

I tend to agree with the insights that the RO project has been advancing. I am uncertain as to how this should play itself out in the relationship between “progressives” such as JIm Wallis and what James KA Smith refers to as “Sojourner types”, and those who have found in RO an unavoidable welcome recfognition of the centrality of ecclesiology, and ultimately, a theology of the People of God. I tend to see much a much richer shared love of church between these two groups than does James KA Smith. I also am concerned about what seems to me to be a danger of alienation between these groups, since I cannot help but believe that the two share a common telos, even though the “structures” these groups envision or work within are of two different strategies. The “political stage” which is in the public’s eye is one which RO identifies as captive to the liberal nation state, and operates out of a modernist, Enlightenment, ultimately “natural theology”. I can see this. I can see the cause for concern for those who place an undue amount of hope or personal/spiritual development in the political process AS IS.

But it is here where my caution enters. I have expressed at several points that RO and its insights are a bit of “hidden treasure”, especially the recogntion that such a thing as “liberal democracy” is such a modernist heresy. It is not so apparent to many who have spent their lives under the assumption that their tireless efforts to “infiltrate” and “overturn” contemporary political corruption and skewed priorities and seek to encourage and enable a movement that has, as its goal, a faitful reading of Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God. That TRUE justice and freedom and “morality” is based on a city whose builder and maker is God.

The rhetoric I hear being hurled at these “Sojourner types” is often not very conducive to a recognition and affirmation of the common telos that exists between them, or for a trust that God’s call to his people will not continue to bring us “further in” to a response as a people that will transform our every effort; both that of the “ecclesially-based expression and celebratrion, as well as the efforts to “tell the world of an alternate vision” and to ensure that the realities of the failures of the system are brought to light so that more will have the knowledge that will enable them to say NO and perhaps work against the continued expansion of evil empires.

I feel like I could go on and on, but maybe I should stop there and see what this might bring up by way of response, further questioning, both positive and negative. Let me add that I wholly subscribe to the Hauerwasian “The role of the church is to BE the church”. This is the bottom line structure for all “strategy”. The strategy must of necessity emante from discernment, whcih can only take place in the company of the comiitted; in the midst of the People of God. We’re not “building a movement”, but PARTICIPATING in God’s movement.