Introducing Radical Orthodoxy

A. Smith James K.

Description

Although God is making a comeback in our society, popular culture still takes its orders from the Enlightenment, a movement that denied faith a prominent role in society. Today, many are questioning this elevation of reason over faith. How should Christians respond to a secular world that continues to push faith to the margins? While there is still no consensus concerning what a postmodern society should look like, James K. A. Smith suggests that the answer is a reaffirmation of the belief that Jesus is Lord over all. Smith traces the trends and directions of Radical Orthodoxy, proposing that it can provide an old-but-new theology for a new generation of Christians. This book will challenge and encourage pastors and thoughtful laypeople interested in learning more about currents in contemporary theology.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian theology
• Fundamentalism

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441206114
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

© 2004 by James K. A. Smith
Published by Baker Academic a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.bakeracademic.com
and
Paternoster Press an imprint of Authentic Media 9 Holdom Avenue, Bletchley, Milton Keyes, MK1 1QR, UK www.authenticmedia.co.uk/paternoster
Ebook edition created 2010
Ebook corrections 11.24.2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-0611-4
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 1-84227-350-7
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are author’s translation.
Scripture quotations identified NASB are from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE ®. Copyright © The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.
To Grayson, whose joy and exuberance invite me to laugh out loud and sing along
Contents
Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Foreword by John Milbank
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: A Theological Cartography
Between Cambridge and Amsterdam: Outline of a Project
A Reader’s Guide: For the Perplexed
Part 1 Orientation
1 Inhabiting the Post-secular: Why Radical Orthodoxy? Why Now?
Mapping the Postmodern Terrain: From Tübingen to Cambridge
Augustine in Paris: Sources and Influences
Defending the Secular: A Survey of Criticisms
Inhabiting the Post-secular
2 Elements of a Manifesto: The Movements of Radical Orthodoxy
Defining Radical Orthodoxy: School, Movement, or Sensibility?
A Symphony in Five Movements
A Reformed Rendition
3 Radical Orthodoxy’s “Story” of Philosophy: From Plato to Scotus and Back
Radical Orthodoxy’s History of Philosophy: Of Narratives, Tall Tales, and Meta-history
Beginning from the Middle: The Modern Turn (to Nihilism)
The Scotus Case
From Univocity to Nihilism
Once upon a Time There Was Plato
Platonism/Christianity
The New Plato
Back to Augustine
Postmodern Augustines: Caputo and Derrida
A Radically Orthodox Augustine: Ward and Milbank
A New Aquinas: Graced Nature
Part 2 Navigation
4 Postmodern Parodies: The Critique of Modernity and the Myth of the Secular
Modernity as Heresy
Modernity as Parody
Statecraft: A Secular Ecclesia
Divine Cities: A Secular Kingdom
More Modernity: On the So-Called Postmodern Turn
5 Possibilities for the Post-secular: Faith, Reason, and Public Engagement
The Pretended Autonomy of Secular Thought
Secular Theologies
Scholasticism in Theology
Faith and Reason Revisited: The Aquinas Case
The Traditional Thomas
The New, RO Aquinas
Doubting (RO’s) Thomas: Criticisms
Philosophy and Theology: Anatomy of a Relation
The End of Apologetics
Inverting the Emperor’s Tale: Political Spaces for Confessional Voices
6 Participation and Incarnation: Materiality, Liturgy, and Sacramentality
Suspending the Material: On Participation
Counter-Ontology 1: Materialism and Transcendence
Counter-Ontology 2: Difference and Peace
A Reformed Caveat: The Goodness of Creation and Plato Revisited
The Goodness of Creation
Eschatology
The Integrity of Creation and the Specter of Occasionalism
A Case Study: Leibniz-Deleuze and the Integrity of Creation
Planes of Immanence: Deleuze’s Leibniz and a “Hymn to Creation”
Giving the Creator His Due: Leibniz on Nature and Creation
Creation as Miracle: The Critique of Occasionalism
Against the Idol of Nature
Integrity, Immanence, and the Folds of Creation: Implications for a Creational Ontology
Affirming Immanence in a Creational Ontology
Meaning, Expression, and Transcendence
Foldings and Enkapsis: Dooyeweerd, Deleuze, and Leibniz
The Beauty of God: Liturgy and Aesthetics
7 Cities of God: Cultural Critique and Social Transformation
The Church as Social Theory
A Christian Sociology
Redeeming Community: The Church as Polis
Against Ethics: Christian Morality and the Antithesis
Erotic Subjects: A Postmodern Augustinianism
Technologies of Desire: Church, State, Market
RO’s Church: Questions and Reservations
A Creational Church? Questions about the State as Ecclesia and the Church as Polis
A Church without Boundaries?
Conclusion: Taking Radical Orthodoxy to Church
Bibliography
Back Cover
Foreword
Authors frequently claim that they have been misread—and the world is right to react to this claim with a measure of skepticism. But in the present case, those authors associated with Radical Orthodoxy will surely not be able to register any such protest. Jamie Smith has done us all an immense service by presenting in clear, direct terms the central ideas, diagnoses, and projects associated with this movement.
To my mind this exercise has proved invaluable for four main reasons. First of all, Smith has effectively dispelled the notion that serious ruptures exist within the movement by showing how all the main authors move within the same horizon and operate within the same ethos, which certainly does not spring from the thoughts of one person alone or even three people alone. A certain shared core now emerges more clearly to view, although this is fortunately compatible with many diverging emphases and differences of opinion.
Second, Smith corrects many common caricatures of RO positions—especially regarding the ontology of peace, nihilism, Scotism, the role of philosophy, and the attitude toward modernity. Those wanting fast access to a sense of what RO is all about can safely turn to this volume. This is not to say that there are not some areas where Smith’s account could be improved—for example, concerning RO’s attitude toward analogy, theology, Platonism, and the doctrine of the fall—but such reservations are inevitable in the face of this sort of exercise. It remains the case that Smith has done a remarkably good job of providing an accessible synthesis.
Third, by simplifying without excessive distortion, Smith helps considerably in moving the debate forward. One might suppose that “a [relatively] popular guide” is mainly about communication and education. To the contrary, the exercise of trying to convey complex ideas in simple terms often helps one to see just what is really being claimed and what is really at stake. In the present case, Smith’s synthesis of many different writers articulates a collective RO position in a way not so directly defined hitherto.
In the fourth place, Smith’s evangelical-Dooyeweerdian reception of RO tends to bear out RO’s claim that it is, indeed, an ecumenical theology that can speak to several different Christian communities. Smith is refreshingly prepared to let the RO perspective correct the one he has inherited, even though of course and quite validly he wishes to put forward his own Reformed correctives to the more generally Catholic perspectives of the main RO authors.
Perhaps what emerges most strongly from this book is the sense of a new theological mood at the outset of the twenty-first century, a mood that includes but extends beyond RO. Smith appropriately describes this as a refusal of dualisms, especially those of nature and grace and of matter and spirit. In the case of the first pair, it seems as if, in retrospect, much twentieth-century theology showed a bias to one pole or the other. A stress on the primacy of nature, the universal, and a neutral philosophy characterized the world of “correlationist” theologies, which to most young scholars today appears now like a bizarre academic twilight zone inhabited by the intellectually craven and impotent. Yet conversely, over-fidesitic theologies, tending to see theology as having its own special, positive domain of concern with belief and salvation, appear now to leave the Christian with too little guidance in other domains and to hand these over to secular authority. This seems especially unsatisfactory in a world in which science, politics, the arts, and social behavior are taking increasingly novel and sometimes bizarre directions. In this situation, the thinking Christian requires a response that is not simply pure (supposed) biblicist condemnation on the one hand nor flaccid accommodation on the other.
What we are seeing, then, is the stepping back of theology into the public domain and a consideration of its relation to the whole of human thought and action. This new mood is not easily characterized as either “liberal” or “neo-orthodox.” It rather occupies the domain of what Balthasar called “the suspended middle” between grace-imbued faith and natural understanding. This domain for him and for Henri de Lubac was that of the paradoxical “natural desire for the supernatural.” If such a desire affects all human existence, then all human knowledge is subject, under grace, to theological modification and qualification. But equally, if we can only, in this life, weakly understand our orientation to beatitude in terms of its fulfillment of our natures beyond their immediate givenness, then theological exploration never is done with natural, finite human understanding. To put this double point briefly: Our knowledge of things of this world can always be qualified by knowledge of God as he is in himself (given by revelation), but equally, our knowledge of God, since it is analogically mediated, is always and only given through a shift in our understanding of the things of this world.
Such an approach implies a synthesis—but always an uneasy and possibly aporetic synthesis—between theology and philosophy (understood as the coordination of all merely natural enquiries). The nouvelle théologi