Review Essay What Hath Cambridge to Do with Azusa Street? Radical
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PNEUMA: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Volume 25, No. 1, Spring 2003 S P Review Essay S What Hath Cambridge To Do With Azusa Street? Radical Orthodoxy and Pentecostal Theology in Conversation James K.A. Smith While not quite a Barthian bombshell, John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory did land with considerable impact on contemporary theol- ogy.1 In retrospect, it was this time that became the manifesto for an agenda described as “Radical Orthodoxy.”2 Dubbed a “Cambridge move- ment”3 and proudly British (largely Anglican), 4 RO has turned theologi- cal attention back to the UK, and has even garnered signicant journalistic 1 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Themes suggested in this work are further developed in the essays col- lected in Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Of particular interest to PNEUMA readers will be his essay on the Holy Spirit and Trinity, “The Second Difference,” pp. 171-93. There he suggests that “[p]erhaps theology awaits its complementation by a ‘theopneumatics’” (171). 2 John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (New York: Routledge, 1999). In this essay, I will refer to the movement by the abbreviation RO, and this particular volume as RO. Routledge now publishes a Radical Orthodoxy Series; the rst volumes include D. Stephen Long, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market ; Graham Ward, Cities of God ; and John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas . 3 In the “Acknowledgements” of RO, it is described as a Cambridge movement in both a present sense (including authors who are current teachers and students at Cambridge, or have past connections) and as a heritage (hearkening back to the “Cambridge Platonists”). 4 In particular, Anglicans “of a High Church persuasion” (see RO, xi). This, of course, would be a point of conversation with Pentecostals. But it is also an issue with Catholic interlocutors: one of Laurence Paul Hemming’s consistent questions is whether and how the adherents of RO can lay claim to the vast resources of Catholic thought but, arbitrar- ily he would suggest, reject a Roman Catholic view of the church and role of the magis- terium. See Hemming, “Introduction” to Radical Orthodoxy?: ACatholic Enquiry , ed. Laurence Paul Hemming (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 7-8. Below I will argue that such a High Church ecclesiology is not required by the central movements of RO, though it does demand Pentecostal reection on the importance of liturgy and sacramentality . ©2003 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden pp. 97-114 PNEUMA: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Volume 25, No. 1, Spring 2003 attention.5 Engaging contemporary currents in philosophy and critical the- ory, particularly new French thought, 6 RO has “taken on” postmodernism in a dual sense: on the one hand, it is a theological movement that speaks in the idiom of contemporary continental thought, engaging in theologi- cal reection in the language of French phenomenology and critical the- ory; on the other hand, it has “taken on” such thought in a polemical sense—seeking to demonstrate the paucity of postmodern “nihilism”7 and then recover an alternative, Christian vision by returning to decidedly pre- modern sources. So while RO speaks the language of postmodernism— at times to the point of obscurantism, some have charged—it is at root a critique of postmodernism, or at least certain incarnations of such. So why would a largely Catholic and Anglican, “High Church,” post- modern theological movement rooted in Cambridge Divinity be of inter- est to Pentecostal theologians and scholars? If we could stage a conversation between RO and Pentecostal theology, what would there be to talk about? What language would we speak in? Would we need translators? And might there not be some deep-seated differences that might prevent the inter- locutors from ever coming to the table? Wouldn’t representatives of RO think Pentecostals are the quintessential example of a theology rooted in 5 Coverage has included Jay Tolson, “Academia’s Getting Its Religion Back,” in U.S. News & World Report (August 28, 2000); Jeff Sharlet, “Theologians Seek to Reclaim the World with God and Postmodernism,” Chronicle of Higher Education (June 23, 2000); and David Ford, “British Theology: Movements and Churches,” Christian Century (April 19, 2000), 467-74 (the concluding installment of a very helpful three-part series on British theology). 6 In this respect, Graham Ward, a key gure in RO, has put the entire theological com- munity (both teachers and students) in his debt by providing two important texts for under- standing the relationship between theology and postmodernis m. His Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory , 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000) provides a compre- hensive overview of major currents in contemporary thought, particularly French theory, with lucid expositions of gures such as the usual suspects of Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Ricoeur, and Levinas, as well as less discussed but important thinkers such as Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Michel de Certeau. This text is nicely complemented by Ward’s edited volume, The Postmodern God: ATheological Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), which provides selections of primary texts from these gures, introduced by lead- ing scholars in the eld. Together, the two volumes would provide the perfect foundation for advanced undergraduate or graduate seminars in Contemporary Theology or Theology and Postmodernism. His other important book, Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theo- logy (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995), is a careful, specialized study of similarities between Barth’s account of language and revelation and contemporary theories of language operative in Derrida, Levinas, and other continental thinkers. As he concludes, the book is meant to function as “the basis for a postmodern theology of the Word” (256). 7 This is RO’s consistent characterization of “postmodernism,” including gures such as Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard. Though this is not the proper context to develop my argument fully, I would just note that such an evaluation could be challenged. 98.