Radical Orthodoxy: a Conversation 29
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Ii I RADICAL ORTHODOXY: A CONVERSATION 29 universe. The utter difference, the utter gratuity, of God's action was m-e:rlaid, and that Chapter 1 led to what you see as two very ambiguous effects, intellectually and culturally: the Reformation, which tries to re-ensbrine the difference of God, but does so at the expense of a robust idea of participation in the divine life; and thenthe Enlightenment, where a challenge is placed against unaccountable authority and tradition, precisely because authority and tradition are seen as :inner worldly phenomena. From this springs Rupert Shortt (ed.) a strong current of unbelief conceived as rebellion against the celestial headmaster. A prime villain in your narrative is Duns Scotus. The speci£c charge against him is that he divorced philosophy from theology by declaring that being could be Radical Orthodoxy: a conversation considered independently from the question whether one is thinking about created or creating being. Eventually this gave rise to an ontology and epistemology abstracted from theology, In the late Middle Ages and early modernity philosophers became preoccupied with the pw-suit of such an ontology and epistemology, and the Refonnation failed to halt the trend. On this readiug of history, the sundering of philosophy and theology meant that theology lost its concern with reality as a whole. It fragmented, grounding itself on certain revealed facts, and issued in the authoritarianism associated both with Protestant Biblicism and ultramontane Roman Catholicism. Western culture thereby lost the patristic and early medieval sense that reason and revelation are not opposed concepts. As you put it in Radical Orthodox.y, your programmatic collection of essays: In the Church Fathers or the early scholastics both faith and reason are :included in the more generic framework of participation :in the mind of SHORTT: No survey of contemporary Anglophone theology can leave Radical Ortho God- To reason truly one must be already illuminated by God, while doxy out of the picture. Though it has divided the critics, at times sharply, there's revelation itself is but a higher measure of such illumination.l ready agreement about the momentousness of the movement inaugurated by you, John, m association with Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward and others, in the I hope this introduction helps clear the ground a little, especially over the question early 1990s. We'll naturally need to consider the cavils in some detail, but I'd like of why the movement seeks to harness the apparently opposed categories of to set the scene with a stripped-down accoilllt of your work 'radicalism' and 'orthodoxy'. John, I wonder if you could take up the story by saying Close to the heart of Radical Orthodoxy Jies the immodest, but in your view something about your background and evolution. vital, belief that Christian thought has to give a plausible and self-confident account of the whole world. You are saying that unless theologycan evoke a coherent universe MILBANK: I th:ink your report touches on the heart of what we're concerned with. in which other things fit, then it becomes a dreary kind of ecclesiastical house We're not necessarily putting forward any one specific Christian metaphysic, but keeping or settles down into what Donald MacKinnon used to call ecclesiological we definitely believe that in the end Christianity is going to be unconvincing if it's fundamentalli;m. One just talks about the Church, And although Radical Ortho not connected to an entire coherent :intellectual vision. Not a totalised vision :in doxy is sometimes thought of as a very Church-dominated or :in-house discourse, it which all the details are set rigidly, but a vision in which all religious belief and could be argued that the opposite is true. practice connects with, say, nature, or the way you read history, or the way you act But how can this be done in a mghly secu1arclimate llke ours? Your answer derives :in society. And I think there is a fundamental conviction among all the people who from the argument that much modern atheism is parasitic on bad theology. In par :inaugurated the movement that there's somethmg unreal about a lot of quite sin ticular, you mailltain that somewhere in the late Middle Ages the whole doctrine of cere religious belief and practice at the moment, that too many people are looking God went badly wrong, because God got sucked :into the business of running the at nature and society in a basically secular way, with spirituality tacked on. It's -- ------------------------------------------------------ 30 RUPERT SHORTT RADICAL ORTHODOXY: A CONVERSATION 31 therefore right to point to Donald MacKinnon's suspicion of pietism as in fact a Wittgenstein, and not sufficiently prepared for a full-blooded engagement with kind of secular phenomenon: this has had a very profound effect on me. In an metaphysicS. It was not that we wanted to abandon the linguistic concerns - far almost Victorian manner he wanted to link Christian doctrine with a rigorous from it- but more that we felt that they were being dealt with in a manner that philosophy, and was very :impatient of shortcuts and pretences. implicitly assumed that language or grammatical structures operated rather like a set of Kantian pre-given transcendental categories. This meant that a modem SHORTT: He didn't teach you, did he? predominance of epistemology over ontology - of lmowledge as lmowledge of our mode of knowing rather than of things known - was still surreptitiously :in place. MlLBk'JK: He didn't. And in fact I've probably exchanged about two words with To the contrary, one can argue that if one takes thelinguistic character of thought Donald MacKinnon in my life, but I went to his lectures and I would say that in an yet more seriously and recognises that the linguistic mediation of reality always era when the norm in many theology faculties was disbelief in the Trinity and the exceeds any determinations of a priori structures, :including those which try to fix incarnation, he successfully sustained an older kind of High Church tradition that what language is capable of, then it becomes at least possible to suppose that our �d a profound understanding of orthodoxy. He was also linked, albeit critically, mode of knowing is continuously reshaped by what there is to be known. The WIth many of the groups in the 1930s like the Christendom movement, and he was 'question of metaphysics', in MacKinnon's phrase, then resurfaces in a way that does one of the last people really to understand the logic of Anglican divinity - in so far not take the 'critical' character of the Kantian critique for granted. as this has truly existed. SHORTT: This was what propelled you to take Continental thought more seriOusly, SHORTT': "What about your earlier career? You studied for a while at Westcott House given its greater concern with ontology in the wake of figures such as Hegel and the Cambridge theolOgical college, in the early 1980s, but decided against ordina: Heidegger? tion. While there you were taught by Rowan Williams and another patristics expert you've identified as an important influence, Mark Santer. This was followed MILBANK: Yes. And although we didn't want to baptise some secular theory or other, 2 by the publication in 1992 of your book TheoloBJ and Soda1 Theory, one of the as so much twentieth-century theology has done, we still found it very interesting foundational texts of the Radical Orthodoxy movement. that postmodemism was calling humanism into question by suggesting that there's very little mileage in trying to explain things in terms of purely human concerns or .MILBANK: Yes. After Westcott I did a doctorate on Vieo, and later went to Lancaster what human beings imagme is going on - including Kantian attempts to have a University as the Christendom Fellow. It was a very exciting period to be in the stable grasp of the processes and criteria of human understanding. Instead you have religious studies faculty there, and I also interacted with perhaps the best sociology to look at wider inhuman forces at work, at that which flows through us, operates department in the country at that time - people like Scott Lash, John Urry and in, -with and despite us. And, while these theories are obviously often nihilistic and Russell Keat. I wrote Theology and Sodal Theory at Lancaster. Radical Orthodoxy naturalistic rather than religious, nevertheless there's a certain parallel between extends the approach taken in that book, where I was callinginto question the idea them and the theolOgical desire to go beyond mere humanism. that the right way forward, if you're relating theology to other diSciplines, is to see Perhaps even more importantly, I think that many postmodem theories - per them as having their particular areas of expertise, and theology as having its O'wn haps in the wake of modem physiCS - have questioned the idea that you can get discrete sphere of competence, and then to bring them together. My argument was determinate meaning and clear certainty in any human field. So there has been a that the social sciences, if you dig into their history, may have already taken all strong insistence all the time that when you think you've got definite meaning, or kinds of theolOgical or anti-theological decisions that you need to be aware of. And some clearly grasped area of value, you're deluding yourself, and in fact you're conversely, I was influenced by Nicholas Lash's view that theology doesn't have its suppressing the questions, the ambigUities that always remain. And part of our case own special subject matter: it's much more a question of the way in which the involves the claim that theology is on the side of .indeterminacy, and of a certain epiphany of God makes a difference to everything.