The big wide world

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4 responses to “The big wide world”

1. June 16, 2005

   Joshie

   Even reading that essay ABOUT Milbank makes my head hurt. I still for the life of me don’t understand what Radical Orthodoxy is besides a dislike of the modern secular/religious arrangement. There doesn’t seem to be much of a positive programme for reform there. But maybe I don’t get it because my eyes start to glaze over after about five minutes of reading about it.

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2. June 16, 2005

   Russell Arben Fox

   Joshie,

   Just be glad you didn’t try to read my whole response; it’s even longer and more convoluted.

   If Radical Orthodoxy could be boiled down to a single sentence, it would probably be: “Seeking a world in which social relations are defined by Christian obligations, rather than individual calculation.” That pretty much captures their belief in a transcedent, orthodox interpretation of Christian truth, their conviction that our politics ought to be measured against such, and that the world of the marketplace and the interest group–in other words, modern liberal society–is a complete failure on those terms.

   Do they have a “positive program for reform”? Nor really. Milbank, in the essay I’m responding to, talks a lot like Wendell Berry or Bill McKibben: he wants less global trade, more worker-owned cooperative businesses, less homogenization in our industries, more small-scale economics, etc. Milbank, at least, says that a revolution won’t get us there, but otherwise doesn’t exactly lay out a plan of action. I don’t think that makes their ideas useless; from an intellectual point of view, at least, I think it’s important to have theologians arguing that socialism is (or at least should be understood as potentially being) both conservative and Christian, rather than solely a progressive and Marxist ideal.

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3. June 16, 2005

   Eric Lee

   I just finished my Radical Orthodoxy class today. We finished by reading David B. Hart’s Beauty of the Infinte. I think it’s definitely a helpful critique and their emphasis on ressourcement (getting back to the pre-modern sources but still living in a modern world so not actually anti-modern) is good as well.

   I’m not theologically trained at all, so Milbank is about as soggy as it gets, although while Hart is complex at times as well, the way writes is rather beautiful and it ends up making more sense.

   But anyway, I think the three biggest critique of RO that I resonate with are:

   1. It’s too academically-oriented, written by academic snobs (not all of them) who really don’t have much of an interest with actually engaging the mainstream evangelical culture. I have no idea how I am to take this stuff into my parent’s uber-patriotic church, because I don’t think the language has really been provided there, yet.

   2. RO rarely, if ever connects with theological ethics except for putting Hauerwas and Yoder in the footnotes here and there. Hart’s Beauty of the Infinite would be great if he connected to a Yoderian ethic (there’s actually a bizarre section in BoI where he goes off on pacifists, which is truly bewildering because the entire book is about an ontology of peace and the Peace that is God).

   3. Jesus? They don’t talk about him much, even though their language is very, very trinitarian (which I think is good).

   …well, those are my mostly uninformed two cents for now. I wasn’t actually taking this class for credit, and I’m woefully behind in the reading at the moment (I’m in the middle of a swamp right now a.k.a. Milbank’s TST).

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4. June 16, 2005

   Lee

   Rusty Reno has criticized Milbank and RO generally for making Jesus into more of an abstract idea than an actual person. See: http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0002/articles/reno.html

   Also, I think there are significant differences between Hart and the ROers. Hart is Eastern Orthodox for one and his thinking is very rooted in the Eastern fathers (as BotI makes abundantly clear!), whereas Milbank et al. are Anglo-Catholics.

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