Here’s a very interesting article from British Christian writer (and self-described “post-Anglican”) Theo Hobson on what he calls the “ecclesiological fundamentalism” of contemporary theology, specifically among “postliberals” and members of the “radical orthodoxy” school.
I am suggesting that a form of ‘ecclesiological fundamentalism’ presently dominates academic theology; it underlies theological postmodernism. I will demonstrate this in relation to four influential theologians: Barth, Lindbeck, Hauerwas and Milbank.
The basic narrative of twentieth-century theology is the rejection of theological liberalism in favour of a new reliance on the distinctive practice of ‘the Christian community’. Which is to say, the church. But ‘the church’ in a very general, abstract sense. What emerges is a virtual-reality form of ecclesiology that exalts an abstract ideal rather than an actual institution. I suggest that such a theology results from the failure of modern Protestant thought.
Hobson sees Karl Barth as making an ecclesiological “turn” (or quasi-turn) in his thinking, turning from his early emphasis on the Word of God that stands over and above any institution to a more ecclesial stance later in his career. The banner of a high ecclessiology has been picked up by postliberals like Lindbeck, Hauerwas, and Milbank, who emphasize the distinctive practices of the Christian community as the manifestation and the warrant for the truth of the Gospel.
Hauerwas’s emphasis on the Christian community has a corrective function: he is reacting very strongly against the American national ideal, which usurps the role of elect community. To some extent, this resembles Barth’s rejection of liberal Christian culture. But he is far quicker than Barth to identify the positive alternative: the authentic Christian community, distinct from the wider culture. Following Lindbeck, Hauerwas’s alternative polis is left denominationally vague: he does not claim that there is no salvation outside the Methodist Church. Yet he is at pains to emphasise that he means an actual community rather than an abstract ideal. And he makes very great claims for this ‘actual’ entity. Salvation, he asserts, ‘is a political alternative that the world cannot know apart from the existence of a concrete people called church.’
Hauerwas thus makes higher soteriological claims for ‘the community’ than his Yale school predecessors. It is the sole arena of Christian witness, and ‘witness’ is understood in a stronger sense than ‘communication’ or ‘proclamation’ – it is closer to ‘realization’. He therefore politicizes post-liberalism, introducing post-Marxist accounts of church and salvation. His rhetoric constantly flirts with chiliasm, as if salvation is to be achieved through the establishment of a pure Christian community. This vision is indebted to the radical Reformation, of course – and it also draws on Roman Catholic ecclesiology after Vatican II, ie. liberation theology.
Hobson thinks that there are several problems with the postliberal approach. First, it tends to deny that there is anything prior to the church – the church ends up being constitutive of the Gospel rather than a creature of the Word of God, which is always prior to the church in classic Protestantism. Secondly, it tends toward a “chiliastic ecclesiology” wherein the church is identified with the kingdom of God coming in its fullness. Thirdly, and ironically, “the church” in much postliberal theology becomes an idealized abstraction rather than referring to any actually existing institution. Discussing John Milbank’s views for instance, he writes:
Theology for Milbank is a sort of utopian sociology; it reflects on the ideal community of the church, which seems to hover somewhere between existence and non-existence. The introduction to his subsequent collection of essays, The Word Made Strange (1998), acknowledges that the ‘practice’, in which theology is based, is elusive.
For all the current talk of a theology that would reflect on practice, the truth is that we remain uncertain as to where today to locate true Christian practice… . [Consequently] the theologian feels almost that the entire ecclesial task falls on his own head: in the meagre mode of reflective words he must seek to imagine what a truly practical repetition [of Christian practice] would be like. Or at least he must hope that his merely theoretical continuation of the tradition will open up a space for wider transformation.
This is a surprisingly clear admission that his ecclesiology is very largely an exercise of the imagination. These essays repeatedly emphasise the priority of ecclesiology, which is of course understood in a very wide and complex sense. Ecclesiology is the engine of Milbank’s theology; yet he doesn’t deign to get his hands dirty by tackling actual ecclesiological issues (there are a few prickly ones in his own Church of England).
Radical Orthodoxy, the school of theology based in Milbank’s work, continues the theological critique of secular modernity as illusory and nihilistic. It argues that modernity results from a series of theological errors in the late Middle Ages, the arch-villain being Duns Scotus. The Reformation and the Enlightenment result from this intellectual Fall. (This denigration of Protestantism and the Enlightenment is reminiscent of the Oxford Movement – another English idealization of catholicism). Radical Orthodoxy wants to revive the ideal (and presumably the reality) of a secular-eclipsing Church, synonymous with culture, learning, civilization. Milbank’s movement therefore has the same theocratic leanings as we observed in Hauerwas’ vision.
The two other principal founders of Radical Orthodoxy are also Anglo-Catholics (Pickstock and Ward), and its godfather is another (Rowan Williams). This is little surprise: Anglo-Catholicism is ideally placed to produce such a theology, being catholic but not Roman Catholic. It has a natural propensity to reinvent theology as ecclesiological idealism.
Hobson concludes that this ecclesiological turn is a result of the failure of Protestant theology, as exemplified in Barth:
After liberalism, theology finds its justification in ‘church’. It fears to stray from ‘the community’, lest it end up back in the clutches of liberalism. But the term ‘ecclesiological fundamentalism’ needs qualification. For, as we have repeatedly seen, this trend does not identify ‘church’ with a particular institution. For all its talk of particularity, it is vague about what ‘Christian community’ it means, or if it really means any concrete one at all.
The triumph of virtual-ecclesiological-fundamentalism must be understood in relation to the demise of Protestant theology. After Barth, Protestant theology takes a very dramatic catholic-ecclesiological turn (which is tantamount to a suicide bid). Ironically, this is largely because of Barth: he was so successful in soiling ‘liberal Protestantism’ that he drove post-liberal Protestants into the arms of catholicism. Barth failed to make it adequately clear what the Protestant alternative to liberalism was: no such thing as Barthianism ever emerged. ‘Post-liberal’, or ‘post-modern’ theology is overwhelmingly catholic, and it is very often openly derisive of Protestantism. As a Protestant theologian, Barth was certainly a failure.
The afterlife of Protestantism is anti-liberalism in search of a church: Hauerwas is the embodiment of this. Post-Barthian theology is only Protestant in the negative sense, of balking at Rome’s claims: it has no substantially alternative vision. For it has effectively repented of the Reformation, which is blamed for the curse of liberalism. It is a less realistic, less rooted version of Roman Catholicism; its dreamy little sister.
I think there’s something to Hobson’s critique; I’ve never been fully convinced by the inflated claims for the church made by some of the “postliberals” whose thought I’m familiar with. The solution to the supposed crisis of authority or unbelief is not, I think, simply to take refuge in the authority of the church, even when it’s decked out with a suitably high “catholic” ecclesiology.
Interestingly, according to Hobson, Bonhoeffer criticized Barth on these very grounds:
It seems that Barth’s rejection of liberal Protestant theology was careless. He threw the Protestant baby out with the liberal bathwater.
Bonhoeffer sensed this. At the end of his life he re-thought his allegiance to Barth, and questioned his achievement as few have done since. He still applauded Barth’s early motivation: the criticism of religion, especially in its liberal Protestant form. He still hailed Barth’s prophetic quest for a renewal of Protestantism. But he now decided that Barth had failed in this quest. His neo-orthodox solution entailed a reactionary reliance upon ‘church’ that betrayed the spirit of his early radicalism.
Barth and the Confessing Church have encouraged us to entrench ourselves persistently behind the ‘faith of the church’, and evade the honest question as to what we ourselves really believe. To say it is the Church’s business, not mine, may be a clerical evasion, and outsiders always regard it as such… We cannot, like the Roman Catholics, simply identify ourselves with the church.
In Bonhoeffer’s judgement, and mine, Barth’s very Protestant revolution failed. His high ecclesiology (‘high’ in an abstract, quasi-Hegelian sense) drowned out his original vision. Bonhoeffer might not have been surprised to learn of Barth’s strange legacy: a golden age of catholic theology.
A Thinking Reed 
Leave a reply to Lee Cancel reply