The Postmoderns Are Our Friends — Part 4: Introducing Radical Orthodoxy

What’s fascinating about James K. A Smith’s book on postmodernism is that he’s both adverse to protestant fundamentalism and liberal “accommodation” theology. While conservative theology overly intellectualizes, abstracts, and literalizes the biblical witness (not to say there are not many key literal elements), the liberal theological project majorly relies on the Enlightenment’s assumptions; individual autonomy, another equally unbiblical concept! So what would it look like for the church to rid itself of a secular desire for absolute certainty, and individual intellectual and social autonomy?

Enter Radical Orthodoxy. Ok, two scary terms squashed together. Radical, well, is radical — no thanks. And Orthodoxy sounds catholic, right? Let’s explain. Radical Orthodoxy is becoming another blanket term to recapture a premodern (not necessarily Catholic) conception of Christian faith. In James K. A. Smith’s book Introducing Radical Orthodoxy Smith engages with the philosophical underpinnings and migrations of the movement.¹ In this short essay, we want to introduce the movement to you and map out some key implications that can help us move our churches into healthier waters. The movement is deeply philosophical and at times a bit opaque, so this essay hopes to contextualize it within everyday concerns of church life. It’s important to note that Radical Orthodoxy is not necessarily a theological movement — it is a project which attempts to move the church’s unconscious philosophical commitments away from modernism and towards pre-Enlightenment understandings.

Radical Orthodoxy has five basic components.

First, Radical Orthodoxy is critical of modernity and liberalism. The conservative protestant church often sees itself as just this; anti-liberal and anti-modern. Radical Orthodoxy would disagree and argue the conservative protestant critique is still grounded in modernist thinking. At a philosophical level, much of the church has accepted the pure dualism between faith and reason — Christianity was never meant to operate within this binary. As a result, modern Christianity has responded in largely two ways. Churches either fundamentalized the biblical witness or accommodated it to the concerns of modern culture. But the problem is both responses work within a modern binary — because if faith and reason are separate, if there is a space for reason to be autonomous, then science and rational discourse become the grounds for truth, not the revelation of the Biblical story!² This binary (among other things) caused churches to either abandon orthodox faith as it was perceived to not hold up against the pressures, claims, and needs of modern culture, or, the Bible was rationalized and fundumentalized into a set of abstract doctrines that collided with culture; in a sense, anything in the bible that was anti culture became it’s essential ingredients — traditional sexuality as an example (James Davidson Hunter’s book To Change the World is an excellent analysis on the conservative and liberal response to modern culture³). Yet, neither of these options, accommodation and fundumentalizetion, have worked or are truly calibrated to the biblical vision. The church needs to recover it’s alternative vision, the kingdom of God, which will never be fully against or with culture. Hence, when we say Radical Orthodoxy is anti-modern and anti-liberal we hope to recover Christian project’s premodern sources. In sense it seeks to transcend the bifurcations of the modern theological spectrum.

Second, Radical Orthodoxy is post-secular. The implication of ridding the church of the binary between faith and reason rids the church of another distinction: the sacred and the secular — undoing the possibility of “secular reason”. Thus, Radical Orthodoxy challenges the “orthodoxy” of the secular academy as the academy has its own credo, it’s own beliefs and ideas. This allows Christianity to be, “…unapologetically confessional and [allows] Christian research across the disciplines to be unapologetically theological. The hope is that once the theoretical foundations of secularity are dismantled…the spaces for public discourse will provide new opportunities for…Christian accounts of reality.”⁴ In essence, Radical Orthodoxy is post secular as it can imagine a space where Christian ideas have the intellectual right to enter the public square. There is no secular space, only different “faiths” whether they be Christianity, Islam, or secular humanism.

Thirdly, Radical Orthodoxy emphasizes participation and materiality. In a sense modernism tried to find meaning without God, it used science to articulate and define the biological, social, and ethical categories in the world. However, postmodernism called into question the ability to do just this (as we saw in Part 2 & 3). Particularly with Derrida (and sociologists like Durkheim, Weber, and Berger) reality was relativized. This led some to nihilism, a negation of the possibility of meaning. Well, Radical Orthodoxy, agrees with the postmodern critique of modern rationality, reality is relative, but not meaningless. Meaning only happens when something participates in the divine, “…nothing is autonomous on itself but is only insofar as it participates in the gift of existence granted by God.”⁵ Therefore, all spheres have meaning in that they participate in the gift of the creator. Thus we must investigate the world, find meaning, as a created world. Thus we can see Radical Orthodoxy as an affirmation of the material world, its fusion with the spiritual, as both participating in the gift of meaning given by God, “…Radical Orthodoxy emphasizes the material and bodily as a site of revelation and redemption: God both appears in the flesh and seeks to redeem it.”⁶

What are the consequences of a reaffirmation of the material and the body? Fourth, Radical Orthodoxy seeks to place sacramentality, liturgy, and aesthetics to the center of Christian worship and formation. Because both the body and the spirit have meaning and participate in the divine, then Radical Orthodoxy argues for a revaluation of the liturgical and doxological nature of creation. Not just the arts, but modes of embodied worship are key to bypassing the modern sovereignty/human agency distinction as liturgy and the arts are gifts to us by God, that by them we turn to him — yet these gifts come from him. This is the mystery of liturgical union — which Radical Orthodoxy sees as essential for Christian meaning and formation.

Fifth, Radical orthodoxy asserts a distinctly neo-reformation (Kuyperian) vision of cultural critique and transformation. Instead of the sharp world (often seen as under Satan’s reign) and church (under God’s reign) distinction, Radical Orthodoxy sees God as revealing himself in the material world (re-centering the role and possibility of art) but also emphasizes God’s concern for the social, political and economic transformation and redemption of the whole world.⁷ This refocuses the church away from having a cultural critique (often a product of the modern idea-centric conception of Christianity which prioritized intellectual assent over practice) but instead to living and acting out it’s critique in an alternative vision of human living, “…its politics is an ecclesiology.”⁸ Thus radical orthodoxy sees the church as a central place for cultural transformation; for being salt and life in the world.

Whole books have been written on each of these topics, so this essay is a feeble attempt to pull back the curtain on vast multifaceted movements in theology. The hope is to encourage Christians to see the role of the Church and of Christian practice to a more central place in Christian life. Instead of the church being mainly about spiritual things, quantified in heady doctrines and then exported to the laity, Radical Orthodoxy hopes to recapture a biblical vision of Christian community — of embodied theology through liturgy, and a stance towards culture that transcends the culture wars — one that seeks to boldly and yet gracefully be the church and have it reflect the glory of God and his kingdom to all people.

[1] Smith, James K. A.. Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004.

[2] Smith. 72–73

[3] James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

[4] Smith. 74.

[5] Smith. 75.

[6] Smith. 77.

[7] Smith. 79.

[8] Smith. 80.