The funny thing about fundamentalists is that for all the blood and thunder, the dark nights of the soul giving way to the glory of the light, for all the tears a repentant Jimmy Swaggart can weep, fundamentalism is a cut-and-dried textbook faith. It’s a creed that in seeking to establish theocracy and make God the answer to every question accidentally leaves God out of the picture. For in fundamentalist theology, God—incomprehensible G-d—takes a backseat to his own Word.

Or rather, the words his or her servants have written; the authority of the Bible displaces the more nebulous authority of the Lord. Literalist readings of scripture reduce the most enduring of stories to pre-processed Bible-in-a-box, a series of if-then and A-leads-to-B logic formulas by which we are to know a world where all nuance can be dismissed as the devil’s deceptions. When you examine the hard-and-fast propositions of fundamentalism, the comparison that calls science a religion cuts both ways: Fundamentalism is science with a choir.

Logic proofs make for a small god. Some say a dead one.

But now from the politest, sleepiest of faiths—Anglicanism—comes a group of theologians who proclaim that God isn’t dead, he or she or it is merely in forced retirement, driven from our lives by the hubris of science. “Science" is a term they use Enlightenment-style to mean all knowledge, whether it’s of physics or fundamentalism. As knowledge, they say, physics stutters for meaning in the absence of faith. As faith, fundamentalism exists in a space circumscribed by rationalism, if not reason. Only the murkiness of an orthodoxy in constant revolution can begin the work of bringing God back to the world, or the world back to God, or maybe revealing the unity of the two. The notion that religion can somehow be quarantined from the daily life is a figment of political imagination, they charge—a denial of the fact that the very word “secular" has no meaning absent the divine against which it’s contrasted.

“The new theology no longer expresses false humility," declares John Milbank, the movement’s founder, referring to the way theologians in recent decades have accepted their restrained roles on the fringe of rational knowledge. He holds that since modern philosophy was born of a “modification or a rejection" of theology, it remains thus bound.

To what, exactly? Suffice it to say: God. Say it again, roll it around in your mouth: God.

If the word sounds odd upon repetition, then you’ve got it. “The Word made strange," Milbank says, the story of Christ made fresh through constant “re-narration"—that’s the creed of Radical Orthodoxy, the knife’s edge of a broader trend called postsecularism which looks to be the biggest development in theology since Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door.

HERESY!

To the Radical Orthodoxy theologians, the modern world born that day is itself heresy. Heresy, they point out, is an act undertaken by the believer, a deformation from within. Such was the Christian creation of modernity—the nation-state, capitalism, the individual, and most of all, what Radical Orthodoxy views as the abomination of “private religion."

Modernity’s every facet is built on a framework of seemingly empirical facts wrenched, in European tradition at least, from vaster oceans of theology. Shorn of their theoretical contexts, facts fell prey to a literal devaluation at the hands of Hobbes, Locke, and Hume; or for that matter, more recent prophets of the modern age such as Henry Ford. What counts? The short and brutal bottom line, whether it’s one of ideology or assembly.

But ideology requires some assembly, points out postmodernism; our beliefs are conceived, not brought to us by storks. Accepting that seemingly simple premise, though, leaves you with nothing to stand on: there are no absolute truths, only a void without intrinsic meaning. Into the emptiness we pour language, but it all disappears into the darkness.

Only theology can turn on the lights, insists Radical Orthodoxy—using, of course, God’s love. But to do that, they declare, theology must reclaim its spot as the mother of all knowledge.

Some say such notions makes it fundamentalism for sophisticates. Not at all, Radical Orthodoxy replies, for it seeks to not only re-conquer the sciences but to do away with the very thought processes that makes the certainties of science—or fundamentalism— possible. “We’re not fascists," Milbank told me. “Theology alone among all disciplines is committed to non-mastery."

But to save the world, he seems to believe, we must make theology our master.

THE WORLD IS AN ASSHOLE

Luther looked and sounded like a revolutionary. “The world is an asshole," he once declared, “and I am its ripe shit."

Milbank, on the other hand, doesn’t seem in person radical, or orthodox, or like a man who delights in a bit of chaos. But insofar as there’s an earthly creator of Radical Orthodoxy, it’s this sandy-haired, red-faced, British professor sipping cranberry juice in a coffeehouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the air is much too humid for his taste, and where an Anglican church worthy of the name can hardly be found.

He takes the word “radical" for what it means—back to the roots. Those carry him toward orthodoxy. The Gospels. Holy Ghost power. Milbank, who teaches at the University of Virginia, scoffs at anthropological readings of Jesus that reduce the resurrection to nothing but a metaphor for Freudian longings. Christ died for your sins, he insists, and then he rose from the dead. Angels move among us. Satan is real.

But that’s where his agreement with fundamentalism ends. “Fundamentalism reduces Christianity to a tight set of propositions," he said, dismissing his Bible-thumping American brethren. “Fundamentalists tend not to think there’s a strong connection between the way you put things and the content." For Radical Orthodoxy, “the message and the means are indivisible."

As is so often the case with those who would topple the world, speech patterns tell the tale. Milbank didn’t really have any. His speech was neither light nor dark, soft nor hard, quiet nor loud; he just talked. And talked. His voice halting but not hoarse, his sentences complex but clear, his monologue long but never dull.

“All philosophy is inside theology, and it can’t get out," he said.

“Theology is God’s own knowledge of himself," he said.

“Radical Orthodoxy rejects the idea that there are fixed secular standards. That theology must justify"—he rolled the word off in three hard syllables, in a rare expression of contempt—"itself before this court."

A sip of cranberry juice. The sweat of the glass dripped onto his neat blue shirt. He didn’t notice.

“Today, the discrete realm of philosophy is collapsing," he said, leaning forward in his seat while a freight train rumbled by outside the coffeehouse, blotting out the sun as if on cue. “Today, the logic of secularism is imploding."