SEND ME A MANIFESTO

“We get letters saying, ‘How can I join?’ or ‘Send me a manifesto,’" Ward, a professor at the University of Manchester, told me one day over lunch in Cambridge, where he occasionally preaches in an ancient stone church called Little St. Mary’s that’s a sort of home pulpit for Radical Orthodoxy. But despite a book he’s writing for a series called “Manifestoes," he insisted there can’t really be a manifesto for this theology.

“Radical Orthodoxy is not ‘the answer,’" he said, a hint of disdain in his voice. A mostly affable, slender man with a rustle of mild red hair, he leaned forward on the table as he talked, his hands shaping his words as though framing questions, not declarations. “It’s not the latest. It’s not just this season’s object."

Why then bring out the heavy artillery of French theory to deconstruct mass media, I asked. “In order to make our critique of culture relevant, it’s imperative that we learn how to read the signs of culture," he said.

Ward finds those signs in shopping malls built to resemble pyramids, and in churches built to resemble shopping malls; in movies like The Matrix and Alien Resurrection; even in sex stores, where he’s gone to do research on the theology of eros. He’s very concerned with desire. Desire for “the longest orgasm, the biggest hyper-ride, Disneyfication harnessed to commodification"—all of which, he believes, mask a desire for meaning. And because he’s a Christian, he understands that as the desire for God— which leads him to the political as personal.

“The desire Christ attracts comes from men and women," he said. “That is the core of eros. Don’t reject the idea that because Jesus was biologically male, he cannot save women. Rather, rethink Jesus. You don’t have to reject the representation, you have to reimagine it, question its meanings. I’m used to people saying, ‘Do you really believe in the virgin birth?,’ or the resurrection, the miracles, these things liberal modernity rejected. I would say, ‘Yes, of course we believe.’ But what we’re saying is that this story is a complex theological statement that none of us fully understands. The idea that it’s nonsense, that it doesn’t fit scientific principles, is in itself a secular form of knowledge. The virgin birth is not just a metaphor. Calling it a myth, or a metaphor, assumes objective knowledge we don’t have."

The truth that Radical Orthodoxy finds in the Logos, he explained, is much like the truth that postmodernists find in the play of culture: Words are bigger than we are.

“I can say we’re all part of the body of Christ," Ward continued. “But that doesn’t mean I can then say, ‘I’m the toe, you’re the pinky.’ But because I don’t know the meaning doesn’t make the Logos meaningless. Mystery has substance. Our confusion is our pedagogy."

BRING BACK THE DARK AGES

Maybe confusion sounds like chaos. Maybe orthodoxy sounds like theocracy. Maybe, coming from the mouths of theologians firm in their faith, “radical" sounds like revolutionary terror. After all is said and done, what is the actual program of Radical Orthodoxy?

Its theologians say there is none. They say they are merely holding a conversation. They say their ideas are little discussed beyond seminary walls. Of course, beyond seminary walls are parishes and pulpits, Sunday schools, ministers who marry the faithful, priests who counsel politicians. Radical Orthodoxy’s confusion allows it an admirable suppleness, or perhaps a disturbing slipperiness. It begs the question of just where believers stand. Nowhere, they answer—we reject the metaphor of a social grid.

More to the point, then, I wondered whether a Radical Orthodox world might resemble a premodern one, in which the church ruled, and heretics, instead of waxing philosophical in endowed chairs, were burned alive at the stake.

“Ours is a theological approach, but it needn’t be Christian," responded Ward, who added that he doesn’t believe in classifying people as infidels. “You could just as easily be a Muslim and make this critique."

Perhaps the Muslims of the Taliban already have.

In an essay for a just-released collection called Radical Orthodoxy? A Catholic Query, edited by Laurence Paul Hemming, Milbank dismisses the notion that his movement would lead to anything recognizable as traditional theocracy. “Theocracy," he writes, “is predicated upon the very dualism [Radical Orthodoxy] rejects."

Hemming, a lecturer at London’s Heythrop College, a Catholic deacon, and a contributor to last year’s Radical Orthodoxy collection, suspects that Radical Orthodoxy is disingenuous in its disavowal of intolerance. “The difference between the pope and John Milbank," he told me, “is that the pope says that faith redeems philosophy. John argues that faith [invalidates] philosophy."

Hemming is disturbed by Radical Orthodoxy’s approach to the branch of Christianity that lays the greatest claim to orthodoxy: Catholicism. “They have a tendency to pluck what suits them from the tradition," he said, whispering in the gentlemanly tones demanded by the Oxford Club, where he’d suggested we meet. “A nastier and sharper way of phrasing it would be to say that Radical Orthodoxy is colonizing Catholicism."

JERUSALEM, NOT BABYLON

If Radical Orthodoxy makes colonies of other traditions, to what sort of country do those colonies contribute their riches? Call it “anarchic theocracy," if it must have a name, Milbank concedes. Under pressure, he is willing to acknowledge that like the second Martin Luther to shake the world, he, too, has a dream. In this dream, Christians will live in a community of beautiful liturgy, of participation in the unstable body of Christ and the unreliable fruits of the land. No one will ever be forced to join this city on a hill, and no one will ever be turned away from its streets. More than that, he can’t really say. “God," he said when I asked, “wouldn’t that be enough?"

“The point of life," he writes in Radical Orthodoxy, “is to set up, in hope, certain contingent structures of truth and justice—to set up Jerusalem, not Babylon." A city of God, not one of laws.

Late one afternoon, walking up the Charlottesville hill over which Jefferson’s university drapes itself, Milbank said again that the boundaries between the two would not be hard and fast. “Extremely fuzzy," he remarked of the line between theology and philosophy, faith and reason.

“That’s what makes Radical Orthodoxy so interesting," Bishop Williams had told me. Perhaps dangerous as well. “Good theology in the wrong hands...," he’d mused.

Milbank and his collaborators don’t want to take anyone back to the dark ages, and for now, at least, there are no Torquemadas or latter-day fascists among them. In the city of God, Milbank said as we parted ways, nobody will worry if the trains run on time.