There’s a recent interview with John Milbank, the founder of the theological school known as Radical Orthodoxy. The interview, and much of the theology associated with the movement, is obscure to the point of incomprehensible. Still, I found the work of Milbank’s students helpful in rethinking the relationship between the pre-modern Christian theological tradition and contemporary philosophy. It’s a bridge I found difficult to construct for myself, in part because of my own theological training.

I read a great deal of German neo-orthodoxy in college (Barth, et al). Then I went to Harvard where I encountered constructivist theologians like Gordon Kaufman, critical theologies like Feminism and Liberation, and the writings of Derrida and Foucault. Putting it all together was impossible. That may be why I retreated into historical study. But I studied history because I thought it continued to have relevance to the life of faith today, and making it relevant was in some sense my ultimate goal.

There are aspects of the project of Radical Orthodoxy I find helpful–especially the attempt to rethink traditional categories, rituals, and the like with an eye to contemporary questions, and to offer a critique of the Enlightenment project from the perspective of earlier thinkers. Thus, Augustine provides an interesting foil to Descartes (see Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity).

The interview with Milbank made clear that there is not only a philosophical project, there is also a political one. That I find somewhat alienating, if only for odd statements like “Marriage and the family, for all their corruption and misuse, are at base democratic institutions,” which is so patently false from an even cursory reading of history.

In addition, there seems to be something of a nostalgia for another time, when Christianity was in some sense “given;” when children were raised in the faith. Such times are long past, and it is silly for theologians or pastors to try to recapture them.

In many ways, we are living in a post-Christian age, when the churches have retreated from the central role they played in culture and society. Whatever the loss, Christianity’s new role holds out exciting possibilities for creating new ways of being faithful, and reaching with new language to embrace people into our communities.