Faith Theological Seminary

Seminar paper on “Radical Orthodoxy: John Milbank and Graham Ward”

Subject: Philosophies and Social Theories for Christian Ethics

Paper Code: MCE002

Submitted to: Dr. Sunny P.

Submitted by: Kodolo Koza

Introduction

John Milbank provides the development of modern social thought and at the same time
offers a criticism of its dominant paradigms. Milbank explains that the central theological
framework of radical orthodoxy is found in the notion of “participation”. 1 He fears that if
theology no longer seeks to position, qualify, or criticize other discourses, then inevitably these
discourses will position theology. Thus, he aims to reposition all other ideologies in relation to
theology.

This paper is more inclined towards reviewing the books authored by Graham Ward in
order to get a glimpse of his concepts and thoughts. It is to be noted that since Ward does not
specifically propound or bring forth a particular notion or concept of his own, it is thus necessary
to look into his writings in order to get a better understanding. In this paper, we shall look into
the reviews of The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader and Theology and Contemporary
Critical Theory.

1. Radical Orthodoxy:
“Radical Orthodoxy” is radical in the sense that it attempts to capture the root of
Christianity and “especially to the Augustinian vision of all knowledge as divine
illumination.”2 The term “orthodox” is understood “in the most straightforward sense
of commitment to creedal Christianity and the exemplarity of its patristic matrix.”3
While realizing that the tradition should be reconsidered, this orientation intends to
deploy its vision by systematically engaging in a critique of “modern society, culture,
politics, art, science and philosophy.”4

1 John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, eds. “INTRODUCTION Suspending the Material: The Turn of
Radical Orthodoxy,” in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999), 3.
2 Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, eds. “INTRODUCTION Suspending the Material…”, 2.
3 Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, eds. “INTRODUCTION Suspending the Material…”, 2.
4 Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, eds. “INTRODUCTION Suspending the Material…”, 2.
 1.1. A Rejection of the Autonomy of Reason:
Immanuel Kant defines, “Enlightenment is man’s emerging from his self-incurred
immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the
guidance of another.”5 This appeal to the autonomous use of human reason
constituted the basic motif of Enlightenment thought. The Enlightenment came to
have faith in moral and intellectual progress of humanity. 6
Milbank investigates the theological critique of Hamaan, Jacobi,
Wizenmann and Herder: “of philosophy constructed as the autonomy of reason.”7
In the book, Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, Milbank, Pickstock and Ward
attempts “to reclaim the world by situating its concerns and activities within a
theological framework.”8 Milbank argues for the recognition of revelation and
undoing of the paradoxical theological construction of an autonomous secular
reason. 9 Modern theology accepts that philosophy has its own legitimacy and
autonomy, apart from faith. “Liberal theology” seeks to articulate the knowledge
of God in terms of philosophical derived categories of being and knowing.10 A
theology “positioned” by secular reason suffers two characteristic forms of
confinement. Either it idolatrously connects knowledge of God with some
particular immanent field of knowledge, or it is confined to intimations of sublimity
beyond representation. Thus, Milbank declares: “The pathos of modern theology is
its false humility.”11 According to Milbank, reason detached from faith lapses into
chaos and nihilism. When reason is separated from faith, “reason domain is
nihilism.”12 He argues that “discovery of a meaningful world governed by a logo
can only be made by faith.”13 He holds that the only difference between faith and
reason is the intensity of participation in God.14
1.2. Separation of Philosophy and Theology:
Milbank criticize Duns Scotus who for the first time established a radical separation
of philosophy from theology by declaring that it was possible to consider being in
abstraction from the question of whether one is considering created or creating

5 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in Kant: Political Writings, edited by H.
Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54.
6 Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought: From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism, edited by Carl

E. Braaten (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1968) 320-341.
7 John Milbank, “KNOWLEDGE The Theological Critique of Philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi,” in Radical Orthodoxy:

A New Theology, edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1999), 22
8 Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, eds. “INTRODUCTION Suspending the Material…,” 1
9 Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, eds. “INTRODUCTION Suspending the Material…,” 6.
10 Milbank, “KNOWLEDGE The Theological Critique of Philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi,” 21.
11 John Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006),
12 John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), 120.
13 Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon, 120.
14 Milbank, “KNOWLEDGE The Theological Critique of Philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi,” 24.
 being. Eventually this generated the notion of an ontology and an epistemology
unconstrained by, and transcendentally prior to, theology itself. 15
Milbank argues that theology must no longer allow herself to be placed from
outside by philosophy and by secular thought generally. He endeavors theologians
to get over their “false humility” 16 In the face of modern secular reason whose
challenge, he announces, “is at the end, for it is seen that it [modernity] was itself
made in terms of metaphysics, and as an expression of a religiosity.” 17 He asserts
that theology is “a social science, and the queen of the sciences for the inhabitants
of the altera civitas, on pilgrimage through this temporary world.” 18
1.3. Modern Secularism:
Radical Orthodoxy argues that the “orthodox” Christian tradition of faith and
reason provides “the only solution” to the “problems of late modernity.” 19 In the
medieval scholasticism a great and unfortunate shift occurred in which the doctrine
of God changed radically, which led to the different understanding of God, creation
and God’s relation to the latter. These changes led to the invention of modern
secularism. Therefore, Milbank seeks to retrieve the earlier traditions using them
to construct an alternative vision of reality to secularism. For Milbank, secularism
is predicated upon “bad theology.”20 According to Milbank, secularization is itself
a Christian heresy and paganism. Milbank attempts to trace back the theological
root of secular reason in unveiling the hidden myth in modernity. In doing so, he
recourse to Foucault’s archaeological method which aims to disclose the
unconscious structure of human thought which is culturally shaped in a certain
epoch and society.21 Milbank states: “Once, there was no ‘secular’.” 22 Rather, “the
space of the secular had to be invented as the space of ‘pure power’.”23 This new
account of “the secular” becomes the site for a new politics.24
1.4. Political Economy:
Political Economy perverted ancient civil virtues for the glory and reputation of the
individual. In consequence, political economy promoted the libido dominandi
which Christianity rejected. According to Milbank, the relation of political
economy to theology is found in the introduction of the concept of providence in
its discourse. He describes political economy as pagan, heterodox “theodicy.” 25

15 Milbank, “KNOWLEDGE The Theological Critique of Philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi,” 23-24
16 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 1.
17 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 260.
18 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 283.
19 Simon Oliver and John Milbank, The Radical Orthodoxy Reader (London: Routledge, 2009), 24.
20 Oliver and John Milbank, The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, 28-29.
21 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 3.
22 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 9.
23 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 13.
24 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 15.
25 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 33-38.
 This is seen in the case of Adam Smith’s “hidden hand” where the individual’s
economic pursuit, out of his/her egoism, produces benefits for the entire society.
That is, the individual’s unintended motive contributes to the interest of the whole
by the hidden hand of God. The modern reduction of man into an economic is
being, far from being a result of secularization, has its theological origin. Milbank
states: “The de-ethicization of the economic domain does not, as one might
suppose, coincide in any straightforward way with ‘secularization’. Here again, the
institution of the ‘secular’ is paradoxical related to a shift within theology and not
an emancipation from theology.”26
In this respect, the division of labor is considered as a natural and
providential process which assures social cohesion. This is a radical departure of
the social ontology that the participatory theological tradition proposes in the sense
that self preservation is the defining character of the human being. According to
Milbank, the danger of this theological justification of capitalism lies in the fact
that the “the ‘theological’ (though ‘heretical’) version of political economy tends
to mystify the description of capitalism.” 27 According to Milbank: Political
economy was not … an emancipated secular science which explored the formal
aspects of economic relations in abstraction from moral considerations. Rather, it
imagined and helped to construct an amoral formal mechanism which allows not
merely the institution but also the preservation and the regulation of the secular.
This new science’ can be unmasked as agonistics, as theodicy and as a redefinition
of Christian virtue.28
1.5. Rejection of Postmodern Nihilism:
Milbank says that Christianity is an unfounded mythos, and insists that the
narrative mode is now the most basic category of language. He acknowledges that
“All our ‘truths’ are only ‘assumptions’, or taking up from previous linguistics
arrangements.”29 Nihilism is inextricably linked with postmodernism precisely
because postmodern is nihilistic. Both concepts are also inextricable bound up with
modernity, for nihilism is a more virulent form of modern secular reason – its final
postmodern form of nihilism, 30 whilst postmodernism itself is, in many ways, an
“exacerbation” of modernity. Postmodernism constitutes the new challenge to
theology in the wake of the death of modern social science, and does so by
relativizing and questioning claims to universality. “It’s more insidious method
reveals no secret behind the mythos, but merely points to other ‘truths’, and shows
how these are suppressed or denied by a totalizing perspective. Yet the obvious

26 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 41-42.

27 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 41.
28 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 41.
29 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 246.
30 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 256.
 implication of ‘many truths’, or rather ‘many incommensurable truths’, is that
every truth is arbitrary, every truth is the will-to-power.”31
He insists that nihilism is metaphysical, a representation, with a positive
geneology of history and an ontology of difference, he also appears to recognize
that nihilism “is also no more than a mythos. To counter it, one cannot resuscitate
liberal humanism, but one can try to put forward an alternative mythos, equally
unfounded, but nonetheless embodying an ‘ontology of peace’, which conceives
differences as analogically related, rather than equivocally at variance.”32 Milbank
provides a counter-ontology which sees peaceful phenomena, as ultimate reality.
The ontology of peace is implied in narratives about divine creation and redemption
– true peace comes not from violence, but ex nihilo of God. 33 In order to attain a
“state of total peace”, the ontology of peace “allows us to unthink the necessity of
violence, and exposes the manner in which the assumption of an inhibition of an
always prior violence helps to preserve violence in motion,” and serves to show
“there is a way to act in a violent world which assumes the ontological priority of
non-violence.”34

2. Review of the Postmodern God: A Theological Reader.

This book edited by Graham Ward provides a framework for those who want to
explore how theology might benefit from a critical engagement with postmodernism.
The book is divided into two parts, the first comprising a selection of texts from some
key postmodern thinkers. These come from Bataille, Lacan, Levinas, Barthes, Girard,
Foucault, de Certeau, Derrida, Irigaray and Kristeva. 35
The second part of the book is a collection of seven essays by thinkers whose
theological work has been (and is being) informed by postmodernism. The essays are
wide-ranging and include reflections on liturgy, the Trinity, feminism and revelation –
but there is much more, and any labelling of the content of these essays would be
inadequate and not do them justice. They are not always easy, but this is not an easy
approach to theology. With this difficulty (in a positive sense) accepted, all the essays
in this section combine theological and philosophical skill with creativity and vision. 36
What makes this book such a significant contribution to the debate about theology
and postmodernism is the background of the essayists. This debate has often focused
on thinkers like Cupitt whose use of postmodernism has led them into what some might
see as theological nihilism. These thinkers are all coming from a position which Ward

31 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 260-261.

32 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 279.
33 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 262.
34 Mibank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 416.
35 Richard Arrandale, review of The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, by Graham Ward, Theology 101/802

(July 1998): 290.

36 Richard Arrandale, review of The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader: 290.
 describes as: “Post-liberal, if not conservative [...] they are theological realists.” 37
Whilst this book does not represent an uncritical acceptance of all that postmodernism
has to offer, it does demonstrate that a purely negative reading is not the only one.
These essays draw the reader into a postmodern theology of possibility (or the
possibility of a postmodern theology?) rather than one of impossibility. 38

3. Review of Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory.

Graham Ward, in Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory, seeks to bridge a
gap between critical theorists and theologians. Critical theory is essentially various
ways to look at how discourse is practiced through the means of socio-cultural factors.
At its core, critical theory engages with various practices of discourse in order to draw
out the implications for how the conclusions may be reached. It calls into questions
those conclusions by pointing out there may be more to the story. 39
In order to explore critical theory, Ward outlines the thinking of various
contemporary theorists under representation, history, ethics, and aesthetics. Much of
the thinking involved here is of interest, sometimes as much for how wrong it seems as
for how enlightening it may be. Ward ends each chapter with insights into how the
theories discussed may be applied to thinking about theology today. These conclusions
demonstrate how even some approaches which seem at odds with Christianity in whole
or in part may help shape theological thought. For example, issues of gender loom large
and Ward suggests that critical theorists have jumped ahead of theologians in their
thinking on the topic through explorations of how concepts of gender are formed.
Whatever one’s thoughts regarding gender, it is true that theologians may do well to
explore this topic further, whether from a critical perspective or not. One area, readers
may fault the work is that Ward while engaging critical theory, is rarely critical himself.
That is, he seems to adopt the findings of critical theorists without himself having a
critical eye towards these same. Ward’s project is to simply present critical theory and
see how it might be applied to theology. That said, it would have been nice to have a
chapter which engaged these theories. Rather Ward essentially just reports on the
theories and comments upon how theology might benefit from them. 40
Towards the end of the book, Ward opines that theology must take the work of
critical theory seriously so that the emphases of theology will change. He writes that
the direction postmodern theology is moving in - away from the atheologies of Mark
C Taylor and Don Cupitt , away from the ‘death of God’ theologies of Thomas Altizer
and Charles Winquist, and towards a reappraisal and re-examination of the tradition

37 Graham Ward, ed., The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), xlii.
38 Richard Arrandale, review of The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader: 291.
39 J.W. Wartick, “Book Review: “Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory” by Graham Ward,” J.W. Wartick –

Reconstructing Faith (15 Oct 2014), https://jwwartick.com/2014/10/15/tcct-gward/ (8 December 2021).

40 J.W. Wartick, “Book Review: “Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory”.
 (Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysus, Meister Eckhart and Karl Barth, for
example) in the light of critical theory.41

Ward puts forth four approaches which are discernible for this direction.
First, there is a retreat to a biological essentialism which cannot accept the maleness
of Jesus Christ and therefore moves towards a post-Christianity (Mary Daly,
Daphne Hampson). Secondly, there is a continuation of the liberal humanist project
in which women are made socially equal and Jesus Christ becomes androgynous
(Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Rosemary Radford Ruether). Thirdly, there is a
pragmatics which attempts to rewrite patriarchal texts (Phyllis Trible) or localize
the theological discourses of women. Fourthly there is a defence of orthodox
Christianity which fights on several fronts (Sarah Coakley, Janet Soskice). 42

Conclusion

Milbank demonstrates that the “secular” is actually defined and traces its origin to theological
claims, which he considers as heretics. Thus, the modern social sciences are not rooted in a separate
secular sphere, but in a heretical (pagan) religion. Milbank’s engagement with postmodernism has
set a new stage for Christian theological reflection.

Ward comments that the theology of tomorrow needs to be more aware of the place it occupies in
discursive borderlands. In the words of Ward, “Theology being profoundly interdisciplinary…
traverses boundaries, like the cloud no bigger than a human’s hand, rising over the sea in the west,
was bearing rains for a famished land.”

418 Graham Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory, 2nd ed. (Great Britain: Macmillan Press Ltd., 2000),
170.
42Graham Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory, 171.
Bibliography

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Macmillan Press Ltd., 2000.
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