TRANSFORMATION THEOLOGY AND RADICAL ORTHODOXY

One of the many strengths of Radical Orthodoxy is the identification of itself in its own narration of our common theological and intellectual history. That narrative is well known. It understands for instance the roots of modern secularism to lie in fact in theological territory and so to be re-graspable as a deviation from its own theological norms. Radical Orthodoxy can then take itself to be the corrective to a nihilistic modernity. But in order to do this well, it has to show that it itself properly belongs to modernity, and does so in fact pre-eminently. Radical Orthodoxy achieves this by arguing that the turn to the sign which signals the advent of modernity is itself first brought about in theological circles. It is itself the product of revelation: Christ himself is in fact preeminently sign. The claim to the pre-eminence of theology within secular modernity, where theology is itself the source of the turn to the sign which defines that modernity, necessarily leads to a marked emphasis on the re-narration of secular modernity as theology. Radical Orthodoxy is that re-narration, and its rationale lies in its own conviction that it can out-narrate the secular modernists. In its imaginativeness, insights and perhaps brilliance, Christian orthodoxy as re-narration of history must outperform all other narratives. It must persuade in the way that the true, the beautiful and the good persuade and as they have enchanted souls and won them over throughout the passage of history. Transformation theology shares with Radical Orthodoxy the understanding that Theology is an historical discourse, albeit one which has an intrinsic orientation to a transcendent source. Theology seeks to think history and transcendence at one and the same time: each in the light of the other. But TT and RO do so, of course, in quite different ways. The difference becomes clear when we ask ourselves: where is the locus of the transcendence? RO will answer this: in the narrative and in the capacity of gifted theologians to grasp and incarnate that transcendence within the cultural sign. Theology here becomes iconic: permeated by transcendence, effulgent. Its capacity to outnarrate is grounded precisely in this grace-filled power of signification.

Where then is transcendence for Transformation Theologians? Not in the narrative certainly, but rather in history. This is not history as narrative, but history as that which is narrated: the place of cause and effect. What happens. Meaning is already constituted in what happens in a way that precedes its narration. Nothing can happen without its own meaningfulness. That is the meaningfulness of cause and effect which science from its own perspective can track and understand. The world already has meaning prior to its reception by human mind and culture: prior to its becoming sign in this human sense. History therefore for the Transformation Theologian is always ultimately a Christological term. The consummate transformational and so also historical happening is the free death of Jesus for us as his total self-offering to God for the sake of the world. God chooses this moment to be the re-origination of the world. Christian faith is the sharing in and living in that Christological re-origination of how things are. It is inescapably beyond narration and re-narration therefore. It is consummately in life as embodied human being given over at our foundation to material process and material form. The transformation that grounds Christian faith is first and foremost not in the mind (even the mind of the theologian) therefore but first and foremost in life in the world as we experience it: drab, mundane and everyday perhaps. Or eruptive, disruptive and transformational. It is grasped in the grace of the moment and in the life of the Spirit in the everyday, to which our narratives, sacraments and Church order must constantly bring us back. SUMMARY How can we summarise the differences then between Transformation Theology and Radical Orthodoxy, between which there is nevertheless a family resemblance in the concern with both radicality and the orthodox. The emphasis in TT is on the power of orthodoxy (and particularly Christological orthodoxy in the renewed reception of the exaltation of Christ) to change us. This is ultimately the power of Christ himself, through the Spirit,

to change us. It is not we who change ourselves. It is not the narrative as such that changes us. Change happens primarily in life and not primarily in thought. It happens in our everyday embodied interactions with others and in our primary communities. We ask ourselves what we have done in the act. It is not the product of narrative (though it is informed by it), but is rather the place of our radical freedom before Christ and before ourselves in the light of Christ. It is the point at which, for the Christian, we are radically set free to choose Christ or not. The narrative presents us with that option, but does not decide the issue. The issue is decided by our own embrace of our freedom in Christ, by grace and by the power of the Holy Spirit. Neither grace nor the Spirit are first and foremost narrated realities. They are firstly rather the real manifestations of history in Christ, or of Christ as the living form of history, which themselves ground the narrative. They are not in the narrative at all therefore; rather the narrative is in them. The role of theology here then is to be in service to the true source of Christian meaning, which is the life of discipleship as faith lived out in the daily repeated unity of belief and act. It is here that Christians encounter the living Christ as the meaning of the world: as the ground and goal of history (and so also of your history and mine). We need to think as theologians as creatively, critically and perceptively as we can about that source of meaning where the Christian finds that she lives both in the world and in Christ: both in Christ, through the Holy Spirit, and in the world. The theologian needs to learn to think, closely with others, as someone who is transformatively underway, in the power of God and under the power of the world simultaneously. The theologian needs to learn to think in ways that orientate the Church to those crowded spaces of power and powerlessness and of spiritual transformation of life through engaged embodied acts. But the theologian needs to do so in a way that is distinctively doctrinal and Trinitarian, facilitating our Christian

recognition of the power of the Three Persons, shaping our world as the narrative describes it. TT differs from RO in its evaluation of the historical roots of theology therefore. It does not perceive the roots of Theology in narrative but in the actual, embodied Christ of history. The modern turn to the sign as a decisive cultural moment is the natural reaction to Newtonian physics, with its determinism and reductive materialism. It breeds apologetics or the articulation and re-articulation of Christianity in the successive forms of secular discourse: in terms of our own meaning-making rather than in the discovery of meaning which is intrinsic to the life of faith. But the world has changed and we are now beginning to live in the sway of what can be termed a non-reductive materialism. We are as much matter as mind. But the matter we are is also the place of Christs living and transforming presence. It is the place of history, where the material world unfolds in him. It is the place of encounter. In a way that is decisively different from RO, TT belongs to those new voices which are seeking in one way or another to find our way back to a kind of realism which grounds human purpose and hope. We have lived long with the comfort of thinking that history is narrative and not what is narrated (and so always also beyond narrative). It is to this beyond that we now aspire to go, into the mystery of history itself as the place of action and of our radical human freedom before and in the act. For the Christian this is the place too of our encounter with Christ, who through the Spirit acts with us and in us, and so it is also where we are brought close to the meaning of the world. But as theologians, we can also see this return to the non-reductive materialism of contemporary realism, with its overwhelmingly complex neurology, multiverse and colliding galaxies, very distinctively as a coming home.

Oliver Davies Professor of Christian Doctrine Kings College London