"Suspended Communities or Covenantal Communities?: Reformed Reflections on the Social Thought of Radical Orthodoxy?"

Jonathan Chaplin
Respondent: John Milbank

Chaplin’s Abstract:
“The paper critically engages with the emerging social thought of Radical Orthodoxy (RO), with the aid of insights drawn from the Reformed tradition. Without implying that all adherents to RO share identical social and cultural analyses, emphases or prescriptions, the paper identifies a substantial (and commendable) commonality of approach and content among five leading proponents: John Milbank, Graham Ward, Daniel Bell, William Cavanaugh and Stephen Long. Core substantive proposals of RO are captured in:

• Milbank’s notion of ‘socialism by grace’ (fleshed out as ‘complex space’);

• Ward’s concept of urban communities as ‘cities of God’;

• Bell’s motif of ‘crucified power’;

• Long’s exploration of an ‘ecclesiocentric economics’;

• Cavanaugh’s proposal of a ‘eucharistic anarchism’.

Each phrase is arresting in its conscious juxtaposition of a ‘secular’ socio-political term with a theological one. The rhetorical purpose, of course, is to signal that - as Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory magisterially ventured - ‘the secular’ only has true meaning in relation to God. The paper will note appreciatively RO’s strategic objective of articulating an authentically and radically Christian social theory which resists accommodation to secularised modernity and stands opposed to its atomistic and nihilistic outcomes.

The first, expository part of the paper will seek to expound the meaning of the five core phrases just listed, with two concerns in mind: first, to show how far each exemplifies Milbank’s programmatic declaration that RO is ‘allied to unrepentant...left-wing political commitments’, and specifically, to a novel postmodern variant of Christian anarcho-socialism; second, to exhibit the relevance for RO’s social theory of a fundamental metaphysical principle underlying the wider program of RO, namely ‘the suspension of the material’. Here the paper will show how RO conceives of diverse human communities in the same way that it conceives everything ‘material’, namely as ‘communities in suspension’, i.e. existing meaningfully only as ‘suspended’ in and so participating analogically in God (Christ).

The second part of the paper will develop a critique - deploying selected insights from Reformed social thought - of the notion of ‘suspended communities’, along three parallel tracks: first, as insufficiently able to account for the stable, particular identities of human communities as historical, but not wholly contingent, human responses to an evocative order of justice rooted in creation (here Frederick Carney’s illuminating analysis of ‘associational thought in early Calvinism’ will be drawn upon); second, as issuing in an unfruitful ecclesiocentrism which needlessly depreciates the relatively independent (but not ‘secular’) social functions of non-ecclesial communities; and third, and as a consequence of the first two, as unable to generate clear guidelines about the political shape of justice-making actions in a world characterised by complex injustices. It will conclude with a vindication of ‘just statecraft’ against ROs repudiation of institutionalised politics.”

(Chaplin’s presentation:)

Looking at the connection between Rad Ox and social thought.

Core substantive proposals of RadOx are captured in:

+Milbank’s notion of socialism by grace (fleshed out as complex space)

+Ward’s concept of urban communities as ‘cities of God’

+Daniel Bell’s motif of ‘crucified power’

+D. Stephen Long’s exploration of an ‘ecclesiocentric economics’

+William Cavanaugh’s proposal of a ‘eucharistic anarchism’

A contemporary radicalized reinterpretation of [Anglo]Catholic Christian socialism showing pacifist leanings and an anarchic bent, socialism.

Early Calvinism and Dutch neo-Calvinism, not Barthianism, share this perspective.

The first part of this paper looks at the two movements
Second part: key themes of 4 leading representatives: Milbank, Long, Bell, Cavanaugh
Third: metaphysical principle: the suspension of the material. Diverse human communities are like all material. As communities in suspension, as existing meaningfully only as suspended in and participating analogically with/by God.

This is contrasted with covenanted communities. RadOx may have fallen victim to a concealed reductionism, and the end of the justification of statecraft.
--

So, we are moving beyond secular reason, but to where?

The Reformed tradition urges this too.

The RadOx phrases above juxtapose secular term with theological ones, in order to signal that the secular only has true meaning in relation to the triune God apart from which all disappears into nothingness.

Here we agree. Meaning means radical dependence on God. RadOx challenges Christian thinkers to purge selves of unholy alliances with modernity, accommodation.

However, there seems to be a contrast between Ward’s position and Milbank’s. I’d like to start a fight between the two this weekend!

RadOx and Reformation thinking also converge here: both agree that the alternative would not be neutral or synthesis, but debilitating captivity to one or another hubristic manifestation of secular reason. This doesn’t imply exclusive use of introverted tribal language inaccessible to those outside the community of faith. As Ward said, theology should not just be self-referring.

Both open up to the charge of accommodation themselves.

We don’t agree on how to name the replacement discourse, on the nature and role of theology in relation to the social sciences. RadOx declares the primacy of theology over other sciences. Long writes: no social science can exist on its own. Christian narrative functions as metanarrative.

My initial reaction was to read into this a theological imperialism. On closer inspection, it’s clearer to me that RadOx doesn’t intend theology in this narrow sense. Its claim isn’t just that theology is over others; theology is itself is a social science. This derives first from ecclesiological considerations, the explication of a sociolinguistic practice (church) or constant renarration of this practice as historically developed. It is concentrated in the sacramental performance of church. So, for Protestants, it seems like a narrowing down. Yet, this liturgical performance is conceived as irradiating the entire creation. Theology, Milbank says, has no proper finite territory its own, yet speaks of God by way of all other subjects and sciences. [[mba: this is the medieval view, right?]]

The insistence that there’s a word of God for every dimension of existence is affirmed by Reformed theology.

But who can interpret this? The Reformed answer is: the whole people of God. Yet, among the people of God are academic theologians and Christian scholars in other disciplines, all of whom are equally subordinate to the biblical Word. The Reformation view denies that this is authoritatively mediated to the sciences by theology. A republic under scripture.

Substantive social theories: There is the socialism of the Gift ontology, in which true community is relational unity with the other, at once free in relation to and yet bound to the others. Community valued for its own sake, not ian nutrimental goal (as in capitalism). Community presupposes difference and otherness; it is necessarily porous, always involving exchange. Community presupposes relative but not absolute self-sufficiency The truth throughout all nature is that every totality is always already breached, always involved in unending exchanges. If so, what holds it together? What gives it its identity. Not, says Milbank, thick virtues of unitarians, which are only experienced from the inside. Augustine’s notion of peace holds the community together--what arises by grace, different gifts and kinds of community. The calling of the people of God is to embody community, as pilgrims, but not as nomads. The community will seek to incarnate the universal gift of reciprocity.

What will this entail? The practice of charity, writes Milbank, not mere philanthropy but something structural--the establishment of forms of free association, public exchange binding one within a fraternity, exemplified in trade guilds, monasteries, universities.

Also, in “On Complex Space,” Milbank makes a critique of the state, which has pulverized intermediate associations, leaving only centralized space. Christians have to defend complex or gothic space, plural entities, retrieved from the political right and rearticulated from a Christian socialist standpoint. This is not a romantical organicist notion, nor Hegelian state corporations, but a biblical medieval notion of complex bodies. In such a model, multiple associations cease to mediate but become a new sort of complex network of confused overlapping jurisdictions.

In a complex space, there is always room to adjust to innovations made by free subjects.

But how do we know what precise institutional forms will manifest this? According to Milbank, in a true community, there is an intrinsically just distribution of roles and rewards.

In Reformed and catholic traditions, Christian social thought has said much about this, but Milbank passes this by. He denies it’s a purely subjective matter, but says it can’t be known without living out justice. You can only receive it in faith. It’s the logos of God, but we can’t simply plan these forms. Christians can have faith that things will ontologically arrive in the mode of beauty and proper proportion. Socialism is now by grace a one. [[I have no idea what I should have written here.]] The formulations of Milbank’s social ontology in these articles rest upon his ontology.

In contrast, Daniel Bell writes about justice and charity in detail, Liberation theology after the end of history, capitalism as a technology of desire, liberationalism as not radical enough (fails to conceive of the church itself as a public sui generis). Christianity as a true politics.

The church of the poor is at the emerging embodiment of such a church, capable of liberating desire from capitalist captivity. The Cistercian order is a good model of nonviolence and forgiveness.

This is an ecclesiocentric politics, but it’s not apolitical. It eschews statecraft, but in direct confrontation with capitalist order. The church embodies a decentralized participatory politics. Otherwise, it’s rights-based, state-based. The church offers instead a politics of forgiveness, through the power of suffering. Crucified power offers penitential redistribution. . and a refusal to cease suffering.

3rd section: From Suspended Communities to Covenanted Communities?

Suspension doesn’t connote temporary cancellation (as in suspension from school). It’s more like a suspension bridge which collapses like a house of cards without the tension of upright supports.

From Theology and Social Theory: the model of free association--flows from ontology, from evershifting contingent interrelation farther than fixed identities of substances. Created difference proceeds from continuous emanation of divine difference. God not a substance; there are no substances in creation. The elements of creation are inherently interconnected qualities. Creation is not a finished product in space, but continuously generated ex nihilo in time. There are no universals or essentials.

[[mba: this supports our arguments about how it makes more sense to conceive of the www in time rather than space metaphors]]

The emanation of difference can’t be anticipated, even by God, much less by us.

According to Bell, social space is not a metaphysical fixity. This is from a Deleuzian version of desire as creative and and an anarchic force behind all creation. This social formation is contingent and unstable .. and [[ . . .something. . .]] of desire.

Order, is a temperate [[or, temporal, I’m not sure]] checking of disorder.

My hunch is that, because communities are only contingent arrests in experiential relational flux, they need to be suspended, upheld, by divine power. They don’t contain anything in themselves, any internal essence, but exist in dependence on God. RadOx invites the following response:

Is it able to account adequately for the widespread human experience of and need for stable identifiable institutional entities? RadOx has overcompensated, losing sight of Calvin’s and Thomas’ insight that human communities do have something like essence, telos, which preserves their identity. Both traditions hold that communities exist in dependence on God, but hold relative independence.

Communities are not endlessly changeable. RadOx’s social ontology privileges a single type of community, but all true communities share the same fundamental character, with the possible exception of the family and, for a long time, the church. RadOx sees endlessly proliferating communities as just so many examples of free association. But to imagine that a flowering social order could be based on this one type is problematic--there are other satisfying communities, not arising from consent, but from the needs of human social nature.

So we need to imagine more complex space.

An early Calvinist account of associative community, offered by Frederick Carney, offers us ways of living faithfully together within and thus fulfilling aspects of human life. We give ourselves to the glory of God and the welfare of our neighbor. We acknowledge fundamental needs and commit to meeting them. We judge by how well it contributes to this vocation.

Covenant is an agreement of association to conduct the life of this association in keeping with the primordial essence of all human life as well as the particular.

RadOx is suspicious of the assertion that communities have a divinely determined purpose. But if all organizations are in continual flux, how could we identify structural injustice as injustice? We need a specific institutional design as recognizable. If we don’t know this in advance, the accumulated historical experience of human kind in Christian narrative yields a wealth of narratives about human communities. Polygamy is dysfunctional, for example, one-party states lead to totalitarianism.

Milbank’s Response:

I am more cautious about the dreamy sectarianism of Hauerwas and its effect on Bell and Long and Cavanaugh.

While we are influenced by the Jubilee Group, we’re not all socialists. Philip Blond is a radical Tory, a red Tory like in the Canadian tradition. I’m sometimes a blue socialist. Socialists have to think about hierarchy, so I don’t just talk about free associations of equals. I don’t support abolishing hierarchy.

But there will be variegation between different kinds of institutions (educative vs sports club).

We haven’t said enough about different kinds of institutions, and I never meant my stuff about flux to imply that I was denying essence. Your hunch is wrong. That would suggest a God of the gaps. Rather, the point of my [[denying?]] postmodern difference and reinserting analogy is that there will be a certain place for essence, but not a closed essence. Later, I tried to develop a theory that even new things have essences and we are constrained for them. I now talk more about essence. Even though things change, certain institutions have inherent purpose. But, not too fixed or historicist. For example, the economy: I am more critical of Locke than you.. . on loose boundaries. . . I resist the idea of separate spheres which have formal contractual liberal relations between them, as if they are big persons. If there are lots of different plural bodies, there are lots of intermediate plural bodies.

I do in fact imagine Cambridge as gothic space. It is dysfunctional, but it is linked to different bodies still linked to worship and other activities and it is wonderful. But, the mess of Oxford and Cambridge is result of the Reformation In the middle ages, there was more function (colleges were pastoral and liturgical facilities, and faculties organized the study). After the dissolution of the monasteries, colleges appropriated the wealth and things went downhill from there. . .

That’s an example of how gothic space can go wrong if you don’t have definition of function--as you suggest.

We need to speak more about theories of usury and just price and how it is that we want to have corporations more answerable to the community. We haven’t done that --I don’t think my genius is for that kind of thing. But we need people to do that .

Reformed theory is still somewhat too contractualist and liberal compared to catholic social theory, though both are still close.

Although we disagree sometimes, Ward expresses well that theology is always mediated (secular disciplines have porosity) and you can never limit the difference theology is going to make. But how are there Christian socialists? Wouldn’t they be doing theology? That makes theology sound too narrowly technical.

It is important to realize that I don’t have a sort of general blanket approach to this assessment of secular disciplines. It’s more ad hoc, one by one. So, on social theory, I had strong reasons for saying it was a kind of quasi theology. I can’t say I think that about every secular discipline. It might be different about some others, some more empirically innocent--maybe anthropology.

Questions:

?? to Chaplin. Are we talking about contractual communities?

Chaplin: In a Calvinist view, all social relationships (contractual or organic) are all in pursuit of vocation which derives from need placed in human nature by God. All communities and all relationships are responses to a calling, to a created norm which comes from God. This is different from liberal instrumentalism.

Milbank: I am not against all property, but I am more interested in property linked to use, as with Long.

Chaplin: Long is leading the way back into natural law, natural virtues, virtues of justice, without immediately having that saturated by grace. . . .(no)

?? (Jamie Smith:) Are all communities covenantal communities?

Chaplin: Marriages are, families are not, since you don’t choose your parents and siblings, church is.

[[mba: this seems a highly flawed understanding of covenant--and baptism--to me. Of course families are covenantal--if covenants are so dependent on individual choice, then where is God’s role. Families, by biology and by adoption, should be a fruitful location for conversations about covenant, in my book. . .]]

?? (Jamie Smith): Early Calvinism was only the covenantal church.

Chaplin: No, a la Carney, I’m talking about a more generalized notion of covenant.

?? (Jamie Smith): Doesn’t that give us New England, with American Civic religion?

Chaplin: You can do without differentiation. If you try to retain plural convenanted communities, but still retain theocracy, you do get New England; but there were crucial insights, which after differentiation could be instructive.

Milbank: Despite my drift toward anarchism and socialism, I don’t rule out the overarching role of the states in certain respects, including, for example, the public control of state utilities.

Chaplin: You haven’t spelled out your notion of the state.

Milbank: I do say I’m not against it all the way. It can have a utilitarian role.

Chaplin: See Cavanaugh for the beginnings of a radically orthodox political theory.

Chaplin: How do you hold onto essence and endlessly revisability?!? Aren’t they incompatible?!

Milbank: Things can be revisable in some dimensions and remain the same in others. But the search for the between, the mediation, between the same and the different (not dialectic), must require stability as well as flux. We’ve been trying to be historicist and not teleological. We were talking about Derrida before. Some concrete theory might be good, but we want to avoid the mistakes of the Christian social theorist. We have to discover in practice what it’s going to be in a particular instance. If we were more specific, I hope we would tie it to what is possible now. Almost nothing seems to be possible now.

Chaplin: You seem to have some pessimism toward change.

Milbank: How could you have any faith in the state now? We’re in such an absolute barbarism, it’s difficult to think in political categories.

Chaplin: I am more optimistic about states and the influences of church on states. Look at public utilities!

Milbank: Sure, Christianity has infused a possible sense of pastoral concern into the state, but even that seems to have mutated into something more Foucauldian and sinister, all to do with control by tabulation. There is a lack of virtue at the heart of this. The last two years leave one reeling.

?? Could we think of liturgy as a category of justice, a la Pickstock? What would be the political implications of that? What does RadOx have to say to Reformed or others on this?

Milbank: It’s important not to instrumentalize your liturgy, since that’s where you realize that the community is a miracle of grace and you hang on to the idea that community is always giving and receiving. It’s not self-worshiping, not absolutizing community, but the receiving of God in a direct and physical way. I was raised a Methodist, but it was always the liturgical that I responded to. I think Calvin wanted a more powerful liturgical centrality than what survived.

Chaplin: No community is self-sufficient. All stand equally under the authority/blessing of God. There is a radical relativizing of all particular communities. For Reformed, it’s not liturgically but faith-based. Both have the same purpose; keep communities in their place, but not allowing any to become hubristic.

Posted by Margaret at September 15, 2003 08:33 PM