http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/ en-us 2004-02-06T09:30:38-06:00 http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/archives/001163.html Due to an upcoming conference, I've been giving some thought lately to how some of the proposals of Radical Orthodoxy intersect with themes of participation and theosis (or deification) as they arise in earlier Christian thought, particularly in the Eastern church. I seem to have mislaid my copy of Being Reconciled (which partly explains my lack of posting anything for several days), but there are some sections of Milbank and Pickstock's Truth in Aquinas where they explore these themes as they arise in the thought of the Angelic Doctor. It's helpful to recall that Milbank and Pickstock do not read Aquinas so much as the Aristotelian natural theologian that has come down to us in popular regard. Rather, they interpret him as deeply entwined within and emergent from traditions of Christian neo-platonism (which was a platonism more Proclean than Plotinian and already revised in light of Aristotle), in line with Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius and, thereby, resonating with various other figures, even earlier Eastern ones such as Gregory of Nyssa. While the topic of Truth in Aquinas is that of knowledge and truth, these notions are so deeply theological for Aquinas--indeed trinitarian and christological--that the entire theme of human participation in the divine is interwoven with them. This is, in large part, because Aquinas' theory of knowledge offers us less an epistemology as it does an ontology of knowledge. Milbank and Pickstock go on to note, "the leading characteristic of this ontology is a grasp of creation in the light of... joel garver 2004-02-06T09:30:38-06:00 http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/archives/001148.html Memory It does indeed seem as if a richer and more nuanced understanding of memory goes a long way toward making room for constructive theological engagement with forgiveness, for figuring out nitty-gritty hands-on aspects of forgiveness, as well as living sacramentally throughout our lives. Of course, memory is not just a tool for forgiveness (or the eucharist, or anything else); memory and forgiveness are interrelated in a number of ways. Hauerwas talks about the importance of forgiveness for memory: To be capable of remembering we must be able to forgive, for without forgiveness we can only forget or repress those histories that prove to be destructive or at least unfruitful. But Christians and Jews are commanded not to forget, since the very character of their community depends on their accepting God’s forgiveness and thus learning how to remember, even if what they must remember is their sin and unrighteousness. (Stanley Hauewas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic, [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981], 69.) Avishai Margalit, in The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), helpfully complicates the matter by appreciating the importance of some forgetting, while describe forgiveness as more than simply erasure. This is how I drew on Margalit in my thesis--using him in a way which reflects my sense of RadOx participation, I think: This is not to say that there is no place for forgetting within forgiveness, but that forgiveness does include remembrance and does not call simply for... Margaret 2004-01-31T21:55:33-06:00 http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/archives/001136.html Part of Milbank's discussion of forgiveness hinges on his account of time and memory, based on Augustine and drawing particularly upon Confessions and De Musica. It seems to me that this is a place in which Milbank's comments easily intersect with some of Margaret's gestures towards confession, eucharist, and the like. In Milbank's words, Augustine suggests that "the past only occurs initially through the supplement of the trace it leaves in the future," which though registered most intensely and reflexively in the psyche, nonetheless remains ontological (53). The past only is what it is in relation to the present and future, through memory, experience, and anticipation, in the way a musical note only "is" within a sequence where the end may change the nature of what has gone before (cf. De Musica) or in the way the final pages of a book may determine the reality of earlier chapters. Thus, while thinkers such as Jankélévitch are correct to emphasize the "pastness" of the past (and thus its irreversibility), a Christian ontology of time and forgiveness allows that the past "in its very originality is open to alteration and mutation" through re-narration and remembrance (53). This, of course, is the dynamic of confession, Augstine's own coming to mind here, against the backdrop of his understanding of evil as a privation and misordering of goods within a creation that, in light of God and eternity, must be understood as absolute gift without remainder. In writing the Confessions, then, Augustine is revising ontology... joel garver 2004-01-26T10:35:27-06:00 http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/archives/001127.html Welcome, Tim, Paul, John, Frank, Daniel, and Berek. Thanks for introducing yourselves and for helping get this conversation rolling. Thanks to your feedback and to Joel’s substantial contributions, we’ve already got a lot of directions to run with. I’ll weigh in haphazardly. Feel free to redirect or backtrack as you are moved so to do. A Recap: A couple of you have raised concerns about Milbank as a philosopher dealing with the practice of forgiveness with (inappropriate) detachment. One might even wonder why are we even engaging with Milbank if we want to talk about the life of the church. The “yes, but” response to this concern is precisely the tension that excites me and that I hope will spread at least a little into more practice-oriented discourse in the church. Yes: it can feel as if there is a vast divide between Milbank’s focus and rhetoric and what frequently get identified as more relevant issues. But: Milbank (and others) speaks of, for, and through the church, reclaiming for the contemporary church some of the resources lost in the (relatively recent) divisions between church and critical thinking. John speaks to this helpfully in his comment. Joel addresses it generally in his initial thoughts, and very specifically in his next post when he spells out Milbank’s critique of secular approaches to forgiveness. All of which is to say that I don’t expect that questions about the apparent tensions between academy and practice, philosophy and church life, will be something we resolve... Margaret 2004-01-23T11:12:18-06:00 http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/archives/001126.html I think the topic of how Milbank might relate to Yoder (or Hauerwas) is a good one. Paul Baxter raised some helpful questions about that in comments below, particularly the difference in emphasis between Yoder's practicality over against Milbank's philosophical theology. Milbank is always presupposing the practices of the church, it seems to me, but is asking about the conditions of possibility for those practices. How is forgiveness possible at all? And he is doing this, in part, over against postmodern philosophical discussions of "radical evil" and forgiveness (Jankélévitch, Zizek, etc.), that have made the very Christian practices he presupposes to seem, in fact, impossible. Part of asserting the possibility of Christian practices of forgiveness in the face of evil requires this kind of philosophical construction. Moreover, Milbank's argument is that forgiveness is only possible (or impossibly possible, perhaps) within the drama of the Christian God in human flesh. This comes out most clearly, I think, in the series of five aporias of (secular) forgiveness that Milbank addresses: [1] Who can forgive since the extent of whom our wrongdoing affects can never be traced, those who are most wronged are those who have died as the result of the wrongdoing, and private forgiveness can interrupt public justice while public forgiveness can neglect private reconciliation? (50-51) [2] How can we forgive since time prevents us from ever changing what wrong we have done, while those whom we have wronged no longer remain in that place of victimization, and we ourselves as... joel garver 2004-01-22T12:19:17-06:00 http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/archives/001120.html My interests in Milbank and the other authors who come together as "Radical Orthodoxy" particularly involve the ways in which they narrate history, their engagements with postmodernism, their retrieval of the premodern, and how their work might interface with that of other thinkers, from Caputo to Hauerwas. But two overarching concerns of mine are how Radically Orthodox thought connects with the text of scripture (after all, I'm a Presbyterian) and how it might express itself in terms of parish life and Christian formation. Margaret has begun our discussion by reference to Milbank's chapter on forgiveness in Being Reconciled, a great place to start on all counts. As Margaret notes, Milbank is building on what he understands to be Aquinas' account of forgiveness. But the way in which Milbank builds his exploration gives us some clues as to how it might relate to the life of real existing Christian communities. While many may find the categories and vocabulary of Radical Orthodoxy daunting--all this talk of ontologies and participation and analogy--Milbank's text can be seen, I think, not so much as the generation of an abstruse philosophical apparatus, but as a discursive exposition of what must be the case ontologically (and the like) if we take Christian practices of forgiveness, worship, community, and so on to be normative. Thus, part of the way we can approach Milbank in relation to issues of parish life and Christian formation, is to see the ways in which he explains and builds upon traditions of theological... joel garver 2004-01-20T18:22:57-06:00 http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/archives/001119.html Greetings. I'm Joel Garver and look forward to soon joining Margaret in this online Round Table discussion. We welcome comments, but would ask that people briefly introduce themselves as they join in the conversation. Towards that end, I'm a professor of philosophy at La Salle University in Philadelphia, PA with a particular interest in philosophical theology. My training is primarily in analytic philosophy, with my dissertation concerning epistemology, but I've moved more into continental and medieval philosophy since graduate school. I was raised and remain within the Reformed tradition, particularly the Presbyterian expression of that (in which my father is a clergyman). I teach, however, in a Roman Catholic environment and have a deep appreciation for both the Anglican and Lutheran traditions. I am married to a magazine editor and have a 17 month old daughter, a dog, and a cat. I enjoy fiction (Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest ranking highly among my preferences) and love to cook.... joel garver 2004-01-20T11:30:55-06:00 http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/archives/001116.html Leaping right into the middle of a challenging topic, we are going to try to begin with a discussion of forgiveness, by way of John Milbank’s chapter on Forgiveness in Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003). (We don’t assume that you will have read this. Feel free to if you want to, but do also feel free to ask questions and chime in without having read the text.) If I understand correctly (and please correct me, Joel, if you think I’ve misread here), Milbank is, among other things, calling us to attend to Aquinas’ presentation of forgiveness. According to Milbank, Aquinas allows that human forgiveness of other humans might be offered without repentance (without inducing repentance), divine repentance does induce repentance (45). Divine forgiveness (“mediated by the Church through the sacrament of penance” [46]) takes the offending past into consideration and provides the forgiven one with the resources to make restitution and reach reconciliation (45). This sense of forgiveness stands in contrast to some popular understandings in which forgiveness involves more erasure than remembering. And, Milbank seems to be suggesting that human participation in divine forgiveness leads to the possibility of a positive restoration of divine love (reflected in human love). Milbank has much more to say about forgiveness, and I’m hoping that you will help flesh this out Joel. Meanwhile, for the moment, I’m wondering if we can begin to think about how this might apply to congregational life, where, in my experience, there is much need... Margaret 2004-01-19T23:18:51-06:00 http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/archives/001115.html Hi. I am Margaret Adam, and I am about to begin a conversation with Joel Garver, which we hope will be joined by some others shortly. We’d like to talk about some ramifications of Radical Orthodoxy for the life of the church. First, I’ll share that I live in Evanston, IL, on the campus of Seabury Western Theological Seminary, where my husband, AKMA, teaches. I finished a MTS at Seabury in the spring of 2003, and I am currently waiting to hear from PhD programs in theology to see where I’ll be going in the fall. Meanwhile, I am continuing to do what I’ve been doing for the past many years--homeschool our kids. Our oldest is in college now, so we are down to two. One is almost 17 and one is 10. I am a cradle Episcopalian, daughter of one Episcopal priest, married to another, and firmly settled into lay ministry, myself. I am a sometime freelance editor and indexer (which vocation by no means guarantees that my own writing is well edited), I am a vegetarian, I like mystery and thriller/suspense novels, and I have a small and not very bright dog named Bea (Beatrice, as in Dante).... Margaret 2004-01-19T23:13:54-06:00 http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/archives/000759.html September 11-13, 2003 Calvin College The entire conference was audio-taped, and the sessions are available for purchase through the Calvin College Bookstore. Contact them at 616-526-6376, or 1-800-748-0122, or bookstore@calvin.edu. Seminars in Christian Scholarship; Calvin College; 3201 Burton St. SE; Grand Rapids, MI 49546. seminars@calvin.edu http://www.calvin.edu/scs/ The proceedings of the conference will be published as Creation, Covenant, and Participation: Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition, eds. James K.A. Smith and James H. Olthuis (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Press, 2005). Material should not be cited with permission of the authors or editors. Some of what follows are papers that might conceivably be available in print, depending on the individual presenter. Some of what follows are responses to those papers, many of which seem not to have been written out in paper form. The rest is conversation, questions and answers, subsequent comments and musings that all occurred on the spot. NOTE: These are my notes, recording what I heard and processed. It is very likely that I got things wrong at times, and it would never be appropriate to cite my notes as direct quotations of any of the speakers. With the exception of the plenary speeches and the concluding round table, the conference scheduled two concurrent papers for each session slot. For obvious reasons, I was only able to attend one paper during each session. For a list of the papers not represented below, see the conference web site. abbreviations and format: The Calvinists at this conference referred to Radical Orthodoxy... Margaret 2003-09-15T20:59:11-06:00 http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/archives/000758.html Plenary Address by Graham Ward Respondent: James Olthuis [This is Ward’s abstract from the handout materials: “Taking the work of Karl Barth, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate how theological discourses cannot be divorced from wider cultural politics. The desire then, by Barth, for a pure dogmatic theology purged of the influence of other social and cultural sciences--paradigmatically summed up in ‘philosophy’--is a dangerous chimera that has the effect of depoliticising theology. The first step in the movement towards such a dogmatic theology, for Barth, is the denial of any apologetic function for theology. This is the heart of Barth’s misgivings about Schleiermacher and Hegel. But this paper argues that the theological discourse is always engaged in an apologetics because it is always culturally and historically informed. Barth’s attack on Hegel therefore betrays an inadequate understanding of theological discourse. In fact Barth needs to give Hegel adequate depth to his own dialectical theology and to avoid the dualisms that are so antithetical to a theology founded upon the incarnation. To recognise theology’s embeddedness is to recognise the cultural and historical as themselves transits of grace.”]... Margaret 2003-09-15T20:48:40-06:00 http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/archives/000757.html Hans Boersma Respondent: John Milbank [Abstract from handout: “In this paper, I argue that for Milbank atonement is an ecclesio-christological process of forgiveness. This participatory model assumes an equation of violence and evil that leads to an unfortunate indeterminacy. Milbank’s apparent reconsideration of this equation, however, may lead to a narrowing of the gap with Reformed theology. My argument proceeds as follows: I give an overview of what I take to be Milbank’s view of atonement as an ecclesial practice by comparing his view to the traditional models. I argue that by subsuming christology into ecclesiology Milbank modifies key concepts of the traditional atonement models and so incorporates them into his participationist model. I maintain that Milbank cannot sustain his appeal to Aquinas for his view of forgiveness as unlimited positive circulation and that Calvin and the Reformed tradition, with their defense of divine punishment, are closer to Aquinas than in Milbank. By combining his participatory atonement theology with an ecclesial practice of non-violence he adopts a problematic ethical and christological indeterminacy. Milbank’s “ontology of peace” has always accounted for violence in a somewhat ambiguous manner. On the one hand, it is the civitas terrena that is the domain of violence and evil with the Church being the realm of peace, the participatory community of forgiveness. On the other hand, since violence is inescapable in everything we do, Milbank must make the admission of the tragic necessity of violence in everything we do. There are several indications, however, that Milbank... Margaret 2003-09-15T20:35:22-06:00 http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/archives/000756.html Robert Sweetman Respondent: John Milbank Sweetman’s Abstract: “This essay begins by noting the small but important role that Scotus plays in the genealogy of our present circumstances elaborated among those thinkers associated with Radical Orthodoxy. John Milbank’s treatment of Scotus in Theology and Social Theory provides a relevant example. This essay goes on to focus more narrowly on the univocity of being as Scotus understood it, since that notion is highlighted in R.O. criticism. It asks first whether Scotus adopts a notion of the univocity of being because he rejects any and all understandings of the analogy of being. It asks secondly whether Scotus had Thomas Aquinas in mind when criticising a determinate understanding of the analogy of being, or thirdly whether his criticism would cover Thomas even if it was not directed explicitly at Thomas’ understanding. Finally, it asks whether analogy is a truly primary notion in medieval theology, or whether it needs to be seen as a derivative of other more truly basic notions. In the process, the essay argues that a genealogical story that would interpret Scotus in terms of the use made of his theology by Luther, Calvin, Descartes et al. must acknowledge its own relativity. It suggests further that Scotus’ understanding of the univocity of being is illumined in at least equally interesting ways if it is inserted into two other stories: one in which Scotus’s notion is seen against the Aristotelian backdrop of Avicenna, Averroes and the Condemnations of 1270 and 1277, and another... Margaret 2003-09-15T20:34:30-06:00 http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/archives/000755.html 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... Margaret 2003-09-15T20:33:08-06:00 http://disseminary.org/seminar/radox/archives/000754.html Justin Holcomb Respondent: Graham Ward (Holcomb’s abstract:) Participation for Radical Orthodoxy and covenant for the Reformed theology function as the central theological frameworks or organizing principles by which they understand the Christian faith. This paper explores the significance of these two motifs regarding theological method, apologetics, and common grace. To get at these issues more clearly, this paper outlines theological response to the rejection of meta-narratives. Some reformed theologians argue that the faithful and proper theological response to postmodernism is to reject the rejection of meta-narratives, because the Christian faith is argued to be one. Following the reformed emphasis on covenant, the Christian faith is not a meta-narrative in the technical use of the term. If Christianity is not ultimately a “meta-narrative,” one must nevertheless explain why it so often looks like one.... Margaret 2003-09-15T20:31:57-06:00