Radical Orthodoxy: Part Three

Another area in which Radical Orthodoxy is less than faithful to the best of its background is in its general failure to take account of non-Christian religions. Despite adopting Kenotic Christology in order to retain Chalcedonian terminology, Anglo-Catholics have often tended to manifest, in a modified form, a feature of the English Modernist, ostensibly anti-Chalcedonian, ‘degree Christology’ that the early Kenoticists so abhorred.

To the Modernists, while Jesus was the human being most enlightened by the Logos (at least to date), everyone was to some extent so enlightened, not least by means of the religious experience at the root of each of the world’s religious traditions or made possible by participation in any such tradition.

All in all, ‘degree Christology’ turns out to be much closer to orthodoxy than is Kenoticism. Jesus is in fact the human being for ever unique in being entirely so enlightened, precisely because His Human Nature is united to the Logos in a single Hypostasis; the enlightenment of everyone else is precisely because of His salvific work, so that it finds its fulfilment in and as the life of His Mystical Body, hence the priority and urgency of evangelisation.

Now that travel and communication make it possible, theology (the study of the order of redemption, grace and faith) and Christian philosophy (the study of the order of creation, nature and reason) can no longer be written without reference to that which is thus fulfilled in other religions, any more than without reference to that which is thus fulfilled in the fine arts, the humanities, the social sciences, or the natural sciences. (As for any claim to have completed and surpassed philosophy, we have heard it all before.)

The recapitulation in Christ and His Church of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire synthesised these, not only with each other, but also with themselves: the legal, prophetic, historical-narrative, poetic and sapiential aspects of the Old Testament; the Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic and other aspects of Greek thought; and so on.

Provided that She does not compromise anything that She has already gained from this original inculturation at the root of the Tradition, the Church may and must use (and thus enrich) that Tradition so rooted, in order to discern all that is true, good and beautiful in the thought-systems of the world, expressing as these do the needs and aspirations of the universal human spirit. Is Radical Orthodoxy doing this?

Meanwhile, there is a growing enthusiasm for non-Western philosophy among the analytical philosophers, many of whom also increasingly defend with real enthusiasm the classic arguments for the existence of God. The first feature, at least no less than the second, must by definition involve a much greater openness to classical Christianity if the analytical school has any consistency. Indeed, it is possible to identify one of the roots of Radical Orthodoxy’s popularity as the 1960s and 1970s enthusiasm for all things supposedly Eastern, whence undoubtedly derives the philosophers’ greater openness: if India (especially), then why not Christendom? But has Radical Orthodoxy itself noticed this?

Radical Orthodoxy is right to recognise the importance and utility of the Continental tradition and of Postmodern thought, but wrong to buy into the (spoken or unspoken) Continental view that metaphysics, natural theology and so on have been demolished by Kant. Does Radical Orthodoxy really want to define itself in terms of the ultimately Kantian rejection of all its professed heroes? Where is then its authority?

Which is where we began, since it is where everything to do with Radical Orthodoxy begins and ends. For that is where everything to do Anglo-Catholicism or any other form of Protestant High Churchmanship, among which we may include Magisterially dissident Catholicism, begins and ends: where is its authority?