Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?

We have seen that postmodern thought can be an occasion for a recovery of ancient Christian themes and sources because the critique of modernity reopens a significant role for tradition. In this chapter we will consider the unique connections between tradition and postmodernism by examining the voice of Radical Orthodoxy.

Raising the Curtain: Whale Rider

If there is one thing that postmodernism is opposed to, it is the traditional. The very notion of the postmodern has become synonymous with the new, the novel, the avant-garde, and at the very least, the contemporary. But is it possible to be faithful to tradition in the contemporary world? Is that even something we should want? Don’t the advances of modernity—instantaneous global communication, the virtual connection of the four corners of the world, the steady march of technological mastery, the fluidity of trends and self-invention—don’t these represent the overcoming of tradition and an escape from its static past? Who would want to go back to crawling when we’ve learned to fly? Or could it be that the price of flying is not worth the so-called freedom? Might the progressive, ahistorical detachment of our modern life be a denial of something that is part of the fabric of being human? Could it be that we are traditioned creatures, in which case unhooking ourselves from tradition would end only in self-alienation, even self-destruction?

These tensions between tradition and contemporary culture are powerfully illustrated in the film Whale Rider.¹ The film opens with the words “In the old days . . . ,” then immediately cuts to the very modern, technological scene of childbirth in a contemporary hospital. The film’s opening is both ancient and future: appealing to “the ancestors” while documenting the birth of the next generation. This ancient-future tension is what drives the narrative, centered around the young girl Paikea.

Whale Rider tells the story of a Maori tribe struggling to flourish in the Eastland region of New Zealand. The Maori have not weathered modernity well: the “opportunities” it has presented to the youth have produced something of a lost generation. Some, like Porourangi (the firstborn who should be chief-in-waiting), have welcomed the possibility of international travel as a way to escape the restrictions and expectations of a traditional culture. His younger brother, Rawiri, like other young men in the tribe (such as Hemi’s father) has also escaped, but into a world of drug-induced immobilization and dilapidated squalor. In response to this rejection of Maori identity—particularly the rituals and “old ways” of the tribe—the chief, Koro, has responded with a retrenched commitment to recover the tradition in its most stringent form, further alienating his sons, Porourangi and Rawiri.

Koro has pinned all his hopes on Porourangi’s firstborn, who, as the film opens, is being delivered into this world with much difficulty. This son, he believes, will be “the One” who will recover the power of the ancestors and redirect the Maori community— a prophet who will lead them. But the birth of this baby boy results in the death of his mother—only for the son to die moments later. Porourangi has lost his wife and son; Koro has lost his hope. And lost in this tumult of grief and shattered hopes, a twin has arrived: a baby girl, ignored by her grandfather and later abandoned by her father. But in his confrontation with his father—who in the presence of Porourangi’s dead wife could only ask, “Where’s the boy?”—Porourangi has the audacity (and the hope?) to tell Koro his daughter’s name: “Her name is Paikea,” he announces.

“What?” Koro responds.

“You heard me.”

“No, not that name.”

Why Koro’s horror on this announcement? Because the name both retrieves and challenges the heart of Maori tradition. The narrative or myth that orients the tribe revolves around the story of an ancient Paikea who, when his canoe capsized in the South Pacific, rode on the back of a whale to the Eastland region of New Zealand. Since that time, the tribe’s chiefs have been the firstborn, male descendants of Paikea. For Porourangi to announce that his daughter would be called Paikea, when his firstborn son and rightful heir had died, was, from Koro’s perspective, an act of defiance and a patent rejection of the traditions of the ancestors. And indeed this was Porourangi’s last act before abandoning the island—and his responsibilities as firstborn—altogether, leaving the baby Paikea in the care of a loving grandmother but a disdaining grandfather, or Paka. In the face of Koro’s rigid understanding of the tradition, Porourangi’s only option is rejection and abandonment: he leaves his daughter, he escapes the tribe, and in a powerful symbol throughout the film, he leaves on the shore an unfinished te waka, or war canoe. Once the object of his artistic gifts and passion and a powerful expression of the tribe’s tradition, the half-finished hulk of a vessel sits abandoned on the coastline—left to the elements but still having an intimidating presence that haunts the tribe. While they have sought to reject and forget their heritage, the massive, empty hull just won’t go away.

When we next see the young Paikea, we find her in a tortured relationship with her Paka—tortured on both sides (for Paikea refuses to stop loving her grandfather). On the one hand, Paka can’t seem to stop loving Paikea, playing with her on his bike, smiling gently into her face; on the other hand, his passion for the revival of the tribe through a new leader—firstborn and male—is frustrated every time he calls Paikea’s name. She represents to him his own failure, and he worries that she is the sign that the tribe has been abandoned by the ancestors; indeed, he sees Paikea as bad luck. With the death of the firstborn male, the line of chiefs has returned to the ancestors, and Koro must find some way to get it back—some way to retrieve the charism of chief in someone. But he knows that can’t be Paikea: the charism of chief could never be given to a girl.

So Koro undertakes measures to try to retrieve the tradition: he gathers all the firstborn males of the village and launches a sacred school meant to form them in the ancient ways. Paikea is systematically excluded, even told to stay off the grounds of the marae, or temple, because it is, according to Koro, “the one place where our old ways are upheld.” In this sacred school of learning, they are taught the old ways: the chants and songs of the tribe, its stories and myths, its dances and rituals. The young boys find these old ways strange vis-à-vis the modernity in which they feel most comfortable. This is seen, for instance, in a ritual war dance where the boys are taught to slap their chests “until they bleed” and to stick out their tongues in the face of the opponent. “When you stick out your tongue,” Koro explains, “you’re saying to your enemy, ‘I’m going to eat you.’ ” The boys, bewildered, are tentative to enter the practice.

They do take to one of the practices: a ritual form of combat using long staffs. Their formation in modernity has fostered a certain interest in violence, even if ritualized. Paikea, excluded from the training, tries to mimic the actions from a distance, using a broom handle. When Koro finds out, he hastily banishes her: “Do you want me to fail?” he asks her. But her grandmother shares an interesting piece of family history: her uncle Rawiri—who is now mired in idleness and squalor by a drug addiction—was once a champion of this ritual fighting (“before he was fat and ugly,” she comments). So she suggests that Paikea ask him for private lessons. Rawiri’s friends and girlfriend are surprised to learn that as a young boy he was once a master of ancient traditions; and indeed, Rawiri has really forgotten this about himself—a microcosmic picture of the way he has generally forgotten who he was (and is). But when Paikea invites him to train her, as soon as he grabs the staff, there is a transformation. This artifact of the tradition has an almost sacramental character and seems to immediately recall him to himself, to remind him of not only who he was but who he is called to be. This reacquaintance with the tradition has a remarkably humanizing effect on one from the lost generation. Rawiri takes up the challenge with fervor and not only trains Paikea to be the best in the tribe but also recovers his own sense of identity and worth.²

Koro’s sacred school of firstborns is finally subjected to one last test to discern which is the One destined to bring the charism of chief back to the tribe. Koro takes the boys out into the bay in a rickety aluminum boat (which is a small, ugly artifact of modernity compared with the massive decorated hull of the waka they can see on shore the whole time). Anchoring in a deep section of the bay, he removes from his neck a whale-tooth amulet (a reiputa) and throws it into the deep: “One of you will bring it back to me,” he announces. The boys dive into the water, eager to retrieve the whale’s tooth and seal their identity as chief-inwaiting. One by one they bob up to the surface, until Koro finally asks, “Well, which one of you has it?” None could retrieve the amulet. They return to shore in silence; Koro makes his way to his bed and remains there for days on end. He has failed; the ancestors have ignored his prayers; his people are doomed to the darkness of forgetting.

But Paikea has heard her grandfather’s prayers and sympathizes with his struggles. “He was calling to the ancient ones,” she tells us in a voice-over, “asking them to help him. But they weren’t listening. . . . So I tried.” She makes her way out to the empty, haunting hull of the waka. It is into the skeleton-like presence of the waka that Paikea retreats when she feels her grandfather’s rejection most intensely. It was also the site of an important conversation with her father, when he briefly returned to the tribe. At that time Paikea was intensely aware of Koro’s rejection, and Porourangi had explained to her: “He’s looking for something that doesn’t exist anymore.” He’s looking for a “prophet,” someone to “lead [their] people out of the darkness.”

But at this time Paikea retreats to the waka to pray for her grandfather—to call the ancestors in his stead. “And they heard me.” This initiates the transformative sequence of the film: one night Paikea gives her award-winning speech in “love and respect” for her grandfather, in which she explains the story of her people and tearfully recognizes that she was not the leader that her grandfather expected; on this same night, Paka finally emerges from his room and is about to attend Paikea’s speech but is turned back to the beach. Distant cries lure him to the shore, where he finds an entire pod of whales have beached themselves and are slowly dying. “Who’s to blame?” he asks himself. The ancestors had heard Paikea’s prayers and tears, and had come. But what did it mean? “It was a test,” Paikea concludes.

The entire tribe comes together in the face of this tragedy and labors through the night to try to save the whales. They drape the creatures with dampened blankets and run to and from the sea with pails of water. When one of the whales dies in the hour before dawn, Rawiri comforts a grief-stricken woman who, just hours before, was one of the cynical old women gathered around the card table. The death of the whale has sparked in her a memory of a way of life she has forgotten. But their nocturnal labors for the whales is tinged with futility as the sun begins to rise: further down the beach they see the massive hulk of a whale that must be ancient, dwarfing those they have been tending. If it has seemed almost hopeless to get these smaller creatures back in the water, what is the hope for saving this mammoth?

Koro approaches the gentle, colossal creature with chants and prayers and quickly diagnoses the situation: they need to find some way to turn the animal around and get it headed back out to sea. Then the others will follow. He barks at Rawiri to gather everyone for this task, but Rawiri is less confident: they’ve been working all night, he replies. “They’ll do it for you,” Koro responds—a first indication that Koro sees in his second-born the charism of a leader. Rawiri gathers together the tribe to devote themselves to this Herculean, impossible task. The strategy seems simple: attaching a massive rope to the tail, which will be pulled with a tractor, both men and women will push simultane-ously on the head and attempt to redirect the whale. The tractor strains and the rope begins to fray, eventually snapping.³ What now? Is there any hope?

Paikea has been watching all this from the hull of the waka. After the tribe leaves the shore, she makes her way down to the water’s edge and inches cautiously toward the whale. Mimicking the traditional Maori greeting she has known since she was a child, Paikea rubs noses with the whale, prayerfully, trying to discern what she ought to do. Slowly, but resolutely, she climbs up on the back of the animal and assumes the stance of her namesake: Paikea the ancient whale rider. The whale responds to her entreaties, beats its tail fin against the sand, and begins to maneuver its massive body toward the ocean’s depths. Paikea remains on the whale’s back, riding the creature as it leads the other beached whales back to the depths, where they can flourish. Paikea seems to refuse to let go and remains attached to the whale as it makes its descent into the water.

As this is happening, Paikea’s grandmother begins to search for her: “Where is she? Where is she?” the grandmother cries. This turns the tribe’s attention to the beach and to the ocean, where they see the young Paikea riding the whale back out to sea. With tears of sadness and anger, the grandmother puts something into Koro’s hand: the whale’s tooth none of the boys had been able to retrieve. “Which one?” he asks.

“What do you mean ‘which one?’ ” his wife replies, indignantly. Koro knows.

The force of the dive pushes Paikea off the whale’s back, and she is later retrieved from the waters, in serious condition. Koro cautiously enters her hospital room, humbles himself before young Paikea, kneeling beside her in submission: “Forgive me, O Wise Leader. I am just a fledgling new to flight.” The scene then cuts to the underwater serenity of a young whale playfully dancing underneath its mother. Koro has found the charism of the ancestors where he had least expected it.

In the closing scene of the film, we see that the creative, unexpected retrieval of the tradition led by Paikea has transformed and renewed the community: cutting across a shot of blue sky is the bow of the waka, now completed and shimmering in bright colors, its intricate carving completed by Porourangi, who has returned home. He and Rawiri lead the team of those from the lost generation as they roll the waka out to sea and launch it on its maiden voyage. On the shore are groups of tribal dancers in traditional costume and paint, chanting and singing according to the old ways and led by some of the young men and women who had been mired in drugs and the underside of modernity. While the film does not present a simplistic rejection of modernity (modern medicine nurses Paikea back to health), it is the recovery of tradition in modernity, and sometimes against modernity, that makes possible the renewal of the identity of Paikea’s people. It is the strangeness of ancient ritual and the outlandish notion of whale riding that grants them a future.

Redeeming Dogma: A More Persistent Postmodernism

The church would do well by learning to ride whales. We need to be attentive and discerning about the way modernity has eroded our identity as the “peculiar people” who make up the body of Christ and seek to retrieve the strange ways and ancient practices of the communion of the saints in order to re-form who we are. In this concluding chapter, we will see that the outcome of the postmodernism sketched in earlier chapters should be a robust confessional theology and ecclesiology that unapologetically reclaims premodern practices in and for a postmodern culture. A more persistent postmodernism—one that really follows through on the implications of claims made by Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault (or better, the meshing of their central claims with insights from the Christian theological tradition)—will issue not in a thinned-out, sanctified version of religious skepticism (a “religion without religion”) offered in the name of humility and compassion but rather should be the ground for the proclama-tion and adoption of “thick” confessional identities. Much that we find in the name of postmodern spirituality, or even in the name of an “emerging” Christianity, is a timidity with respect to the particularities of the Christian confessional tradition. While this is almost certainly a corrective with respect to rabid forms of fundamentalism—whether Protestant or Catholic—a retreat into a thinly “ecumenical” Christianity that reduces confession to bland concerns with justice or love still remains a latent version of a very modern project.⁴ In this respect much of the dominant discussion in postmodern theology or philosophy of religion actually shrinks back from the more radical implications of the postmodern critique.

The most persistent postmodernism will issue in a postmodern dogmatics—or what we might call a postcritical dogmatics of second naiveté. And on the level of practice, a more persistent postmodernism will engender not quite a postmodern church but rather a postmodern catalyst for the church to be the church.

In this respect a recent movement or sensibility in Christian theology embodies this more persistent postmodernism. Radical Orthodoxy⁵—a sensibility that seeks to articulate a robust confessional theology in postmodernity—represents a more persistent or thoroughgoing postmodernism insofar as it refuses the modern (and skeptical) equation of knowledge with omniscience. In other words, unlike much postmodern theology or Continental philosophy of religion, Radical Orthodoxy refuses to be haunted by Cartesian anxiety.⁶

What do we mean by this? We must appreciate the sense in which many advocates of postmodern theology or religion are deeply critical of particular, determinate formulations of religious confession. Figures such as Derrida and John D. Caputo rightly point out (and many who are part of the emergent conversation are very sympathetic on this score) that the modern Cartesian dream of absolute certainty is just that: a dream, and, admittedly, one that has been a nightmare for those who have become victims to such rational confidence (colonized peoples, an exploited creation, etc.). And far too often, some version of Cartesian certainty has attached itself to particular religious expressions—the result is what we call fundamentalism—and engendered untold harm. The problem with such modern religion—whether in the form of post-Kantian liberal theology or the equally modernist versions of Protestant fundamentalism—is twofold: on the one hand, it rests on a mythical epistemology of immediate access and cognitive certainty; on the other hand, its fruit has included harm, violence, and suffering for communities, both to those within such communities and to those regarded as “other” by these religious communities.

If, then, we are going to be postmodern—if we are going to get rid of what is worst about modernity—then surely we need to abandon not only foundationalist epistemology but also the forms of religion that have hitched their wagon to this Cartesian train. But for Derrida, Caputo, and others, the rejection of modernist religion (and its attendant epistemology) takes the form of a critique that might be said to still accept the rules of the game laid down by Descartes. In particular, a common move in postmodern theology⁷ is to reject the Cartesian equation of knowledge with quasi-omniscient certainty, instead asserting a kind of radical skepticism that opposes faith to knowledge but thereby actually retains the Cartesian equation of knowledge and certainty. “I don’t know,” Derrida once said; “I must believe.”⁸ In other words, the postmodern theologian says, “We can’t know that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. The best we can do is believe.” Why? Because to know would mean being certain. We know that such certainty is an impossible dream; therefore, we actually lack knowledge. We don’t know; we can only believe, and such faith will always be mysterious and ambiguous. But this isn’t a bad thing; quite to the contrary, it is liberating and just. It is precisely when we think we know something about God that we start erecting boundaries and instituting discipline. People who know what God wants effect the worst sort of violence on those who don’t know, even on those who are part of the “knowing” community. Not only infidels are harmed by such “believers” (who are really “knowers”) but also those internal to the religious community, who are subjected to all kinds of legalistic rules, even if they are self-imposed. So postmodern religious faith eschews knowledge and therefore also eschews the particularity of dogma and doctrine. In other words, according to this line of thinking, postmodern faith sees any particular, determinate religious confession as still tainted by knowledge; instead, the postmodernist advocates a “religion without religion” that is not linked to any particular creed or denomination—a more transcendent, less determinate (or even indeterminate) commitment to justice or “love.”⁹

Much in this critique has been rightly affirmed by many who have tried to think through the shape of the emerging church in postmodernity. Those whose Christian experience has been shaped by American fundamentalism (like myself ) are particularly open and receptive to this critique of determinate modern religion since we have seen and experienced firsthand the kind of harm that is done—both to people and the gospel—by such practices and theological formulations. So it is understandable that the emergent church has flirted with a religion without religion, sympathetic to versions of postmodern spirituality that undercut the role of dogma and the institutional church.¹⁰However, I suggest that such a religion without religion is not really postmodern:it is rather an extension of deeply modern sensibilities. Further, a more properly postmodern theology will reject the very terms of this critique and, in fact, be much more hospitable to both dogmatic theology and the institutional church.

First, this quasi-postmodern religion without religion does not upset the modern Cartesian formulation of the problem. Instead, it proceeds by accepting the Cartesian equation of knowledge with certainty; then, because such certainty is impossible, it must conclude that knowledge is impossible. But we need not accept this all-or-nothing logic. Indeed, before Descartes this would have seemed simply mistaken. From Augustine through Aquinas, medieval theologians were very attentive to the difference between “comprehending” God (which was impossible) and “knowing” God (which was possible, because God had given himself to us in terms that could be received).¹¹Why should we think that the criterion for knowledge is godlike certainty or omniscience? Why should we accept the clearly mistaken modern equation of the two? Quasi-postmodern religion without religion actually accepts and works from this Cartesian paradigm, whereas a more persistent or proper postmodernism rejects this paradigm as an aberration in the history of philosophy and theology.¹²

It is precisely this refusal of the Cartesian paradigm that characterizes Radical Orthodoxy, which seeks to reanimate the account of knowledge offered by Augustine and Aquinas. On this ancient-medieval-properly-postmodern model, we rightly give up pretensions to absolute knowledge or certainty, but we do not thereby give up on knowledge altogether. Rather, we can properly confess that we know God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, but such knowledge rests on the gift of (particular, special) revelation,¹³is not universally objective or demonstrable, and remains a matter of interpretation and perspective (with a significant appreciation for the role of the Spirit’s regeneration and illumination as a condition for knowledge). We confess knowledge without certainty, truth without objectivity.

Second, it is the acceptance of the modern Cartesian paradigm that undergirds Derrida’s and Caputo’s critique of dogma and determinate religious confession. To confess something determinate and embody this in dogma or doctrine would be to claim to know something about the transcendent, and the inverted Cartesian skepticism of this quasi-postmodernism can’t have that. Postmodern religion without religion’s resulting affirmation of “faith” seems both deeply fideistic and anti-institutional. The most significant problem with this, from a Christian perspective, is that it is deeply unincarnational. It operates with what I have elsewhere described as a “logic of determination” rather than a “logic of incarnation.”¹⁴According to this logic of determination, particularity itself is violent and leads to violence; therefore, in order to avoid violence we must have, for instance, a social hope that is indeterminate and hopes for a justice that is unspecified, or we must have a religious community without dogma or discipline. But Derrida’s premise, which equates determination with violence, can and must be called into question. The determinate and finite would be construed as violent and exclusionary only if one assumes that finitude is somehow a failure—implying that we are somehow called to be infinite. In short, to accept Derrida’s premise that all determination or finitude constitutes violence, one would have to adopt some version of a gnostic ontology, which construes finitude as a kind of fall, an original violation. But we are free to reject this premise, particularly on Christian grounds.

Instead of adopting a logic of determination that construes finitude or particularity as a violence, I advocate a logic of incarnation that honors finitude and particularity as a good. If one begins, instead, with an affirmation of embodiment as good, then the fact of finitude and particularity—for example, the confession that God became flesh at a particular time (“under Pontius Pilate”) and in a particular place (“born of the Virgin Mary”)—is not construed as injustice or violence, because with the rejection of Derrida’s logic of determination one must also reject the very modern notion of an ahistorical, a-geographical, transcendental religion. Therefore, it follows that the particularity of religious confession is not violent per se. (It can even be argued that one can locate the seeds of such an incarnational logic in undeveloped aspects of Derrida’s early work, such that we might be able to deconstruct Derrida on just this point.)¹⁵

Christian confession begins from the scandalous reality that God became flesh, and became flesh in a particular person, at a particular time, and in a particular place. The affirmation of particularity is at the very heart of the incarnation, which is itself a reaffirmation of the goodness of particularity affirmed at creation. This affirmation of particularity is then extended in and by the body of Christ, which is the church. But such an incarnational affirmation of embodiment and particularity—including the particularities of dogmatic confession, institutional organization, historical unfolding of doctrine, and so on—is more properly postmodern than the lingering modernism of a religion without religion that, in Kantian fashion, reduces faith to a generic affirmation of love or justice. A more persistent postmodernism embraces the incarnational scandal of determinate confession and its institutions: dogmatic theology and a confessionally governed church.¹⁶Perhaps in its most scandalous form, there is nothing more postmodern than hierarchy!¹⁷(And nothing more modern than autonomous, nondenominational anarchy.)

So far, I have been suggesting that a properly postmodern theology will be dogmatic, not skeptical. This is not to advocate a return to an uncritical fundamentalism or the triumphalist stance of the Religious Right. Rather, it is to affirm that our confession and practice must proceed unapologetically from the particularities of Christian confession as given in God’s historical revelation in Christ and as unfolded in the history of the church’s response to that revelation. To be dogmatic, then, is to be unapologetically confessional, which requires being unapologetic about the determinate character of our confession, contra the Cartesian anxiety exhibited by much postmodern theology. This should translate into a robust appropriation of the church’s language as the paradigm for both thought and practice. While this affirmation of the primacy of revelation is a core tenet of Radical Orthodoxy, it is one shared with other movements in postmodern theology, including postliberalism.¹⁸But this issue of the primacy of revelation raises another concern I’d like to briefly address before moving to a more specific consideration of what an incarnational affirmation of history entails for worship and discipleship.

One of the concerns I have about the shape of the postmodern or emerging church is what could technically be described as a correlationist model.¹⁹“Correlation” refers to a theological strategy whose pedigree is distinctly modern. It operates as follows: beginning with a certain confidence in the findings of a secular discipline—whether philosophy, psychology, history, or sociology—a correlationist theology adapts this neutral or scientific framework as a foundation and then correlates Christian theological claims with the facts disclosed by secular science. For instance, Bultmann accepted the neutral (supposed) facts of Heidegger’s existential account of the human condition and then correlated Christian theology to fit this model. Or liberation theology took the findings of Marxist sociology as disclosing the scientific facts about human community and then correlated Christian theology with this “scientific” foundation. In every case, correlationist theology has a deeply apologetic interest: ultimately, the goal is to make Christianity intelligible or rational to a given culture (even if it operates on the assumption of a transcultural, neutral, objective reason). In the process, however, primacy is given not to the particularity of Christian revelation or the confessional tradition but rather to the poles of science, experience, and so on, which are taken to be neutral “givens.”²⁰

But such a correlational method is true not only in theology; we can also clearly see it in church practice. In fact, one of the most trenchant critiques of contemporary evangelicalism has charged the church with looking primarily to its surrounding culture for the norms of what it means to be, or better, to “do,” church. Thus seeker-sensitive churches have sought to translate or correlate the gospel into terms of a given (usually white, upper-middle-class) culture, even giving a certain priority to this cultural pole. What Robert Webber helpfully describes as “pragmatic evangelicalism”²¹ operates on a deeply modernist level. And many in the emerging church have been critical of just this cultural assimilation, which has dominated the megachurch, church-growth paradigm. But I wonder whether, in the name of creating a postmodern church, the emerging church continues this correlation by other means. While this is by no means a monolithic phenomenon, there are certainly streams in emerging discussions that are simply looking to update the church and bring it into correlation with a postmodern rather than a modern culture. Those in the emergent conversation who are more reflective see this for what it is: more of the same and really just an extension of (modern) pragmatic evangelicalism. However, even among more reflective emergent thinkers, one can see hints of a retained correlational stance. There remains a certain notion that the church needs to “get with”postmodernity such that postmodern culture sets an agenda for the church, rather than postmodernity being a catalyst for the church to recover its own authentic mission.²²

If we hope to be properly postmodern, then we must intentionally resist this correlational model. And here Radical Orthodoxy is instructive in both its diagnosis and prescription. At the level of diagnosis, Milbank observes that “the pathos of modern theology is its false humility.”²³Conceding its foundations to the conditions of modernity and accepting the notion of a neutral science that must position theological discourse, modern theology had to be apologetic. But “once theology surrenders its claim to be a metadiscourse, it cannot any longer articulate the word of the creator God, but is bound to turn into some oracular voice of some finite idol, such as historical scholarship, humanist psychology, or transcendental philosophy. If theology no longer seeks to position, qualify or criticize other discourses, then it is inevitable that these discourses will position theology.”²⁴But it is precisely the postmodern critique of Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault that has unmasked this myth of a neutral scientific discourse that could position the supposed irrationality of theological discourse. All discourses and disciplines proceed from commitments and beliefs that are ultimately religious in nature. No scientific discourse (whether natural science or social science) simply discloses to us the facts of reality to which theology must submit; rather, every discourse is, in some sense, religious. The playing field has been leveled. Theology is most persistently postmodern when it rejects a lingering correlational false humility and instead speaks unapologetically from the primacy of Christian revelation and the church’s confessional language. Radical Orthodoxy, then, is more properly postmodern than Derridean religious skepticism precisely because it embraces this situation. Indeed, it is “intended to overcome the pathos of modern theology, and to restore in postmodern terms, the possibility of theology as a metadiscourse.”²⁵

The rejection of correlation with respect to theology should also be true of our understanding of church practice, worship, and discipleship. If the pathos of modern theology is its false humility, it might be that the persistent pathos of postmodern Christian practice and the emerging church is a continued false humility. If Christian theology should proceed from the primacy of God’s revelation in Christ and Scripture, then Christian practices of worship and discipleship should do the same. Our understanding of what it means to be the church must be shaped by the priority of revelation and the Christian tradition, not what (even) a postmodern culture needs or is looking for. A radically orthodox church practice will refuse the correlational idol of relevance without giving up the central impetus of hospitality. We see this modeled in the case of Whale Rider: the community’s capitulation to modernity only spelled disaster. Rejection of tradition in favor of modernity showed itself to be a failure. But the solution was not to broker a compromise with modernity either—to come up with a correlation between modernity’s tenets and a thinned-out version of the faith tradition that was “suitable” for moderns. (Correlation always privileges the culture, whether of modernity or postmodernity.) Rather, healing and communal wholeness were found when the community risked putting its tradition first—when it granted primacy to its faith stories and let those stories position their response to and appropriation of modernity (or postmodernity).²⁶This was not a simple going backward either: it was a nonidentical repetition of the tradition in a postmodern context. It was not a nostalgic, romantic return to old paths. This was a creative retrieval of the tradition for a postmodern culture. After all, the charism of chief was unexpectedly incarnated in a girl.

Recovering Tradition: Taking History Seriously

I have suggested that a more persistent postmodernism, articulated by Radical Orthodoxy, begins from a primary affirmation of the incarnation. In the preceding section I argued that if our theology and practice are going to be fundamentally incarnational, then they should be the catalysts for a reaffirmation of the particularities of Christian dogma, confession, and ecclesial practice. I want to extend this incarnational logic into two more spheres that are significant for Christian worship and discipleship in the postmodern world. First, in this section, I suggest that the incarnation should entail a deep affirmation of time and history, which should translate into church practice that is catholic and traditional (though in a postmodern mode). The following section explores the implications of the incarnational affirmation of space along two axes: an affirmation of liturgy and the arts and a commitment to place and local communities.

Let us first think about time. There is a significant sense in which modernity tried to transcend time in its quest for universal, ahistorical principles and truths that applied at all times, in all places, to all people. This universal penchant for ahistoricality resulted in the colonial imposition of one particular set of practices as rational and universal, when in fact they were the fruit of a very determinate history and geography. In this respect modernity represented a revival of traditional Platonism, which held that ideas—and it is ideas that modernity really cared about—trafficked in the eternal, unchanging, atemporal realm of the Forms.²⁷In other words, to grasp an idea was to transcend time, and the ideas that really mattered were not conditioned by time or change. In fact, it was the realm of bodies and matter— the realm of generation and decay—that was also the realm of time, history, and change. Thus it is no surprise that modernity, launched by the disembodied Cartesian “thinking thing,” would come to have an ambivalent relationship to the world of bodies and time. History, rather than being affirmed as the arena for the material unfolding of latent possibilities, was something to be subdued and transcended. For Kant, for instance, what was properly ethical or good could not bear any relationship to the particular contingencies of time or place.

The church’s theology bought into this ahistoricism in different ways: along a more liberal, post-Kantian trajectory, the historical particularities of Christian faith were reduced to atemporal moral teachings that were universal and unconditioned. Thus it turned out that what Jesus taught was something like Kant’s categorical imperative—a universal ethics based on reason rather than a set of concrete practices related to a specific community. Liberal Christianity fostered ahistoricism by reducing Christianity to a universal, rational kernel of moral teaching. Along a more conservative, evangelical trajectory (and the Reformation is not wholly innocent here), it was recognized that Christians could not simply jettison the historical particularities of the Christian event: the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, there was still a quasi-Platonic, quasi-gnostic rejection of material history such that evangelicalism, while not devolving to a pure ahistoricism, became dominated by a modified ahistoricism we can call primitivism. Primitivism retains the most minimal commitment to God’s action in history (in the life of Christ and usually in the first century of apostolic activity)²⁸ and then seeks to make only this first-century “New Testament church” normative for contemporary practice.²⁹This is usually articulated by a rigid distinction between Scripture and tradition (the latter then usually castigated as “the traditions of men” as opposed to the “God-given” realities of Scripture).³⁰Such primitivism is thus anticreedal and anticatholic, rejecting any sense that what was unfolded by the church between the first and the twenty-first centuries is at all normative for current faith and practice (the question of the canon’s formation being an interesting exception here). Ecumencial creeds and confessions—such as the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed—that unite the church across time and around the globe are not “live” in primitivist worship practices, which enforce a sense of autonomy or even isolation, while at the same time claiming a direct connection to first-century apostolic practices.³¹

I’m suggesting that this anticatholic ahistoricism stems from the absorption of a modern aversion to the logic of incarnation and the affirmation of the goodness of creation—and the attendant affirmation of embodiment, change, time, history, and therefore tradition. To affirm the goodness of creation ³² (Gen. 1:31) is to affirm the goodness of time, time’s unfolding in history, and the fruit of this process in tradition. As John Milbank puts it, it is not just the material creation that “participates” in God; our own human poiesis, or “making,” is a kind of co-creation that also participates in God’s transcendence. In other words, human cultural making—including the culture making of the church’s institutions and practices over time—is an arena of the Spirit’s continued activity and revelation.³³

While the emerging church rightly rejects the disincarnate theologies and practices of pragmatic evangelicalism, I wonder if it has retained something of modernity’s ahistoricism or its evangelical version, primitivism. In the name of postmodern Christianity, we often hear sentiments about believing in Jesus but not Christianity, not letting tradition distort Jesus’s radical message in the Gospels, or sorting out the nonnegotiable essentials of the gospel from traditions—where, ironically, the traditions in question are usually the machinations of pragmatic evangelicalism. Sometimes this is expressed in a regulative principle about theological concepts: if a theological concept isn’t in the Bible, then it lacks any normativity.³⁴This also underwrites a persistent non- or even antidenominationalism in the emerging church, which rejects the normative confessional boundaries of any institutional hierarchies. This relates to our earlier observation of a lingering affirmation of autonomy in the emerging church; along the axis of time, we see a lingering, disincarnate rejection of time, history, and tradition.

Radical Orthodoxy articulates an incarnational affirmation of history that could help the emerging church think through its commitment to the incarnation by exorcising its latent primitivism. For, as Catherine Pickstock announces, “one of the most central aims of a radically orthodox perspective is to restore time and embodiment to our understanding of reality.”³⁵On this more incarnational account, time is not “something to be lamented or circumvented by means of the instruments of nostalgia, but rather as our very condition of possibility per se.”³⁶If we are created as finite, temporal creatures, then time is part of the good creational air that we breathe, so to speak. “Changefulness in time is actually what defines us.”³⁷To be human is to be temporal; to be temporal is to be traditioned, which is simply to say that we are always and only temporal in a social or communal manner.³⁸

But this is not a traditionalism; an affirmation of time, history, and tradition rejects the notion of a reified, static past that feeds the nostalgia of traditionalism. Rather, Pickstock emphasizes an ancient-future affirmation of time. We are constituted “as much by the past as by the future. For no co-ordinate of time—past, present, or future—wields supreme sway.”³⁹This “peculiar relationship to time,” she concludes, “distances us from both liberals and conservatives, for both these latter tend to invoke theology or the notion of God to underwrite some pre-existing value—whether, for conservatives, some fetish of tradition, or for liberals, some timeless humanist value. Against such positions, [Radical Orthodoxy] would prefer to emphasize that there are no such pre-established givens, for everything is a never-finished work, which yet discloses what lies invisibly within the interstices of time.”⁴⁰What is wrong with modernity is its suppression of time, and this suppression of time is seen in both liberal ahistoricism and the conservative evangelical version of ahistoricism: primitivism. In contrast to both, Radical Orthodoxy asserts an affirmation of time as the incarnate arena for the Spirit’s unfolding and thus takes seriously the fruits of time as it becomes embodied in tradition. This is not to make a fetish of tradition but rather to recognize that time is a medium for God’s continued revelation and to concede a certain authority and normativity to what precedes us.

The shorthand to describe this affirmation of time and tradition is simple: this is catholic faith. In order for the church to be postmodern, it should be catholic. This might seem counterintuitive at first. But what the emerging church is reacting against is a deep, hurtful experience of sectarianism; the antidote to this is a generous orthodoxy and healthy catholicity. To be emergent should entail being catholic.

It is no secret that the evangelical tradition can take shape in forms that are deeply sectarian, provincial, and polemical.⁴¹But when we diagnose the cause of such instantiations of evangelical faith, we find one common cause: memory loss. In particular, such sectarian versions of evangelical identity tend to see themselves as relatively new inventions, or—following the logic of primitivism that we’ve already noted—new recoveries of the “true” faith and “New Testament church principles.” The most polemical and schismatic permutations of evangelical faith and practice tend to exhibit a paradoxical blend of primitivism and temporal hubris: on the one hand, they tend to have an air of having just dropped from the sky, but, on the other hand, they claim to give us the only authentic version of Pauline Christianity. While trumpeting notions of recovering the truth, these polemical elements of the evangelical tradition seem to be characterized by a deep forgetting. We might suggest that these versions of Christianity are more interested in being “holy” and “apostolic” than in being “catholic”—as if these traits could be separated.

Much earlier, in the early fifth century, Augustine grappled with another version of sectarianism—Donatism—which also tended to suffer from memory loss. And thus, when pastorally addressing the challenge for his parishioners, Augustine advocated remembering. In particular, he charged them: “Remember, you are catholic” (Sermon 52). The emerging church could heed the same admonition today. With Augustine’s admonition in mind, the emerging church might find a resource in an unlikely place:papal biographer George Weigel’s Letters to a Young Catholic.

That an admonition to be catholic would give evangelicals pause is evidence of precisely why such an exhortation is so important. (I’ve been in evangelical congregations that, if they recite the creed, project it on a screen and expect us to confess “the holy universal church,” just to keep things straight.) In an era when even confessional churches are being co-opted by a kind of generic evangelical pragmatism, American civic theology, or mainstream liberalism, Weigel’s Letters should be received as a reminder of the Augustinian challenge to remember our catholicity. Such a remembering of who we are—disciples of Jesus who are members of one, holy, catholic, apostolic church—is a powerful antidote to both the schismatic and the polemical elements of the evangelical tradition and should also revitalize a sense of antithesis, or what Weigel describes as “the catholic difference.”⁴²

It will be most difficult for evangelicals—particularly “emerging” evangelicals—to imagine themselves as recipients of these letters. Because of various shifts in identity and historical factors, we might not immediately think of ourselves as the audience for a book addressed to “catholics”; but insofar as our credo includes the confession of one holy catholic church, what Weigel articulates is the core of Christian faith and practice. While we often hear the term “catholic” as a way of marking off a body of Christians from other Christians, when Weigel speaks of “the catholic faith,” he means the faith that distinguishes the people of God from the secular and pagan faiths of the contemporary world. If there is a polemics here, it is directed not against other Christians (Weigel is not out to demonize Protestants) but against the Christian faith’s most seductive foes: secularism, naturalism, and liberalism. When Weigel articulates “the catholic difference,” he is not marking off Roman Catholics from Presbyterians but rather describing what distinguishes the people of God as a peculiar people and a holy nation. Indeed, Weigel even wants to reinvigorate the notion of the ghetto, recalling the Catholic ghetto of his Baltimore youth: “The most ghettoized people of all,” he concludes, “are those who don’t know they grew up in a particular time and place and culture, and who think they can get to universal truths outside particular realities and communities.” ⁴³ In the same way that some of my Dutch friends are drawn to the accounts of Hasidic communities in Chaim Potok’s fiction, Weigel gives us a sense in which a community constituted by “the catholic difference” functions as an empowering ghetto—though with its own set of struggles and challenges. “The real question,” he offers, “is not whether you grow up in a ghetto, but whether the ideas and customs and rhythms of your particular ghetto prepare you to engage other ideas and customs and life experiences without losing touch with your roots.”⁴⁴

Of course, the same peculiar people that are marked by “the catholic difference” also comprise a transnational and enduring community. So Weigel’s strategy for introducing his young interlocutor to the catholic faith is via a world tour of catholic places inhabited by exemplars of catholic faith. Beginning with the Baltimore ghetto of his youth, Weigel takes us on “an epistolary tour” of places such as Saint Peter’s Rome, Chesterton’s pub in London, Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai, the Oratory that was home to Cardinal Newman in Birmingham, and the Basilica of the Holy Trinity in Kraków, one of several Polish sites in the book. (Curiously absent from the tour are any sites outside the Northern Hemisphere; indeed, the entire continents of South America and Africa are silent in this account.) The result is a rich sketch of the core themes and affirmations that constitute “the catholic difference,” which is, “at bottom, a way of seeing the world.”⁴⁵If you’ll permit a Kuyperian indulgence, I take Weigel to be providing a lucid account of the Christian world- and life-view. And indeed, the reason I think this book is such a wonderful reminder of our catholicity—why I receive it as an Augustinian injunction to remember I am catholic—is because Weigel helps to locate key themes we traditionally re-gard as part of a Reformed worldview as ultimately catholic Christianity. “While Catholicism is a body of beliefs and a way of life,” he remarks, “Catholicism is also an optic, a way of seeing things, a distinctive perception of reality.”⁴⁶And one of the core features of the optic of Catholicism is its emphasis on tradition. Catholic faith constitutes a community of memory that resists both romanticism and the kind of temporal hubris that dismisses everything prior to 1968. “Christian thinking,” Weigel suggests, “should adopt an ecumenism of time, employing wisdom and insight from any historical era.”⁴⁷In other words, Catholicism is what Chesterton called “a democracy of the dead” because it affirms tradition, which “means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.”⁴⁸It is precisely this ecumenism of time that makes catholic Christianity critical of what Newman described as liberalism in religion.⁴⁹In an era when what we are getting in the name of postmodern spirituality might be more akin to “liberalism,” Newman’s voice and critique could be an ally in recovering the more antithetical side of the confessional tradition—what Weigel has been calling “the catholic difference,” or “countercultural Catholicism.”

A more persistently postmodern church must be radically incarnational. And to affirm the incarnation is to affirm the scandal of particularity with respect to both space and time. This requires a healthy sense of being constituted by our traditions as we look forward to an eschatological hope in the future. The postmodern church will be a witness to its contemporary generation by being a peculiar people oriented to a coming kingdom through the practices and language of a living tradition.⁵⁰The postmodern church must take the risk of learning to ride whales.

Renewing the Body: Space, Place, and Incarnation

A radical affirmation of the incarnation means affirming not only time (and history and tradition) but also space; that is, it must entail an affirmation of the goodness of the stuff that Descartes described as extended and then wrote off so quickly: bodies, buildings, and bowls of soup. (“Thinking things” never get hungry.) The materiality of God’s good creation, like time, is something that modernity sought to repress. And modernist, fundamentalist worship and spirituality reflected this: focused on a didactic sermon meant to convey the ideas that make up the “system” of Christian truth, evangelical worship services have fostered a talking-head Christianity that accords well with the “thinking things” of Cartesian modernity, but not with the robust, fleshy, communal beings that God called into being in Adam and Eve. The iconoclasm and ritual-phobia of evangelical worship bear direct affinity with the disenchanted world bequeathed to us by the immanentism of modern science.

Thus here again, it seems, if we want to be postmodern in some sense, we must recover elements of ancient ritual and practice, for it is liturgy that honors our fleshiness. But this is not a merely traditionalist fiat; it stems from the very way we think about the world and what it means to be human. In other words, an incarnational affirmation of liturgy and the aesthetics of worship is the fruit of an incarnational ontology (an account of the nature of reality) and a holistic anthropology (an account of what it means to be human).⁵¹If we want to resist the reductionistic Cartesian picture of human persons as “thinking things” (and we should also resist other reductionistic accounts of the human person as merely consuming things or biological things), we must recover the holistic anthropology we find intimated in Scripture and unpacked in the Augustinian catholic tradition. An incarnational anthropology begins with the affirmation that human persons are material: that we don’t just inhabit flesh and blood, but we are flesh and blood. Being embodied is an essential feature of being a human creature. As such, we are not defined by thinking; rather, we are primarily affective: the center of the person is not the mind, but the heart. (That’s not to say we are irrational, but only that rationality [mind] is relative to what Augustine calls “the right order of love”—the direction of our heart.) When Pascal famously stated that “the heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing,” he meant to assert this primacy of affective, embodied being-in-the-world. This holistic anthropology (or account of the human person) is postmodern precisely because it rejects the reductionism of modernity, but it admittedly recovers key insights of a premodern, biblical worldview.

Because of this fundamental affirmation of embodiment, materiality, and affectivity, a radically orthodox worldview is fundamentally sacramental. It affirms not only the goodness of material bodies but also that the whole realm of the material has a revelational potential. And when this is coupled with the incarnational affirmation of time and tradition, a radically orthodox vision asserts a special mode of sacramentality for aspects of the church’s tradition, ritual, and liturgy.

George Weigel gets at the same point when he says that the catholic optic is animated by a sacramental imagination. (Once again, I’m suggesting that the best way to be postmodern is to be premodern; to be emergent, one must be catholic.) Weigel sees this sacramental imagination unfolded for us in G. K. Chesterton’s old haunt, the Cheshire Cheese pub in London, where we find the rotund apologist enjoying the very material blessings of food and ale. As Weigel puts it, Chesterton’s delight in the material world illustrates “the bedrock Catholic conviction that stuff counts.” Indeed, Weigel makes the radically orthodox claim that only a catholic account of the world can really affirm materiality: “Catholicism takes the world, and the things of the world, far more seriously than those who like to think of themselves as worldly.”⁵²Both fundamentalists and so-called materialists, he argues, subscribe to a gnostic imagination; only those who affirm the paradox of the incarnation can see the world with a sacramental imagination.⁵³

We find the same affirmation of stuff in the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins and in the almost sacramental (or theurgical) ladder of love in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.⁵⁴And it is ultimately this affirmation of creational stuff that makes us take history seriously, as illustrated in sites of pilgrimage and veneration. In commenting on the scavi (excavations) beneath Saint Peter’s, Weigel suggests that “the scavi and the obelisk— Peter’s remains and the last thing Peter may have seen in this life—confront us with the historical tangibility, the sheer grittiness, of Catholicism.” The foundations of the Catholic faith are something we can touch.⁵⁵

Although Catholicism may seem to be an otherworldly ideology, Weigel contends that, paradoxically, only catholic faith can really affirm the world—and modern materialists and naturalists actually flatten the world and reduce it to nothingness (and an attendant nihilism). This point is illustrated in what Radical Orthodoxy describes as a “participatory ontology”: the sense that we properly understand the nature of the world as creation only when we see that the world “participates” in God. Or, as proponents of this view put it, creation is “suspended” from the divine. The material stuff of the world is “suspended” from the immaterial, invisible God in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). This suspension of the material is what gives matter its depth, as it were; it makes it more than material. The disenchanted, flattened matter of modern naturalism, on the other hand, actually dissolves matter into nothing. Thus only Christians can be proper materialists!

Because of this Christian materialism, a catholic postmodernism (or postmodern catholicity) affirms sacramentality on two levels. On the one hand, it affirms a general sacramentality: the whole world has potential to function as a window to God and a means of grace from God because God himself affirms materiality as a good thing. We see this not only in creation itself but also in the reaffirmation of it in the incarnation, in which God is happy to inhabit the goodness of flesh. Furthermore, materiality receives an eschatological affirmation in our hope for the resurrection of the body. Even the future kingdom will be a material environment of sacramentality. On the other hand, when an incarnational ontology and anthropology are linked with our earlier affirmation of time and tradition, a catholic postmodernism also affirms a special sacramentality—a special presence and means of grace in the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. Thus a properly postmodern ecclesiology must overcome the triumph of a deeply modernist (and Zwinglian) notion of the ordinances of baptism and communion and recover a thicker, more sacramental practice of worship.

If it seems strange to suggest that only Christians (or what I’m now calling “postmodern catholics”) can properly be materialists, a related theme offers a similar reversal of first impressions:despite assumptions that Catholicism is Victorian in its supposed repression of sexuality, in fact at the root of Catholicism is a rich, affirmative theology of the body. Building on the founding affirmation of the incarnation, Weigel provides a kind of exegesis of the Sistine Chapel to help us reach John Paul II’s conclusion: that the Sistine Chapel is “the sanctuary of the theology of the human body.”⁵⁶The sacramental imagination, which affirms the goodness of creation, animates an iconic imagination that affirms the presence of the invisible in the visible—that “lifts up” the messiness of bodies to be more than biological machines. “Human bodies,” Weigel summarizes, “are icons.” And if this is pictured in the Sistine Chapel (Letter 8), and undergirds the beauty of Chartres Cathedral as a kind of “antechamber” of heaven (Letter 12), it is articulated most forcefully by John Paul II. “In a move that takes the argument about the sexual revolution as far beyond prudishness as you can imagine, John Paul has proposed that sexual love within the bond of faithful and fruitful marriage is nothing less than an icon of the interior life of God himself.”⁵⁷ Contrary to the assumptions of the New York Times reporter who thought the pope should have been embarrassed by the nudes in the Sistine Chapel, John Paul II steadily sketched a theology of the body in 129 addresses to general audiences between 1979 and 1984. Weigel does an excellent job of showing how countercultural this affirmation of embodiment and sexuality is in our contemporary context.

Taking the incarnation seriously means taking bodies seriously, which means affirming the space that they occupy as an arena of revelation and grace. The sacramental imagination begins from the assumption that our discipleship depends not only—not even primarily—on the conveyance of ideas into our minds, but on our immersion in embodied practices and rituals that form us into the kind of people God calls us to be. It is only Cartesian “thinking things” that can do without liturgy; for we embodied creatures, whether ancient or postmodern, the rhythms of ritual and liturgy are gracious practices that enable discipleship and formation. Thus postmodern worship stages a recovery of the aesthetic aspects of the Christian tradition as a crucial means for redirecting our imagination in community—a means for reordering our love.⁵⁸We were created for stories, not propositions; for drama, not bullet points. As someone has suggested, humanity cannot live on prose alone.⁵⁹The story of God-become-flesh is best rendered by the poetry and painting of affective worship rather than the narrowly cognitive didacticism of Power-Pointed “messages.” Properly postmodern worship resists such reductionism by reclaiming the holistic, full-orbed materiality of liturgical worship that activates all the senses: hearing (not just “messages” but the poetry of the preached Word), sight (with a renewed appreciation for the visual arts, iconicity, and the architectural space of worship), touch (in communal engagement, but also touching the bread that is Christ’s body), taste (the body and blood), and even smell (of wine in the cup of the new covenant but also the fragrance of worship in candles and incense). God’s taking on a human body also takes up our bodies into worship and participation in the divine.

Finally, if a radically orthodox, incarnational vision takes time and tradition seriously and affirms the goodness of bodies and space, it should also think carefully about place. A radically or-thodox vision entails not only a distinct liturgy and aesthetics but also a distinct geography. If modernity fosters an ahistorical penchant for timelessness and a disembodied notion of persons as merely thinking things, it also fosters a disconnection from space and locality. David Matzko McCarthy relates this to the increasing hegemony of the (modern, capitalist) market for which, Marx famously noted, all that is solid melts into air: “Our modern growth economy,” he observes, “requires that our attachments to people and things be superficial. We must be on the move in order to follow the market.”⁶⁰Not only are we increasingly mobile across national and international territories; we also find that the modern market makes us the kind of people who can’t be satisfied in one place for very long. Smaller urban homes can’t meet the desire for bigger and better, so we make the market-driven pilgrimage into the suburbs to secure the requisite square footage and adequate number of garage doors (three being the new standard)—even though this also means that we spend increased amounts of time commuting in the solitary space of our SUVs. (Descartes had to retreat into a private room to dream up a “thinking thing”; we have the long drive on I-95 to reinforce this solipsism.)

The suburbs, we might suggest, are quintessentially modern, and so it is not surprising that evangelical churches not only have followed the market but also thrive in “mega” forms in this suburban environment. For instance, the modern facilities of First Family Church in Kansas City include a vast lobby surrounded by plasma-screen TVs, buttressed by a food court, a sprawling Barnes-&-Noble-like bookstore, and entryway to the Christianized version of the magical kingdom for kids (where children are admitted to Sunday school by scanning their bar codes).⁶¹But perhaps what best signals First Family’s dislocation from place is the vast sea of vehicles that surround the church like a metallic moat. Because of this growing distance from the parking lot’s edge to the entrance of the gymlike sanctuary (the architecture fosters the iconoclasm of pragmatic evangelicalism), visitors are greeted by a large golf cart to shuttle primly dressed families into worship. And at the conclusion of worship, parking attendants help direct the rush of SUVs as they head for the exit, dispersing across the suburbs.⁶²

The convoy of SUVs making its way to and from “worship” at this suburban congregation owes more to the disembodied, disincarnate worldview of Cartesian modernity than to the radically incarnational confession of the church catholic. Being a properly incarnational, more persistently postmodern church entails not only a sacramental, embodied mode of worship practice but also translates into considerations about the place where we worship. The Christian ekklesia must be not only liturgical but also local; it must transform not only hearts but also neighborhoods; its worship must foster not only discipleship but also justice—indeed, disciples who are passionate about justice.

If the emerging church needs to be catholic, as I’ve suggested, then it must also recover the notion of parish ministry.⁶³The postmodern church must be willing to embrace, above all, those who have been crushed by the underside of modernity: those who inhabit the urban core of our cities. And to do so, it is important that the postmodern church stay put; that is, the church is properly postmodern not when it seeks to “plant” new congregations in the comfortable environs of American suburbia but when it struggles to revitalize existing congregations and communities in our inner cities. (Indeed, I wonder if church “planting” isn’t a rather modernist phenomenon, given to an infatuation with the new and wanting to work from a clean slate rather than the messiness of given communities. New construction is always easier than renovation. But there is something about the givenness and grittiness of existing communities that challenges our autonomous dreams to create or plant the next best thing. And if we can run with the architectural metaphor, I would take a restored Arts and Crafts home from the 1900s over the blandness of new developments any day.)

As Eric Jacobsen suggests, in an era of disincarnate suburban dislocation, incarnational ministry might simply mean praying for sidewalks.⁶⁴Embodied worship must be symbiotically related to the place in which we worship: the neighbor sometimes actually means the one next door. If the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, this should translate into an incarnational geography for the church, countering the disembodied abstraction of modernity that has too often been adopted by pragmatic evangelicalism. We need to counter not only the ideas of modernity but also the practices of modernity, and one of its most insidious practices involves a flight from the messy realities of urban community. Sidewalks might represent a threat to Cartesian autonomy, but they can also be a means for the inbreaking of grace.

Taking Radical Orthodoxy to Church

The radically orthodox church, while perhaps not Roman, is nevertheless catholic. And it is precisely this catholicity that takes up the key elements of the churches we toured with Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault. In other words, we can see that this unholy trinity of Parisians has unwittingly already pointed us to elements of a more incarnational, even radically orthodox understanding of the church and practice. This is a kind of whale riding: creatively retrieving the empowering core of traditional identity but enacting a rendition of this in and for postmodernity. Such a project is motivated not by nostalgic traditionalism or fear of modernity’s eroding effects but rather by an incarnational logic that assumes we are by nature traditioned creatures who properly find our identity only by being traditioned well. Just as Paikea took risks to pray in the tongues of her ancestors, so we must consider that the way forward might run along ancient paths. What we have already affirmed in our earlier tours of postmodern churches—the centrality of the Word, the use of the lectionary, the engagement with the arts, practices as ritual discipline—can now be seen as undergirded by the incarnational affirmation of time (tradition) and space (embodiment).

As we enter the radically orthodox church, we enter a space that is organized by a certain “ergonomics” of community: an eclectic collection of chairs is arranged in concentric circles around a table bearing the sacraments, contained in pottery fashioned by a member of the local parish. This organization of space means that during each phase of worship, members of the congregation are faced by others: they see and are seen by others, which reminds them of the iconic gaze of God, who confronts us in the other (Matt. 25). The worship space is also organized by dynamics of light and darkness: surrealist stained glass casts a colored light over portions of the sanctuary, while candles flicker both light and shadow from chapel stations on the fringes of the sanctuary. Several screens display shifting digital images that function as a kind of digital glass of images drawing us into worship.⁶⁵Like traditional icons—which can be found in one of the side chapels— these digital images function as windows to transcendence. But it is not only the visual arts that draw us into participatory worship. Immediately upon our entering the sanctuary, the scent of burning candles conveys a difference from the concrete jungle we’ve just emerged from and also distinguishes this experience from the scentless passivity of MTV and film.⁶⁶There is also a curious ambience emitted by an unlikely ensemble playing from one of the chapel stations: a jazz combo with sax, double bass, lead guitar, harmonica, and musical saw.

We are signaled to more intentional worship by an a cappella call to worship in the form of a chant from Afghanistan. This draws together the families around the table for the recitation of a poem by one of the congregation’s gifted poets. The eclectic ensemble then leads us in worship in song, drawing on hymns of the faith, choruses from around the globe, and U2’s “40,” based on Psalm 40. The Old Testament reading from the lectionary is staged as a drama and liturgical dance, while the reading from the Gospel is backed up by a soulful anthem from the sax. The homily focuses on the Epistle, challenging the congregation to reorient their desires to what really matters (Phil. 1:9–10). This ultimately points us to two important communal experiences of our identity and opportunities for formation. First, this week a young family has brought their daughter to be baptized. Utilizing a beautiful baptismal formula from the sixteenth-century Huguenots, the parents express their desire and passion to see their daughter formed in the faith; but we too, as the congregation, pledge to be the village that will raise her together in Christ.⁶⁷ Second, baby Anthea, newly welcomed into the body of Christ, pulls up to the table with her family to participate in her first meal at Christ’s table: the Eucharist. Anthea, with her siblings and parents, remain seated at the table. After the consecration of the meal (including a poem by Anne Sexton), the celebrant invites the congregation to share in Christ’s body and blood by being seated at the table with Anthea, newest member of the church’s family. Anthea’s parents pour wine and break bread for each of us as we sit briefly at the table of fellowship and communion. As we proceed to and from the table, the ensemble has spread out around the sanctuary, and the sounds of the instruments bounce back and forth across the worship space. The digital glass has shifted to images of children from around our community— the local space that is our parish. We are reminded that our commitment to Anthea is both a communal commitment and a commitment to our community.

At the conclusion of worship, we are sent out into our neighborhood as ambassadors of the King-in-waiting, reminded of Monday’s meeting about the neighborhood co-housing project, and reminded of our Sabbath commitment to abstain from the economic cycle for the day. The walk home with parishioners who are also neighbors solidifies the sense that we are a peculiar people.

The radically orthodox church, then, is not traditionalist, even if it is traditioned; it is not a rote system of repetition but a creative repetition of the core features of what constitutes us as the people of God; it is not a nostalgic retreat into “the way we used to do it” but a dynamic reappropriation of ancient practices as the very material means to be formed differently, as agents who will counter the practices of modernity’s market and empire. The radically orthodox church is the space for the formation of postmodern catholics.

1.Whale Rider, DVD, directed by Niki Caro (Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2003).

2. This positive impact of the tradition is seen in another episode related to the sacred school. One of the sharpest young boys, Hemi (clearly one that Koro has his hopes set on to be the One), is the son of an absentee, wayward father who is also part of this lost generation, sucked in by the wiles of modern culture. But when he briefly visits the marae to see Hemi’s ritual performance, he swells with pride—even though he immediately leaves the marae, as if to protect himself from this pull of the ancestors. But by the end of the film he cannot withstand this pull; he is one of the decorated tribesmen who launches the waka. Then Hemi beams in pride at his father.

3. This recalls an earlier incident in the film: Paikea is with her Paka as he works on the pull cord of a battered old outboard engine. Paikea’s curiosity about the tribe’s myth leads her to ask about their connection to the ancestors. Paka responds by using the analogy of the rope in his hands: Their heritage is like this rope, he suggests, which is made up of many tiny strands. So, too, they are part of a long line of chiefs that is made up of many ancestors. When Koro then uses the rope to start the motor, it snaps. As he goes to retrieve another cord, Paikea repairs the rope and starts the engine. “I don’t want you to do that again,” Paka scolds her. “It’s dangerous.”

4. For my criticism of Derrida on this point, see James K. A. Smith, “Re-Kanting Postmodernism: Derrida’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone,” Faith and Philosophy 17 (2000): 558–71.

5. For a more extensive introduction, including a consideration of Radical Orthodoxy’s relation to other like movements (e.g., postliberalism), see James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004).

6. For a helpful discussion of the long shadow cast over theology by Descartes’ doubt, see Nancey Murphy and Brad J. Kallenberg, “Anglo-American Postmodernity: A Theology of Communal Practice,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Kevin Vanhoozer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 26–41. As they point out, a properly postmodern theology will refuse the terms of the debate set by Descartes at the origins of modernity.

7. “Theology” is not quite the right term here, and Caputo and Derrida would be somewhat uncomfortable with the term, since it seems to have too much a sense of being linked to a determinate confession. Instead, they would describe this as “postmodern philosophy of religion” or simply “religious studies.” My employment of the term “theology” in this context is largely heuristic and a shorthand.

8. See Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michel Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 155.

9. For a lucid, entertaining articulation of such a postmodern “religion without religion,” see John D. Caputo, On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001).

10. It is this aspect of the emerging church that D. A. Carson criticizes so harshly regarding questions of truth and objective knowledge. But as I noted in chapter 2, I am trying to sketch a third way between radical, albeit religious, skepticism and Carson’s confidence in objectivity. This third, Augustinian way affirms the possibility and reality of knowledge and truth but rejects the modern notion of objectivity. It is, we might say, a confessional realism.

11. For more on this point, see James K. A. Smith, Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of the Incarnation, Radical Orthodoxy Series (London: Routledge, 2002), chap. 5.

12. Murphy and Kallenberg note Stephen Toulmin’s suggestion that modernity “is a giant Ù-shaped detour” (“Anglo-American Postmodernity,” 39, citing Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 167). The idea is that the turn made with Descartes has been shown to be a wrong turn, and as we get back on track, we find significant continuity with premodern forebears. This affirms Webber’s “ancient-future” thesis and explains the invocation of the epistemologies of Augustine and Aquinas as more properly postmodern.

13. It must be noted that Derrida and Caputo rule out a priori any possibility of a particular, determinate revelation. This is perhaps one of the most fundamental differences with Radical Orthodoxy, which, like Barth, begins from an affirmation of a given, particular revelation of God in Christ. The religion-without-religion paradigm seems to deny the very possibility of revelation, whereas postliberalism and Radical Orthodoxy affirm the primacy of a given revelation.

14. See James K. A. Smith, “Determined Violence: Derrida’s Structural Religion,” Journal of Religion 78, no. 2 (April 1998): 197–212; and Speech and Theology, chap. 5. I will unpack this further in a forthcoming book, the working title of which is Holy Wars and Democratic Crusades: Deconstructing Myths of Religious Violence and Secular Peace.

15. See James K. A. Smith, “A Principle of Incarnation in Derrida’s (Theolo-gische?) Jugendschriften: Towards a Confessional Theology,” Modern Theology 18 (2002): 217–30.

16. To reaffirm our point in chapter 4 in dialogue with Foucault, where we noted that the continued penchant for nondenominational spirituality could be seen as a lingering form of modern autonomy.

17. For some background considerations, see John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), chap. 10.

18. For a lucid introduction to postliberal theology, see George Hunsinger, “Postliberal Theology,” in Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, 42–57. See also Brian D. McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (El Cajon, CA: Emergent Youth Specialties; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), chap. 8.

19. I unpack this model in more detail in Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, 33–42.

20. A classic representative of correlational theology is David Tracy. See his Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and idem, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Herder & Herder, 1998). The same correlational method lies, I would suggest, behind the Wesleyan quadrilateral (which appeals to Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience as “sources” of theology), which has been widely recovered as of late.

21. Webber, The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002), 41.

22. I suspect that some of this lingering correlationism in the emerging church is at least partly due to a lingering correlationism in one of its theological leaders, Stanley Grenz (requiescat in pace). This could be seen in his sympathy for the Wesleyan quadrilateral in Revisioning Evangelical Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1993), a book to which I owe a great deal. (Brian D. McLaren also appeals to the Wesleyan quadrilateral in A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey [San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001], 55.) Grenz was attentive to this concern. For instance, in a recent contribution on ecclesiology, he explicitly rejects what he calls a “sociological foundationalism of community,” specifically referring to Milbank’s critique (see Stanley Grenz, “Ecclesiology,” in Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, 258). But his method in earlier works, and even in this same essay, seems to indicate a lingering foundationalism or correlational method. For a discussion along these lines, with a response from Grenz, see Archie Spencer, “Culture, Community and Commitments: Stanley J. Grenz on Theological Method,” Scottish Journal of Theology 57 (2004): 338–60.

23. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 1.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. This might be embodied in the way that modern technology and tools could be appropriated to complete and launch the waka (war canoe). What mattered was the identity that was wrapped up in the waka.

27. I should clarify that my reference to “Platonism” here is to a traditional understanding of Plato as a dualist. In fact, Radical Orthodoxy seeks to retrieve quite a different Plato in a positive, non-dualistic way. Though I criticize the dualism or “Platonism” of modern Christianity here, I don’t mean to suggest that Radical Orthodoxy is critical of Platonism per se. For a discussion of the issues, see my chapter, “Will the Real Plato Please Stand Up? Participation versus Incarnation,” in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition, ed. James K. A. Smith and James H. Olthuis (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 61–72. My thanks to Geoff Holsclaw for noting this tension.

28. The fact that primitivists accept the shape of the biblical canon as determined several centuries later is a nasty little exception to this rule.

29. This might be most radically played out in Plymouth Brethren traditions (the tradition of my own conversion to Christian faith), but this stance is quintessentially Baptist. However, Pentecostal Christianity tends to operate on the same principle. It is not a coincidence that all these streams emphasize the autonomy of the local congregation.

30. For a lucid critique of this framework from a card-carrying evangelical, see F. F. Bruce, “Scripture and Tradition in the New Testament,” in Holy Book and Holy Tradition, ed. F. F. Bruce and E. G. Rupp (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), where Bruce argues that the New Testament itself constitutes an interpretive tradition.

31. This primitivism opens up such evangelical traditions to any new wind of doctrine. The key is for such new doctrines to assert their first-century, primitive origins. So, for instance, the radically novel eschatology of dispensationalism could become the dominant orthodoxy in just half a century because it claimed biblical rather than traditional warrant. For a relevant discussion, see Larry V. Crutchfield, The Origins of Dispensationalism: The Darby Factor (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992).

32. The incarnation is a reaffirmation of the goodness of both time and space.

33. As Milbank stipulates, “I have always tried to suggest that participation can be extended also to language, history and culture: the whole realm of human making. Not only do being and knowledge participate in a God who is and who comprehends; also human making participates in a God who is infinite poetic utterance: the second person of the Trinity” (John Milbank, Being Reconciled [London: Routledge, 2003], ix).

34. For instance, despite McLaren’s healthy affirmation of tradition in A Generous Orthodoxy (El Cajon, CA: Emergent Youth Specialties; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 87, he often makes such observations as the following: “For much of Western Christianity, the doctrine of creation (a biblical term) has been eaten alive by the doctrine of the fall (not a biblical term)” (234). I understand the distinction, but a thoroughgoing incarnational theology will think the distinction a moot point.

35. Pickstock, “Radical Orthodoxy and the Mediations of Time,” in Radical Orthodoxy? A Catholic Enquiry, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 64.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. For more on traditionality as an essential aspect of creaturehood, see James K. A. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000), 152–57.

39. Pickstock, “Radical Orthodoxy and the Mediations of Time,” 64.

40. Ibid., 65.

41. For a comprehensive, and disturbing, account of this in the twentiethcentury American Reformed tradition, see John M. Frame, “Machen’s Warrior Children,” in Alister E. McGrath and Evangelical Theology: A Dynamic Engagement, ed. Sung Wook Chung (Carlisle: Paternoster; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 113–46.

42. George Weigel, Letters to a Young Catholic (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 9.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., 10. This way of putting it suggests an overlap with Radical Orthodoxy. Indeed, when showing the way in which Flannery O’Connor’s work countered the flatness of “debonair nihilism,” Weigel notes: “If Mary McCarthy was right, and the Eucharist only represented Christ in some magical way, then Flannery O’Connor was being utterly, thoroughly, radically orthodox when she muttered, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it’ ” (16).

47. Ibid., 80.

48. Ibid., 92.

49. Ibid., Letter 5.

50. On the possibility of speaking ancient languages to a postmodern culture, see Marva Dawn, Talking the Walk: Letting Christian Language Live Again (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005).

51. I unpack this connection in more detail in my Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, 223–29.

52. Weigel, Letters to a Young Catholic, 86.

53. Ibid., 87, 94.

54. Ibid., 98–100, 101–14.

55. Ibid., 26–27.

56. Ibid., 130.

57. Ibid., 131.

58. For more on liturgy and sacramentality, including the ontology of participation that undergirds this, see my Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, chap. 6.

59. See Alternative Worship: Resources from and for the Emerging Church, compiled by Jonny Baker and Doug Gay, with Jenny Brown (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 63. The authors employ Les Murray’s distinction between the “narrowspeak” of reductive modernity and the “wholespeak” of a more imaginative worldview, calling for a recovery of wholespeak as the church’s language. This “poetic discourse” represents “the re-enchantment or re-mythologization of speech, where speech reflects the Christian imagination, recognizing the importance of symbols, images, ‘myths,’ and metaphors as well as sharing space and time with music and the visual arts” (ibid.).

60. David Matzko McCarthy, The Good Life: Genuine Christianity for the Middle Class (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004), 42.

61. For a survey of the megachurch phenomenon with a critical eye, see James B. Twitchell, Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc.,and Museumworld (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 47–108.

62. Admittedly, the same placelessness and mobility can be true of urban congregations that draw people from long distances—including people who want to worship in “diverse” communities but don’t necessarily want to live there. So it is not only suburban churches that fail to enact a “parish” theology committed to place. Simply being located in the core city does not make a congregation a parish. And conversely, it is possible for a suburban church to be actually more properly “parish” oriented. My thanks to Brian McLaren for pushing me on these matters.

63. For an argument along these lines, based on a concrete case study, see Mark Mulder, “A Dissonant Faith: The Exodus of Reformed Dutch Churches from the South Side of Chicago” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, 2003), esp. 141–208, on the interrelation of issues of place and church polity. Mulder advocates recovering a sense of parish as a necessary condition for justice.

64. See Eric Jacobsen, Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2003), 84. Jacobsen provides an excellent introduction to these issues, even if he does not situate the concerns vis-à-vis postmodernism. For more on an incarnational theology of place, see T. J. Gorringe, A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment, Redemption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

65. For samples of this kind of visual material, visit sacramentis.com.

66. We also catch a whiff of the scent of good Sumatran (fair-trade) coffee— the new wine of the postmodern church!

67. See Tod Bolsinger, It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian: How the Community of God Transforms Lives (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004).