Phillip Blond and the rise of Radical Orthodoxy

Since Phillip Blond will be speaking at Georgetown’s Tocqueville Center tonight, I thought I’d pass on this profile of the man and his think-tank ResPublica:

As many readers will know, Blond is not just any Anglican, or any theologian. He is a student of and advocate for Radical Orthodoxy, the Anglo-Catholic (yet ecumenical) “project” that came in part out of Peterhouse, Cambridge in the 1990s, and is perhaps best known through the work ofJohn Milbank (who taught Blond at Peterhouse). In recent years, Milbank has garnered attention outside theology through his regular sparring with such continental atheist philosophers as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. But his most important achievement to date (which, incidentally, has not received nearly enough attention from social scientists), is Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. In that book, Milbank took a swipe at almost every theological and social-theoretical tradition stretching back to the days of Duns Scotus. The framing argument is that theology should not accept social theory’s terms of debate: religion (God) cannot be understood in terms of the social, but only in terms of itself. Inasmuch as theology has accepted a secular arrangement, it has ceased to be true theology. Secular social science—indeed, any secular norm—is, we might say, abnormal and, ultimately, a failure in its own terms because it harbors metaphysical impulses. “The secular episteme is a post-Christian paganism,” he writes. Theology has to become the master social science, the channel through which all social thought passes. “It is theology itself that will have to provide its own account of the final causes at work in human history, on the basis of its own particular, and historically specific faith.” The importance of this account, in Milbank’s view—and why it both must be and deserves to be universal and encompassing—is that it will allow us to replace an “ontology of violence” with an “ontology of peace,” the latter being the true position of Christianity. Secular reason, as expressed in social theory and the compromised theologies that it tolerates, is always ultimately nihilistic, always based on this ontology of violence.

Suffice to say, we have few public thinkers like Blond in America.