The Poverty of Radical Orthodoxy

Lisa Isherwood, Marko Zlomislić, Isherwood, Zlomislic

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781608999378
  9781498258463
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630875800
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Radical Orthodoxy, whose founding father is John Milbank, claims that God has been pushed to the margins in modernity and that a false and misleading neo-theology has taken hold that needs to be revisited and contested. It is this return to the premodern that often leads theologians to have reservations about Radical Orthodoxy when they might otherwise have some sympathy for many of its positions. Radical Orthodoxy, like most traditional theology, claims that the power of God is in all creation and that God sits everywhere for all to partake of. But there appears to be a failure to see that the church and theology do not set in place systems that live out this basic assumption. Liberation theology, while sharing much of the same assumption that God is everywhere and to be shared, at the same time engages in a critique of the structures that claim to facilitate this vision, and finds them wanting. From here, then, liberation theologians attempt to refigure our understanding of shared power in order to broaden the vision, while it may be argued that Radical Orthodoxy simply restates the assumption with little political critique of the issues. Perhaps this point explains why this book is titled The Poverty of Radical Orthodoxy rather than Radical Error!

1

Impoverished Desire

Lisa Isherwood

Desire has always been a tricky issue for dualistic Christian theology: on the one hand, Christians should have it and it should fuel their pursuit of God, but on the other, it has to be strictly controlled as it is commonly held to be a treacherous emotion that can lead to ruin. Female desire, of course, has been considered the most dangerous, as women have been thought incapable of the spiritual will necessary to control and direct desire toward the right goal. In addition, the Fathers, in this case Augustine, tell us that once we come to God, then desire itself will cease, since its home is in God and the end of all desire is God. We will be restless with desire until we rest in God. This has usually been understood as a final stage, since the living, it is assumed, cannot find union with God necessary for desire to cease. In this scenario, we come to understand desire as a rather troubling aspect of what it means to be human, an emotion that should be directed to God, but one that is unsettling, problematic, and easily misled. In short, it is an emotion that should make us on edge with ourselves­—a blessing and a curse. While this may work well within Christian theology, and it is a position most would recognize, it perhaps leads to lives cautiously lived in fear for ourselves; thus, perhaps this is not celebrated in quite the way the incarnational strand of Christian theology could and should lend itself to. We fail to see ourselves as the original blessings Matthew Fox urges us to be, and we have half an eye to the ever-lurking possibility of rampant desire leading to disaster.

It would, of course, be quite unfair to suggest Christian theology alone has placed us in this tense and in the “on guard” position with ourselves. Deleuze and Guattari believe the troubling nature of desire entered our consciousness when Plato associated it with acquisition. This association made it, they claim, a dualistic concept with, on the one hand acquisition, and on the other lack.1 It also meant desire, by its very nature, must always go unsatisfied, as according to this scheme when desired object is present desire will cease. Of course, the desired object must also be thought of and created in the mind’s eye, or else there would be no trigger for desire in the face of lack. Fantasy therefore plays a large part in this formation of desire. Perhaps we can then begin to understand why Christianity has sat easily with this view of desire, since it has at its center a God it cannot see but desires to know and be in the presence of. The being with God will not only bring about the end of desire, but in some sense it will lead to the revelation of the true self, who has, for some theologians, been only partially known when desiring God. By implication, if there is to remain a self, then there must also remain desire; it must always be unsatisfied.

The idea of losing one’s self once desire is satisfied sits very uneasily with me and other feminist theologians, since we have observed and experienced the suppression of female desire and the limiting and, at times, destructive results of such a move. To be fair to the tradition, it does have within it one or two who have a more positive outlook on desire, for example, Pseudo-Dionysius, who credited God’s creative power to God’s other directed desire. Pseudo-Dionysius could imagine a God who lacks nothing but desires everything, and who in the act of creation also creates desire. Although this is part of the tradition, it is not a part that is usually highlighted. However, in Carter Heyward we find something of an echo when she says:

In the beginning was God

In the beginning was the source of all that is

God yearning

God moaning

God labouring

God giving birth

God rejoicing

And God loved what She had made

And God said

“It is good”

And God knowing that all that is good is shared

Held the Earth tenderly in Her arms

God yearned for relationship

God longed to share the good Earth,

And humanity was born in the yearning of God

We were born to share the Earth.2

Here we see that if God loves us, indeed, desires our very creation, then we are needed, since: “A lover needs relation—if for no other reason, in order to love.”3 And further, we too are required to love, to desire in response to the desire that brought us into existence. This is a rather different starting point in the consideration of desire from many orthodox theologians. For Heyward, God’s creative power is the power to love and to be loved, to desire and be desired. Heyward declares it was this incarnate, loving, dynamic, relating God that Jesus declared through the incarnation. For it was here that God could be touched, held, and desired. It was in flesh that the desire, of which both Pseudo-Dionysius and Heyward refer to, could be fully lived out as the relationality of the ever-desiring God became possible as a mutually relating and desiring relationship. Heyward suggests Jesus saw no difference between our love for our God and our love for our neighbor [Mark 12:28–31]. Therefore, we are laboring to create a new life based on mutual love, one in which “we are dealing with a real love for man for his own sake and not for the love of God.”4 There can be no passive observance if we are to be in mutual relation. Heyward is not alone, of course, in talking about the love of God, but for her it is a love that is passionate, erotic, and desiring, not a sanitized form of love that Christianity has been able to handle once it is stripped of any passion or desire.

Heyward sees this as quite contrary to what the life of Jesus was meant to highlight and not in line with what the gospels proclaim. She asserts that humans must dare to acknowledge their divine nature through dunamis, which is the gospel term for our raw, dynamic, erotic power, a power that draws us out to each other in vulnerable mutuality. This is the power she claims Jesus lived by and left as our heritage; it is radical love through the skin and in the world, pulsating with desire and transforming potential. She claims radical love incarnates the kingdom because intimacy is the deepest quality of relation. Heyward says to be intimate is to be assured we are known in such a way that the mutuality of our relation is real, creative, and cooperative. It is possible to see Jesus’s ministry as based on intimacy, since he knew people intuitively, insightfully, and spontaneously. Most of all, Heyward’s Christology is fully embodied, sensuous, and erotic, seeking vulnerable commitment, alive with expectancy and power. This is not a Christology that could ever imagine our desiring should or could cease, since it is in the very nature of God to desire eternally, as made incarnate and demonstrated in the life of Jesus. Further, it is an idea of God which requires us to be fully human, to embody a self, and to touch others through that enfleshed self in order to learn how to increase the transforming power of radical love in the world. This view may seem a very great distance from what we have understood as traditional theology, but there appears to be echoes of Pseudo-Dionysius here, as well as a solid gospel base for what Heyward claims. It might be this kind of theology, then, we could expect to see in any movement with “radical” in the title, and this level of engagement with both biblical and traditional questions, as well as questions of humanity and who we may be.

Radical Orthodoxy, of course addresses the issue of desire, but to a large extent it simply dresses up the long-standing orthodox position in order to appeal to more radical audiences.5 For the most part, the realities of being human are largely placed within a pre-existing theological frame, thus drowning any authentic voice of enfleshed humanity. The end result then, is still very much the same: desire is seen as a mixed blessing that only finds its end in God. However, when we turn to Daniel Bell’s book Liberation Theology and the End of History, we find that a large part of his argument deals with desire and the fact that it has been captured by the forces of capitalism, which sounds as though it may actually get to grips with people and the systems they struggle under. Any initial hopes are soon dampened when Bell tells us what we need is a “therapy of desire,” which he believes lies in forgiveness.6 Through returning God’s gift of forgiveness of us to others, we are liberated from the hold of capitalism. God did not demand what was due to him, rather he forgave us and gave up on the terror of justice as Bell sees it. Bell states, “the claim that forgiveness more faithfully characterizes the way God overcomes sin than does the liberationists’ account of justice rests upon an interpretation of the atonement.”7 This interpretation is, of course, that of substitution atonement, which has certain problems attached to it. We may not have paid, but an innocent did, an interpretation that sits well with savage capitalism, since Christ’s sacrifice is interpreted as belonging to an economy of credit and exchange, which is reimaged as a gift of love, a point Bell seems to entirely overlook. Bell understands those events as Jesus returning the gift of love and obedience to God8—the fact is, there was a crucifixion and this should not be overlooked, even in the light of a resurrection, in the world in which we live today. Bell, in fact, does not overlook it, but he states that crucified people are bearers of salvation in the world—that is, of course, as long as they do not complain about their crucifixion, and their communities remain open and hospitable to those who have oppressed and crucified their compatriots.9 Bell finds it amazing that, despite the fact that the blood and tears of the poor make capitalism grind on, they do not lash out. ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Impoverished Desire
• Chapter 2: Evidential Theology, an Antidote to Orthodoxy: An Example
• Chapter 3: J. G. Hamann and the Self-Refutation of Radical Orthodoxy
• Chapter 4: The Less Sublime Allure of the Paradox
• Chapter 5: Girls and Boys Come Out to Play
• Chapter 6: Radical Orthodoxy and the Closed Western Theological Mind
• Chapter 7: Reading Yoder against Milbank
• Chapter 8: Touch, Flux, Relation
• Chapter 9: Communities of Faith, Desire, and Resistance
• Chapter 10: Paper Cut-Outs of Christ in Plato’s Cave
• Chapter 11: The Eucharist Is Drive