Here we present the final installment in our little symposium on Graham Ward’s Politics of Discipleship–replaying a discussion of the book that took place at the American Academy of Religion last November. Today we post Graham Ward’s response to Ron Kuipers and Luke Bretherton. Ward, as readers no doubt know, is Professor of Contextual Theology at the University of Manchester and has established himself as one our generations leading theologians of culture, offering theoretically-informed analyses of contemporary cultural phenomena as seen in his earlier books such as Cities of God, Christ and Culture, and Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice.
Here’s a snippet, a bit of a teaser, from the introduction to Ward’s paper:
I want to
start this response to my respondents by examining something of this
existential and hermeneutical situation because it is my abiding experience
that my own work is pre-read, pre-judged, through two specific sets of lenses.
This pre-reading or pre-judging is neither right nor wrong – it is intrinsic to
the act of interpretation, as Gadamer has taught us. But I must admit to some
frustration here that may surface in my own pre-reading, pre-judging of the
responses I have received. That is all part of the dialectic of communication –
the ongoing and never to be erased act of misunderstanding that reverberates
throughout any reception and response.
On
experience, my work is received as: a) a further unfolding of the project of
Radical Orthodoxy; and/or b) a celebration and affirmation of everything ‘post’
– ‘post-liberal’, ‘postmodern’, ‘postsecular’ and even ‘post-democratic’. To
some extent, I admit, my work invites this with titles or subtitles like ‘the
postmodern God’ or ‘postmaterial citizenship’: what trouble a word can land you
in! But whatever academics, more particularly contemporary theologians, tend to
understand by Radical Orthodoxy is actually the work of John Milbank (who is
and remains a long-standing friend of mine). Somehow, take Amazon books for
example, John’s Theology and Social
Theory (a ground-breaking work for Christian theology) and its project of
‘out-narrating’ secularism has become Radical Orthodoxy’s programmatic thesis –
even though it pre-dates Radical Orthodoxy as a book series by almost a decade.
Let me state now: I have no investment in Radical Orthodoxy, as such, as either
a Christian theological ‘movement’ or even a sensibility. That is fetishism, to
my mind. When I sit down to read or to write I do not think of either the
future development of Radical Orthodoxy or its demise. I just want to write
good theology – a theology which issues from and is conscious of our
contemporary milieu. Any ‘sensibility’ that John and I share, or Catherine,
John and I share, is not an organised and deliberated phenomenon. The ‘sensibility’
appears after the fact – not before it. It is my complaint about systematic
theology – voiced clearly in the Introduction to Christ and Culture – that it presents itself as a universal
template for the logic of the Christian faith, and forgets that though there
must be a universality if truth is to be truth (not relativised), human beings
(and theologians enlist among them) are profoundly culturally and historically embedded
– what we are, and what we produce is, the produce of our times. Again, as I
wrote in the Proviso: “The most
rewarding comments about the description I offer would be that it was useful,
it was insightful, it enabled me, the reader, to recognise and name something
of the world in which I live and the role my faith plays in it.” I’ll return to
the descriptive nature of the project (at least as in governs the first part of
the book) in a moment.
For now, given what I have just said about
pre-judgements of my work on the basis of an assumed understanding of Radical
Orthodoxy, I wish to register my delight in Ron’s recognition that The Politics of Discipleship does not
fall foul of a certain criticism levelled at Radical Orthodoxy – that it
valorises the pre-modern over the modern and lapses into nostalgia. Whether the
criticism, aimed by certain people mainly at John and Catherine’s work is fair,
I am not sure. To offer, as they each do, a genealogy of certain dominant
aspects of contemporary philosophy, theology and economics – with their
emphasis upon immanence, immediate gratification, the will to power, nihilism
and nominalism – , in genealogy issuing from a metaphysics that departs from
the classical Christian tradition of Aquinas through figures such as Scotus and
Occam, is not in itself a nostalgic project. Genealogy does not lend itself
easily to nostalgia; it is a mode of analysis as Michel Foucault understood,
with two feet firmly placed in the current situation. It is a form of cultural
history – only it works backwards from the present. I wouldn’t then regard
Cyril O’Regan’s explorations of the cultural history of Gnosticism and its
prevalence in modernity, as an act of nostalgia. What is more difficult – and
this is where I part company from the complex narrative composed by Charles
Taylor in A Secular Age – is the way
genealogy can be mapped on to an historical account of a decline from a more
propitious cultural situation. Foucault himself shows how easily this is done
in his examination of how the ‘gaze’ came to dominate thinking, particularly
medicine, in the eighteenth century (in Birth
of the Clinic). A shift in the governing epistemē becomes apparent, and although Foucault is not very
articulate when it comes to demonstrating how one epistemē morphs into another, he does rather imply an evaluation of
the shift itself as negative. In Charles Taylor’s narrative there is a charting
of a theological decline into heterodoxy. Certain people who published in the Radical Orthodoxy series, associating
themselves with the kind of theology more generally understood to be advanced
in that Series, do hold to such a narrative of theological decline. It is a
theological narrative that gained currency among certain mid-twentieth century
Catholic theologians like Hans Urs von Balthasar and Yves Congar, and is
rehearsed more recently by thinkers such as MacIntyre, Fergus Kerr and
Charles Taylor. I myself have never accepted such a thesis and recently gave my
theological reasons for the rejection in an article on A Secular Age to be published soon in Modern Theology. First, the narrative implies a theology of history
of the kind Hegel was producing in the 1820s (only this is Hegel in reverse).
Hegel’s division of time (since Christ) into periods, each of which distinctly
manifests Spirit in a new way and the operation of Providence throughout, is a
theological narrative of progress: God’s new unveiling of Himself in and
through the actions of individual men and women in specific cultural and
historical locations. The narrative of a theological decline, articulates a
very similar grammar, only not one of ascent towards some consummation of time.
It is quite possible to spell out such a theological account of history, Hegel
did it, but I have not seen it done; and would wish to understand the
theological premises upon which it could be done; how a narrative of a fall
from grace in our own history is constructed. Furthermore, such a narrative of
a theological decline assumes that it was so much easier to be faithful in
mediaeval Christendom (at is classical height) than today, and I can’t accept
that – what possible theological rationale can there be for God making things
harder for us now to accept the gift of Godself?