...and taking names (2)

Another of Jamie Smith's remarkable achievements is his fine introduction to Radical Orthodoxy (RO). Introducing Radical Orthodoxy is the best overall introduction to the themes and major figures of RO. An added bonus of the volume is the interaction Smith develops between RO and the continental Reformed tradition. One particular aspect of RO with which Smith expresses some reservation from his Reformed perspective is RO's "participatory ontology."

Whether it is best described as a movement, a school, a sensibility, or a book series, RO presents a politics (socialism), based on an epistemology (illumination), funded by an ontology (suspension). All of this is presented as a counter to a post/modern ontology (nihilism), with its faulty epistemology and agonistic politics. In the programmatic volume, Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, editors Milbank, Pickstock, and Ward single out the "suspension of the material" as the turn of Radical Orthodoxy. This turn of RO depends on an Augustinian Platonism, filtered through the Cambridge Platonists. In essence (!), RO espouses a view of the material that grounds every instance of immanence in transcendence. Only if the immanent participates in a reality beyond itself can its existence really be guaranteed. Another way of putting it is to say only a Christian (Platonist) can truly be a materialist without devolving into nihilism. While Smith applauds RO's defense of the project of metaphysics, he is not a great fan of the Platonic ontology RO employs (probably in part because he suffers from the Reformed allergy to the analogy of being, on which see millinerd's post).