L<\/span>ambert Zuidervaart\u2019s essay on \u201cradical Augustinian social critique\u201d is, of course, mainly about Radical Orthodoxy. He devotes several pages to Graham Ward and John Milbank, highlighting the power of their work but offering some criticisms.<\/p>\n He disputes Milbank\u2019s notion that the church is a \u201csociety,\u201d claiming that this confuses church and kingdom. He also questions Milbank\u2019s diagnosis of Western secularism as a failure of the church being church. He quotes Milbank\u2019s claim that \u201cEither the Church enacts the vision of paradisal community . . . or else it promotes a hellish society beyond any terrors known to antiquity . . . For the Christian interruption of history \u2018decoded\u2019 antique virtue, yet thereby helped unleash first liberalism and then nihlism\u201d (232).<\/p>\n Zuidervaart asks, \u201cwas \u2018the Christian interruption\u2019 really all that powerful? Did not other factors play an equal role, including economic, technological, and political forces that were not simply intellectual or ethical?\u201d If I\u2019m understanding Milbank, he\u2019s talking about the \u201cChristian interruption\u201d of incarnation and resurrection. I have to assume that Zuidervaart is responding to something else, perhaps to some claim about the church detached<\/em> from Christ\u2019s work (as if the \u201cChristian interruption\u201d = the church as a sociological reality). If that\u2019s what Zuidervaart disputes, I believe he\u2019s missed Milbank\u2019s point. If he is responding to what I take to be Milbank\u2019s actual<\/em> point, then it seems Zuidervaart is claiming that the events of the gospel are no more decisive for history than economic, political, or technical forces. And that leaves one rather dumbfounded.<\/p>\n Zuidervaart further claims that Ward and Milbank locate \u201cthe source of societal goodness in an ideal pattern that lies outside human history\u201d (232). This is perhaps a comment on the Platonism of Radical Orthodoxy; if it\u2019s a comment on the eschatological orientation of Augustinian social critique, I don\u2019t think it counts as a criticism. The ideal pattern for societal goodness does<\/em> lie outside human history (or, pre-eschatological human history), because the ideal pattern is a city that is yet to come. <\/p>\n Zuidervaart recognizes Ward and Milbank find this ideal pattern is found in \u201ccertain practices developed within an ecclesial community,\u201d in particular \u201cthe celebration of the Eucharist.\u201d This leaves Radical Orthodoxy with \u201cfew theoretical resources with which to make nuanced judgments about better or worse tendencies. By emphasizing that all cities should be cities of the good, it has little to say about what makes specific cities relatively good. . . . we are left, for the most part, with abstract norms that have little historical effect and historical developments little normative promise: either a city of the good, but no good cities, or potentially good cities that are never good enough\u201d (233). This isn\u2019t entirely fair, but it\u2019s fair enough to hit home. <\/p>\n And here I would suggest that Radical Orthodoxy\u2019s liturgically-centered social model and social critique (which I find compelling) can be enhanced by a Protestant emphasis on the Word. The eucharist is a social model, and provides a base for social critique, but that model and critique take on the nuanced specificity that Zuidervaart rightly asks for when the Eucharistic liturgy is also a liturgy of the Word, when the Bible is on the table with the bread and wine.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lambert Zuidervaart\u2019s essay on \u201cradical Augustinian social critique\u201d is, of course, mainly about Radical Orthodoxy. He devotes several pages to Graham Ward and John Milbank, highlighting the power of their work but offering some criticisms. He disputes Milbank\u2019s notion that the church is a \u201csociety,\u201d claiming that this confuses church and kingdom. He also questions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[463,1174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-milbank","category-radical-orthodoxy"],"yoast_head":"\n