21 November 2006

Peter Leithart captured the moment I would love to have seen:

The papers in the seminar on the recent Duke publication Theology and the Political: The New Debate were dense, difficult, and hard to follow. And then Graham Ward got up and said, essentially, that the whole point of Radical Orthodoxy was to start with Christ; all the philosophical apparatus arises as second-order reflection on what is revealed, particularly on the incarnation. Thus, the debate about ontology is not about analogy or participation per se, but about trying to formulate a “Christic ontology,” which Ward admitted has not been achieved. He spent a good bit of his time discussing passages in Colossians and 1 Corinthians.

Hart spoke on Saturday about “the Christian interruption of metaphysics,” and here Ward is enacting the Christian interruption of academic discourse: when a heavily-theorized God unexpectedly takes on flesh, we must fall silent—or rather, we must sing hymns of praise to the God who walks among us. It’s a life-giving interruption and the embodiment of Christian humility, that we would be willing to suspend our cherished theories of distance and différance and deferral at that moment when we glimpse the son of God in a stable or an empty tomb that once held the crucified Christ.

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Tags: Philosophy,Radical Orthodoxy