Abstract
The Radical Orthodoxy movement in theology argues that the modern world suffers from nihilism. Their research mines the theological origins of modernity for a cure to this ill. On their analysis, modern nihilism is a product of the secularization of theological concepts. Modern society is built on a theological conceptual structure, but God is absent. Integral for the proper functioning of such concepts, God needs to return. This chapter demonstrates that the cure for our modern malady proposed by the Radical Orthodoxy movement—bring God back into public life—is not the only one that follows from their premises. The conditions under which the movement’s arguments hold up, I contend, using movement member William T Cavanaugh’s arguments as a paradigm case, are the very conditions creating the possibility of two treatments: reinstate God and a belief in Him, or create a society based on non-theological ideas. A renewed belief in God may restore the theological concepts on which modernity is built to their proper functioning, thus curing the modern world of its nihilism; but according to Cavanaugh’s arguments, so may removing the theological concepts on which modernity is built.
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Notes
- 1.
A certain degree of rigor is lost by discussing these thinkers as a group. One inevitably glosses over the nuances in each member’s ideas; however, members of the movement, I contend, share a common analysis of the history of ideas, a common diagnosis of the state of the contemporary world as one of malady, and a common prescription for how to remedy those ills.
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- 3.
John Milbank hints that his position is ‘counter-modern’ (1990: 6); however, it is the secularity of modernity that Milbank disputes. As such, I refer to his argument as ‘counter-secularist’.
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- 5.
Some sociological research disputes this association between secularization as a social-institutional process of removing religion from the public sphere and secularism as the ideology that defends the process. Secularization as a social-institutional phenomena does not entail the successful uptake of secularism, they argue (e.g. Chaves 1994). The high levels of individual religiosity in the US—a secular state—are the most obvious example.
- 6.
This is precisely AC Grayling’s response to John Gray’s argument that modern politics is an episode in the history of religion. Gray blurs and confuses just when important distinctions are required (Grayling 2009: 185). In essence, categorising almost every institution and system of thought that comes after Christianity as ‘Christian’ is to commit a fallacy of equivocation. It is precisely the differences between the various Christian descendants and their progenitors that matter, not what they share.
- 7.
Cavanaugh never identifies these two notions as conceptual replication and conceptual perversion; however, without them he cannot simultaneously and consistently believe in modernity’s degeneration and its only-apparent secularity.
- 8.
This may also mean that any secular proposal to do away with theological thought patterns is a performative contradiction. That is, if proposing non-theological thought patterns contradicts the non-contingent presuppositions of theological (and therefore secular) thought, then any (∼C) secularist proposal falls down, i.e. ((∼C & ∼ G) → ∼ M) and/or ((∼C & G) → ∼ M) But I don’t know whether or not proposing non-theological thought patters contradicts the non-contingent presuppositions of theology.
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Nickelson, D. (2014). Counter-Secularism: Parsing the Theological Cure for Our Modern Malady. In: Sharpe, M., Nickelson, D. (eds) Secularisations and Their Debates. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7116-1_6
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