theology

From the book: "Towards the Radical Political Theology", available on Amazon.
Radical political theology stands with Radical Orthodoxy in the assertion that the theological capitulation to modernity, which originated most clearly in liberal Protestantism, has hollowed out the Church’s capacity to speak prophetically to culture. John Milbank captures this diagnosis with stark clarity: “Secular modernity is the creation of a perverse theology.”[1] In his reading, liberal theology did not merely accommodate modernity’s categories; it provided the theological scaffolding upon which secular culture was constructed. Rather than challenging the epistemological and moral assumptions of the Enlightenment, liberal theology baptized them, thereby facilitating the displacement of divine revelation with human-centered reason and sentiment.

In what has been described as a “radical metaphysical–theological turn, seeking to overcome both Protestant bibliolatry and post-Tridentine Roman Catholic authoritarian positivism as the consequences of hermeneutical–theological deviations,”[2] Radical Orthodoxy aims to redefine, within a secularized domain - in which truth has been devalued and stands on the verge of extinction - a new theological dimension of truth, as well as an alternative version of modernity. It aspires to renew and expand a Christian ontology and a practical philosophy in harmony with the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith. As Boris Gunjević, Croatian scholar with expertise on Milbank, asserts:

“The central strategy of Radical Orthodoxy is vividly expressed in its uncompromising critique of modern theology, summed up in the axiom: ‘theology or nihilism.’ This means, above all, that theology, aiming to remain credible, must abandon the modernist pathos into which it was driven by the Enlightenment. Furthermore, theology must become the central discourse for understanding being and knowledge, for only in this way will metaphysics be true metaphysics, and philosophy true philosophy.”[3]

Beginning in the 19th century, liberal Protestantism recast Christianity from a revealed, doctrinal faith into an ethos based in human experience and culture. Friedrich Schleiermacher famously defined religion as “the feeling of absolute dependence,” shifting the center of gravity from God’s revelation to subjectivity and sentiment as a result of higher criticism.[4] Once Scripture is treated primarily as a record of human religious experience rather than the divinely inspired testament, the core claims of the creed (incarnation, atonement, resurrection) become negotiable, and ultimately the Church’s power to speak prophetically is significantly deteriorated. As protestant tradition moved towards the critical interpretation of the Scripture, mainline Protestantism was steadily marching towards theological relativity and absurdity. With Bultmann’s thesis of demythologizing the New Testament, reinterpreting and questioning the supernatural elements, protestant theology continued towards its ontological demise. By the early 1930s, theological conformism had eroded doctrinal anchors in many Protestant faculties. Once the hermeneutical lens was completely obfuscated, there was little left to warn of an impending totalitarian threat emerging. Historian Robert P. Ericksen documents how prominent churchmen greeted Hitler’s seizure of power in quasi-religious terms. Erlangen’s Lutheran theologian Paul Althaus hailed 1933 as “a gift and miracle of God,” sacralizing a political revolution and signaling the collapse of confessional resistance[5], that is, of course, with the exception of the Confessing Church led by Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Niemoller, which steadfastly stood against Nazi ideology until the last breath. Since liberal theology eventually led to practical indolence and consent to totalitarianism, it’s not coincidental that its contemporary nihilistic offspring rooted in identity theologies are vehemently supporting a new form of progressive “soft-totalitarianism”, which Milbank rather bluntly defines as “tiresome careerist and naturally elitist bollocks, [which] no one serious takes it seriously. Or if they do, that is utterly tragic.”[6]

Schleiermacher’s and Bultmann’s approaches to New Testament exegesis laid the intellectual groundwork for a generation of liberal biblical scholars, including Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Robert Funk, who would later form the “Jesus Seminar.” This group sought a radically historical-critical understanding of the New Testament, challenging traditional orthodox interpretations by attempting to distinguish the historical Jesus from theological constructions. Their work was highly controversial because it explicitly aimed to separate the supernatural claims of Scripture from what could be historically verified. As Borg observed: “the old consensus that Jesus was an eschatological prophet who proclaimed the imminent end of the world has disappeared”[7], reflecting a broader shift in scholarship away from reading the Gospels as literal accounts of historical events. Moreover, Borg critiqued the notion of divine inspiration as traditionally conceived, arguing that contemporary Christian fundamentalism had recast the Bible as a source of infallible, factually guaranteed knowledge: “[...] I cannot agree with its attempt to establish the Bible as a source of divinely guaranteed factual knowledge.”[8] In this framework, Scripture is understood not as a set of immutable historical facts but as a text, meaningful in its ethical, spiritual, and symbolic dimensions that serve as inspiration for social justice and as Truth. Undoubtedly, there was a clear intent to offer the world a non-traditional narrative about Jesus and the Gospels:  “We should give Jesus a demotion. It is no longer credible to think of Jesus as divine. Jesus’ divinity goes together with the old theistic way of thinking about God. [...] We must find a new plot for a more credible Jesus.”[9]

The assumption of Funk and Hoover, that the material in the Gospels is unreliable until proven otherwise, is logically problematic. By their reasoning, one would have to question every narrative until definitive historical verification is provided, effectively placing historical skepticism above the textual and theological integrity of the Gospels. A simple syllogism illustrates the flaw: if all Gospel material is deemed unreliable until independently confirmed, then even the most central claims of Christian faith become perpetually suspect. Radical political theology challenges this approach, asserting that faith in the traditional exegesis of Scripture is rational precisely because it is grounded in the witness of the Church and the apostolic tradition. It is more reasonable to trust the testimony of the Apostolic Fathers, who lived within one or two generations of Jesus and preserved the earliest accounts of Christian teaching through apostolic succession, than to place ultimate confidence in modern scholars, whose interpretations emerge two millennia later and are inevitably shaped by contemporary biases and presuppositions. Such claims, as Moreland and Wilkins assert are indeed just assumptions: “It requires the assumption that someone, about a generation removed from the events in question, radically transformed the authentic information about Jesus that was circulating at that time, superimposed a body of material four times as large, fabricated almost entirely out of whole cloth, while the church suffered sufficient collective amnesia to accept the transformation as legitimate.”[10]

From this perspective, the theological and historical authority of the early Church provides a more reliable epistemic foundation for understanding the life, teachings, and significance of Jesus than the speculative reconstructions of post-Enlightenment scholarship. If we were to adopt the radical historical skepticism of the Jesus Seminar, we would also be compelled to question the reliability of independent historical sources such as Tacitus, Josephus, and other contemporaneous historians who attest to the existence of Jesus, as Boyd asserts.[11] This exposes a fundamental flaw in the Seminar’s methodology: while Borg, Funk, and other proponents insist on scrutinizing the Gospels as potentially unreliable, they rarely extend the same skepticism to external historical witnesses whose accounts corroborate the existence of Jesus. This selective skepticism undermines the logical consistency of the Jesus Seminar’s methodology and calls into question whether their reconstructions of the “historical Jesus” are genuinely historical or simply reflective of modern presuppositions. Another important critique concerns the consequences or outcomes of the respective approaches to the Gospels. The traditional view, which affirms the authenticity and divine inspiration of Scripture, has historically inspired generations of believers to lead meaningful, morally grounded, and socially productive lives. In contrast, the approach taken by the Jesus Seminar, with its presumption of skepticism and selective doubt, tends to foster uncertainty regarding foundational truths, encouraging relativism and, in some cases, a subtle form of nihilism. By prioritizing historical probability and consensus over faith and theological continuity, this methodology risks undermining not only the authority of Scripture but also the moral and spiritual frameworks that have guided countless individuals and communities for centuries. The question, therefore, is not only about historical reconstruction but also about the practical and existential consequences of embracing one epistemic framework over another.

The Seminar’s methodology, emphasizing consensus-based historical probability and rigorous textual criticism, provoked intense debate over the boundaries between faith, history, and theology, yet it faced substantial criticism from mainstream scholarship. As Luke Timothy Johnson observes, the Jesus Seminar “stands as a far better example of media manipulation than of serious scholarship.”[12]  Critics pointed to the evident bias in the selection of participants, the subjective nature of the voting procedures, and the arbitrary weighting of evidence, leading many scholars to reject the Seminar’s conclusions outright, some even referring to it as “academic disgrace.”[13] Moreover, the Seminar’s approach inspired strains of modern liberal theology that assert that virtually none of the New Testament was authored by contemporaries who personally knew Jesus, but rather by communities emerging one or two generations after his death.

This perspective laid intellectual foundations for movements such as “The New Evangelicals” and the “Progressive Christian Alliance,” which often prioritize identity politics, sociocultural critique, and the concept of “decolonization” over the traditional approach to Scripture. This is not surprising since the major hermeneutical ingredient scholars belonging to the Jesus Seminar, as William Crage states, is a radical left-wing ideology. The basic presupposition of their approach is that scientific naturalism denies any notion of miracles and the supernatural.[14] Such theological frameworks risk distorting the original message of the Gospel, subordinating its sacred content to contemporary ideological agendas, and reducing the life and teaching of Jesus to mere social narratives serving the neo-liberal interpretations and social justice activism, and performativity. Such an ideological matrix inevitably ends in the pit of despair and ultimately nihilism. One of the great Church Fathers, St. Gregory the Theologian, in his First Theological Oration, responding to the heresy of Arianism, wrote: “They are the people who delight in profane chatter, and in paradoxes of pseudo-knowledge, and in wranglings over words, which tend to no profit.”[15] Progressive Christianity does, in fact, assert an ancient heresy condemned at the First Council of Nicaea. Arius, and later Eunomius, taught that Jesus was created and therefore not eternal. In the words of Arius himself, “there was a time when He was not.” In addition to this, Progressive Christianity rejects the traditional doctrines of Hell, Heaven, and the Resurrection, as can be clearly seen in its teachings and examples. So what is Progressive Christianity? At a high-level overview, it is a Marxist social-justice movement grounded in neo-Marxist deconstruction and the lower textual criticism characteristic of liberal theology. It denies the supernatural events of the Bible and reinterprets Scripture to conform to the aims of postmodern identity politics. Ultimately, it is anti-American.
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[1] John Milbank, quoted in Radical Orthodoxy: An Overview, High Plains Research (Washington, DC: High Plains Research, 2018), accessed August 10, 2025, https://www.hprweb.com/2018/07/radical-orthodoxy-an-overview/.
[2] John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999), 2.
[3] Gunjević, Boris. “Triplex Modus per Corporis Christi – u rekonstrukciji radikalne ortodoksije.” Kairos 3 (2009): 89–100.
[4] Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, summarized in “Absolute Dependence,” Boston University’s Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology (accessed Aug. 2025).
[5] Paul Althaus quoted in Robert P. Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). See also Ericksen’s summary: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Christian Complicity?” (2009)
[6] Stephen Butler Murray, “John Milbank’s Twitter Bombshell on the Landscape of Identity‑Based Theologies,” Political Theology Network, July 19, 2020, Political Theology Network (blog), accessed August 10, 2025.
[7] Marcus J. Borg, “A Renaissance in Jesus Studies,” Theology Today 45, no. 3 (October 1988), accessed August 29, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20120204055910/http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/oct1988/v45-3-article2.htm#13
[8] Marcus J. Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith (United States: HarperCollins, 2009).
[9] Robert Funk, opening remarks of the launch of the Jesus Seminar in March 1985 in Berkeley, California
[10] J. P. Moreland and Paul K. Wilkins, Jesus Under Fire (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 22.
[11] “The Jesus Seminar and the Reliability of the Gospels,” ReKnew, December 6, 2007, https://reknew.org/2007/12/are-the-gospels-reliable/
[12] Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (United Kingdom: HarperCollins, 1996), 1.
[13] Ibid, 18.
[14] See: William Craig, “How Seriously Do Scholars Take The Jesus Seminar?”
uploaded by Dr William Craig, 2000, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLKCvcg6M_4
[15] Gregory of Nazianzus, The First Theological Oration (Oration 27), Section I, in The Five Theological Orations (translated by Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow), accessed via New Advent (New Advent, n.d.)