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Mediating theologies: Karl Barth between radical and neo-orthodoxy

The attempt to bring radical orthodoxy (and in particular, the work of John Milbank) into conversation with Barth is hampered by the movement's dismissal of him as ‘neo-orthodox’, a thinker who rejected liberalism only to embrace revelatory positivism. If Barth were a positivist, he might be guilty of alienating human history, language, and culture from their divine source: ‘the secular’ would then be autonomous. But he does nothing of the kind – certainly not in his mature theology, probably not even in his earlier work. Radical orthodoxy's reading of Barth may reflect the influence of D. M. MacKinnon, who tended to highlight the prophetic and crisis elements in Barth's thought. The radically orthodox are more accurate when they cite ecclesial mediation as the real source of contention. While the stress on mediation can have disastrous results, dissolving Christ's identity into that of the church, this need not happen; indeed, one can argue that Barth's Christology demands a stronger account of church and sacraments than he himself supplied. The deeper issue may be what radical orthodoxy means by its stress on human poesis. Is the movement really an ecclesial theology, taking its stand within the historic church? Or is it just another form of liberalism, seeking to re-invent the church in default of authentic performance? If the latter, then theology has indeed become ‘tragically too important’, occluding sheer celebration of the divine gift.