A friend brought a debate between Miroslav Volf and Daniel Bell to my attention this week. Having read through the respective comments they both put forward in volume 19 of Modern Theology, I thought I would post my comment here as well. This is not a detailed point by point account, but more a meta comment about what I perceive to be the nature of the debate.

Firstly, thanks for bringing this debate between Miroslav Volf and Daniel Bell to my attention. Believe it or not, I don't really follow RO stuff. I tend to read Volf for what he is good at, and then people like Bell and Philip Goodchild when I want to think about theological perspectives on economics and their vision of global political order.

In any case, I just downloaded Bell and Volf's exchange in Modern Theology to get a sense of what they're on about. I won't bother getting into too many details as the issues are complex with a lot of baggage attached to them. I would say this though, the difference between them is a good example of the ways in which RO political impulses are largely incompatible or nonsensical to Protestant traditions rooted in the American context. For instance, Volf critiques Bell's understanding of desire as Pelagian. This is an echo of Luther's critique of scholasticism. So too, Volf maintains a separation of ecclesial and state polities, even arguing to some degree that the church should not understand itself as a counter political organization to avoid any attempt at theocratic statecraft. Bell counters of course, but the counters are rooted in a series of reappraisals of premodern sources that don't make much sense if you are rooted in a humanist Reformation tradition as I think Volf is. In other words, how you understand the metaphysics of modernity makes all the difference when appraising the church's response to capitalism today.

I would add, that part of the reason I worked on Barth while researching here with Graham Ward was because Milbank dismisses him too easily as a modern liberal. This leaves Protestant traditions without one of their great voices of the last hundred years. I personally think that if political and social transformation of the church in America is going to take place, then the RO tradition will need to engage much more explicitly and closely their own appraisal of the humanist Reformation tradition. At the moment, there is a dismissive attitude coming through that I find counterproductive. 

It seems to me that Protestant traditions cannot abandon and redress medieval and modern sources quite as radically as Milbank might want without doing so from within some of their key sources. So, the Finnish scholars in Helsinki are really important insofar as they are re-reading Lutheran metaphysics. My work does the same to some degree by comparing Heidegger and Barth's concomitant explications of Luther. Furthermore, Milbank's concession that thinkers like Hamann (the Illuminations series with Blackwells is publishing a book on Hamann soon) offers Protestants a truly radical orthodox voice in the heart of the modern era is inadequate precisely because Hamann is too obscure to connect very directly with Reformation traditions. Personally, I think we have to find key Protestant theologians that the majority of the tradition is familiar with, like Barth, and begin to highlight the issues they were raising and dealing with in a way that helps Protestants come to terms with contemporary political challenges.

In this sense, I am with Volf insofar as I want to engage a modern Reformed discourse in order to challenge and revise capitalism in particular and theological politics in general. But, I am deeply persuaded by Bell that our response to capitalism and the state cannot rest on the kind of pragmatic positivism nor the modern metaphysics upon which such pragmatism finds its justification. Part of why I have enjoyed studying in England s that it has given me some crucial distance to begin to see just how serious the political economic problems are today, and how much more thorough Protestant Americans are going to have to be if they are going to address them.

All that to say that the debate between Volf and Bell seems to me to be a matter of conceptual slippage. Bell has absorbed, by and large, Milbank's read of modernity from scholasticism forward (e.g. his citation of the need to return to a Thomistic participatory ontology). Volf has not. As such, they disagree about a whole host of matters that find sharp focus when they both start to talk about capitalism in particular in the terms inherited from the manner in which they have come to terms with modern metaphysics.