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For Milbank, raised an evangelical Methodist, that logic blew up shortly after he’d decided to become an Anglican priest. He was in his second year of seminary when he took a course from a man named Rowan Williams. Last fall, his former teacher became archbishop of Wales; now he’s whispered about as a future candidate for the Anglican Church’s top spot, in Canterbury. Although he disputes aspects of Radical Orthodoxy, he and Milbank have been fellow travelers since they met as teacher and student years ago.

Back when Bishop Williams was still teaching, he assigned his pupils the work of Hans Urs von Balthazar, an ultraconservative Roman Catholic theologian who had been sowing the seeds of postsecularism and quietly transforming the church with his insistence that it hew to its roots and abandon its attempts to accommodate the modern world. Not long after, Milbank began reading the French theorists of postmodernism. To him, the worldview of the medieval church and that of postmodernism looked an awful lot alike. Both denied the primacy of fact. Both considered symbols—those of the liturgy or those of pop culture—just as real as that which they stood for.

But postmodernism leads to nihilism: What, it asks, can really be known? Premodernism offered an answer, but one it insisted was radically unknowable: God. If God is the root of everything, the thinking goes, God is beyond definition. To define God would be to use terms God created to explain their creator. As postmodern theory, an unknowable entity that precedes existence reduces all being to self-reference. But as faith, just the contemplation of such an idea reveals at least a small part of a chain of interconnected ideas and things—an infinitely vast outline of the divine.

“The revival of that [premodern] trend in theology and the espousal of postmodern rhetoric were parallel developments," Bishop Williams told me, speaking from his office in Monmouth, Wales. “It’s hard to say why [postsecularism] happened when it did, after hundreds of years during which modernity’s divisions were rarely questioned. But we must see that theology, all knowledge, happens in history. We don’t think from nowhere. What’s been happening in the last 50 years, with theology, with postmodernism, might be a reaction to the assumption that the ‘individual’ was the dominant paradigm. Then, in the 1960s, came a group of theologians who wondered about the death of God. And theology found that unless it did something, it was going to disappear like the Cheshire Cat, leaving nothing but a strange smile."

The postsecular theology that arose in response “broke up the sterile ground between fundamentalism and liberalism," he said. “At last we could see a way to read the Bible intelligently, critically, and obediently."

Milbank the student found the mix of pre- and postmodernism nothing short of revelatory. “If God is radically unknown, that amounts to saying there’s a dimension of everything that’s unknown," he reasoned, delighted to find a way of thinking by which reasoning itself was not so much informed by revelation as dependent upon it. The new approach, though, led him not to the church, but to the university. He didn’t hear the calling to be a priest. Instead, he would be a theologian.

THERE CAN BE NO GOING BACK

In 1985, an academic publisher asked him to write a volume on the relationship between theology and secular social science for use in seminaries. It was a plum assignment for a young scholar, and he started out in good faith. “But I knew by the time I’d finished the proposal that I was onto something different," he recalled.

“Once, there was no ‘secular,’" begins Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, but the book quickly abandons the style of a fairy tale for a tone of apocalyptic urgency: “There can be no going back: Only Christian theology now offers a discourse able to position and overcome nihilism itself."

How did nihilism come to pose such a threat? Milbank traces revisionist history of the Western world in which the main villain isn’t Machiavelli or Attila the Hun, but a 13th century Scottish “metaphysician" named John Duns Scotus (from whose name “dunce cap" is said to have been derived). “Scotus inaugurated a tendency for talking about reality as if it consisted of discrete objects, atoms, facts," Milbank told me. “Things that we can talk about without any values."

Following Scotus, thinkers during the Enlightenment derived what they believed were “natural" laws of society: the shape of states, codes of justice, principles of commerce. In due time, modern social science arose to shore up those beliefs—and send God into exile, according to Milbank. Then, during the last several decades, postmodern deconstructionists tore down the assumptions of the secular world. But although postmodernists are powerful enough to take modernity to pieces, he writes, that’s all they are: powerful. Dependent just like modernity on the black and white of either/or assumptions, postmodernism is no more than so many slings and arrows.

CHRISTIANITY ISN'T AN ARGUMENT

When D. Stephen Long read a photocopy of Milbank’s handwritten manuscript, which made the rounds in theological circles in advance of its publication, he thought the then- unknown scholar had found a way beyond the stuffiness that had so long defined his field. “He took a theology that’d been predictable, boring, stagnant, and turned it upside down," Long, a theologian at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Chicago, told me. “Milbank appealed not to reason but to beauty. He said Christianity isn’t an argument, it’s a story."

Milbank sees stories as the shifting surfaces of the world made by God. Whereas modernity holds that every person is the subject of his or her own sentence, capable of the deduction necessary to know essential truth, the peeling away of superficial layers in order to reveal something deeper, better, more authentic, more original, the medieval thinkers from whom Milbank draws intellectual sustenance concerned themselves with the world as it appeared, the given as the received, creation marred only by human hands. The devil isn’t in the details, they thought; God is.

By turning our gazes away from the world, inward to something called the individual rather than outward to creation, Milbank charges, modernity brought not enlightenment, but the darkness named by Nietzsche. “What is the modern?" D. Stephen Long paraphrased the German philosopher: “God is dead, and we killed him. No up or down, left or right. We’re just here on a little blue ball floating in space—beyond good and evil."

If Nietzsche’s conception of modernity sounds postmodern, says Milbank, it should. “Postmodernity is the reverse face of modernity, and in the end is really identical with and fulfills modernity." But the choice between two unsavory views of the world is a false one, he says—Radical Orthodoxy is a third way. “We’re the real postmodernism. We are the critique of modernity that is not simply wanting to go back. Make a half-move back, yes. Then go forward."

THE SHOCK OF THE DIVINE

Where to? In The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture, a recent collection of his essays, Milbank writes that in the past, ritual—the performance of the liturgy— made the word of God “strange" by acting it out, so that the faithful could forever hear it anew with the “shock of the divine."

Milbank is an odd sort of traditionalist—he thinks not only Christianity, but all religions have ceded to mass media too much power to perform our stories for us. Ritual has lost even the power of repetition; in most houses of worship it amounts to little more than a misunderstood gesture, a quick two-step for the superficially pious and zoning-out time for everyone else.

Feeling the pressure to offer a better alternative, he met in 1997 with Catherine T. Pickstock, then a graduate student of his at the University of Cambridge and Graham Ward, an Anglican priest also teaching at Cambridge. Together they came up with the name Radical Orthodoxy. It was denounced immediately as a joke, an accidental irony, or just too deadly earnest. Liberal theologians said it carried things too far, and feminists feared the implications of “orthodoxy." Priests said Milbank and company were blinded by theory; postmodern theorists didn’t deign to comment.

But a conference at Cambridge that year drew critics and Radical Orthodoxy born-agains alike. If there was disagreement among the theologians, it was welcome. Their tangles over Augustine and Aquinas, identity politics and pastoral procedure, tumbled out of the creaky departments in which they’d been fretting for years and into the realm of philosophers, historians, literary critics, musicians, artists—the thinking worlds from which theology had long ago been nudged away.

Radical Orthodoxy has built up enough momentum to produce a half-dozen books in the three years since. In 1998, Pickstock, now a research fellow at Cambridge, published After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, about the Eucharist as model for a participatory community. As philosophy it’s as difficult as anything out there, but as a guide to worship, After Writing has found followers beyond academe. In Anglican and British Catholic circles, it’s had the effect of a stone skipping across water—no big splashes so far, but multiple points of contact with circles of influence rippling outwards.

Ward has released several books of his own that spell out the connection between God and such seemingly godless thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. D. Stephen Long published a book earlier this year on Radically Orthodox economics. And last year, Milbank, Pickstock, and Ward edited a definitive collection, Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, including many even younger scholars who’ve flocked to the movement. It sold unusually well for an academic volume, and in surprising places. In England, church bookshops that normally do a brisk trade in tales of country vicars found themselves filling orders for a jargon-filled jeremiad against certainty, security, and the existing moral order.