Radical Orthodoxy is probably the most compelling movement within current theology. It takes seriously the great Platonic, Aristotelian, Augustine, Thomistic tradition (what some have termed the perennial philosophy) and is serious about engaging current philosophy, sociology, and cultural theory. However, RO seems to me to fall short of my existential need for a concrete savior. Its Platonic impulses tend to prioritize the metaphysical over the pastoral and existential.
When RO Theologians speak about the suffering and death of Christ John Milbank, for example, speaks of the act as poiesis in the Aristotelian sense. That is an act which is not an end to itself, but has its aim in something beyond itselfs (eg shipbuilding has its aim in a seaworthy vessel). For Milbank the aim of Christ's death is only realized within the church, through our forgiving of others. The unfortunate impact Milbank's understanding of the death of Christ on ecclesiology is that the Christ is absorbed in the Church.
Graham Ward approaches the death of Christ through sacramental theology and postmodern philosophy. According to Ward, a careful reading of the gospels reveals a portrait of Jesus' body as a constant movement of semiotic displacement. Ward marks five distinct moments of displacement in the narratives: incarnation/circumcision, transfiguration, Eucharist, crucifixion and resurrection/ascension. Jesus corporeality is indistinguishable from the migration of its semiotic identifications. Jesus, a circumcised Jew becomes Jesus transfigured as the translucent image of God, who becomes transformed into and handed over as bread, who deteriorates and becomes lifeless and alive in/with us as the body of the church. There is no one body of Christ immutably referenced, testified to and carried by the church community. Ward writes
"This is my body. Take, eat. This is my blood. Drink.' The body is always in transit; it is always being transferred. It is never there as a commodity I can lay claim to or possess as mine. This is the ontological scandal announced by the Eucharistic phrase - bodies are never simply there (or here)."
In either case Jesus Christ, the person, becomes diffuse either in the through giving his body to the world (Ward) or within the Church and it's action of forgiveness. This is insightful and interesting stuff, but it leaves one a little cold during holy week. More importantly it fails to answer our deepest questions.
Those of us who have experienced loss and tragedy look to the cross not in metaphysical reflection, but in anguished existential cries. We need a savior with a body like ours, who understands real suffering, and whose death accomplished something in itself (in Aristotelian terms praxis). Though RO has much to commend it, for Easter I will stand with evangelicalism and its understanding of a historical, human/divine Jesus, who felt physical pain, whose actual and identifiable body was broken for our sins, and whose actual and non-diffuse blood was shed for our sins.
