ABSTRACT
Opening with W.H. Auden’s A Certain World, and more specifically, Auden’s observations on theological language, Root’s first lecture begins with an acknowledgement of the ambiguity of ‘radicalism’, and, related to this, ‘theological radicalism’. According to Root, the radical temper has to do with innovation, but innovation requires tradition, an orthodoxy to which radicalism can respond. There is, says Root, no radicalism without conservativism. That said, conservatives think radicals ‘the starters of crazes’. Root, however, acknowledges the value of the questions which radicalism forces us to ask. At the same time, Root argues for theological integrity over and against the reductionism of those who, motivated by apologetic or ‘omni-relevance’, advocate translation from theological to non-theological terms and concepts as if this were possible without loss. Addressing the death of God theologians, Bishop John Robinson and others, Root clearly has 1960s Cambridge radicalism, a movement of which he was to some extent a part, in mind.
