ABSTRACT
This chapter explores radical orthodoxy’s (RO) genealogy of the secular, its description of the contemporary postsecular situation, and the task it has set itself in renewing Christian socialism in a postliberal form. RO narrates the origins of the modern notion of the secular as something imagined and created, and dependent on deviations in the Christian tradition. If the postsecular names the moment of awareness that the idea of the secular as a tradition-free space is imploding, RO makes use of this opportunity to reiterate a theological construal of the secular as time under grace. It questions the idea of the postsecular as ‘postmetaphysical’ because all thinking and practice implies an ontology—an account of the way the world is. RO attempts to resituate the world within a renewed Christian ontology in order to out-narrate rival mythologies and so allows for the emergence of a more genuine Christian practice today.
