ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the allegorical world of The Pilgrim's Progress, its topography, its creation of an alternative theological topos. It develops a systematic theology that issued in a specific cultural context and posed a critical intervention with that context, like the liberation theologians, like liberal theologians, but which took the revealed origins and materialism of theology seriously. The overall aim remains the exposition of an engaged systematic theology that can act as a cultural critique; that can be understood as Kulturkritik, albeit one which deepens, metaphysically, the earlier work of Max Horkheimer and the work of Theodor W. Adorno. The reading of Michel de Certeau's work came at a time when Graham Ward was also reading the theology of another Jesuit, Hans Urs von Balthasar. Radical Orthodoxy (RO) was certainly ecumenical - as the conferences to date on RO and Roman Catholicism, RO and the Reformed Tradition, RO and the Orthodox Tradition and RO and Process Theology testify.
