John Milbank

  • The Best of Ideas: On Radical Orthodoxy (Podcast)

    Milbank’s central argument is, that modern social and political thought rests on no better or more secure foundation than Christian theology. Both are stories about how things are, and as such they stand the same footing. But Christian theology, Milbank says, out-narrates modern thought, because it has a better and a truer story to tell.

  • Three Questions on Modern Atheism

    • We need instead a new kind of ‘romantic’ politics that is specifically religious, and often Christian, in thinking that one can only get distributive equality on the basis of agreed values and an elite transmission and guarding of those values. A more Carlylean and Ruskinian politics then—basically left yet with elements that are not really right so much as pre-modern and traditionalist. Strictly speaking the pre-modern predates right versus left.

    Prophecy is perilous, but we may have reached the point where the only way out of a catastrophe that could potentially destroy the West is to abandon our global idolatrous worship of sacralized absolute sovereignty, and the formally neutral market, with their empty pursuit of power, in West and East alike. Both empty secular power and arbitrary theocratic power, in their secret complicity, show us no way forward.

    Those demands of the living also are infinite and infinitely legitimate, and so, here indeed, without resurrection arises an irresolvable problem: I should not cease mourning and apologizing, and yet I should. Only the hope for an infinite community of all who have ever lived frees us from this dilemma, again to do good. And so we must finally conclude that resurrection, not death, is the ground of the ethical.

    In the face of the secret alliance of cultural with economic liberalism, we need now to invent a new sort of politics which links egalitarianism to the pursuit of objective values and virtues: a “traditionalist socialism” or a “red Toryism”. After all, what counts as radical is not the new, but the good.

    So I think you can see that kind of tension going on in the final chapter, and it is also there that I am suggesting that if we look back into Augustine there aren’t just a few reflections on providence at work in history, or something like Luther’s two kingdoms theory, it is a real genealogy. It is a real kind of socio-historical diagnosis of the structural logic at work within the pagan Roman Empire.

    About

    Theopolitical is the weblog of Davey Henreckson, a graduate student in theology at the University of Notre Dame. Topics of conversation are political and historical theology, with semi-frequent forays into literature, economics, localism, and the divine American sport -- baseball.

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