Current mood:	tired
Current music:	Year of the Rabbit - Hunted
Entry tags:	john milbank

Week of Milbank, post 1: "I'll take the postmodern God for $600, Alex"
In Graham Ward's The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, John Milbank has an essay titled "Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A Short Summa in Forty-two Responses to Unasked Questions." I read the first fifth of this on the first day of my Radical Orthodoxy class with my pastor, and just finally got around to reading the rest of it a couple days ago. It is structured in a numerated list of "answers to unasked questions," so I will just excerpt some that I thought rather interesting.

1 The end of modernity, which is not accomplished, yet continues to arrive, means the end of a single system of truth based on universal reason, which tells us what reality is like.

2 With this ending, there ends also the modern predicament of theology. It no longer has to measure up to accepted secular standards of scientific truth or normative rationality. Nor, concomitantly, to a fixed notion of the knowing subject, which was usually the modern, as opposed to the premodern, way of securing universal reasion. This caused problems for theology, because an approach grounded in subjective aspriation can only precariously affirm objective values and divine transcendence.

3 In postmodernity there are infinitely many possible versions of truth, inseparable from particular narratives. Objects and subjects are, as they are narrated in a story. Outside a plot, which has its own unique, unfounded reasons, one cannot conceive how objects and subjects would be, nor even that they would be at all. If subjects and objects only are, through the complex relations of a narrative, then neither objects are privileged, as in premodernity, nor subjects , as in modernity. Instead, what matters are structural relations, which constantly shift; the word "subject" now indicates a point of potent "intensity" which can rearrange given structural patterns.

[...]

12 If God can only be given some content through community, then speaking of God is not just a matter of words, but also of images and bodily actions. These all articulate "God."

[...]

15 One way to try to secure peace is to draw boundaries around "the same," and exclude "the other"; to promote some practices and disallow alternatives. Most polities, and most religions, characteristically do this. But the Church has misunderstood itself when it does likewise. For the point of the supersession of the law is that nothing really positive is excluded -- no difference whatsoever -- but only the negative, that which denies and takes away form Being: in other words, the violent. It is true, however, that Christians perceive a violence that might not normally be recognized, namely any studnting of a person's capacity to love and conceive of the divine beauty; this inhibition is seen as having its soul in arbitrariness. But there is no real exclusion here; Chrisitanity should not draw boundaries, and the Church is that paradox: a nomad city.

[...]

18 Where there is a positing of a sacred over against a chaotic other, then the supremacy of the sacred can always be deconstructed, for it appears that there is something more ultimate that includes both the sacred and chaos, that governs the passage between them. Is not this passage itself chaotic? Hence there is a hidden connection between premodern pagan dualism and postmodern dualism. The latter's self-proclaimed paganism is a kind of deconstructed paganism, for the real pagans were always hoping to subordinate the admitted conflictual diversity of the gods to a harmonious order; an open celebration of the finality of the agon was only latent. But Christianity, which is not dualistic in this fashion, and already admits the flux of difference, is therefore outside the reach of deconstruction (in precisely Derrida's sense).

[...]

32 For if evil is truly overcome in the perfect harmony of Christ's life in community with his followers, and in the language of this community which we remember, this still does not mean that here we possess a gnosis, in the sense of a given forumlaic wisdom that we must just recite or magically invoke. Instead, this language allows us to escape from the dominating effects of a human discourses which totally subsume all differences, new occurrences, under existing categories. Atonement means that the flux is permitted to flow again, that the Logos only really speaks with its real intent in the ever-different articulation of our responses. The Holy Spirit is associated with this diversity of answers. But they all form the continuous unity of the body of Christ (Pages 265-274).

Some interesting points, to be sure. These points after #3 are connected, but they became less interesting and more convoluted in that very frustrating Milbankian, swampy way.

In the spirit of "Jeopardy," I wonder what the questions were that preceeded these answers...?

As mentioned here when I finished Milbank's magnum opus, I hope to spend the next few days working through some of the material that caught my eye in Theology & Social Theory (read: stuff that I could understand and seemed provacative).