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Sharpe, Matthew
2014.
Secularisations and Their Debates.
p.
109.
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Integrity and Realism: Assessing John Milbank's Theology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Extract
On the acknowledgements page of Theology and Social Theory John Milbank thanks, rather abruptly, ‘Rowan Williams, who taught me theology’. No other teacher is recognised. The formal teaching was at Westcott House, Cambridge, in the mid-70s; but there is evidence enough that the current Archbishop of Canterbury has been an abiding influence on the whole of John Milbank’s theological career. In the crowded Metro of Milbank’s footnotes, it is rare to see a face more than once; but Williams appears five times in The Word Made Strange, speaking variously of Barth, Arius, Lossky and Gregory of Nyssa. And often, Milbank’s ideas seem closely related to those of his teacher. The concept of poesis in Milbank’s ‘A Critique of the Theology of Right’ (1989) - ‘the ceaseless re-narrating and ‘explaining’ of human history’, a self-exceeding act — is clearly the twin of Williams’ ‘generative revelation’ — ‘events or transactions in our language that break existing frames of reference and initiate new possibilities of life’ — in his essay ‘Trinity and Revelation’ (1986). But this example serves not just as a demonstration of Williams’ influence on Milbank; it also shows how Milbank overtakes his teacher, tackling on a grand scale ideas that are in Williams rather tentative. For Milbank, the idea that somehow Christian experience generates its own momentum of truth contributes to the overthrow of Kantian transcendentalism; for Williams, the same sort of idea provides ‘a way of thinking’ about the Spirit’s work in the church. Milbank’s theological ambition seems much greater than Williams’.
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References
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11 Unless the context specifically indicates otherwise, I have taken criticisms of Radical Orthodoxy to apply also to John Milbank. I concede that this is dangerous. But it’s justifiable, I think, given the prominence of Milbank and his pupils (Catherine Pickstock, Conor Cunningham, et al) in continuing the movement beyond the original volume of essays, and the way that Graham Ward and his pupils (including Gavin Hyman) have been more critical of the enterprise. Also, where Radical Orthodoxy speaks with one voice (as in Introduction to the original volume) it sounds more like Milbank than anyone else.
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34 In asserting that Milbank’s grand narrative is fictional, perhaps Hyman is thinking of Milbank’s 1992 declaration: ‘Fortunately, the Church is first and foremost neither a programme, nor a ‘real’ society, but instead an enacted, serious fiction’.35 But Milbank goes on to talk of the eucharist as ‘ritual distance’, saying ‘this ritual distance of the Church from itself defines the Church, or rather deflects it from any definition of what it is. In its truth it is not, but has been and will be’. This surely implies an acceptance of instability in Milbank’s conclusions. Further on in the same article he talks of his descriptions of the Church: ‘...the ‘formal’ descriptions (which I do not claim could ever be exhaustive – even within the confines of formalism) – in terms of peace, forgiveness, harmony, etc – describe structural relations, and do not isolate essences... nor prescribe ‘what is to be done’ ’ (p.343).
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41 Hyman, p.62-64
42 Theology and Social Theory, p. 296.
43 ‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’, p.228: ‘The Community is what God is like, and he is even more like the ideal, the goal of community implicit in its practices’.
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