Simplicity Itself: Milbank's Thesis

Extract

John Milbank's work is familiar to the assiduous reader of New Blackfriars, who will recall his two-part study of William Warburton, as well as his more recent essays ‘On Baseless Suspicion: Christianity and the Crisis of Socialism’ and ‘Religion, Culture and Anarchy: the attack on the Amoldian vision’. Although not incorporated materially into Theology and Social Theory, these essays open up related lines of investigation, and, having read them, one might not find his massive book so intimidating. It may be said, at least, that one might have been prepared for this venture into a post-Nietzschean theology which is also profoundly (Anglican) Catholic—an unlikely conjunction, one might have thought.

The book’s dense scholarship and theoretical complexity are formidable, but, fortunately, in the title, the epigraph and the table of contents, we are offered three clues to the brilliantly simple thesis which it takes all the learning and argument in the rest of the book to expound and substantiate.

A book entitled Theology and Social Theory in a series containing titles such as Theology and Philosophy, Theology and Politics and the like, would naturally be expected to bring together in a mutually illuminating way what everyone is likely to think of as two radically different disciplines, each with its own autonomous method and distinctive discourse—‘naturally’, that is to say, in the cultural environment of carefully protected academic specialisms which we inhabit and which the author means to disrupt. Theologians, peering through the machicolations of faith-engaging scholarship, would learn from sociologists about the ways in which ideas are shaped by social processes.