John Milbank

The article discusses the history of monotheism from the earliest times to the present. It begins with arguments against the notion of monotheists as an evolutionarily early stage in religion and then proceeds to characterize monotheism in the Old testament. The view that there was every a pre‐monotheistic phase of one ‘national God’ is called into question, along with the priority of the ‘God of history’ over the creator God. Association of the divine with social justice is shown to be common to the ancient Near East as a whole; however, Israelite monotheism, it is argued, was associated with a kind of conservatism which preserved more features of an oral and gift‐exchange culture, while calling into question the more fetishistic aspects of such culture. Monotheism, it is claimed, is what refutes both myth and rationalism, while the superiority of one God to many gods is defended in connection with the theme of peace. The final section deals with the three monotheistic faiths, and argues that Christianity, with its doctrines of incarnation and the Trinity, is not qualifying monotheism and its distinctive features as just adumbrated, but on the contrary developing it in the purest and most consistent form

What is postmodernity? — not simply postmodernism as a set of theories, but also postmodernity, as a set of cultural circumstances. Above all, it means the obliteration of boundaries, the confusion of categories. In the postmodern times in which we live, there is no longer any easy distinction to be made between nature and culture, private interior and public exterior, hierarchical summit and material depth; nor between idea and thing, message and means, production and exchange, product and delivery, the state and the market, humans and animals, humans and machines, image and reality — nor beginning, middle and end. Everything is made to run into everything else; everything gets blended, undone and then re-blended. There are no longer any clear centres of control, and this means that new weight is given to plurality and the proliferation of difference. However, none of these differences ever assumes the status of a distinct essence: rather they are temporary events, destined to vanish and be displaced

Salvation is neither "individual" nor "social" but concerns insertion into an ecclesial narrative. This conclusion invites a series of metanarrative considerations by which, in turn, the "narrative ecclesiology" of Henri de Lubac is shown to be too apolitical in comparison with that of Augustine, Augustine's too resigned to the permanence of two cities compared with that of Hegel, and He- gel's too suppressive of the salvific viability of a non-coercive order compared with that of PierreSimon Ballanche. In a corrected form, Augustine's philoso- phy of history outlines the basic narrative conditions for salvation, and this, rather than the metanarratives of enlightenment, gives the true possibility of social critique.

Invoking Zygmunt Bauman’s acute exposition of a left-critical hesitation between intellectuals as saviours and intellectuals as oppressors, this essay argues that while Bauman reveals this hesitation as crucial and symptomatic, nevertheless he leaves it unresolved. The essay shows how the human nature/ culture distinction is, in fact, constitutive of human culture as such; moreover, the essay argues that this constitutive distinction reproduces itself within culture in terms of reciprocal hierarchies of social division — intellectual/non-intellectual, shamanistic/folk, aristocratic/popular. This pattern of vertical reciprocity is precisely what the purely horizontal axis of capitalist-bureaucratic liberalism excludes, collapsing the hierarchical axis of political culture into the horizontal false-binary of ‘left’ versus ‘right’. In this way the essay argues that the crux of an authentic resistance to capitalist-bureaucratic liberalism will involve not a triumph of the ‘left’ over the ‘right’, but the retrieval of the dynamic paradox of the vertical axis of the hierarchical communion of guiding excellence fused with popular spontaneity. The hierarchical yet dynamically educative interplay between innovators and those being constantly innovated is the organic root of human culture and the means of the authentic practice of human justice.

Managerialism in the Church is rooted in the very character of Reformation theology. The letter's understanding of salvation as imputation and its reduction of the importance for salvation of belonging to the Church encourages the idea that there is a religious 'product' which can be managed and marketed. Modern evangelicalism consummates this tendency and uniquely allows a combining of the capitalist product with the capitalist actor. 'Fresh Expressions' in the Church of England fuses this trend with a liberal ideology of choice and the assumption that parish life must inevitably decline. The new modes of Church which it sponsors deny the very idea of the need to encounter different others in a specific locality which is crucial to the Pauline notion of the Body of Christ. It is hence a misconstrual of Christianity as such

The Christian Bible was from the outset a dogmatic and Christological conception, which entailed a mystical reading of signs and events, a practise of speculation at once narratological and phenomenological. The trilogy of Olivier‐Thomas Venard OP – Thomas d'Aquin, poète théologien – is proposed as crucial to understanding how Thomas Aquinas preserves the authentic biblical character of Christian theology, proceeding along the diagonal axis of the mystagogical, an axis neither purely vertical nor purely horizontal but a blending of both at once. Here a reading of Aquinas is offered as initiating a participational ‘linguistic turn’, an alternative modernity that can heal the dissociation of the science of being from the phenomenal and hermeneutical embeddings in which human life is constituted

Community and Gift Despite growing uneasiness about the economic and social consequences of the free market, today socialism, like religion, exhibits merely a spectral reality. It no longer seems either plausible or rational, and it has been consigned to the realm of faith. Yet, as with Christianity, socialism still haunts the West because nothing has emerged to replace it. Just as the story of a compassionate God who became a man was seen as the “final religion,” so the hope of a universal fraternity based on sharing was seen as “the final politics.” With its demise, all that seems to…