John Milbank

The current global economic crisis concerns the way in which contemporary capitalism has turned to financialisation as a double cure for both a falling rate of profit and a deficiency of demand. Although this turning is by no means unprecedented, policies of financialisation have depressed demand (in part as a result of the long-term stagnation of average wages) while at the same time not proving adequate to restore profits and growth. This paper argues that the current crisis is less the ‘normal’ one that has to do with a constitutive need to balance growth of abstract wealth with demand for concrete commodities. Rather, it marks a meta-crisis of capitalism that is to do with the difficulties of sustaining abstract growth as such. This meta-crisis is the tendency at once to abstract from the real economy of productive activities and to reduce everything to its bare materiality. By contrast with a market economy that binds material value to symbolic meaning, a capitalist economy tends to separate matter from symbol and reduce materiality to calculable numbers representing ‘wealth’. Such a conception of wealth rests on the aggregation of abstract numbers that cuts out all the relational goods and the ‘commons’ on which shared prosperity depends.

The exercise of philosophical judgement requires attention to an apologetics, that is usually uttered by faith. In the case of Christian theology apologetics is central rather than secondary. It involves a defensive narrative of the exceptional life of the God-Man and of other lives lived in his wake. The invocation of reason by this narrative implies a certain apophatic reserve as to the nature of the witness of these lives and this same reserve permits a counter-apologetic for the purposes of this world: a conceptual space in which it can state its case. Christian apologetic in fact expounds itself both as a pointing away from the world of human theory and human politics and a recognition of the necessary mediating role of this world. It is therefore caught in a tension in which it must to an extent deploy reason and deploy power, yet at the same time can only remain true to its exceptional witness if it cleaves to the personal dimension of the apologia which allows itself to be guided by both feeling and the imagination. Sometimes this has been best grasped by Christian poets, as I try to illustrate

Radical Orthodoxy is a new wave of theological thinking that seeks to re-inject the modern world with theology. The group of theologians associated with Radical Orthodoxy are dissatisfied with conteporary theolgical responses to both modernity and postmodernity Radical Orthodoxy is a collection that aims to reclaim the world by situating its concerns and activities within a theological framework. By mapping the new theology against a range of areas where modernity has failed, these essays offer us way out of the impasses that postmodernity represents.

The following essay explores the way in which notions of truth are linked to those of secure identity and hence to certain mathematical issues, from Plato and Aristotle onward. It argues that this recognition underlies traditional resorts to notions of form or eidos as securing both particular and general identity—at once the integrity of things and the link among things. I contend that nominalism rightly saw that there were certain problems with this notion in terms of the strict application of the logical law of identity and the recognition of the “artificial” character of human understanding. However, I also argue that the most extreme fulfillment of the nominalist program after Frege itself ran foul of the law of identity because of the paradoxes of set theory. In the face of this double impasse I press for a re-configured Thomistic realism, taking account of the insights of Nicholas of Cusa that would abandon the ultimacy of the law of identity as paradoxically the only way to save identity and so truth, and would admit that the passage to the recognition of universals lies through the human creative construction of universals. Realism can still be saved here because in the Divine Son or Logos, in whom human reason participates, divine ideas are at once made and seen.

Today we live in very peculiar circumstances indeed. The welfare of this world is being wrecked by the ideology of neo-liberalism, and yet its historical challengers—conservatism and socialism—are in total disarray. Socialism, in particular, appears to have been wrong-footed by the discovery that liberalism and not socialism is the bearer of “modernity” and “progress.” As the suspicion arises that perhaps modernity and progress are themselves by no means on the side of justice, then socialists today characteristically begin to suspect that their own traditions, in their Marxist, Social Democratic, and Fabian forms, have been too grounded in modes of thought…

Theology finds itself in search of the locus of authority: should theology seek to defend its theses in function to the critical norms established by Western academic culture? Or should it guide its reasonings according to the teachings of the Church? The article shows that the way forward involves an historical and conceptual examination of the epistemic change occurring around 1300. Univocity and representation became progressively dominant concepts in the West; the result is that reason began to be conceived over against faith. The author draws upon the thinking of Henri de Lubac and Nicholas of Cusa and recuperates the notions of participation, giving new vigor to the ideas of the supernatural, the corpus mysticum, and allegory. He argues that the Church constitutes an event of concordantia, whereby the Bishop appeals ultimatly to the original concordantia of the whole cosmos, grounded in the consensus of the Trinity. Finally, the author purposes that theology is answerable to reason to the extent that it is answerable to the Church, herself answerable in turn to the Triune God. /// A teologia encontra-se em busca do locus da autoridade: deverá a teologia procurar defender as suas teses emfunção das normas críticas estabelecidas pela cultura aca démica ocidental? Ou deverá desenvolver os seus argumentos em conformidade com os ensinamentos da Igreja? O presente artigo mostra até que ponto a resposta a estas questões implica um exame histórico e conceptual da mudança epistémica que ocorreu no Ocidente por volta de 1300. Univocidade e representação tornaram-se progressivamente conceitos dominantes, de que resultou um conceito de razão em contraposição à fé. O autor recorre ao pensamento de Henri de Lubac e de Nicolau de Cusa em ordem a recuperar a noção de participação dando novo vigor a ideias como as de sobrenatural, corpus mysticum, e de alegoria, argumentando que a Igreja constitui um acontecimento de concordantia, em relação à qual o Bispo apela em última análise à concordantia original do cosmos, a qual está por sua vez fundada no consenso da Trindade. Finalmente, o autor propõe que a teologia deve responder à razão na medida em que deve responder perante a Igreja, ela própria necessitada de responder perante o Deus uno e trino.

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.