John Milbank

What is the meaning of the word tradition ? Are there live traditions today? Does tradition clash with innovation? Is it possible to love the proper tradition and look to innovation at the same time? This study brings together a number of insightful contributions that focus on the complexity of the relationship between tradition and innovation and on the forces that could emerge from it, if tradition is seen to represent the cornerstone for future. The volume is subdivided into four sections: I. Tradition: an historical background; II. Tradition and innovation: which future?; III. Law and tradition; and IV. Tradition: a theological point of view.

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…

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

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

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

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

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…