John Milbank

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…

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.