Our August Myths: The Legitimacy of Theology in a Secular Age (Part C)
A Secular Age [B]:
The Obscure Origins of the Seemingly Obvious
Part of the
architecture of the “meta-theological” dilemma is the assumption of the
discretely different nature of a “theological explanation,” and a “secular
(sociological, historical, etc…)” explanation, to which the theological can be
reduced. Many of you who are more
philosophically and metaphysically minded will no doubt want to immediately
point out that, analytically speaking, such a reduction is a crass category
mistake regarding levels of description.[i] And you would be quite right. It, for example, leads to the odd situation
in which a Nobel-prize winning Biologist can make the bizarre reductionist
observation that “Biologists no longer study life,” because “there is no
metaphysical entity behind that word, ‘life.’”[ii] Life is just a nominal designation of cells
in flux; indeed “cells” are just a nominal description of a relatively stable
and discrete environment of chemicals; chemicals just a nominal designation for
a particular constellation of molecules, etc…
down and down until we find the abyss within each thing—or as current
superstring theory would have it, vibrating strands of essence foaming just
above the void. This makes eerily prescient the earlier words of Michel
Foucault regarding the “technology of the human,” (which is to say: the
conceptual apparatuses[iii]
that allow us to become understandable to
ourselves) that they necessarily make life only “a sovereign vanishing point
within the organism.”[iv]
Or, for example, this category mistake leads to many like
Daniel Dennett who, assuming they have in fact laid out a valid case for
religion as an entirely natural phenomenon, to proclaim that thereby they have invalidated theology;
yet, as David Bentley Hart points out, “Dennett’s [argument] is entirely
inconsequential…even if by sheer chance his story of religion’s evolution were
correct in every detail, it would still be a trivial project…[because] of course religion is a natural
phenomenon. Who would be so foolish as
to deny that?...After all, it does not logically follow that simply because
religion, in the abstract, is natural it cannot become a vehicle for divine truth,
or that it is not in some sense oriented toward ultimate reality (as, according
to Christian tradition, all things are).”[v] Or, in other words, as Herbert McCabe put
it: “God is not a separate and rival
agent in the universe. The creative
causal power of God does not operate on me from outside, as an alternative to
me; it is the creative causal power of God that makes me.”[vi]
As relevant
and interesting as these questions are, they must be left for another
time. We are here to ask, rather, a
historiographical question (or, perhaps better: the analytic questions just
posed in the mode of historical inquiry): what
is the secular? That we live in “a
secular age,” we would probably all agree upon;[vii]
yet just what it was we were all agreeing upon is not quite so
forthcoming. The literature is vast, and
we have neither the time, nor I the expertise, to detail the various
ins-and-outs regarding recent inquiry.
But by and large recent scholarship has begun to question the so-called
“official” or “received” story of secularism, which in its bare bones goes
something like this:
[Here is] modernity's first great attempt
to define itself: an 'age of reason' emerging from and overthrowing an 'age of
faith.' Behind this definition lay a simple but thoroughly enchanting
tale. Once upon a time, it went, Western humanity was the cosseted and
incurious ward of Mother Church: during this, the age of faith, culture
stagnated, science languished, wars of religion were routinely waged, witches
were burned by inquisitors, and Western humanity labored in brutish subjugation
to dogma, superstition, and the unholy alliance of church and state.
Withering blasts of fanaticism and fideism had long since scorched away
the last remnants of classical learning; inquiry was stifled…Then, in the wake
of the 'wars of religion' that had torn Christendom apart, came the full
flowering of the Enlightenment and with it the reign of reason and progress,
the riches of scientific achievement and political liberty, and a new and
revolutionary sense of human dignity. The secular nation-state arose,
reduced religion to an establishment of the state or, in the course of time, to
something altogether separate from the state, and thereby rescued Western
humanity from the blood-steeped intolerance of religion. Now, at last,
Western humanity has left its nonage and attained to its majority, in science,
politics, and ethics. The story of the travails of Galileo almost
invariably occupies an honored place in this narrative, as exemplary of the
natural relation between 'faith' and 'reason and as an exquisite epitome of
scientific reason's mighty struggle during the early modern period to free
itself from the tyranny of religion.[viii]
The sole
defect of this narrative, argues Hart, is the little hiccup “that it is false
in every detail.”[ix] As the historian and philosopher of science
Ronald Numbers put it recently: “the greatest myth in the history of science
and religion holds that they have been in a state of constant conflict.”[x] George
Steiner once wrote in his wonderful book Real
Presences that “method is metaphor made instrumental,”[xi]
and perhaps no where can this been seen as true more than in how the metaphors
of humankind’s various “coming of age” and “warfare of science and theology”
stories paint it as emerging from the darkness of superstition, theology, and
ignorance. Indeed as John Milbank
writes, “narrative is our primary way of inhabiting the world, and it
characterizes the way the world happens to us.”[xii] Or as Charles Taylor notes this “”pure face
off between religion and science is a chimera, or rather an ideological
construct.”[xiii]
Thus it is not merely because this or that historical detail gets distorted
(though obviously it is also this) but because it uses idealized categories of
“science” and “theology,” to paint a historical picture. Yet “science” as we categorize
it, is a recent invention of the mid 19th century. Prior to this, many disciplines we now
consider science were labeled under the umbrella “natural philosophy,” which
had immediate alliances, disagreements, and complex intersections with
varieties of Christian theologies (note the plural), each picturing the world,
say as a machine, or utilizing “design arguments” inferring God’s mechanical
genius, informed for example, biology, and was informed by it. Here the categories “theology” and “science”
as discrete moments of thought break down as transhistorical categories; and
many antagonisms, as well as alliances, were between—not theology and science,
but often between two different concepts
of science, or two different concepts of theology, or any combination
thereof.[xiv] These are not historically absolute
categories, but they become so in the
secularization thesis because they need a relatively neat narrative of dark
superstition being overcome by bright science.[xv]
Thus to understand secularization
and the meta-theological dilemma, we must absolutely heed Charles Taylor’s
words:
A crucial part of this new
conviction rests on a narrative of how we got to where we are…we can see how
these two narratives, that of courageous coming to adulthood, and that of
subtraction of illusion, belong together.
They are two sides of the same coin.
What we got rid of were the illusions, and it took courage to do this;
what is left are the genuine deliverances of science, the truth about things,
including ourselves, which was waiting all along to be discovered. Coming of age, subtraction, these are two
faces of this powerful contemporary story.[xvi]
In this way Taylor continues and
notes secularism is “a story that must
be understood in the “perfect tense,” that is, as always “in the condition of having overcome [supposed] irrationality
of belief.”[xvii]
Just so, Graham Ward is right to point out, “Sociologists have a vested
interest in maintaining the secularization thesis. The foundation of their discipline was the critique of religion at the forefront of
the Enlightenment agenda. The critique
opened up an intellectual space for investigating ‘society’ as such.”[xviii] And he continues:
The public sphere that sociology
examined was a flat field of relations without transcendent horizon. Earlier—and I am advocating no nostalgia for
this—religion in the West defined what society was. That is, society was the effect; what was needed was to understand the religious cause of
the effect. In the Enlightenment,
religion was viewed as one special institution among a number of other
specialized institutions and each institution had a function in the formation
and maintenance of society. The foundation changed; society was now
the fundament to be examined by new philosophical methods—empiricism,
positivism, naturalism, humanism. In the
light of this new foundation and its approaches to understanding, the presence
of religion was to be explained (away) by the newly minted social sciences.[xix]
We can
perhaps begin to see the emerging picture that the “meta-theological” dilemma
we encountered above is in fact not posed as a scientifically “neutral”
dilemma, but is itself based on the “naturalist” assumptions that religion (or specifically, Christianity) is purely
epiphenomenal, an effect of some
other more fundamental substrate—be it nature, society, psychology, etc…[xx] But the argument here does not hinge upon the
idea that the meta-theological dilemma is merely a naturalistic inversion of
the earlier assumption that theology lay at the base of everything. Most if not all of the “standard”
secularization theories would acknowledge this gladly and say the reversal was
a necessary one, since we can, mercifully, deal with the “pure and clear” facts
now that the “enchanted” and fanciful world of religion has, in Max Weber’s
famous term, been “disenchanted.”
Certainly there is a lot of critical bite vis-a-vis the fact that the extensive “scientific” critiques are
actually not science, but a framework of philosophical naturalism that,
whatever the validity of its subsidiary empirical observations about phenomena,
is itself not an empirical but a metaphysical hypothesis. Here though, as we
said, we will focus on a major piece of historiographical
argumentation which disputes these “received stories of secularization.” A major fulcrum of their arguments as
“counter-histories” often consists of various analyses that contest that the
so-called “remainders,” or that which is left over after “disenchantment,” are purely
“natural,” or “just there” (the purely
human, the social as such, history as such, etc…) but rather that they are themselves, variously traceable as vestigial elements constructed by the
now-abandoned, supposedly irrational era of theology.
This comes
in a variety of fun flavors. The philosopher Karl Löwith,[xxi]
and one of his students, the German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, both
argued, for example, that our “common sense” view of history as progressive and
linear is in fact first given to us by the Judeo-Christian views of history as
oriented between the now, and the eschatological horizon of God’s future, final
action. Löwith argues that the very idea
of progress and human freedom (as opposed to say, a cyclical view of the world)
was only possible within the horizon of Christian eschatology and salvation
history. And Pannenberg writes, “the
presupposition of the historical consciousness in Israel [as opposed to other
ancient religions] lie in its conception of God. The reality of God for Israel is not
exhausted by his being the origin of the world, that is, of normal ever
self-repeating processes and events.
Therefore, this God can break into the course of his creation…the
certainty that God…is a ‘living God’…forms the basis for Israel’s understanding
of reality as a linear history moving toward a goal… History is event so
suspended in tension between promise and fulfillment that through the promise
it is irreversibly pointed toward the goal of future fulfillment.”[xxii] As
such, “Theologians cannot, without prejudicing their own subject,” says
Pannenberg, “attach themselves to this or that methodological
approach…conceived for secular use. The
secular understanding and method must be subjected to scrutiny in relation to
the (usually omitted) religious dimension of the realm of phenomena under
discussion…”[xxiii]
Or take the
work of Alasdair MacIntyre, who makes similar claims regarding the notion of
morality. In his seminal work After Virtue he concludes a fascinating
survey of intellectual history by suggesting that “a new dark ages,” are upon
us.[xxiv] And these new dark ages are symptomatic of
the “disquieting suggestion,”[xxv]
with which his book opens: that we have suffered “a catastrophe…of such a kind
that it was not and has not been—except perhaps by very few—recognized as a
catastrophe.”[xxvi] This catastrophe about which MacIntyre speaks
regards moral discourse, and he
argues that even our most sophisticated and elaborate moral deliberations are
only, in fact, “simulacra of
morality,” which is to say, pale imitations of moral discourse, because our
ethical grammar is only a bricolage of fragmentary leftovers “which now lack
the contexts from which they derived.”[xxvii] In fact, from one angle we can say that After Virtue in this sense is an
extended look at what we saw earlier was Chesterton’s memorable phrase that our
current vices are in fact “Christian virtues gone mad...because they wander
alone.” Says MacIntyre:
Up to the present in everyday
discourse habits of speaking and moral judgment as true and false persists; but
the question of what it is in virtue of which a particular moral judgment is
true or false has come to lack any clear answer. That this should be so is perfectly intelligible
if the historical hypothesis which I have sketched is true: that moral
judgments are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which
have lost the context provided by these practices.[xxviii]
This is so,
argues MacIntyre, because of a certain process of secularization where even for
those who continue to believe there is “a change in the mode of belief.”[xxix] And this change in “mode” was precisely that
“in the [early modern] period morality became the name for that particular
sphere in which rules and conduct which are neither theological nor legal nor
aesthetic are allowed a cultural space of their own.”[xxx]
We forget that much like our current use of “science” the concept of the
“moral” is in fact a very recent invention; earlier cultures had no word for a
realm that was not theological, aesthetic, legal, or otherwise because what we
would call “ethics” was in fact a seamless stream embedded within wholes or
“forms of life.” As Stanley Hauerwas
puts it, indebted to MacIntyre (and John Milbank) “once, there was no
‘Christian ethics.’”[xxxi] Thus this fragmentation, the “invisible
catastrophe” that MacIntyre recounts is essentially the dialectical evolution
(or failure) of those like Hume, Kierkegaard, Kant, John Stewart Mill, and
others to shore up a relatively unchanged “received morality” of
Christian-Aristotelianism within new theoretical
bases: “In a world of secular rationality religion could no longer provide such
a shared background and foundation for moral discourse and action; and the
failure of philosophy to provide what religion could no longer furnish was an
important cause of philosophy losing its central cultural role and becoming a
marginal, narrowly academic subject.”[xxxii]
One can, I think, begin to see how this affects the “meta-theological”
dilemma. In the words of Hart:
The ethical presuppositions
intrinsic to modernity, for instance, are palliated fragments and haunting
echoes of Christian moral theology. Even
the most ardent secularists among us generally cling to notions of human
rights, economic and social justice, providence for the indigent, legal
equality or basic human dignity that pre-Christian Western culture found not so
much foolish as unintelligible. It is
simply the case that we distant children of the pagans would not be able to
believe in any of these things—they would never have occurred to us—had our
ancestors not once believed that God was love, that charity is the foundation
of all virtues, that all of us are equal in the eyes of God, that to fail to
feed the hungry or care for the suffering is to sin against Christ, that Christ
laid down his life for the least of
his brethren.[xxxiii]
Moving on, perhaps
the most notorious of recent critics of this received view is John Milbank,
whose book Theology and Social Theory is
self-described by Milbank as a sort of postmodern translation of Augustine’s
theological critique of Rome in City of
God.[xxxiv] When Milbank’s book first arrived on the scene in 1991 it dropped
like something of a bomb on the playground of sociologists, and is one of those
rare instances when a theologian actually made secular theoreticians stop what
they were doing to pay attention. Milbank
is fully aware of the various critiques that fall under what we have here
called the “meta-theological” dilemma: do non-theology, or nothing. He notes that most theologians responses to
this “situation [have] been an exercise in damage limitation; although
they admit the validity of a reductive suspicion of religion in sociological
terms, they seek to limit the scope of this suspicion by staking out a dimension
to religion or theology which must remain irreducible.”[xxxv] This “theologian of the gaps” strategy to
Milbank, “is fatal,” and is “theology’s false humility,” for “once theology
surrenders its claim to be a meta-discourse…it is bound to turn into the oracular
voice of some finite idol…”[xxxvi] In essence Milbank offers his own
“meta-theological” dilemma as a counter: do theology,
or nothing.[xxxvii]
This is an exaggeration in the
sense that Milbank is not rejecting science.
Nonetheless Milbank does want to posit his own counter meta-critique to
show the “critical non-avoidability of the theological and metaphysical” in all
discourse and practice by which he means to “cast doubt on [this reductionist]
suspicion itself.”[xxxviii] That is, Milbank does not merely want to deny
the reduction of the religious, say, to the social, but more radically: “I mean
rather a ‘foundational suspicion,’ which seeks to show that, universally,
something ‘questionable’ [cannot be] reducible to…what is unquestionable. Hence in retracing the genesis of sociology I
have opened the way, not to denying ‘reduction to the social,’ but rather to
casting doubt on the very idea of there
being something ‘social’ to which
religious behavior could be reduced.”[xxxix]
Thus, as we
saw, much like “science” and “morality” as categories
are recent inventions, so Milbank famously opens Theology and Social Theory with the line: “once, there was no
secular.”[xl] To
show this Milbank uses a method of tracing the historical genealogy of ideas,
that is “[to trace] the genesis of the main forms of secular reason [including
sociology] in such a fashion as to unearth the
arbitrary moments in the construction of their logic…to show how the
genesis of discourse is intertwined with the genesis of new practice; in
particular this allows me to demonstrate that secular social theory only applies to secular society [which
it has created], which it helps to sustain.”[xli] At
this juncture we may note Graham Ward has recently pointed out that
statistically speaking Milbank’s thesis is born out by the fact that
“ideological secularism…develops exponentially in countries where the
secularization thesis is most
adamantly insisted on. The question
arises, then, as to whether secularism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” [xlii]
“Sociology,”
continues Milbank, “is only able to explain or even illuminate religion, to the
extent that it conceals its own theological borrowings and its own quasi-religious status.”[xliii]
Hence in doing all this Milbank “wishes
to challenge both the idea that there is (or could be) a significant
sociological ‘reading’ of Christianity which theology ‘must take account of’”
because in fact “sociology,” is not a neutral science based upon simple
observation, but “I [Milbank] hope to make it apparent that ‘scientific’ social
theories are themselves theologies or
anti-theologies in disguise…in
effect, theology encounters in sociology only a theology, and indeed a church in disguise.”[xliv] This is a lot to take in. Of
course the social exists, I think we are tempted to say. But what Milbank is arguing is that “the
social” is an “imaginary” to use Charles Taylor’s term. As a theoretical unit, it does not “exist”
but is a symbol used to organize and so also explain large scale human
collectivity. It may do so with more or
less success, and within its specified domain employ, say, mathematical models
and statistics. When Milbank argues that
“religion” cannot be reduced to the “social,” this is because both are
fundamentally symbolic orders of explanation and meaning. “Religion” or “theology” cannot be reduced to the “social” because both are
operating within the same plane, so to speak.
Thus if one “explains” religion through “social” categories, this is,
not reduction but translation from one symbolic order to
another, different symbolic order, which imports distortions:
Supposing a sociologist were to say
‘a function of the eucharist is to bind together disparate elements of the
Christian community.’ The main problem
with this statement is that it seems to explain a phenomenon (the eucharist) in
terms of what it is and does, and so verges on tautology. For this reason it could equally be a theological statement. It is only regarded as more than tautology
because one mentally splits what is only one item into three: so that, rather
like a bad theologian, one thinks of the eucharist as a reified ‘something in
itself’ apart from what it does; then he refers what it does, its function, to
an ecclesial community thought of in abstraction from all the sets of
collective actions, including the eucharist, which alone give it any
reality. Thus the claim to decode an
internal ecclesiological understanding in objective sociological terms actually
imports epistemological illusions…[xlv]
Thus “the social” is not a “natural
thing” upon which the epiphenomenon of religion and theology is built, rather:
The secular as a domain had to be
instituted or imagined, both in theory and in practice…It belongs to the received
wisdom of sociology to interpret Christianity as itself an agent of
secularization, yet this thesis is totally bound up with the one-sided
negativity of the notion of desacralizing; a metaphor of the removal of the superfluous and additional to
leave a residue of the human, the natural, and the self-sufficient. For
this negative conception it is convenient that there should always have been
some perception
of
the pure remainder…[the secular] achieved a certain highly
ambiguous autonomy with regard to theology. However autonomization
was…only possible because the new science of politics both assumed and constructed for
itself a new autonomous object…the self-knowledge and
self-construction of the secular as power…This autonomous object was, first of
all, ‘natural’…natural law [describing] the sealed off totality of nature.[xlvi]
But this
still was a transformation “within” categories of various theologies of the day
that had bequeathed the concepts and thought-world. Here Milbank sounds similar to Nietzsche:
“The belief upon which our science rests remains a metaphysical belief. We seekers after knowledge today, we godless
ones and anti-metaphysicians, we too continue to take our flame from that fire
ignited by that belief that is a millennia old, that Christian belief…that God
is truth, and truth divine.”[xlvii] In this case sociology “can be maintained,
but only as historiography,” it
cannot explain based on law. For example
“against such claims one can point out that in the case of a social entity like
a medieval town, or…a medieval monastery, it often makes little sense to argue
about the relative primacy of ‘ideal’ or ‘social’ factors which can be
separated from political, economic, or religious arrangements…Thus precisely to
the degree that the society of a medieval town coincided with the Christian
ethos and was informed by it, it is impossible to give explanatory priority to
social causation over religious organization.”
Nor can we then merely say that in
the Medieval town the religious and the political (or economic, social, etc…)
were simply improperly mixed or
blended, where the spheres of religion, sociality, economics, and politics (or
more broadly the religious and the secular) have not properly defined
themselves. This “diachronic” fallacy, as
Milbank puts it “betrays and subverts history.
It takes as an a priori
principle of sociological investigation what should be the subject of genuine historical inquiry: namely, the emergence of a
secular polity, the modern imagining
of incommensurable value spheres, and the possibility of the formal regulation
of society…But this eventuality, like earlier imaginings, can only be narrated, and is not traceable to
‘fundamental’ influences.” Or even
further: “It is only after the modern
differentiation that one can talk in a more or less general way, about economic
influences on religion, or vice versa.
In the Middle Ages, political economy and sociology could not have been
discovered, “because their ontological objects were not yet present.”[xlviii]
When these “backwards ideas” are unscrambled “the whole notion of a social
explanation for religion simply disintegrates.
It is not that religion should not be reduced to social influences…It is rather that there is nothing
social to which it could be reduced to…as
these boundaries are not ahistorical absolutes..it follows a fortiori that religion never rests, not even to a degree, on a
social basis [in this technical sense].”[xlix]
[i] To my mind the best recent, most philosophically
rigorous and brilliant contribution to an analysis of “levels of description,”
and the relation of theological theory and scientific, evolutionary theory is Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why Ultra-Darwinists
and Creationists Both Get it Wrong (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing,
2010).
[ii] F. Jacob, quoted in Conor Cunningham, The Genealogy of Nihilism (London:
Routledge, 2002), 176.
[iii] For those who are interested: “apparatus” is actually
a technical Foucauldian term, in Giorgio Agamben’s words: “Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I
shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to
capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures,
behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore,
prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories,
disciplines, judicial measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in
a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy,
agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and--why
not--language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses--one in
which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself
be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to
face.” In Giorgio Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” What
is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University, 2009),
14.
[iv] Quoted in Counningham, Genealogy of Nihilism, 176. To
which Cunningham continues: “nothingness…is always within every [reductionist, non-theological] description. Biology [in this sense] cannot see the loss of life. Death is never seen, again, no one dies…Here
in the modern world nothing happens, nothing is, or is not. The ‘cancer’ in my body is a world unto
itself. My leg becomes apart from me, it
grows as it re-narrates my body, in a manner in which Kafka would be proud…our
very being is carted away…” (177). C.f. Stratford Caldecott, “Is Life a
Transcendental?” Radical Orthodoxy:
Theology, Philosophy, Politics vol.1 no.1 & 2 (August 2012): 188-200.
[v] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
(New Haven: Yale, 2009), 7.
[vii] Taylor, A
Secular Age, 1.
[viii]
Hart, Atheist
Delusions, 33-34.
[x] Ronald Numbers, “Introduction,” in Galileo Goes to Jail, 1.
[xi] George Steiner, Real
Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989), 100.
[xii] Milbank, Theology
and Social Theory, 359.
[xiii]
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 332.
[xiv] An absolutely phenomenal account of this is the
historiographic work done by John Brooke and Geoffery Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of
Science and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
[xv] A great introductory work here is Ronald Numbers, ed. Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths on
Science and Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
[xvi] Taylor, A
Secular Age, 575.
[xviii]
Graham Ward, The
Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens (Grand Rapids:
Baker Academic, 2009), 121.
[xx] Ibid., “Other associated disciplines beside sociology
experienced similar reversals of their own theological foundations. For example, in the light of humanism,
Enlightenment anthropology cannot entertain a theological perspective on being
human, nor can psychology.”
[xxi] Karl Löwith, Meaning
in History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1949).
[xxii]
Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Redemptive Event and
History,” in Basic Questions in Theology vol.I
trans. George H. Kehm (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983), 18. C.f. his
“Christianity as the Legitimacy of the Modern Age,” in The Idea of God and Human Freedom (Philadelphia: Westminster
John-Knox, 1973), 178-191.
[xxiii]
Wolfhart Pannenberg Anthropology in Theological Perspective
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985), 391.
[xxiv]
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1984), 263.
[xxxi]
Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, “Why
Christian Ethics Was Invented,” in Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, eds. The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Massachusetts:
Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 28.
[xxxii]
MacIntyre, After
Virtue, 50. On this c.f. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and
Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), esp. 149-196.
[xxxiii]
Hart, Atheist Delusions 32-33.
[xxxiv]
Milbank, Theology
and Social Theory, 380ff.
[xxxvii]
This is an exaggeration, for Milbank is not saying
all discourse is “reducible” to theology, nor is he rejecting science. Rather he is calling theology a
“meta-discourse” that situates other discourses within a “total frame of
reference.”
[xxxviii]
Milbank, Theology
and Social Theory, 102.
[xlii]
Ward, Politics
of Discipleship, 128.
[xliii]
Milbank, Theology
and Social Theory., 52.
[xlvii]
Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996) Essay III par. 26, p.127.
[xlviii]
Milbank, Theology
and Social Theory., 90-91.
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