Appeal and Attitude: Prospects for Ultimate Meaning Book

The first thing to say about this book is that it is a heavy, amazing, profound and deep piece of theological engagement with philosophy, sociology and cultural ideas. The second thing to say is, it is an incredibly challenging read. I put this up there with David Bentley Hart's Beauty of the Infinite as books which stretched me more than any other. Milbank demonstrates a familiarity with Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Durkheim, Marx, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Delueze, Foucault and much more. The audience for this work is other professional theologians, of which I am not. There were times as I read where I thought I should give up and find something easier.

It reminds me of the first time I read The Silmarillion, Tolkien's history of Middle Earth from creation to the Third Age. Anyone who enjoys The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings ought to also read The Silmarillion. That said, its much different. Its like the Old Testament of Middle Earth. It is filled with names upon names upon names. I was lost. Then the second time I read it, I decided not to try to keep up with all the names. Instead, I wanted to get the plot and the themes. By the third time through, it became my favorite Tolkien book.

Now, there is about a .0001% chance I ever read Theology and Social Theory again. But I thought of my experience with The Silmarillion as I read. There may be some readers who are familiar with the nuances of Durkheim and Weber or Nietzsche and his interpreters. I imagine those readers would find Milbank's work even richer (and perhaps they'd be able to critique it too). The rest of us can settle into the fact we will never have that depth of understanding, yet if we focus on the themes of the book, there is much that we can learn.

Milbank demonstrates that the secular is not a neutral ground (and he echoes and cites Charles Taylor, someone I have read*). The problem recent theology has run into is that it tries to present theology in terms inherited from other fields. Thus, social theory is the ultimate arbiter. Milbank calls on theologians to not take this path. The reality is that these social theories themselves are not given or proven but are up for debate as to whether they can deliver what they promise. Further, historically they grow out of forms of Christian thought and to this day they remain similar as far as it takes a level of faith to accept them. In other words, there is no proof that tells us naturallly found truths are all there is. This is a philosophical statement and thus up for debate.

Now, somewhere a Christian apologist is drooling. Being familiar with Christian apologetics, it would be tempting to enlist Milbank in the crusade to defend the faith. Certainly there is some overlap, perhaps some apologists have even learned from Milbank. To the overconfident materialist or naturalist, pointing out that, against his insistence, some truths cannot be found in science alone, is worthwhile. We all do begin with assumptions and presuppositions. Yet, Milbank is not an apologist. The biggest difference is that many Christian apologists seek to meet their secular interlocutors on neutral ground and prove faith is reasonable (the evidence demands a verdict, after all). I imagine Milbank would say that they are still making something else the ultimate: this supposed neutral territory where we can reasonably weigh our ideas. One of Milbank's points is that no such territory exists.

Throughout, Milbank is critiquing secular social theories. In the end, Milbank's call is for Christians to tell an alternate story. The only coherent secular story ends up being nihilism, which Milbank seems to say (again, he's writing some heavy stuff and maybe I misunderstood) really only Nietzsche consistently put forth as many of Nietzsche's interpreters try to add things on that do not really work. At the root of the nihilist story is violence, the world rests in violence. I think the idea is that difference leads to conflict and violence. How do we exist in difference without violence. Well, we don't. There is no greater reality than that the powerful survive and the weaker do not. The option here is difference, violence and power.

Conversely, the Christian story deals with difference in a totally different way. The root of Being is God as Trinity. So there is difference seen in Father, Son and Spirit. Yet this difference is not inherently violent but is held up by love and peace. Evil, Milbank argues, though in line with the best of the Christian tradition, is not even a real positive thing. It is a negative, not adding anything new but merely corrupting what is already good. Evil, and violence, are overcome in the Christian story of ultimate Being creating a world filled with love and peace.

Honestly, the last chapter is worth the price of the book. I may go back and read that three or four times.

As a take-away on a very practical level: I work in campus ministry and there are all sorts of ideas floating around. Debates are sometimes enjoyable but rarely does anyone change their mind. Yet most people do not deal with the logical implications of their views. Telling the Christian story includes critiquing the other stories. Not critiquing from that non-existence neutral place, but just asking people if how they act really lines up with what they really believe. Can their passions and desires and hopes and dreams truly rest on how they view the world working? On the flip side, we are called to tell a better and more compelling story that invites people into a way of life geared towards love and peace. Through that, we discover this is not just a way of life but ends up being the way most in line with how we were created to live in the first place.

*As a sidenote, it is awesome when Milbank cited authors I was more familiar with. He mentions Taylor a bit, and also Rene Girard as well as Alasdair MacIntyre. All four of those writers have written some of my favorite books of all time, books that stretched and challenged me. It is cool to get a glimpse of the academic world where there is not just awe in their brilliance (which is how I read them) but critiques of their ideas (which I don't fully get as its all a bit too nuanced). It also makes me wonder who the popularizer of someone like Milbank is? After all, James KA Smith wrote a book summarizing Charles Taylor (as have some others) and I've read a few books on the thought of Girard. I suppose the place to go would be other books on Radical Orthodoxy?

There's always more books...sigh...