Here’s a short piece I wrote for The Christian Lawyer magazine. This issue will include introductions to various theologians by Christian law professors.
John Milbank for Christian Lawyers
The role of positive law in a pluralistic democracy presents a significant theological problem for anyone who takes Christian theology seriously. That this is so might not seem immediately evident to many Christian lawyers in America.
If you are reading The Christian Lawyer, there is a more than fair chance that you have been influenced by the American culture wars. Whether you consider yourself “progressive,” “conservative,” or something in between, if your conception of positive law has been shaped by the culture wars, you probably think the task of the “Christian lawyer” in the public square is to explain in neutral terms, accessible to everyone, why certain legal rules or policies comport with intrinsic, self-evident, common-sense notions of what is good for society.
Theologically, this approach is tied to views of “natural law” or “common grace” that assume most people in most times and places basically know what is really good and bad. The longstanding theological problem of the relation between nature and grace is essentially passed over by assuming that the inherent imago Dei, or grace, or some vague combination of both, provides common ground for public reason.
Curiously, for many culture warriors, nature and/or grace usually seem to deliver reasons that look much like the platforms of one or the other of the major political parties. If you have a sneaking suspicion that this is too optimistic, too easy, too closely wedded to the preoccupations of American power politics and the selfish logic of the market, too attached to modern notions of “neutral” human reason divorced from the historic commitments of Christian faith, you might want to explore the work of John Milbank.
In his influential and difficult book Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Blackwell, 2d ed., 2006), Milbank seeks to re-infuse Christian theology with the priority of metaphysics and ontology. He excavates the Christian philosophical tradition in an effort to recover the pre-modern idea that Christian theology is a scientia that comprises the true explanation of what reality really is like. At times, Milbank sounds like the contemporary neo-Thomists and neo-Calvinists who tend to dominate the law and religion discourse in America. He notes, for example, that “more importance must be given to propositions, and so to ontology,” than is permitted by the post-liberal cultural-linguistic theory of doctrine that in recent years has provided the most clear path between fundamentalism and liberalism (TST, at p. 384).
But Milbank takes seriously the postmodern critique of foundationalism. He mercilessly deconstructs all social theories, whether secular or presumptively Christian, based on any supposed foundation other than the reality narrated in the Christian story and incarnated in the Christian community. Any account of reality in which there is any such thing as “secular reason,” for Milbank, represents pagan or atheistic philosophy. Christian theology need not “answer” to secular reason. Rather, the reality of the Christian God revealed in Jesus Christ is the only ground for any sort of account of “reason.”
Many readers will disagree with some of the implications for political theology that Milbank draws from this return to ontology, not least his version of “Christian socialism.” Yet some of those same readers might be surprised to note the affinities between Milbank and, say, Abraham Kuyper’s sphere sovereignty as developed by his student Herman Dooyeweerd. In any event, anyone who makes the effort to read through Theology and Social Theory will be rewarded with a renewed commitment to the priority of a thoroughly theological account of the good in relation to any truly “Christian” theory of positive law.