{"id":2000,"date":"2011-04-12T11:43:29","date_gmt":"2011-04-12T18:43:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=2000"},"modified":"2011-04-12T11:43:29","modified_gmt":"2011-04-12T18:43:29","slug":"milbank-for-christian-lawyers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2011\/04\/12\/milbank-for-christian-lawyers\/","title":{"rendered":"Milbank for Christian Lawyers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a short piece I wrote for The Christian Lawyer<\/a> magazine.\u00a0 This issue will include introductions to various theologians by Christian law professors.<\/p>\n

John Milbank for Christian Lawyers<\/h3>\n

The role of positive law in a pluralistic democracy presents a significant theological problem for anyone who takes Christian theology seriously.\u00a0 That this is so might not seem immediately evident to many Christian lawyers in America.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If you are reading The Christian Lawyer,<\/em> there is a more than fair chance that you have been influenced by the American culture wars.\u00a0 Whether you consider yourself \u201cprogressive,\u201d \u201cconservative,\u201d or something in between, if your conception of positive law has been shaped by the culture wars, you probably think the task of the \u201cChristian lawyer\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Theologically, this approach is tied to views of \u201cnatural law\u201d or \u201ccommon grace\u201d that assume most people in most times and places basically know what is really good and bad.\u00a0 The longstanding theological problem of the relation between nature and grace is essentially passed over by assuming that the inherent imago Dei<\/em>, or grace, or some vague combination of both, provides common ground for public reason.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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 \u201cneutral\u201d human reason divorced from the historic commitments of Christian faith, you might want to explore the work of John Milbank.<\/p>\n

In his influential and difficult book Theology and Social Theory:\u00a0 Beyond Secular Reason<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(Blackwell, 2d ed., 2006), Milbank seeks to re-infuse Christian theology with the priority of metaphysics and ontology.\u00a0 He excavates the Christian philosophical tradition in an effort to recover the pre-modern idea that Christian theology is a scientia<\/em> that comprises the true explanation of what reality really is like.\u00a0 At times, Milbank sounds like the contemporary neo-Thomists and neo-Calvinists who tend to dominate the law and religion discourse in America.\u00a0 He notes, for example, that \u201cmore importance must be given to propositions, and so to ontology,\u201d 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).<\/p>\n

But Milbank takes seriously the postmodern critique of foundationalism.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Any account of reality in which there is any such thing as \u201csecular reason,\u201d for Milbank, represents pagan or atheistic philosophy.\u00a0 Christian theology need not \u201canswer\u201d to secular reason.\u00a0 Rather, the reality of the Christian God revealed in Jesus Christ is the only<\/em> ground for any sort of account of \u201creason.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cChristian socialism.\u201d\u00a0 Yet some of those same readers might be surprised to note the affinities between Milbank and, say, Abraham Kuyper\u2019s sphere sovereignty as developed by his student Herman Dooyeweerd.\u00a0 In any event, anyone who makes the effort to read through Theology and Social Theory<\/em> will be rewarded with a renewed commitment to the priority of a thoroughly theological <\/em>account of the good in relation to any truly \u201cChristian\u201d theory of positive law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s a short piece I wrote for The Christian Lawyer magazine.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That this is so might not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law-and-policy","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-wg","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}