John Milbank

What happened? What's with the attitude shift? How did we get here in all these years?

Yeah, the theologian who's, I think, said it the most pithily is John Milbank of Once There Was No Secular.

And so a lot of our divisions of the world between the secular and the spiritual, the medicinal and the miracle are much more contemporary concepts coming out of a modern enlightenment.

And so the story that I tell actually tracks some of what we could call this story of disenchantment.

And I ended up winning a Commonwealth scholarship to the University of Cambridge and And I ended up in the Divinity School there.

And Professor John Milbank, the great Anglican leader of the Radical Orthodoxy Circle, he was my supervisor.

And he and others in that circle really looked after me.

You know, I was really fortunate to have their support when I was in Cambridge.

about.

Sure.

When I first went to Cambridge, my supervisor, his first words to me, this wasn't John Milbank, this was somebody else, but he said, so you're a Catholic.

Do you follow Rana or Balthazar? You know, that was the very first question I was asked.

Reflecting divine justice, the human justice of right relationship combines what is due and what is more than due.

It includes obligations that fulfill rights so prominent in modern political thought and in law around the world and differs from the skepticism of rights voiced by Christian intellectuals including Oliver O'Donovan, Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, John Milbank, Alistair McIntyre, Ernest Fortin, Nigel Biggar, Richard Hayes, and Stanley Hauerwatz, who look upon rights as possessive, individualistic, and vehicles of self-assertion.

Rights find sound defense, though, as protections of human dignity.

Rights are found explicitly in the Bible, for instance, the rights of the poor in Proverbs, They are found more extensively in the natural law, which the reasoning mind can apprehend, and which the Catholic and certain Protestant traditions find in the Ten Commandments and their corollaries.

As I understand it, you could It's not just a Catholic understanding.

Somebody like John Milbank seems to be promoting something on that order.

Milbank is more positive on the prospect of human liberty, to his credit.

Milbank has his nostalgias, but he is less willing to throw personal liberty under the bus.

The thing that seems to mark this, at least for me, And that is that the willing use of coercion and violence or the relinquishing of the sword and to say, well, no, that we don't, as Christians, we're not in the business of determining the outcomes of history or even the survival of the state.

In fact, that's not our primary concern.

And so, uh, consequently, uh, You end up in a situation where, on the one hand, the task of Christian proclamation is liberated because I no longer have to deform the way that I proclaim the gospel.

in order to make it credible to some kind of set of extrinsic standards.