The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture.

Cunningham, David S.

THE WORD MADE STRANGE: THEOLOGY, LANGUAGE, CULTURE. By John Milbank. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997. Pp. ix + 298. $62.96; $28.95.

The importance of this collection is due not only to Milbank's theological acumen, but also to the contemporary theological movement he represents. This movement, sometimes dubbed "Radical Orthodoxy," finds recent Christian theology guilty of a long-standing slavish devotion to modernity, and names such collaboration as puerile and even idolatrous. The seeds were sown in M.'s encyclopedic Theology and Social Theory, which examined the theological and atheological claims hidden at the heart of various modernist metanarratives (whether sociological, dialectical, or nihilistic) and proposed a "postmodern critical Augustinianism" as the most truthfully Christian response to Enlightenment rationalism and romanticism.

Many of the essays in this new collection explore the larger implications of two fundamental Christian claims: (1) that the world is created ex nihilo, rather than through the violent overcoming of some primeval chaos; and (2) that there is no positive evil, only the privatio boni that results from human sinfulness. These claims, often considered mere theological hairsplitting, take on enormous significance insofar as they preclude any ontology rooted in violence and conflict. Instead, they remind us that God's relationship toward the world is characterized by peaceable, superabundant donation--with important implications for Christology, pneumatology, and ethics.

Three examples. "The Linguistic Turn as a Theological Turn" is a reworking of an important two-part article entitled "Theology without Substance" in which M. offered some early ruminations on Christianity as an overcoming of (rather than a capitulation to) a metaphysics of substance. The essay displays a mastery of Christian authors writing both "in" and "over against" the Enlightenment--Vico, Hamann, Herder--as well as an impressive rehabilitation of Berkeley and an explication of the medieval sources upon which many of these writers drew. This revised version goes beyond the original article by suggesting that Christian authors had already completed the "linguistic turn" well before the idea entered the heads of certain 20th-century philosophes, who only thought they were avant garde.

"The Second Difference," originally a 1986 article bearing the subtitle "For a Trinitarianism without Reserve," offers a capsule theology of the Holy Spirit, and in so doing clarifies many of the issues underlying the focus on "relation" in contemporary trinitarian theology. M. understands the relation of the Spirit through the category of difference: she is properly a "second difference" that prevents the "very perfection of relation between Father and Son" from "obliterating the usual significance of personal relatedness" (188). This is contrasted with the "transcendentalist" approach of Walter Kasper and the "Hegelian" solution of Moltmann, Pannenberg, and Jungel. Along the way, readers will find a good defense of Augustine against facile modernist charges of "psychologism" and an appropriately reserved appreciation for the Cappadocian contribution.

Finally, "On Complex Space" is a brilliant political analysis of the theology underlying recent Roman Catholic social teaching in general and the encyclical Centesimus annus in particular. M.'s originality lies in setting this tradition against a new foil: not liberation theology's "priority of praxis" model, but rather the medieval appreciation for "complex space." M. uses this term as a Bakhtinian chronotope which contrasts mightily with its modern political alternative--that of "enlightenment." The latter would represent the past as a time of illusion and confusion, which can only be extirpated by establishing "the political" as a simple, unmediated space between individuals and the sovereign. By contrast, "gothic" space was aware of networks and overlapping jurisdictions, of mediations and dispersements, well embodied by the "fragmentary and therefore always-already `ruined' character of the gothic structure" (276). This contrast is employed to analyze the emergence of the secular, the modern distrust of indeterminacy, and the craving for monolithic unity. M. endorses the Catholic advocacy of a complex, gothic space, but fears that it is too often alloyed with modernist absolutism in ways that can easily lead to fascism.

The book contains nine other essays of similar caliber, some of which invite attention through their allusive titles alone: "A Critique of the Theology of Right"; "Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics"; "The Poverty of Niebuhrianism." Vast learning stands behind all twelve essays, and the implications of M.'s project are profound: if he is right, much of what is being done today under the guise of "theology" is destined for the scrap-heap that Feuerbach prepared for it. In contrast, "Radical Orthodoxy" proposes Christianity as a metanarrative of nonmastery, repudiating a self-enclosed fideism yet also denouncing the peculiarly modern form of theological abdication which hands over the criteria of judgment to atheological enterprises. Contemporary theologians would do well to heed M.'s claim that "there is no independently available `real world' against which we must test our Christian convictions, because these convictions are the most final, and at the same time the most basic, seeing of what the world is" (250).