The Social Science Library » Should Divinity Overcome Metaphysics? Reflections on John Milbank’s Theology beyond Secular Reason and Confessions of a Cambridge Platonist

Should Divinity Overcome Metaphysics? Reflections on John Milbank’s Theology beyond Secular Reason and Confessions of a Cambridge Platonist

Author(s)	Betz, Hans Dieter; Elshtain, Jean Bethke; Tanner, Kathryn
Abstract	John Milbank’s work clearly constitutes a major influence in modern English-speaking theology. He has produced an exhilarating overarching theory about the nature of the subject in relation to modern society and culture. Thinkers of the stature of Charles Taylor and Nicholas Lash have praised the energy and ambition of Milbank’s project of attacking the superficiality and complacency of much secular “critique” of religious institutions and beliefs. In this article, I wish to explain why, notwithstanding the breadth, imagination, and energy of Milbank’s critique of “secular reason,” this spirited attack on reason is merely rhetorical. Philistines. “Deconstructing” and “subverting” “secular reason” may be ingenious as negative apologetics, whereby the entire legacy of the Enlightenment critique of Christianity can be unmasked as itself theological polemic. But this fideism leaves theology itself in an alarmingly precarious state: attacking rationality may fend off the cultured despisers of religion, but it also removes one of the important sources of religious belief, reason as the “candle of the Lord.”
IssueNo	2
Pages	271-298
Article	Access to Article
Source	Journal of Religion
VolumeNo	80
PubDate	2000
ISBN_ISSN	00224189
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Should Divinity Overcome Metaphysics? Reflections on John Milbank’s Theology beyond Secular Reason and Confessions of a Cambridge Platonist