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Saving Time: Thoughts on Practice, Patience and Vision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

+ Rowan Williams
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Extract

Theology and Social Theory is a book that prompts conversation on almost every page - conversation of both the ‘yes, and..and the ‘yes, but . kind, as well as something like a ‘no, but. . .’ on occasion. An adequate review would have to be a kind of gloss, a talmudic margin. It is no small tribute to Milbank that this work is so hard to discuss briefly. What follows is not a review, but a few fragments of this reader’s side of the conversation, assembled round a focal area of unease within an overall admiration for the learning and boldness of the enterprise. My title will hint at something of my discomfort: is Milbank’s commitment to history and narrative, to time as the medium of benign creativity and non-competitive difference, fully realised in his exposition? Does he ‘save time’ in a theological sense or only in the colloquial one of getting more expeditiously to his goal than the circumstances might seem to warrant?

The project of reconstructing a Christian ontology by retelling the story of the Christian Church’s origins, so as to display it as the history that makes sense of all histories, is heralded as one of the indispensable moments in the rehabilitation of a properly theological critique of secular order (e.g. p.381). ‘The metanarrative. . . is the genesis of the Church’ (p.387). This is an intriguing and exhilarating prospect; I am not sure if it has been carried through. Christian universalism is opposed to the ‘orders’ of non-Christian antiquity—the Roman sacralisation of dominion, with its programmatic refusal of a properly common good, and the Jewish commitment to law as the defining structure of a common good, at least for one specific community.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 73 , Issue 861 , June 1992 , pp. 319 - 326
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 ‘The End of Dialogue’, in d'Costa, G., ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, New York 1990, pp.174–191Google Scholar.

2 Practically all of these issues are addressed expertly in Crossan, J.D., The Historical Jesus. The Lift of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, Edinburgh 1991Google Scholar; see especially pp.422 ff. on the parallelism of Christianity and Mishnaic Judaism.

3 For some reflections on this, see Williams, R., ‘Does it make sense to speak of pre‐Nicene orthodoxy?’ in Williams, R.. ed., The Making of Orthodoxy. Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, Cambridge 1989, pp.1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 It seems fairly clear from the relevant section in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (ed. Hodgson, P., Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1985, vol.III, pp. 124 ff.)Google Scholar that the overthrowing of the constructions of meaning typical of Roman society and religion requires precisely the trauma of God's manifestation in the body of an individual maximally devoid of sacrality and significance within the Roman system ‐ thus in the corpse of a man suffering a slave's death at the hands of imperial authority as well as at the instigation of his own traditional religious authorities.

5 Derrida, J., D'un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie, Pans 1983Google Scholar; ET in Semeia. An Experimental Journal for Biblical Criticism 23 (1982). pp. 62–97. from the text as given at a conference in 1980.

6 See especially some articles published in Libres Props, May and August 1929; some very good discussion of the issue in Peter Winch's book, Simone Weil. “The Just Balance”, Cambridge 1989, chs.5–9, 11, and c.f. the present writer's review article on Winch's book, Philosophical Investigations 14.2 (1991), pp.155–171, especially 158ff.

7 Faces of Jesus. Latin American Christologies, ed. J.M. Bonina, Maryknoll, NY, 1984 (the Spanish original appeared in 1977).

8 ‘“Between purgation and illumination”: a critique of the theology of right’, in Surin, K., ed. Christ, Ethics and Tragedy. Essays in Honour of Donald MacKinnon, Cambridge 1989, pp.161–196CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 183–192.