Showing posts with label milbank. Show all posts
Showing posts with label milbank. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

A Nietzschean Call to Worship?

In both Milbank's Theology and Social Theory as well as David B. Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite (though I can't find the reference right now) it is stated that "post-Nietzschean social theory suggests the practical inescapably of worship." Does anyone know who or what stream of thought is being referred to? I don't think either authors offer specific footnotes at that point.

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Friday, June 06, 2008

Things You Would Hear In A Medieval Youth Sunday School Class . . .

A month or two ago I was in our youth Sunday School class and asked us to go around and share the last time we experienced God. This question was perhaps not formed in the most helpful way. Nearly all of us who shared including myself referred to a time when we felt in some way threatened and that the comforting presence of God became apparent to us. This morning as I continued to slowly peck through the new edition of Milbank's Theology and Social Theory I came across his critique of the anthropological claims of religion as that which deals with the lacunae or gaps of life. He writes specifically how experiences of the sacred created appropriate life transitions when ambiguity or confusion arises, how sacrifice restores people to an ordered state when chaos or broken relationships occur, and how theodicy (hmmm theodicy does not show up on my online spell checker) functions to understand suffering and tragedy. Milbank argues that these views marginalize theology as a minor component of social reality and that pre-modern consciousness would have had a much more integrated understanding of God's presence.
All this to say that we offered very modern answers (or that I asked a very modern question) in Sunday School. I wonder what the pre-modern answers would have been?
Why I experience God in the wholeness of my body and the meaning of the words on my lips.
Any other ways a medieval youth Sunday School class would respond?

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