The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, and Culture by John Milbank (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, and Culture. By JOHN MILBANK. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. Pp. 292. $59.95 (cloth), $23.95 (paper). ISBN 0631-20335-4 (cloth), 0631-20336-2 (paper). It is the rare work in contemporary theology that generates a sense of intellectual excitement. Without intending to suggest that my own reading has a peculiar, normative status, this is the sort of experience that I think prospective readers ofJohn Milbank's book can anticipate, and for a variety of reasons. In the first place, it is a conspicuously and consistently thoughtful book; the author's keen intelligence is displayed throughout. Moreover, it is highly opinionated, a book in which Milbank is not content simply to summarize or explicate alternative perspectives. These are typically portrayed as erroneous perspectives; once submitted to critical scrutiny and exposed as problematic, they are vigorously rejected. Finally, the point of view that emerges as superior and so as preferable to these various alternatives is itself characterized by a certain "strangeness." This strangeness, as the title of the book serves to indicate, is not regarded by the author as an undesirable quality, as something to be avoided or suppressed. Echoing Hans Urs von Balthasar, Milbank argues for the necessarily strange, even "shocking" quality of the divine revelation, as it is embodied in orthodox Christian tradition and faithfully represented or (as Milbank puts it) "re-performed" by Christian theologians (1). Indeed, if the substance of this "good news," the truth of Christianity, has ceased to seem surprising to us, it is both because modernist sensibilities effectively tend to distort or obscure it and because much of contemporary theology can be judged as inauthentic. Some of the "strangeness" of Milbank's discourse, then, appears to be a designed rhetorical feature of the text, intended, at the very least, to capture the reader's attention. As the Catholic novelist Flannery O'Connor once suggested, when people are hard of hearing, one shouts. (I am not implying that Milbank shares O'Connor's stylistic predilection for hyperbole or for the grotesque. He speaks more softly, but nevertheless waves a big intellectual stick.) One factor that nourishes this sense of strangeness is the novel (but not unprecedented) interweaving in Milbank's argument of postmodern philosophical with traditional Christian theological perspectives. Here Augustine and Aquinas encounter Derrida, with a result that is frequently quite extraordinary. What is not so novel in all of this is the virtually wholesale 633 634 BOOK REVIEWS rejection of "modernity." In that regard, Milbank has plenty of company among contemporary theologians espousing a postmodern or a postliberal point of view. The book consist of twelve essays, organized as pairs into six parts. All except one of the essays have been previously published; of these, all have been significantly revised. Collectively, they represent both the extension and the elaboration of a project that Milbank initiated in an earlier work, Theology and Social Theory, a book published in 1990 and subsequently the focus of a good deal of theological conversation. The scope of this project is enormous and ambitious; the range of Milbank's erudition is comparably impressive. In a review of this sort I can only hope to capture something of the flavor of the whole, to identify several distinctive subplots of his grand narrative, and to offer a few comments in passing. In one way or another, all of these essays "take language as their subject matter" (2). The postmodern tenet that all meaning is linguistically mediated might be perceived by some theologians as a relativizing threat to the privileged status of distinctively Christian meanings. Rather than reject such a tenet, Milbank embraces it, but recasts it in distinctively theological terms. Reality is always already linguistic. Extending the interpreted insights of Berkeley, Hamann, and others, Milbank attempts to develop a "theory of human being as linguistic being which participates in the divine linguistic being." While the initial contention about meaning may have a postmodern inspiration, there is nothing postmodern about Milbank's appeal to Christian doctrine or his privileging of the Christian narrative in order to interpret this claim. On Milbank's account, the key to understanding how language works or what "meaning...