When I Reach for a Gun

When someone uses “faith traditions”:

John Milbank and Adrian Pabst (The Politics of Virtue, 269) argue that secular critiques of liberalism cannot hit home because “they are incapable of making the key argument that various different faith traditions are able to make—that nature is neither external to humanity, nor should humans ever aspire simply to dominate their own or external nature.”

Well, if you ask me, a faith that goes by “faith tradition” has already inhaled a good degree of liberal secularism. But oh how warm and fuzzy if feels to unite with Hindus, Muslims, and Jews in criticizing modernity.

Peter Leithart adds:

This is crucial. To deconstruct X as socially constructed, one has to be able to distinguish culture cleanly from nature. If that distinction is messy, then there’s no space for the easy deconstructive critique.

But isn’t faith tradition “socially constructed”? And isn’t it a tad messy to disaggregate Christians from Hindus so that once both sides unite to overturn liberal secularism, they can turn on each other? Messy indeed.

So is looking to Milbank as someone who will have your back when you’re teaching the Westminster Confession (and the Divines were English even).

One thought on “When I Reach for a Gun

  1. David Van Drunen—“Scripture is not the appropriate moral standard for the civil kingdom…. The Old Testament Scriptures were not given to the world at large but to the people of Israel. . . . Neither were the New Testament Scriptures given to the world at large but to the church, the new covenant people. Thus, there is a covenant reality — a redemptive reality — that grounds the moral instruction of Scripture. Biblical moral instructions are given to those who are redeemed and are given as a consequence of their redemption. The Ten Commandments, for example, provide not an abstract set of principles but define the life of God’s redeemed covenant people. (LGTK, pp. 38, 39)

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