¹ This presentation was originally given at the Nov. 2003, Annual Meeting of the AAR, at Atlanta, GA, USA, and was responded to in the same session in person by John Milbank and Kathryn Tanner. I have lightly edited this published version of my part of the session, preserving as much as possible the tone of the original exchange. The opening section is intended as an accessible account, for a general audience, of a highly complicated debate about ‘gift’ which stretches back several decades now: I have here risked oversimplification for the sake of clarity. Further details of this ongoing debate may be pursued in the secondary literature cited below, and especially also in Schrift, Allan D. (ed.), The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity (New York: Routledge, 1997)Google Scholar; Caputo, John D. and Scanlon, Michael J. (eds), God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1999)Google Scholar; and Horner, Robyn, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology (New York: Fordham UP, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Milbank, John, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London, Routledge: 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 10: ‘Culture: The Gospel of Affinity’, pp. 187–211.

³ Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar. The 1st edn of the monograph appeared originally in French in 1924, as Essai sur le Don, Forme et Raison de l'Echange dans les Sociétés archaïques (L'année sociologique, 1923–4; subsequently Paris: Alcan, 1925).

⁴ See Derrida, Jacques, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992)Google Scholar and The Gift of Death (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995).

⁵ Heidegger's elusive remarks about an es gibt, a fundamental ‘givenness’ that lies even beyond ‘Being’ (see his On Time and Being (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 6) hover in the background of the discussion taken up by Derrida here.

⁶ Marion's work is animated less by response to Mauss (or even primarily by response to Derrida) than by an interest in Husserlian phenomenology and its possibilities for a theological renaissance. Relevant writings of Marion on ‘gift’, Husserlian ‘givenness’ and Heidegger's es gibt, which show the development of his thoughts on these matters, are: God Without Being (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991); Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1998); ‘The Saturated Phenomenon’, in Dominique Jaricaud et al. (eds), Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate (New York: Fordham UP, 2000), pp. 176–216; ‘Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Gift’, in Merold Westphal (ed.), Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1999), pp. 122–43; Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002). I am grateful to Tamsin Jones Farmer, Harvard Th.D. student in theology, for discussions on the development of Marion's thought.

⁷ Milbank, John, ‘Can a Gift be Given?’, Modern Theology 11 (1995), pp. 119–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also his ‘The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice’, First Things 91 (1999), pp. 33–8.

⁸ See ‘Can a Gift be Given?’, pp. 133–44.

⁹ See Milbank, Being Reconciled, p. ix, for the idea of ‘gift’ as ‘a kind of transcendental category’; and ibid., ch. 9: ‘Politics: Socialism by Grace’, pp. 162–86, for Milbank's distinctive concept of Christian ‘socialism’.

¹⁰ Kathryn, Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Tanner, Kathryn, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

¹² I say a ‘selective’ reading of Calvin, because a closer reading of his corpus reveals a complex relation of divine providential ordering and human participatory response – which renders the idea of divine ‘unilateralism’ somewhat questionable. On this theme see Billings, J. Todd, Calvin, Participation and the Gift (Oxford: OUP, 2007), esp. chs 1, 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Kathryn Tanner, ‘What does Grace have to Do with Money?’, Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Spring 2002), p. 9a; see now her Economy of Grace, p. 25.

¹⁴ Russell, Norman, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: OUP, 2004)Google Scholar provides an invaluable starting point in analysing a variety of options in the early Christian tradition for this crucial notion of ‘participation’ (which is of course by no means restricted to the ‘Greek’ tradition).

¹⁵ See Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, pp. 2–5, 9, 91–2.

¹⁶ See e.g. Mauss, The Gift, pp. 8–20.

¹⁷ See Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’; and Luce Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, in Schrift (ed.), Logic of the Gift, pp. 148–73, 174–89.

¹⁸ This connection is, as far as I know, never made explicit by Derrida but may be readily intuited from such passages as Derrida, Jacques, Spurs Nietzsche's Styles (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1979), pp. 56–9Google Scholar, 63, cf. pp. 108–9, read in relation to Derrida, Given Time: 1, pp. 4–5 (the discussion of Mme de Maintenon's ‘feminine’ desire). I am grateful to Mary Anderson, Harvard Ph.D. student in religion, for discussion and insights on this point.

¹⁹ Milbank, John, ‘The Second Difference’, in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), ch. 7, pp. 171–93Google Scholar, at p. 190, n. 3 (my emphasis).

²⁰ Ibid. (my emphasis).

²¹ Milbank, Being Reconciled, p. 207.

²² Ibid., p. ix.

²³ Ibid., p. x.

²⁴ One might then ask whether the Maussian system has been sublated, after all.

²⁵ See Being Reconciled, p. x.

²⁶ The crucial relevant section is De Trin. 15.27–37; trans. Stephen, McKenna, C.SS.R, Saint Augustine: The Trinity (The Fathers of the Church, 45) (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963), pp. 491–504Google Scholar. The specificity of the Spirit for Augustine as love and gift is not only founded in scripture (in particular, in Rom. 5:5), but is intimately bound up with Augustine's understanding of the Spirit's ‘procession’ from both Father and Son: ‘it is not without reason that in this Trinity only the Son is called the Word of God, and that only the Holy Spirit is the Gift of God, and that only He, of whom the Son was begotten, and from whom the Holy Spirit principally proceeds, is God the Father . . . . [The Father} so begot [the Son], therefore, that the common Gift should also proceed from Him, and that the Holy Spirit should be the Spirit of both’ (De Trin. 15.27, p. 493).

²⁷ See again Milbank, Being Reconciled, p. x, my emphasis.

²⁸ I am admittedly going beyond what Augustine explicitly argues here in De Trin. 15, in connecting what he says about the specificity of the Spirit as donum to questions of gender; but he does elsewhere in the De Trin. consciously consider, and reject, the idea of making the Trinity the prototype of the nuclear family: De Trin. 12: 5–8 (Fathers of the Church trans., pp. 346–51).

²⁹ See Milbank, Being Reconciled, pp. 207–8 (my emphasis).

³⁰ Tanner, Economy of Grace, p. 77: ‘Nothing is transferred, as if these gifts involved the moving of material goods from one site to another. and therefore one can retain full possession of one's own property in giving to others’.

³¹ See Kathryn Tanner, ‘Incarnation, Cross and Sacrifice Revisited: A Feminist-Inspired Reappraisal’, Anglican Theological Review 86 (2004), pp. 35–56, for an earlier account of Tanner's resistance to the themes of sacrifice and punishment in her account of Christian soteriology.

³² Tanner, Economy of Grace, p. 84.

³³ See Mark 10:21; 12:44. (It is striking that Tanner explicitly disavows the idea of ‘giving out of poverty’: Economy of Grace, p. 84: ‘we are to give to others not out of our poverty but out of our own fullness’). A comparison with Paul's discussion of alms-giving in 2 Cor. 8 may be instructive here. At best, Tanner's position seems to approach Paul's compromise, second-best, option for the more recalcitrant Corinthians (see 2 Cor. 8:10–15), who are only willing to even up to some extent the difference between the haves and the have-nots; whereas it is clear that the more exalted option for Paul is a truly sacrificial one (cf. 2 Cor. 8:1–7).

³⁴ The sermonic teaching of the Cappadocian Fathers on donation to the poor (and esp. on the lessons of Matt. 25:31–46) is insightfully expounded in Brian E. Daley, SJ, ‘1998 NAPS Presidential Address – Building a New City: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Philanthropy’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 7 (1999), pp. 431–61; and in more detail in Holman, Susan R., The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia (New York: OUP, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁵ I take this argument somewhat further in ‘On the Identity of the Risen Jesus: Finding Jesus Christ in the Poor’, in Richard Hays and Beverly Gaventa (eds), The Identity of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, forthcoming, 2008); and in a more detailed discussion of ‘Gift’ in my 2005 Hensley Henson Lectures, to be published as The Broken Body: Israel, Christ and Fragmentation (Oxford: Blackwell, in preparation).

³⁶ God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge: CUP, 2009).

³⁷ The question in what sense gender can be ‘grounded’ in God is a complex one, which Milbank does not explicate in detail. It seems to me that we confront an irreducible paradox here: on the one hand there is clearly not gender in God, since God qua God has no body; but on the other hand, if the authority of revelation is accepted, there are two ways in which we seemingly have to speak (in some sense) of gender in relation to God: (i) on account of the inner-trinitarian ‘Fatherhood’ being analogously, though mysteriously, related to human fatherhood (I follow Aquinas here in distinguishing carefully between ‘Fatherhood’ as applied to God analogously when trinitarian, on the one hand, and metaphorically of the generic divine, on the other); and (ii) on account of the incarnation of the Second Person in a male human body. In the latter case, it is by no means obvious that this results in ‘masculinity’ in God. For we would then have to discuss the implications for gender-in-God of different construals of the communicatio idiomatum (and only if it were two-way would human maleness affect the divinity); we would also need to debate the relationship of Jesus's earthly, human body to his risen human body, since the tradition has tended to avoid dogmatism about the maleness of the risen Christ given the importance of the soteriological principle: ‘The unassumed is the unhealed’.

³⁸ See again Being Reconciled, p. x.