The mythic dimension of the cultural operations of human being represent a vital location for understanding not only the processes of mythopoiesis, but also the theological dynamics of cultural change. The questions of how mythic sensibilities encounter one another and how mythic sensibilities change as a result of such encounters shed light on what we mean by culture, human ways of being, as a participation in the life and activity of God. In what follows, we will observe what is meant, specifically, by the encounter of mythic sensibilities, as distinct from the other dynamics of the flux of culture. Given Milbank’s insights into the origins of the mythos of secular modernity, we will continue to engage with his analysis of mythic difference. By a close examination of his use of mythos in Theology and Social Theory, however, it becomes clear that his agonistic understanding of difference cannot finally serve a Christian theology of mythopoiesis and understanding of difference.

This chapter begins by tracing the consequences of the subsuming in modernity of mythos under the auspices of logos, namely the reduction of God to the status of the ‘biggest’ of all beings. The consequences of this for mythopoiesis are many, but chief among them is the foreclosure of the further distancing of plainly theological (that is, mythopoieic) discourse from the realm of the reasonable. By re-examining the relationship between the natural and the supernatural, however, the chapter concludes by pointing towards a way of understanding not only the work of theologians and people of faith as pointing towards the divine, but that all of our mythopoiesis is, in some sense, a making towards God.

This concluding chapter briefly considers the puzzle of why belief in the supernatural is endemic in certain times and places but not, for the most part, in modern Western Europe. It explores a range of theoretical possibilities: salience; the theory dependence of observation; the effects of language, concepts, cultural conditioning; and what might be called cultural and scientific myths and liturgies. It then moves to a brief consideration of how the general thesis of the book relates to other ‘modernity stories’, including those of Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory, John Milbank, and Alasdair MacIntyre.

This chapter asks whether Robert Dodaro and John Milbank are correct in their claim that Augustine thought that the earthly city was necessarily a place of political vice. To this end, this chapter examines Augustine’s idea of the love of material possessions, the love of glory, and the love of domination, and finds that while he looked on these loves as always sinful, he held that they did not necessarily lead people to commit politically vicious actions, but could in fact act as a restraint on people’s actions, ensuring that people conformed their lives to the highest political and social standards.

In Chapter 4, I consider some responses to the charge that theology bases itself on a metaphysics that is onto-theological. While I do not question any potential differences between a revealed theology and a natural theology, to the extent that theology is articulated in conceptual categories, it is included in this charge. One response to this view, represented by John Milbank, strongly reaffirms a scholastic metaphysics and embraces the belief that by means of revelation, Christians can judge the world from a higher vantage point than others. In fact, according to his approach, Christians have such a high vantage point that they can have a ‘God’s-eye view’ or what is sometimes called a ‘view from nowhere’. To demonstrate a second type of response by theologians to the charge that theology can simply be dismissed as onto-theological, I examine the complex case of Marion's engagement with a number of Thomistic thinkers. While Marion does not prosecute his case with resounding success, his questions at least disturb some of the assumptions of a scholastic approach that is seen to be fundamental to Catholic theology.

This chapter reflects on the ongoing scientific revolution as a metaphysical and even theological revolution, whose unarticulated presuppositions about being, nature, knowledge and truth have governed the so-called dialogue between science and religion. The essence of this revolution is captured in the Baconian triumph of art over nature, which conceives of nature mechanistically and knowledge pragmatically in advance of scientific inquiry and has produced a scientific and technological civilization that exceeds even Bacon’s utopian imagination in the New Atlantis and offers both promise and peril for the human future. Simultaneously challenging and conceding the stunning triumph of this utopian vision, and in dialogue with John Milbank’s poetic and ‘magical’ proposal to enfold its genuine achievements within a radically creational ontology, Hanby attempts to set forth some principles for any genuine dialogue in the future and for any conception of being, nature, knowledge and truth adequate to the Christian doctrine of God and the Christian vision of creation.

There are two dominant approaches to Christian engagement with Islamic ethics, both of which hinder understanding of sharī‘a, fiqh, and their place in Islamic political discourse. One claims Islam is theocratic and necessarily in competition with Christian views of the distinction between the spiritual and earthly. This perspective depicts Islam and Christianity as locked in a clash of religions that is rooted in the core scriptural and theological identities of both communities. The second approach understands Islam to be trapped by its past, but nonetheless able to evolve, as Christianity did in the West, through adopting secularism. Islam is at its core a religion of peace, but this truth is best realized when Islam follows the lead of secular liberalism by privatizing religion. Neither approach amounts to an honest engagement with Muslims’ own differing and diverse accounts of the importance of sharī‘a and the moral world that it imagines and ritually enacts. By relegating sharī‘a to only absolutist law, Christian theological engagement with Islam forgoes opportunities for genuine dialogue, mutual learning, and constructive disagreement in political theology.

This chapter explores one of the most important recent Christian critiques of human rights. It uncovers how a group of British and North American theologians, who gathered under the title of “radical orthodoxy,” has claimed that modern human rights laws, and religious liberty in particular, have done great damage to Christianity and should be abandoned. This chapter shows how this line of argument, which has also been embraced by several progressive scholars, has complicated roots. It argues that the origins of radical orthodoxy’s claims lay in reactionary Catholic opposition to religious liberty, and in particular, in the belief that religious freedom was a Protestant conspiracy to eradicate Christianity from the public sphere. This chapter then shows how the writings of radical orthodoxy’s leading figures, John Milbank and William Cavanaugh, resurrected these confessional polemics in their attacks on religious liberty. It then concludes by reflecting on the potential meanings of this genealogy to recent critiques of religious freedom more broadly.