John Milbank



Alasdair John Milbank (born 23 October 1952) is an English Christian theologian and the Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Nottingham, where he also directs the Centre of Theology and Philosophy.

The Word Made Strange (1997)

 * Perhaps the most surprise, the most shock, should arise when what is said is really most orthodox and ancient, since the tradition is so rarely re-performed in practice today.


 * I seek, after George Berkeley, especially, to elaborate a notion of the real itself as linguistic, and as divine language, and, after Robert Lowth and Johann Georg Hamann, to develop a theory of human being as linguistic being which participates in the divine linguistic being.


 * In focusing in this section on Lowth and Berkeley, I am also deliberately trying to disinter a spirit within British tradition which runs counter to the myth of British identity to which it has nonetheless surrendered: that it is empiricist, philistine and basely pragmatic.