Of course, the title is true -- Milbank grew up in the Church of the Nazarene, as I did. Milbank became a high church Anglican, a return to the site of John Wesley; I have remained within this offspring of Wesley's Methodists. Despite obvious differences of intellect, reading, and institutional matrix between myself and Prof. Milbank, I can find much of my life in what he affirms and that against which he reacts. I am intrigued by the formative roles of particular traditions that can re-emerge in other manifestations in radically different persons and contexts.

I've also been following the fortunes of my book, Telling God's Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation, on the "free market" of Amazon.com (it has regular moved from 30,000 to 360,000 on the Amazon.com "best seller" list -- now around 340,000th, I believe) and comments on the web (not much recently -- I hope to share some emails and web reviews in the near future). As a matter of fact, if someone would want to write a review of the book for Amazon.com, I'd greatly appreciate it!

As I was reading Milbank's preface, I was reminded how Milbank's criticism of 'the social' helped me develop a crucial part of my thesis on that oxymoron "American Christianity" that forms the backdrop of my chapter 2 and much of my other work in Second Temple Judaism by "de-naturalizing" the "church-sect" cycle found in the United State as already a manifestation of liberal (mal)formations produced by liberal democratic political thought and institutions. I try in the chapter to concretize what Milbank, and others such as Hauerwas and Phil Kenneson, had done to respond to the accusation of endorsing a "sectarian" form of Christianity. One should have a clue to the problem of such an accusation that such "sectarian" thought often does so on a claim to catholicity in thinkers such as Yoder, Milbank, Hauerwas, Ratzinger, and, if I may, Wright!

At any rate, Milbank writes that his wok at first invoked "a certain amount of outraged protest from sociologists, many of whom took it that I was objecting to a supposed 'reduction' of religion to the social, when I was explicitly arguing that 'the social' of sociology was itself an unreal, unhistorical and quasi-theological category. Today, this sort of reaction survives only amongst theologians themselves -- who are so often belated. Within secular social theory by contrast, there is a widespread recognition (only a very little indebted to my book) that 'sociology' is an exploded paradigm, and in part because of its inbuilt secular bias. The less ideologically-freighted models of ethnography and histoire totale are today far more in vogue -- in academic practice still more than in academic theory" (p. xii). The argument is much more radical than the often "conservative" reductionist argument against sociology -- it is taking the social more seriously in undercutting its own claim to understand the world by showing how the social itself is anchored in particular histories and traditions that were formed as heretical alternatives to catholic Christianity. It is because of this that one cannot simply uncritically use the "social sciences" such as psychology, sociology, and political sciences (or a liberal or Marxist bent) to pursue and define the ministry of the church. We cannot conceive of the life of the church as "applied sociology" or "critical theory" as the world conceives of engineering as "applied physics," for instance. We must not react against this thought, but think differently to continue the faithful ministry, the only effective ministry of the church long term, my book argues, to which we are called.

What is interesting is that I have at times found the same response to my book -- but also, more importantly, to the congregation at Mid-City. Because of concern for the works of mercy and the resultant awareness that the political and economic forces of the society are so patterned to hurt those to whom we are commanded by Jesus to go, we have consistently faced tensions with those who wish to engage the "social" and "the political" to use the congregation for a broader agenda of social change with operationally-defined social and political results -- to continue the early 20th century Protestant liberal 'social gospel' agenda for building the kingdom of God through engagement of the proper sociological and political structures within the contemporary culture -- thus reifying the categories of the unreal categories of 'the social' and 'the political' that Milbank correctly implodes through genealogical and historical analysis. A more radical orthodoxy that wants to live according to the reality that there are no categories of the "social" and the "political". The Real is found in the biblical categories of "Israel/church" and "the nations/world". We must understand the life of the church within the context of "total history", a history that must be understood as that described within the characterizations and typologies found within the biblical narrative -- which never discusses the social or the political. We can learn from sociological and political and economic projections; but the importance of random events teach us that these must be subordinated to a sense of Christian wisdom that comes from the concrete formation of the sanctifying Spirit in our lives as we live in the local contexts that such projections are abstractions from such a context.

For persons initiated into the politics that form the social as real, some read Milbank -- and myself -- as promoting an authoritarian, conservative, nostalgic response to the modern, even as others, as they read Milbank -- and myself, as promoting a critical leftist reactionary program against the modern. Rather than this, we must remember that we live as "resident aliens" or "sojourners" -- out "political commonwealth is in heaven" -- i.e., our ultimate end is in God. Recovering this sense of local wisdom outside the ideologies of this age through the proclaimation of the Word -- finding ourselves within the narrative of Scriptures; the sharing of the Sacraments -- baptism into the elect life of the church through dying and rising with Christ and then being made the true body of Christ together through the sharing in Christ's body and blood; and personal engagement in the physical and corporeal works of mercy -- thus opening ourselves to repentance from the Spirit's sanctifying presence with us, is the call of local congregations that would seek to live as part of the church catholic throughout the ages.