Root and Milbank on Gift

Root and Milbank on Gift November 24, 2003

Michael Root raised some pointed questions about Milbank’s views on gift. The most cogent criticism was about Milbank’s view of the atonement, in which he argued that there is no “Godward” move in the atonement for Milbank. Milbank explicitly rejects sacrificial notions of atonement, and by Root’s assessment ends up with a refined moral influence theory of the atonement.
Unfortunately, Milbank didn’t quite take up that challenge. I think Root is onto something.

But Milbank offered a number of interesting ideas on gift:

1) He rejected the idea that unilateral gift (God’s monergistic grace, eg) should be played off against reciprocity. Divine cause and secondary cause are never in competition; each is a total cause within its sphere or level of operation. He pointed to recent work that indicates there was a shift from an intrinsicist to an extrinsicist view of divine-human causality in the wake of Scotus. Another mark against Duns.

2) One way he said the above point was quite striking: Creation is pure gift, so pure and sheer a gift that without the gift there is not even a recipient. The gift is the formation of the recipient. But if the gift of creation, of being, is absolutely gift, then it is also absolutely debt. There is no zone anywhere where gratitude is not called for.

3) Root had argued that both Milbank and Katherine Tanner fail to deal adequately with the problem of sin, the “refusal of gift.” Milbank said that gifts can indeed be refused, but this refusal can be met by God’s refusal of the refusal, which is the meaning of grace. That God continues to give (particularly the gift of continuing existence) in the face of refusal is the very definition of grace.

4) Another way to make the point: The gift is the Spirit, which IS the reciprocity of the Father and Son. Thus, the unilateral gift is inseparable from reciporicity, since the unilateral gift of the Spirit is the gift of participation in the reciprocal giving of Father and Son.

5) Milbank argued that giving needed to be construed hierarchically in order to make this connection of unilateral and reciprocal. I’m not sure I followed that, but he suggestively noted that “equality” is not really what we’re after so much as hierarchy that is construed as existing in time. Once time is introduced, then hierarchy is not a fixed relationship, but a constantly shifting relationship. Conversation is the paradigmatic gift-exchange relationship, and conversation occurs through a constant play and shifting of a hierarchy of speaker and listener, of dominator and submissive. Sexual difference, he suggested, also follows this pattern, not so much an issue of fixed hierarchy as one of shifting hierarchy, with sometimes the man and sometimes the woman “on top” (and he intended the innuendo).

5) Rather boldly (given the atmosphere at AAR), Milbank argued for real sexual difference. That is, men have certain “natural” tendencies and strengths, and women have different, complementary ones. Men are more subject-object oriented, while women are more subject-subject oriented. (Yes, it’s obvious; AAR exists to belabor the obvious.) One interesting footnote to this was his suggestion that the subject-object relationship is not really wholly opposed to the subject-subject, but is complementary to it. He used the example of ancient ideas of weaponry; each weapon had its history, and someone who uses the weapon is not only using an object but somehow partaking of that whole history. The object actually takes on a more personal dimension.


Browse Our Archives