John Milbank
All Articles by John Milbank
Professor Emeritus of Religion, Politics and Ethics, University of Nottingham; Visiting Professor, Edith Stein Institute of Philosophy, Granada
Ecumenism, Geopolitics, and Crisis
Christians need to see Christian decline and current global crisis as equally linked to an older division of Christendom, itself connected to theological and ecclesial inadequacies. The way forwards needs to be an integral strategy: the promotion of mixed government with different emphases at once in Church, State and International Order. This must be linked to a recovery of a true sense of natural law as involving grace as well as nature and as mediated to civil and local law only via the international ius gentium. Thus, effective ecumenism is a key to global crisis, while recovery of the sacral ‘kingly’ role, at every level, including the international, is actually a crucial aspect of ecclesiology.
In this paper I want to argue for a connection of ecumenism to politics. On the one hand, I shall suggest that we need to be more fully aware that ecclesiology is in part a matter of politics in the real sense. On the other hand, I shall also argue that we need to be far more aware of the relevance of ecumenical matters to geopolitical ones.
In keeping with the English constitutional tradition, Richard Hooker, who lived from 1554 to 1600, and was in many ways the father of Anglican theology, always emphasised that Church government should be mixed: of archbishop in convocation and of king in parliament, backed up by popular assent.
At the international level, then, one would have thought that, in traditional terms, this mixture should apply to the authority of the Pope in ecclesial council, together with the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor in a conclave of nobles, with the former ideally enjoying eminent power, if circumstances permit, but the latter sustaining a Byzantine or Dantean reminder of the integrity of justice and the ultimate apocalyptic elevation of even corporeal concerns to the supernatural level. Could one not say that this would be the proper geopolitical translation of Hooker’s radically Christological and apocalyptic integralism once shorn of his rather excessive, and indeed somewhat Byzantine sacral monarchianism?
To some degree Hooker himself indicated such a translation:
For as one and the same law divine…is unto all Christian Churches a rule for the chiefest things, by means thereof they all in that respect make one