John Milbank on Adam Kotsko

In an interview, John Milbank said this of Adam Kotsko (the author of a book on Zizek and theology, who blogs here):

[T]he posturing of someone like Kotsko can only produce a wry smile in someone of my generation. This is exactly the sort of pusillanimous theology of some in the 1960s that we have long sought to escape from. Why? Because it is bad faith. If you are going to be an atheist and nihilist, then be one. Only second-raters repeat secular nostrums in a pious guise. Such theology can never possibly make any difference, by definition. It’s a kind of sad, grey, seasonal echo of last year’s genuine black. All real Christian theology, by contrast, emerges from the Church, which alone mediates the presence of the God-Man, who is the presupposition of all Christian thinking. Kotsko fears that the Church is an institution, but of course it isn’t—or isn’t primarily—as Graham Ward has well pointed out. It’s rather the continued event of the ingestion of the body of Christ. This fact provides a critical self-correction, well in excess of any outsider criticism of all the Church’s shortcomings and abuses, which I would hope to be among the first to recognize and denounce.

This sort of posturing is common among young "theologians" (though I don't know Kotsko's work well enough to fully endorse Milbank's rather harsh treatment of him). There's a difference between critically approaching Christianity from the perspective of continental philosophy and critically approaching continental philosophy from the perspective of the Church. Those who to do the former and claim to be theologians are hopelessly confused.