Hauerwas om faran med en "personlig relation" med Gud

Question: Christians often describe their faith as a "personal relationship with God." Is that a useful category for those who are looking on at Christianity and trying to figure out what it's all about?


Answer: No. The last thing in the world I'd want is a personal relationship with God. Our relationship with God is mediated. Without the church we know not God. No Israel, No God, Know Church, Know Jesus. Our faith is a mediated faith with people formed through word and sacrament. So I'd never trust myself to have a personal relationship with God.

Interview with Stanley Hauerwas

Old mysteries, and new ones ...

At first humans regarded all natural phenomena as effects of supernatural causes. In the next, ‘‘philosophical’’ stage, they explain the world by means of abstract notions—‘‘essences,’’ ‘‘faculties’’—thereby replacing the old mysteries by new ones.

- Louis K. Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (Yale University Press, 2004), 207

Milbank on fundamentalism and fideism

In the face of secular scepticism, pragmatism and positivism, many religious people tend to take refuge in the notion that there is nonetheless another source of truth enshrined in certain texts, practices and traditions. Ironically, for these texts, practices and traditions to acquire absolute authority outside the workings of human reason, they have to be regarded positivistically, in a fashion which mimics scientific positivism itself. The irrational strangely colludes with the most vigorously reduced rationalism, and often one finds that various fundamentalisms and fideisms are able happily to coexist with, and even to reinforce, the technoscientific capitalism of our day.

John Milbank och Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (Routledge, 2001), Preface