Bediako neatly describes the dualism that results when the church attempts to apply the questions and answers of European or American Christianity to Africa without addressing the questions of Africans themselves. He quotes John Taylor’s pointed question: “if Christ were to appear as the answer to the questions that Africans are asking, what would he look like?” Bediako asks, “Why should an Akan related to Jesus of Nazareth who does not belong to his clan, family, tribe and nation?” When... Read more

Bediako criticizes other African theologians who claim that there is no African theological tradition. There is, he admits, not much if we’re looking for school theology. But focusing on that lack misses the real action – the “grassroots” theology expressed in songs, worship, sermons, personal evangelism, etc. And this is the real location of “authentic” theology. Theology is authentic when it is “a task, not of scholars alone, but of a community who share in a common context” and when... Read more

What Milbank describes as “postmodern Kantianism” (in Zizek, Nancy, and others) wants to take evil seriously, which means “positively.” They do not think Augustine’s theory adequately accounts for modern evil, complaining that the Augustinian account’s weakness left Europe open to the possibility of radical evil. Milbank suggests on the contrary that this position, not the Augustinian privatio, leaves open the possibility of infinite evil. He suggests that postmodern Kantians view “the alternative good/evil in pre-ontological terms as entirely prior to... Read more

Milbank makes a couple of interesting points regarding the import of an Augustinian view of evil. 1) Augustine’s view assumes the goodness of matter, in fact the goodness of all being. This, Milbank claims, seems to excuse evil – it’s some lack, a weakness or finitude, that makes for evil. And he points to the lament in Romans 7 to suggest that Paul is even willing to exonerate the will: “where the will has failed to will what it should,... Read more

In the view of many, the Holocaust belied the Augustinian description of evil as the privation of good. Something much more insidiously positive was at work in the death camps. Hannah Arendt, however, seems to confirm the Augustinian perspective in her treatment of the banality of evil. According to Milbank, “For Arendt, famously, the mass murderer Albert Eichmann, on trial in Jerusalem, discloses not a pre-Satanic will to evil, nor a lust for horror, but instead ‘the banality of evil,’... Read more