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In a recent interview, the unradical and tediously orthodox John Milbank recently described the Church in this way:

“the Church is … the continued event of the ingestion of the body of Christ.”

While I am no expert on the human digestive system, I am quite sure that the ultimate “continued event” of an “ingestion” is a poo.

But Milbank’s scatotheology does not end there. For something must emerge even from the poo (that is, theology itself):

“All real Christian theology, by contrast, emerges from the Church [the poo], which alone mediates the presence of the God-Man”

So theology is a poo’s poo; the shit of shit. And it doesn’t stop there, because theology mediates a further presence. Applying Milbank’s logic, the God-Man is a poo’s poo’s poo all of this shit originates with the God-Man. And at the origin of all this shit, according to Milbank, is the God-Man.

Even though Milbank and Žižek seem to have argued almost entirely at cross purposes in their recent co-written book (The Monstrosity of Christ), here in his conception of the Church and Christ Milbank finally approximates Žižek’s own view:

“Protestantism … [conceives] Christ as a God who, in his act of Incarnation, freely identified himself with his own shit, with the excremental Real which is man … ”

(Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (2006): 187)

As a further complication, Milbank has also attempted to expel Adam Kotsko from his excremental body. See “Because I am lukewarm…”.

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