ABSTRACT
The three-fold pattern of violence, breaking and gift flashes out from theReligion After Metaphysics, a recent collection of essays from some of the most eminent names in continental philosophy a collection that is representative of a pervasive oral tradition in philosophical theology. Metaphysics, like liberalism, is a word that immediately invokes a certain sense of hostility and superiority in a certain sort of philosophical breast. The violence wrought by a metaphysical way of thinking has everything to do with the Immanuel Kantian anxiety that our knowing the world is at the same time a manipulation and a veiling of the world. An investigation of James K. A. Smith's argument exposes some of the theological, and philosophical, dubiety of post-Kantian approaches marked by the pattern of violence, breaking and gift. Towards the end of God, the Minds Desire, Paul Janz comments, orthodox Christianity actually demands kind of empirical realism along roughly Kantian line.
