From the pen of Joel Garver, talking in the WrightSaid list about a rejoinder to Michael Horton given by John Milbank:

"Also, he [Milbank] suggested that Horton's emphasis on hearing and Word--
without sufficient attention the liturgical and sacramental context
of that Word as enacted and made visible--is dangerous. It leaves us
with a de-contextualized "voice of God" with no "face" (to use
Levinasian terminology). While we don't yet see God face to face, we
do look into each others faces and find God's glory reflected therein
as people being recreated in Christ.

To emphasize the Word at the expense of the sacramental, personal,
and liturgical runs the danger, Milbank suggested, of leaving us with
a bare Word that is too easily manipulated to mean whatever we want
it to mean and which we can deploy to our own ends. If this is what
Horton is saying, Milbank asserted, then he's just at a different
place on the same trajectory as Osama Bin Laden."

This is a perfectly fascinating and very insightful argument. I share its view because my eyes have seen it in practice. Exactly this kind of decontextualisation of the word from its covenental, sacramental (MOST of all sacramental), and personal manifestations is what the worst of intellectualised, platonic 'christianity' is all about. And there is a strong streak of it in the Reformed Churches of New Zealand - quite possibly in betrayal of our heritage. People - the very images of God - are trampled all over and beaten down in the name of an abstract, de-peopled 'truth'.

It was never meant to be so.