I have just finished Aussie PM Kevin Rudd's essay on the financial crisis in The Monthly. In it, he mounts a strident attack on 'free-market fundamentalism' which he blames for our current woes - positioning himself as a pragmatic 'social democrat' in the meantime. It is interesting to see such an ideological turn from an Aussie politician - usually we steer clear of that stuff. It is a rather turgid read I have to say - but he lays the challenge out there to neo-liberals: how has your ideology done anything but expose us to this terrible danger?
I have never been fully persuaded that by the small govt mantra of the neo-liberal/Reaganite. I can understand some apects of it, but my theological appraisal of human nature (that we are unusually evil AND stupid) means that I don't trust the free market to produce just outcomes anymore than I trust government not to become corrupt and self-serving. Neo-liberalism has its own utopian vision - a dream of unfettered market forces aligning to produce prosperity and security for all. This is just as dangerous as the utopian vision of the socialist of course, with a completely planned and fixed economy. The trouble with neo-liberalism is that it hopes that a human vice - namely, greed - will produce much virtue.
The Pauline account of the role of the state focuses on justice - the restraint and punishment of the wicked (Rom 13). That is, in its own way, minimal - a 'small' government. Does it square with Rudd's view of the role of the state? -
Government is not the intrinsic evil that neo-liberals have argued it is. Government, properly constituted and properly directed, is for the common good, embracing both individual freedom and fairness, a project designed for the many, not just the few.
Well, I think so: here is a vision for the adminstration of justice - with the government taking its proper role of serving the people and not itself. The state is after all 'God's servant to do you good'. The language of 'fairness' echoes a kind of Rawlsian philosophy of justice, perhaps - and that could be debated, certainly. Rudd here speaks of 'the creative agency of government' - a phrase that could alarm neo-liberals and Reaganites, but which, in the current circumstances is prbably justified.
As Sarkozy says: Le laissez-faire, c'est fini.
Showing posts with label political theology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political theology. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Notes on the nature and significance of community as a theological concept
Humankind was created for communion, but is everywhere divided. [1]
The human individual is, as a matter of theological datum and observable fact, made for sociality and collaboration with others in the world. ‘Community’ is a term that recognizes this unquenchable aspiration amongst people. In community with others we hold things in common rather than in private: sharing is the heartbeat of community. In community, things are communicated between two or more people.
This may of course mean material things. But community also involves the sharing of a common understanding of the significance of shared things.[2] An example is the sharing of food: in human communities the eating of meals is not merely functional, but given a representative function as well – who I eat with, and what, and when mean something. What is more, communities share in, or aspire to share in, an identity – a shared self-understanding. Various signs and ceremonies and practices mediate this self-understanding to the individuals within a community. They facilitate recognition of other members of the community.
There is then, for human community the necessity of effective communication of this identity - of ascribing significance to our shared possessions. The narration of our shared history, on the one hand, and the creation of works of art, on the other, combine to make a community a tradition that can be passed on. In this way, human community can feel itself secured somewhat against the ravages of time and the inevitability of death.
Again, this description is a matter of anthropological observation and of the way in which the Pentateuch describes the proper development of a particular human community. Community is a good that human beings need for their proper flourishing as individuals. In Scripture, however, the ideal human community is not just human. The Lord himself intends to live in community with people – to make for himself a people with whom he will dwell. Adam and Eve live with God in the garden.
Such might be a description of ‘community’ in a state of innocence. But Christian theology cannot be happy with this description as it stands. We have already hinted that another function of community is that of protection and security. As Scripture narrates it, human beings huddle together because humanity is vulnerable to nature; and because they need protection from other human beings. If there is a good in community, then it needs to be secured. There are other communities whose significations and representations may cut across the path of mine. Each community is a community among other possibly competing, possibly threatening communities. The protection of the city wall is needed – or, more effectively, the creation of a self-understanding which means that membership in community X means hatred of community Y. If I am Tutsi, I am not Hutu.
What is more, the self-communication and self-representation of a community may strengthen its bonds, and appear to benefit its members, but actually be deeply hubristic. Protection gives way to pretension. Without God, a community, whether as small as a family or as large as a nation, may develop the illusion of its own totality and sufficiency. It may come to believe in its own transcendence, and in its own destiny. The besetting sin of communities is, then, idolatry. The story of Babel (Gen 11) is offered as a restraint against just this sort of over-weening pride: the Lord scatters the people and confuses their languages in order to restrain the possibility of an idolatrous belief in the power of human community. The will make a ‘name’ for themselves, and thereby not recognise the name of the Lord from whom true authority stems. Thus, the plurality of communities is both a protection of humans from their own power-hunger and an ongoing question against the promise of human community to fulfill human longings.
In the Biblical narrative we see both God’s judgement on human communities and his determination to redeem human beings in community (Gen 12).[3] The election of Israel was both a choice for them over against the nations that surrounded them, and a sign of God’s determination to bless all the families of the earth. The torah was intended to insure that the character and actions of God were at the heart of Israel’s communal life, just as it was absent from the other nations.
The gospel of Jesus Christ marks the formation of a new community whose shared ‘possession’ is Christ himself. Unlike other human communities, this one is not marked by fear but rather love; by peace, not enmity; and by fellowship, not competition for scarce resources. In the new community, quite remarkably, a plurality of identities is included without being at the same time dissolved. Thus, though I am a citizen of the heavenly kingdom, my identity as an Australian is not erased. However, it is certainly relativised, and even transformed. I can be, in Christ, Australian in a new way, and understand Australian-ness as it might be expressed in service of the divine ruler. In particular, the coming of Christ signifies the breaking down of barriers between peoples (Eph 2), such that communities need no longer be understood as mutually exclusive of one another. Here is then the possibility of unity without the dissolution of plurality.
The gathering of this new community is for the purpose of extending God’s blessing to all peoples. Not only are the disciples of Christ called to follow after him: they are also sent by him into the world. They are not to creep unobserved into the corners of the world; Christ rather calls them to preach the gospel and make disciples of all nations, ‘in Jerusalem, Samaria and to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8) – which activity is most certainly for the public sphere and for the public good.[4] The churches thus are rightly addressed by Peter as a diaspora (1 Peter 1:1-2): they are a scattered gathering, with a shared task of the further gathering and building of God’s community throughout the earth.
Christians are certainly enjoined to preserve and uphold the communities in which they find themselves, insofar as they are in the business of restraining and punishing wickedness and rewarding good (Rom 13). They are to honour and uphold rule insofar as it administers God’s justice. In the NT, this especially refers to retributive justice; but may fairly also be applied to the challenges of distributive justice. But Christians also continue to witness to the immodesty of the claims of human communities, by reminding human communities of the ultimacy of God’s rule in Christ. A true secularity (that is, an understanding of the divine authorization but not the divine right of forms of human power) is needed in order to break the idolatrous self-deception of communities as absolute and self-sufficient. As we have been suggesting all along, ‘community’ alone is an insufficient term to describe a good, because community itself may be perverse or idolatrous, or serve perverse and idolatrous ends. A criminal gang might provide its members with a remarkable degree of fellowship, but still be obviously a corruption or misuse of community. While human sociality is needed for human flourishing, there are forms of sociality which are in themselves destructive.
We recognize that in the late-modern world, the chief problem for many people is exclusion from the goods offered by human community. The individualism which is so characteristic of the age has resulted in the disconnection of many people from the forms of human community that they need in order to flourish. If community means sharing, it is precisely the case that some individuals are unwilling or unable to share in what is common that is most problematic – anti-human, even. However, it is also the case that access to a human community is not, in and of itself, sufficient to meet the human need.
Michael P Jensen
July, 2008
[1] W.T.Cavanaugh, “The City – Beyond secular parodies”, in John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, Radical Orthodoxy : A New Theology, Radical Orthodoxy Series. (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 182.
[2] For this and much of what follows, see Oliver O'Donovan, Common Objects of Love : Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community : The 2001 Stob Lectures (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2002)..
[3] not as community, but in community, note: community remains the means by which God redeems individuals.
[4] Hence the NT language of ‘light/salt of the world’, or the ‘royal priesthood’ of the church.
The human individual is, as a matter of theological datum and observable fact, made for sociality and collaboration with others in the world. ‘Community’ is a term that recognizes this unquenchable aspiration amongst people. In community with others we hold things in common rather than in private: sharing is the heartbeat of community. In community, things are communicated between two or more people.
This may of course mean material things. But community also involves the sharing of a common understanding of the significance of shared things.[2] An example is the sharing of food: in human communities the eating of meals is not merely functional, but given a representative function as well – who I eat with, and what, and when mean something. What is more, communities share in, or aspire to share in, an identity – a shared self-understanding. Various signs and ceremonies and practices mediate this self-understanding to the individuals within a community. They facilitate recognition of other members of the community.
There is then, for human community the necessity of effective communication of this identity - of ascribing significance to our shared possessions. The narration of our shared history, on the one hand, and the creation of works of art, on the other, combine to make a community a tradition that can be passed on. In this way, human community can feel itself secured somewhat against the ravages of time and the inevitability of death.
Again, this description is a matter of anthropological observation and of the way in which the Pentateuch describes the proper development of a particular human community. Community is a good that human beings need for their proper flourishing as individuals. In Scripture, however, the ideal human community is not just human. The Lord himself intends to live in community with people – to make for himself a people with whom he will dwell. Adam and Eve live with God in the garden.
Such might be a description of ‘community’ in a state of innocence. But Christian theology cannot be happy with this description as it stands. We have already hinted that another function of community is that of protection and security. As Scripture narrates it, human beings huddle together because humanity is vulnerable to nature; and because they need protection from other human beings. If there is a good in community, then it needs to be secured. There are other communities whose significations and representations may cut across the path of mine. Each community is a community among other possibly competing, possibly threatening communities. The protection of the city wall is needed – or, more effectively, the creation of a self-understanding which means that membership in community X means hatred of community Y. If I am Tutsi, I am not Hutu.
What is more, the self-communication and self-representation of a community may strengthen its bonds, and appear to benefit its members, but actually be deeply hubristic. Protection gives way to pretension. Without God, a community, whether as small as a family or as large as a nation, may develop the illusion of its own totality and sufficiency. It may come to believe in its own transcendence, and in its own destiny. The besetting sin of communities is, then, idolatry. The story of Babel (Gen 11) is offered as a restraint against just this sort of over-weening pride: the Lord scatters the people and confuses their languages in order to restrain the possibility of an idolatrous belief in the power of human community. The will make a ‘name’ for themselves, and thereby not recognise the name of the Lord from whom true authority stems. Thus, the plurality of communities is both a protection of humans from their own power-hunger and an ongoing question against the promise of human community to fulfill human longings.
In the Biblical narrative we see both God’s judgement on human communities and his determination to redeem human beings in community (Gen 12).[3] The election of Israel was both a choice for them over against the nations that surrounded them, and a sign of God’s determination to bless all the families of the earth. The torah was intended to insure that the character and actions of God were at the heart of Israel’s communal life, just as it was absent from the other nations.
The gospel of Jesus Christ marks the formation of a new community whose shared ‘possession’ is Christ himself. Unlike other human communities, this one is not marked by fear but rather love; by peace, not enmity; and by fellowship, not competition for scarce resources. In the new community, quite remarkably, a plurality of identities is included without being at the same time dissolved. Thus, though I am a citizen of the heavenly kingdom, my identity as an Australian is not erased. However, it is certainly relativised, and even transformed. I can be, in Christ, Australian in a new way, and understand Australian-ness as it might be expressed in service of the divine ruler. In particular, the coming of Christ signifies the breaking down of barriers between peoples (Eph 2), such that communities need no longer be understood as mutually exclusive of one another. Here is then the possibility of unity without the dissolution of plurality.
The gathering of this new community is for the purpose of extending God’s blessing to all peoples. Not only are the disciples of Christ called to follow after him: they are also sent by him into the world. They are not to creep unobserved into the corners of the world; Christ rather calls them to preach the gospel and make disciples of all nations, ‘in Jerusalem, Samaria and to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8) – which activity is most certainly for the public sphere and for the public good.[4] The churches thus are rightly addressed by Peter as a diaspora (1 Peter 1:1-2): they are a scattered gathering, with a shared task of the further gathering and building of God’s community throughout the earth.
Christians are certainly enjoined to preserve and uphold the communities in which they find themselves, insofar as they are in the business of restraining and punishing wickedness and rewarding good (Rom 13). They are to honour and uphold rule insofar as it administers God’s justice. In the NT, this especially refers to retributive justice; but may fairly also be applied to the challenges of distributive justice. But Christians also continue to witness to the immodesty of the claims of human communities, by reminding human communities of the ultimacy of God’s rule in Christ. A true secularity (that is, an understanding of the divine authorization but not the divine right of forms of human power) is needed in order to break the idolatrous self-deception of communities as absolute and self-sufficient. As we have been suggesting all along, ‘community’ alone is an insufficient term to describe a good, because community itself may be perverse or idolatrous, or serve perverse and idolatrous ends. A criminal gang might provide its members with a remarkable degree of fellowship, but still be obviously a corruption or misuse of community. While human sociality is needed for human flourishing, there are forms of sociality which are in themselves destructive.
We recognize that in the late-modern world, the chief problem for many people is exclusion from the goods offered by human community. The individualism which is so characteristic of the age has resulted in the disconnection of many people from the forms of human community that they need in order to flourish. If community means sharing, it is precisely the case that some individuals are unwilling or unable to share in what is common that is most problematic – anti-human, even. However, it is also the case that access to a human community is not, in and of itself, sufficient to meet the human need.
Michael P Jensen
July, 2008
[1] W.T.Cavanaugh, “The City – Beyond secular parodies”, in John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, Radical Orthodoxy : A New Theology, Radical Orthodoxy Series. (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 182.
[2] For this and much of what follows, see Oliver O'Donovan, Common Objects of Love : Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community : The 2001 Stob Lectures (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2002)..
[3] not as community, but in community, note: community remains the means by which God redeems individuals.
[4] Hence the NT language of ‘light/salt of the world’, or the ‘royal priesthood’ of the church.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Locke's tolerance - its limits
'Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon the atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.'
John Locke, Letter on Toleration
The father of modern liberal politics shows his true colours...
John Locke, Letter on Toleration
The father of modern liberal politics shows his true colours...
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Apocalyptic Amillennialism?
From my RTR article 'Left Behind? Christian Eschatology and Society in the Age of Terror' vol 63, 2004.
...We take issue with the eschatologies of pre- and post-millennialists, Moltmann and the liberation theologians. Amillennialism seems a more biblically satisfactory position, although it has a tendency to over-spiritualise the Kingdom’s presence and to embrace a smug ecclesiastical imperialism.[1] However, the re-emergence of the apocalyptic in twentieth century theology, in the tradition of Luther, has restored balance to the biblical horizon. Apocalyptic literature of both Testaments focuses on the sovereignty of God over the cosmos and history, his vindication of his people (involving resurrection) in righteous judgment and his “supernatural” and dramatic intervention in history to bring these things to pass. There is a radical discontinuity between the present, which features a great struggle between good and evil, and the apocalyptic future. The apocalyptic literature of the New Testament picks up the universalism of other passages which speak of the cosmic scope of God’s redemptive act in Christ (1 Cor 15:22, Col 1:19-20, Phil 2:9-11, I Tim 2:4-6), and at the same time paints a clearly separationist picture which rightly reflects the Biblical vision of God’s eternal justice. A decisive irruption into history is indeed necessary for the fulfillment of the times. Even historicist (and Hegelian) Wolfhart Pannenberg admits:
Nothing less than a new heaven and a new earth (Rev 21:1; cf 20:11 and Isa 65:17) is demanded as a prerequisite for the definitive actualizing of the kingdom of God.[2]
[1] Bloesch, op.cit., p.197
[2] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, op.cit., p.584
...We take issue with the eschatologies of pre- and post-millennialists, Moltmann and the liberation theologians. Amillennialism seems a more biblically satisfactory position, although it has a tendency to over-spiritualise the Kingdom’s presence and to embrace a smug ecclesiastical imperialism.[1] However, the re-emergence of the apocalyptic in twentieth century theology, in the tradition of Luther, has restored balance to the biblical horizon. Apocalyptic literature of both Testaments focuses on the sovereignty of God over the cosmos and history, his vindication of his people (involving resurrection) in righteous judgment and his “supernatural” and dramatic intervention in history to bring these things to pass. There is a radical discontinuity between the present, which features a great struggle between good and evil, and the apocalyptic future. The apocalyptic literature of the New Testament picks up the universalism of other passages which speak of the cosmic scope of God’s redemptive act in Christ (1 Cor 15:22, Col 1:19-20, Phil 2:9-11, I Tim 2:4-6), and at the same time paints a clearly separationist picture which rightly reflects the Biblical vision of God’s eternal justice. A decisive irruption into history is indeed necessary for the fulfillment of the times. Even historicist (and Hegelian) Wolfhart Pannenberg admits:
Nothing less than a new heaven and a new earth (Rev 21:1; cf 20:11 and Isa 65:17) is demanded as a prerequisite for the definitive actualizing of the kingdom of God.[2]
[1] Bloesch, op.cit., p.197
[2] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, op.cit., p.584
Monday, November 19, 2007
Revolutionary Calvinism - Stout again
Stout speaks passionately about democracy, and against the anti-liberal-democratic reading of history proposed by Hauerwas and co:
This reminder is salutary. I think a nice renaissance of religious reasoning is occurring in Australia, and it isn't just a Right wing thing. I wonder if it will bear fruit... Stout could have added Prohibitionism to his list, and that was a movement stemming from the same source but which squandered a good deal of political capital as far as religious groups were concerned.
The first modern revolutionaries were not secular liberals; they were radical Calvinists. Among the most important democratic movement in American history were Abolitionism and the Civil Rights movement; both of these were based largely in the religious communities. Religious colleges and seminaries provided strong support for both movements. If religious premises had not been adduced in support of them, it is unlikely that either movement would have resulted in success. The Christian majority needed to be persuaded in both cases that commitment to scriptural authority was at least compatible with the reform being proposed. If the religious Left does not soon recover its energy and self-confidence, it is unlikely that American democracy will be capable of counteracting either the greed of its business elite or the determination of many whites to define the authentic nation in ethnic, racial or ecclesiastical terms. Democracy and Tradition, p. 300
This reminder is salutary. I think a nice renaissance of religious reasoning is occurring in Australia, and it isn't just a Right wing thing. I wonder if it will bear fruit... Stout could have added Prohibitionism to his list, and that was a movement stemming from the same source but which squandered a good deal of political capital as far as religious groups were concerned.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Stout savages Hauerwas
Hauerwas is so dominant in the thinking of a generation of American theologians that is a relief to hear him challenged. But Stout does so as a non-theologian: it is a shame that it took a non-theologian to do it:
Ouch - harsh but fair. Tenure at Duke hardly seems like persecution, now, does it? He charges Hauerwas with inconsistency over his reading of Scripture. Hauerwas wants to make non-violence thee central feature of the Christian message. But is the pacificist case really convincing on the basis of Scripture? And how come he is such a rigorist on this issue, but not on others - say, on remarriage after divorce? As Stout says:
And further, Stout articulates a point I had thought of but not really expressed before: Hauerwas's church, his 'peaceable kingdom', doesn't seem to exist. When he says 'the church', which church is he talking about? What does he mean? As Stout says,
A cynic might say that the secret of Hauerwas's vast influence in the church in the 1980s and 1990s lay in the imprecision of the sacrifice he appeared to be demanding of his followers. Surely he was not proposing that the strength of one's sentimental identification with the church could by itself secure noncomplicity with the evils of the world. His favourite patristic text appears to be Origen's Exhortation to Martyrdom. [Actually, here Stout is taking a piece of O'Donovan's rhetoric in Desire of the Nations rather literalistically! - a bit of a schoolboy error. MJ] But in the absence of a clear statement of the price Christians must be willing to pay, his audience was able to indulge itself in fantasies of martyrdom without experiencing
actualy poverty or persecution at all. (p. 158)
Ouch - harsh but fair. Tenure at Duke hardly seems like persecution, now, does it? He charges Hauerwas with inconsistency over his reading of Scripture. Hauerwas wants to make non-violence thee central feature of the Christian message. But is the pacificist case really convincing on the basis of Scripture? And how come he is such a rigorist on this issue, but not on others - say, on remarriage after divorce? As Stout says:
It is hard...to escape the conclusion that his ethics rests on an extremely selective reading of the Bible. (p. 160)
And further, Stout articulates a point I had thought of but not really expressed before: Hauerwas's church, his 'peaceable kingdom', doesn't seem to exist. When he says 'the church', which church is he talking about? What does he mean? As Stout says,
The actual church does not look very much like a community of virtue, when judged by pacificist standards. (p. 161)
Jeffrey Stout asks three good questions
It's been a hard couple of weeks!Stout challenges MacIntyre, Hauerwas and Milbank - who have harboured such resentment against modern secular democracy. He asks three good questions (Democracy and Tradition, p. 104):
is it not possible to discern the workings of the Holy Spirit, and thus some reflections of God's redemptive activity, in modern democratic aspirations? is there nothing in the political life of modern democracies, or in the lives of those who are struggling for just and decent arrangements within them, that a loving God would bless? if the plenitude of God's triune inner life shones forth in all of creation, cannot theology discren some such light in democratic political community?
Well indeed. I would add a fourth question: is it not the case that modern democratic community is the child of Christendom, even if it is somewhat of a prodigal?
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Benedict XVI on changing things...
I bet the Pope uses a Mac. He likes everyone to be the same everywhere... He has even brought back the Latin mass. That's regress for you!
Politicians of all parties take it for granted today that they must promise changes - naturally, changes for the better. The once mythical radiance of the word 'revolution' has faded in our days, but far-reaching reforms are demanded and promised all the more insistently. This must surely mean that there exists in modern society a deep and prevailing sense of dissatisfaction precisely in those places where prosperity and freedom have attained hitherto unknown heights. The world is experienced as hard to bear. It must become better. And it seems that the task of politics is to bring this about. So since the general consensus is that the essential taks of politics is to improve the world, indeed to usher in a new world, it is easy to understand why the word 'conservative' has become disreputable and why scarcely anyone views lightly the prospect of being called conservative, for it appears that what we must do is not preserve the status quo but overcome it. Values in a Time of Upheaval, p. 11
Change is the one constant of political discourse it seems...
Politicians of all parties take it for granted today that they must promise changes - naturally, changes for the better. The once mythical radiance of the word 'revolution' has faded in our days, but far-reaching reforms are demanded and promised all the more insistently. This must surely mean that there exists in modern society a deep and prevailing sense of dissatisfaction precisely in those places where prosperity and freedom have attained hitherto unknown heights. The world is experienced as hard to bear. It must become better. And it seems that the task of politics is to bring this about. So since the general consensus is that the essential taks of politics is to improve the world, indeed to usher in a new world, it is easy to understand why the word 'conservative' has become disreputable and why scarcely anyone views lightly the prospect of being called conservative, for it appears that what we must do is not preserve the status quo but overcome it. Values in a Time of Upheaval, p. 11
Change is the one constant of political discourse it seems...
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Update
The view from my room at Nuneham College, Cambridge.Well it has been a slower period than normal on what my sister affectionately calls 'the most boring blog in the world.' Not that I'm sensitive...
Chiefly, the reason is that my HP/Compaq laptop has given up the ghost, and it has taken the Uni computer dudes a few days to decide this. This is the longest I have ever owned a single laptop: others have been lost to lightening strike, theft, water spillage (what idiot left a paper cup of water on the computer desk at Moore College), and virus. I would love your help on a replacement: at the moment I am favouring a Toshiba Satellite Pro.
Cambridge was excellent: I went to a Symposium on Oliver O'Donovan's Ways of Judgment which is proving to be a re-readable book - which in a world of many great books is high praise. Trouble with the English in formats like this is that they are too polite, and so it is hard to tell when they are actually having an intellectual disagreement. Jonathan Chaplin, Nigel Biggar and Ben Quash gave papers, and O'Donovan responded to each. He is a very fine and engaging speaker, and concedes very little!
The Tyndale Conference followed: this was more of a mish-mash of issues and papers. We heard some very interesting stuff on Islam, and also from David Ford (Prof at Cambridge) on 'Scriptural Reasoning'. He has a new book out called 'Christian Wisdom' which looks enticing. Basically, he is suggesting that inter-faith dialogue (and ecumenical dialogue) take place on the basis of reading one another's scriptures. This prevents an annoying liberal consensus having to be established first (WCOC style). Brian Brock gave a great paper on Genesis 1-4 and ethics. We heard some other papers on politics that made me feel more and more that Christendom wasn't so bad, crusades and what-not notwithstanding. Whenever I hear a Christendom-basher make huge sweeping statements about some fourteen centuries of Church-state relations - as is currently the fashion in Hauerwas-dominated circles - it makes my toes curl. I am becoming more grumpily conservative in me old age...
I also went to one of the Biblical Theology papers given by Brian Rosner. What was fascinating for me is that I realised that there is a HUGE chasm between the methods of biblical studies scholars and those involved in doctrine and ethics. And it seems to me that there is not a great deal of mutually respectful conversation going on between the two...
Since then: I have been reading Barth's Dogmatics II.i, one of the must-read volumes. His review of the Supralapsarian-Infralapsarian controversy is fascinating... though you can see how he is introducing his own position as the only alternative through his account.
I should also report that I have an almost complete first draft of my thesis. Blogging has not hindered but rather helped this! Having had a couple of readers review parts of it, I am encouraged to do a lot better of course. But at least I am getting better at answering that 'what is your thesis about' question...
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Collaborating with power? The book of Daniel...
The court tales of the book of Daniel provided for intertestamental Jews (and for the early Christians) a pattern for encounter with foreign rule and also great comfort that the invincibility of the empires of the middle east was largely an illusion. Daniel and his friends witness in each case to the provisionality of the ruler’s rule, but do so in service of the ruler himself! The humour of the stories derives from the depiction of human power over-reaching itself and being thwarted, while Yhwh’s representatives appear completely unruffled. Thus, Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue with feet of clay (Dan 2) is mysterious to his magicians and sorcerers and terrifies the mighty king who need fear no-one. It is the man of God to whom is given the insight and wisdom to interpret the meaning of the dream to the king: his role as a service to the king is to remind the king of his personal and political mortality. In the end, this king accepts this verdict, remarkably:
Daniel 2: 46 Then King Nebuchadnezzar fell upon his face and paid homage to Daniel, and commanded that an offering and incense be offered up to him. 47 The king answered and said to Daniel, "Truly, your God is God of gods and Lord of kings, and a revealer of mysteries, for you have been able to reveal this mystery." 48 Then the king gave Daniel high honors and many great gifts, and made him ruler over the whole province of Babylon and chief prefect over all the wise men of Babylon. 49 Daniel made a request of the king, and he appointed Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego over the affairs of the province of Babylon. But Daniel remained at the king's court.
No doubt to hear Yhwh’s praises on the lips of a pagan tyrant was a delight to the book’s first audiences. There is no refusal from Daniel of the king’s homage, nor any sense that Daniel is merely out to protect the interest of the Jews in accepting his high position. Two stories (coupled together in the books chiastic structure) narrate the vulnerability and even the fall of pagan rulers (chapters 4 and 5). In chapters 3 and 6 we are given the two narratives of most interest to our theme: the fiery furnace and the lion’s den. In each instance, the ruler is tempted in his vanity to over-reach himself and demand not just homage but worship from his subjects. This is exactly what the servants of Yhwh cannot give him, though the cost is potentially very great. Their insistence on the truth that the sovereign Lord is the only appropriate focus of human worship in this way is a lesson gratefully learned by the rulers, who then decide that the truly loyal ministers of their government were in fact these Israelites – and that the native Babylonian advisors were finally deserving of the very punishment they had wished for Daniel and his friends. At issue, notably, is right worship, not a merely moral challenge of some kind. The young men give witness to the truth and reality of Yhwh’s rule, specifically. They do not go into the furnace, or into the lion’s cave, in order merely to critique and expose tyranny in its egotism and corruption. This indeed they do, but only as a corollary to their standing for the ultimate power and authority and worthiness of Yhwh as the supreme and sole object of human worship.
Daniel 2: 46 Then King Nebuchadnezzar fell upon his face and paid homage to Daniel, and commanded that an offering and incense be offered up to him. 47 The king answered and said to Daniel, "Truly, your God is God of gods and Lord of kings, and a revealer of mysteries, for you have been able to reveal this mystery." 48 Then the king gave Daniel high honors and many great gifts, and made him ruler over the whole province of Babylon and chief prefect over all the wise men of Babylon. 49 Daniel made a request of the king, and he appointed Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego over the affairs of the province of Babylon. But Daniel remained at the king's court.
No doubt to hear Yhwh’s praises on the lips of a pagan tyrant was a delight to the book’s first audiences. There is no refusal from Daniel of the king’s homage, nor any sense that Daniel is merely out to protect the interest of the Jews in accepting his high position. Two stories (coupled together in the books chiastic structure) narrate the vulnerability and even the fall of pagan rulers (chapters 4 and 5). In chapters 3 and 6 we are given the two narratives of most interest to our theme: the fiery furnace and the lion’s den. In each instance, the ruler is tempted in his vanity to over-reach himself and demand not just homage but worship from his subjects. This is exactly what the servants of Yhwh cannot give him, though the cost is potentially very great. Their insistence on the truth that the sovereign Lord is the only appropriate focus of human worship in this way is a lesson gratefully learned by the rulers, who then decide that the truly loyal ministers of their government were in fact these Israelites – and that the native Babylonian advisors were finally deserving of the very punishment they had wished for Daniel and his friends. At issue, notably, is right worship, not a merely moral challenge of some kind. The young men give witness to the truth and reality of Yhwh’s rule, specifically. They do not go into the furnace, or into the lion’s cave, in order merely to critique and expose tyranny in its egotism and corruption. This indeed they do, but only as a corollary to their standing for the ultimate power and authority and worthiness of Yhwh as the supreme and sole object of human worship.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Talking about God in public
The second tempter of the martyr Thomas in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral offers him a collaborative arrangement under the power of the king. When he rejects this, asserting instead his episcopal authority, he is accused of being merely interested in power.
The same temptation is offered under very different historical conditions by the late-modern liberal segregation of the sacred (private) from the secular. Religious people are indeed invited to take their place in the business of public reasoning, but on the condition that they jettison those components of their thinking that held by others to be ‘religious’. The most prominent contemporary exponent of political liberalism – indeed, arguably the most influential political philosopher of the last forty years – is John Rawls. Rawls began in A Theory of Justice (1971) to concur with Kant and to try to earth justice solely in a universal and abstract notion of ‘Reason’. However, in Political Liberalism (1993) he suggests the notion of ‘reasonableness’. He distinguishes this from ‘Reason’ by noting that a person acts reasonably when they are willing ‘to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will do so’. From behind the ‘veil of ignorance’, Rawls proposes that people will choose reasonably for fair terms that will receive acknowledgement by ‘overlapping’ consensus. It would be quite possible for people to hold the same political values for quite disparate reasons: but these reasons are in the end quite irrelevant. Rawls writes provocatively, ‘[F]or the purposes of public life, Saul of Tarsus and Paul the Apostle are the same person.’ Rawls claims that this conception of justice is ‘freestanding’: it moves entirely in the practical and political world and leaves philosophy (and presumably theology) untouched. Rawls’ attempt to justify political liberalism at least has the virtue of accommodating the fact of pluralism: it (supposedly) allows for peaceful disagreements, and finds considerable space for positive agreement. Rawls wants to establish more than a modus vivendi: if groups in society are merely tolerant of one another, there is always the possibility of instability if the balance of power shifts and one group gains more power than others. His theory appears also to avoid the difficulty of appeal to some form of ‘comprehensive doctrine’ (the term he uses for ‘the contents of persons’ determinate conceptions of the good’). This modus vivendi forestalls the entry into the public space of the religious in such a way as to protect society from facing discussions about matters which may prevent the productive and safe conduct of its business. However, it also forces religious groups to speak in public only in terms of outcomes and utility, and perhaps about (their own) rights. The business of the actual concrete determination and management of justice must be carried out without reference to the ‘shadowy’ discourse of theology. Any Christian address of a controversial matter of public interest must prove itself in a measurable way, aside from its own logic. Economics is the new queen of the sciences to whom all other forms of knowledge must pay tribute. There is an option, however, delivered by postmodernity and present in the later Rawls. This is the ‘territorial’ option, whereby the religious group asserts and protects its own interests within the public sphere, usually on the basis of ‘rights’. Its speech having been excluded from the public forum, it can now only speak in the language that succeeds in that space, occupy as much of it as possible, and engage in talking mostly in an inner-directed way to its own constituency. The group may even succeed in gaining representatives of its interests elected into government office. The result is that it creates a new public space for itself, which it seeks to enlarge at the expense of other groups. To put it another way: the exclusion from the public forum of religious types of speech means that religious people feel a great difficutly at feeling their point of view is really heard in public. This situation may be accepted by some, who then have to live with the Paul/Saul bifurcation of their identities; but, for others, it is an invitation to occupy as much of the public sphere as possible without feeling the need to talk persuasively in the public sphere at all.
The same temptation is offered under very different historical conditions by the late-modern liberal segregation of the sacred (private) from the secular. Religious people are indeed invited to take their place in the business of public reasoning, but on the condition that they jettison those components of their thinking that held by others to be ‘religious’. The most prominent contemporary exponent of political liberalism – indeed, arguably the most influential political philosopher of the last forty years – is John Rawls. Rawls began in A Theory of Justice (1971) to concur with Kant and to try to earth justice solely in a universal and abstract notion of ‘Reason’. However, in Political Liberalism (1993) he suggests the notion of ‘reasonableness’. He distinguishes this from ‘Reason’ by noting that a person acts reasonably when they are willing ‘to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will do so’. From behind the ‘veil of ignorance’, Rawls proposes that people will choose reasonably for fair terms that will receive acknowledgement by ‘overlapping’ consensus. It would be quite possible for people to hold the same political values for quite disparate reasons: but these reasons are in the end quite irrelevant. Rawls writes provocatively, ‘[F]or the purposes of public life, Saul of Tarsus and Paul the Apostle are the same person.’ Rawls claims that this conception of justice is ‘freestanding’: it moves entirely in the practical and political world and leaves philosophy (and presumably theology) untouched. Rawls’ attempt to justify political liberalism at least has the virtue of accommodating the fact of pluralism: it (supposedly) allows for peaceful disagreements, and finds considerable space for positive agreement. Rawls wants to establish more than a modus vivendi: if groups in society are merely tolerant of one another, there is always the possibility of instability if the balance of power shifts and one group gains more power than others. His theory appears also to avoid the difficulty of appeal to some form of ‘comprehensive doctrine’ (the term he uses for ‘the contents of persons’ determinate conceptions of the good’). This modus vivendi forestalls the entry into the public space of the religious in such a way as to protect society from facing discussions about matters which may prevent the productive and safe conduct of its business. However, it also forces religious groups to speak in public only in terms of outcomes and utility, and perhaps about (their own) rights. The business of the actual concrete determination and management of justice must be carried out without reference to the ‘shadowy’ discourse of theology. Any Christian address of a controversial matter of public interest must prove itself in a measurable way, aside from its own logic. Economics is the new queen of the sciences to whom all other forms of knowledge must pay tribute. There is an option, however, delivered by postmodernity and present in the later Rawls. This is the ‘territorial’ option, whereby the religious group asserts and protects its own interests within the public sphere, usually on the basis of ‘rights’. Its speech having been excluded from the public forum, it can now only speak in the language that succeeds in that space, occupy as much of it as possible, and engage in talking mostly in an inner-directed way to its own constituency. The group may even succeed in gaining representatives of its interests elected into government office. The result is that it creates a new public space for itself, which it seeks to enlarge at the expense of other groups. To put it another way: the exclusion from the public forum of religious types of speech means that religious people feel a great difficutly at feeling their point of view is really heard in public. This situation may be accepted by some, who then have to live with the Paul/Saul bifurcation of their identities; but, for others, it is an invitation to occupy as much of the public sphere as possible without feeling the need to talk persuasively in the public sphere at all.
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