“It is the social function of the church to intrude an ultimate vision into the comfortable arrangements and watered-down values of political and economic everyday, to be the unauthorized upsetter of the achieved world.”
Robert W. Jenson, Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel About Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973) 85.
The right of liberal democratic states to defend themselves with nuclear weapons - and this seems to be accepted by the international community - is in effect an affirmation that suicidal war can be legitimate. This leads me to the thought that the suicide bomber belongs in an important sense to a modern Western tradition of armed conflict for the defense of a free political community: To save the nation (or to found its state) in confronting a dangerous enemy, it may be necessary to act without being bound by ordinary moral constraints.
Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) 63.
To believe in Jesus’ God, the God of unconditional accessibility and even-handed compassion, to believe in an anarchic mercy that ignores order, rank and merit, is to accept that our projects and patterns are the mark of failure, of illusion, of the infantile belief that we can dictate truth and reality.
Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley, 1990) 17.
The life of faith is about being broken open so that life may happen, relating to Jesus not as a distant figure setting a good example but as someone whose life and fire is kindled in us, so that for the world to see us who believe and struggle is to see Jesus. And that claim is as bold, as unlikely and as embarrassing in the twenty-first century as it has ever been. Christians are Christians not because everything is clear, not because we know exactly what we ought to do, when and how, and because (as it is so often said) we have all the right answers to the questions that no one is asking. No: Christians are Christians because they sense that God’s own life, broken, shared and buried has proved to be uncontainable. It has spread out, kindled and renewed lives the world over.
From Rowan Williams’ sermon at St-Martin-in-the-Fields delivered on April 28, 2008.
The McDonald’s hamburger is the first ‘universal’ food, but the people — be they from La Paz, Bombay, Cairo or Brisbane — who eat the McDonald’s hamburger also consume the American way of life with it. Equally, the adherents of the ‘world ecumenism’ canvassed by the religious ‘pluralists’ align themselves with a movement that is ‘universal’, but they too ‘consume’ a certain way of life. Not quite the American way of life itself (though it is no accident that Cantwell Smith, a Canadian, and Hick and Ninian Smart, both Englishmen, have largely based themselves in the United States), but a single, overarching way of life which has become so pervasive that ‘the American way of life’ is today simply its most prominent and developed manifestation; namely, the ‘life’ of a world administered by global media and information networks, international agencies and multi- national corporations. The dominant ideology of this new world reality declares that nations, cultures, religions, and so forth, are simply obsolete if they are maintained in their old forms as fixed and intractable ‘particularities’. It is this new world reality and its ideological concomitants (e.g. the ‘global gaze’) which both makes the McDonald’s hamburger into a ‘universal’ food and sustains the ‘world ecumenism’ advocated by the exponents of religious ‘pluralism’. It creates the episteme or ‘paradigm’ which renders both sets of phenomena intelligible.
Kenneth Surin, “A Certain ‘Politics of Speech’: ‘Religious Pluralism’ in the Age of the McDonald’s Hamburger,” Modern Theology 7:1 (October 1990) 96-98.
I’ve been reading John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio today and came across this gem that I just had to post.
In believing, we entrust ourselves to the knowledge acquired by other people. This suggests an important tension. On the one hand, the knowledge acquired through belief can seem an imperfect form of knowledge, to be perfected gradually through personal accumulation of evidence; on the other hand, belief is often humanly richer than mere evidence, because it involves an interpersonal relationship and brings into play not only a person’s capacity to know but also the deeper capacity to entrust oneself to others, to enter into a relationship with them which is intimate and enduring.
It should be stressed that the truths sought in this interpersonal relationship are not primarily empirical or philosophical. Rather, what is sought is the truth of the person—what the person is and what the person reveals from deep within. Human perfection, then, consists not simply in acquiring an abstract knowledge of the truth, but in a dynamic relationship of faithful self- giving with others. It is in this faithful self-giving that a person finds a fullness of certainty and security. At the same time, however, knowledge through belief, grounded as it is on trust between persons, is linked to truth: in the act of believing, men and women entrust themselves to the truth which the other declares to them. Any number of examples could be found to demonstrate this; but I think immediately of the martyrs, who are the most authentic witnesses to the truth about existence. The martyrs know that they have found the truth about life in the encounter with Jesus Christ, and nothing and no-one could ever take this certainty from them. Neither suffering nor violent death could ever lead them to abandon the truth which they have discovered in the encounter with Christ. This is why to this day the witness of the martyrs continues to arouse such interest, to draw agreement, to win such a hearing and to invite emulation. This is why their word inspires such confidence: from the moment they speak to us of what we perceive deep down as the truth we have sought for so long, the martyrs provide evidence of a love that has no need of lengthy arguments in order to convince. The martyrs stir in us a profound trust because they give voice to what we already feel and they declare what we would like to have the strength to express.
In a recent address to the London School of Economics Rowan Williams argues for a more robust understanding of human rights distinctively shaped by Christian theological convictions. In typical form, Williams wonderfully recasts the terms of debate. You gotta love this man. Here is a brief excerpt:
The dignity accorded to the human other is not, then, a recognition that they may be better than they seem, but simply a recognition that what they have to say (welcome or unwelcome, intelligible or unintelligible, convergent or divergent) could in certain circumstances be the gift of God. Not every human other is a fellow-
member of the Body of Christ in the biblical sense; but the universal command to preach the gospel to all prohibits any conclusion that this or that person is incapable of ever hearing and answering God’s invitation, and therefore mandates an attitude of receptivity towards them. Not silencing the other or forcing their communication into your own agenda is part of remaining open to the communication of God – which may come even through the human other who is most repellent or opaque to sympathy. The recognition of a dignity that grounds the right to be heard is the recognition of my own need to receive as fully as I can what is being communicated to me by another being made by God. It compels that stepping back from control or manipulation of the other which we so often seek for our security, so as to hear what we cannot generate for ourselves. And it should be clear, incidentally, that this is an argument that also grounds whatever we might want to say about the ‘right’ of the non-human world to have an integrity not wholly at the mercy of human planning.
What holds a life together is simply the trust - or faith - that the eyes and the heart are turned towards truth, and that God accepts such a life without condition, looking on the will rather than merely the deed. God asks not for heroes but for lovers; not for moral athletes but for men and women aware of their need for acceptance, ready to find their selfhood in the longing for communion with an eternal “other.”
Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of the Cross (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1991) 96-97.
If we cannot transcend the vulnerability of belief by positing as accessible a nonparticular “natural,” might we then celebrate confessionally that light and truth have taken on the vulnerability of the particular? That would then call for and empower a missionary ethic of incarnation.
The challenge will still remain to find ways to translate and to work at a reciprocal adjudication of the varieties both of perception and of evaluation, where one provincial vision clashes with another. But the way to do that is not to imagine or proclaim or seek or discover some “neutral” or “common” or “higher” ground, but rather to work realistically at every concrete experience of overlap and conflict. By “overlap” I mean that two provincial visions are dealing with the same subject matter of bringing people into common enterprises. By “conflict” I mean simply that people may have different commitments behind these common enterprises, and thus they need to wrestle with those differences in terms that take account of each other’s distinct identity. Christians will never meet this challenge better by seeking to be less specifically Christian. They will meet it better if they take it on faith that Christ is Lord over the powers, that Creation is not independent of Redemption.
John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) 44.
No, I’m not going to quote N.T. Wright. Let’s see if you can guess who I’m going to quote…
Because this man Jesus carried his obedience and love to the point of accepting destruction (not just the torture of the cross but death, an ending, a total failure), because of this, he has been raised up beyond death to love which is the life of God. The resurrection of Jesus was the creation of the new bodily world, the new way of being human, the new way of being bodily. The risen Jesus did not enter paradise. He is paradise. Heaven is not a place beyond the sky. It is the risen Christ, the body of Christ living by love, the beginning of risen humankind, the ultimate future of humanity. It is because our bodies share in this bodily life of Christ (the thing we anticipate and symbolize in the eucharist), it is because we belong to this bodily world, that we conquer death, that we are able to live not for ourselves but by love, the love that Christ brings to us from God. And it is because of this that we celebrate the cross at Easter.
Hebert McCabe, God, Christ, and Us (New York: Continuum, 2005) 90-91.
