Natural theology FAIL

According to this article, redemption looks like the “boyish grin” of Brett Favre on a “good night,” simultaneously smells like the “oaky tease” of a Napa Chardonnay and the “outside smell” of the family dog in November, and tastes like the hoppy bitterness of an IPA and free range “Turkeyness.”

So, in other words, redemption is akin to shit middle-class white folks like to do in Grand Rapids, MI?

For and Against Dula Against Schlabach

A guest post by Gerald Schlabach

A response to Peter Dula’s critique of Unlearning Protestantism

in “For and Against Hauerwas Against Mennonites” (Mennonite Quarterly Review July 2010)

On behalf of the ACRS Reading Group in Harrisonburg, Ray Gingerich has asked me to respond to Peter Dula’s “trenchant” and “poignant” critique of me in a recent MQR article.  Let me first say, however, that I took Peter’s critique as such a friendly one that I did not myself think of it as “trenchant,” though his analysis is as usual exceptionally smart and illuminating.   I received it as the kind of critique that a scholar can and should welcome readily.  I have been subject to critiques from other scholars on other matters that I found difficult and painful because they seemed unfair – and unfair because they seemed not to have first endeavored to engage my arguments on their own terms before carrying debate forward.  Peter’s critique was one I welcomed, precisely because he summarized me fairly and knowledgeably, so that I could be confident we would be differing as scholars ought – pushing the field forward instead of endlessly backtracking to clarify what had been misunderstood and talked past.  I had actually asked Peter to read my book in manuscript form, because he seemed to be such an ideal reader – a student of Hauerwas, familiar with virtue ethics, etc., yet with an especially acute independence of mind, and with a Barthian bent that I anticipated would offer the best rival position to my own.  Peter didn’t get a chance to comment pre-publication because he had the funny idea that he should practice stability by getting married and doing his job at Eastern Mennonite well, rather than talking about stability.   Good for him.  This is not to say that I think Peter gets me altogether right.  But even where I will want to push back, Peter has got me thinking and examining my own assumptions and motivations in a way that is salutary.

Peter’s most pointed critique (or at least the one that may penetrate to core assumptions) is based on his inferring or perhaps deconstructing my motives – my “anxiety-ridden” fear that the church is failing to survive the corrosions of modernity and individualism.   I would prefer that my argument did not stand or fall on evidence of my motives, but Peter sets up his own critique in such a way that I am going to have to engage in retrospective self-analysis.  After all, his critique depends heavily on him being right when he says:

The central animating force behind the ecclesiology in Schlabach’s book is a deep-seated anxiety, even fear, about the future of the church. Moreover, the background is a particular communitarian diagnosis of modernity, without which the anxiety dissipates. That is, the argument depends almost entirely on Schlabach (actually, Alasdair MacIntyre) being right about our cultural condition and upon our sharing his anxiety in light of that condition.  (388)

Legitimately, Peter finds ample evidence in my apparent dependence on MacIntyre, and my use of a quote from Hauerwas that was just too good to use only once, about the task of Protestants who now need to figure out how to “survive” the modern world they helped create.  I will freely admit that Peter has textual evidence to run with this, and that he has prompted me to reflect deeply and self-critically about whether I am in fact fearful and preoccupied with survival to the point that I am somehow failing to trust God for the future of the church.  Maybe.  I will welcome a report from your group as to whether others read me this way, and I am sure I will keep thinking about this possibility in any case.  But at this point, I really don’t think so, and want to explain why I think there are other motives and influences at work in my book.

First, about MacIntyre:   I certainly have gotten a lot of intellectual help from him and describe myself as MacIntyrian with regard to the method of tradition-based inquiry, virtue ethics, and the priority of inquiry into “the good.”   But what I think I owe MacIntyre is that he helped me consolidate influences that were important to me well before I had even heard of him.   MacIntyre helped me understood what I was already appropriating from Thomas Kuhn, while avoiding the moral relativism for which others have found comfort in Kuhn.  He helped me to go deeper into the virtue ethics to which Hauerwas had introduced me.   And he helped me to link the sociological insights of Robert Bellah et al. with the philosophical disciplines that I had to learn as a doctoral student in Christian ethics.  But – and here’s the catch – all of those were already resonating with me because in my formation I was (and no doubt remain, even as a Catholic) so much of an Amish Mennonite, an identity in which the task of “sustaining Christian community” is nearly constitutive.

MacIntyre’s diagnosis of cultural “fragmentation,” which he illustrated with the famous thought experiment that opens After Virtue, has thus seemed interesting to me, and well-taken if strictly applied to the state of moral philosophy, but only that.  To me as a Mennonite and then a Mennonite Catholic who has no particular illusions about some prior supposedly intact state of Western civilization, MacIntyre’s preoccupations have never really been mine.  Insofar as they have resonated, it is because my Amish Mennonite upbringing (or more precisely, the legacy of my father’s Amish Mennonite upbringing) gave me a deep sense of solidarity with traditional cultures that I came to know over the years – the Maya in particular, but villages and neighborhoods in Latin America generally, as well as other traditional cultures I learned about in other continents through MCC, though from a distance.   To be sure, Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart did resonate as a diagnosis of the cultural state of North America, and this bears a family resemblance to MacIntyre’s cultural diagnosis.   But what seemed important to me even there was not its own investment in the practices of some prior golden age of American society.  Rather, what seemed important was the way it might help us understand the corrosion of Christian community itself, and the conditions needed to sustain “thick” communal practices.

Now, all of this could still leave me motivated by inordinate fear that modernity is corroding the conditions for sustaining Christian community, and leave Peter saying that he rests his case.  In other words, I might still be tending to neglect or even betray the cruciform shape of the Christian faith by worrying unduly about “survival.”  And as I say, Peter will keep me reflecting upon this possibility for a long time.  I have to take his reading seriously.  After all, I am quite on the record, in writings about “Abrahamic community” spread over nearly two decades, for insisting that there is a necessary if paradoxical tension to all faithful Christian community – namely that the originality of Abrahamic and then Christian community is that it actually loses its identity by protecting it with any kind of siege mentality, and that it preserves its identity only by placing that identity at risk again and again in such service as offers itself as a blessing to all the families of the earth (see http://personal.stthomas.edu/gwschlabach/docs/2v1k.htm).   Though I first wrote of this as a “paradigm” for Mennonite social ethics, it is nothing I have needed to lay aside in becoming a Catholic, for it seems to me that Vatican II encodes much the same pattern by speaking of the church as the “sacrament of the world’s salvation,” and the “sacrament of human unity.”   In any case, for me to neglect or betray this cruciform, Abrahamic, pattern of community life would not only constitute a scholarly inconsistency, but would constitute a cause for repentance – if indeed it is the case that anxiety, fear, and a preoccupation with survival are what have driven my project.  But humbly and with openness to fraternal correction, here’s why I don’t yet feel a need to repent:

For one thing, it seems obvious to me that martyrdom cannot emerge from nowhere.  Yes, individual Christians and indeed entire Christian communities can be called to lay down their lives for the sake of the gospel.  No, survival can never be a supreme value within faithful Christianity.   But martyrs are able to be martyrs because they have been formed with a certain kind of Christlike character.  And that formation in turn depends on certain qualities of communal life, which must exist through time, with enough “continuity” to form its members.   Everything I say in the opening pages of chapter two about the creative paradox inherent in a “tradition of dissent,” which attracted Hauerwas to Mennonites, could be argued in parallel fashion about the kind of continuing tradition that is paradoxically needed to produce Christians who feel no obsessive need to survive.   Jesus called out a community of disciples who would be willing to die for the sake of the gospel, but he didn’t call them to immediately be stillborn as a community.  Christian communities have to live long enough and sustainably enough to give up their lives freely, or else they are purely victims.   Even Jesus, by insisting on what New Testament scholars call the “messianic secret,” seems to have taken pains that neither he nor his movement die prematurely.   Already in Nazareth, following his “inaugural” proclamation in Luke 4, he deliberately eluded a premature execution through stoning, for example.

For another thing, I have written about the “practices of stability” above all because I think they are right.   If readers like Peter must do a deconstructive genealogy of ideas on me, I would – to repeat – at least ask them to pay attention to my Amish Mennonite roots.   (Quick story:  Since my father, Theron Schlabach, was visiting for a week when the task of doing a final copy edit fell upon me in the middle of a semester, I asked him, as an experienced editor, to do that task for me.  When he gave me back the manuscript, there was a little note in the corner of the cover sheet:  “Amish ordnung writ large?”)  Whatever the ironies of my having now become Catholic – which I try to face forthrightly in my book’s introduction –  and however much John Yoder has been my preeminent Mennonite influence, I always considered Harold Bender and Guy Hershberger to be the greater role models for an ecclesial intellectual.  Why?  The senior seminar paper I did as a history major at Goshen College took me back past their writings alone, to the 1920s, when both made very deliberate decisions to hang in there with the church, at a time when many of their peers in the Young People’s Movement were peeling off impatiently.   (Later, Yoder and other Concern Group members ultimately stuck with the church too, as I discuss in chapter two, but arguably in spite of themselves or at least in spite of their ecclesiology; and of course Yoder’s relationship to the flesh-and-blood Mennonite church was at best uneasy for decades.)  So as Hauerwas’s virtue ethics would predict, the most important theological data has come to me in the form of mentors and role models – lives that embody the good.  Later of course I encountered Catholic models, some of whom I tell about in my introduction and others of whom I narrate in chapter 5.  I do not believe it is anxiety that has produced this book, therefore, but something far more positive: the attractiveness of these lives.  Of course my book goes on to use as many analyses and devices and tacks as I can think of to get readers to notice what is inherently a self-effacing “ordinary” virtue.  But my most important motive is the conviction:  Stability is the right way to be a Christian; stability is the right way to participate in Christian community.

Postscript no. 1:  For those who have not read my introduction and might wonder, let me add that I became a Catholic not to depart unstably from the Mennonite community, as it were, but because all of this also required me to search for fresh models by which distinctive traditions and communities within the Church catholic can remain true to their vocations and charisms while remaining in or seeking communion with large wholes.

Postscript no. 2:  I guess am willing to accept one of Peter’s critiques – namely, that for someone so apparently influenced by Hauerwas, I do surprisingly little actual theology in my book.  Looking back, perhaps Peter is right.   If I have a lame defense it is this:  Peter’s critique may be a little like that of certain evangelicals who want an altar call at every church service, or want every Christian trade book to work “the plan of salvation” in somewhere.  A Mennonite (and for that matter a Methodist or a Catholic) replies:  But after someone gets saved, what does a Christian do next?  Analogously:  my book is not so much an ecclesiology or theology of the church as it is about the “then what?” of church, the “what then?” of Christian community.   Perhaps because I was at pains that the book not come across as a Catholic apologetic, I may have tried rhetorically to allow any reader’s ecclesiology to serve as a starting point, so long as he or she takes the church seriously enough to care about “sustaining Christian community.”  In my own mind, my earlier work on Abrahamic community, filled out by key ecclesiological developments at Vatican II, were all assumed.   But sure, I probably shouldn’t have assumed.

Gerald W. Schlabach

19 September 2010

Barth on sacralization

We are thinking of what can and does always and everywhere happen in a hundred different forms; of the slipping of the community into the sacralisation in which it not only cuts itself off from its own origin and goal and loses its secret by trying to reveal it in itself, but also separates itself for its own pleasure from poor, sinful, erring humanity bleeding from a thousand wounds, trying to impose itself where it owes its witness, and denying and suppressing its witness by witnessing only to itself. Sacralisation means the transmutation of the lordship of Jesus Christ into the vanity of a Christianity which vaunts itself in His name but in reality is enamored only of itself and its traditions, confessions and institutions. Sacralisation means the suppression of the Gospel by a pseudo-sacred law erected and proclaimed on the supposed basis of the Gospel. Sacralisation means the setting up of an idol which is dead like all other images of human fabrication; which cannot hear or speak or illuminate or help or heal; in which the man who has discovered and created it cannot in the last resort admire or worship anyone or anything but himself.

(Karl Barth, CD IV.2, 670)

God has not ever, no not ever

I realize that my theological limitations and my close identity with the social conditions of black people could blind me to the truth of the gospel. And maybe our white theologians are right when they insist that I have overlooked the universal significance of Jesus’ message. But I contend that there is no universalism that is not particular. Indeed their insistence upon the universal note of the gospel arises out of their own particular political and social interests. As long as they can be sure the gospel is for everybody, ignoring that God liberated a particular people from Egypt, came in a particular man called Jesus, and for the particular purpose of liberating the oppressed, then they can continue to talk in theological abstractions, failing to recognize that such talk is not the gospel unless it is related to the concrete freedom of the little ones. My point is that God came, and continues to come, to those who are poor and helpless, for the purpose of setting them free. And since the people of color are his elected poor in America, any interpretation of God that ignores black oppression cannot be Christian theology. The ‘blackness of Christ,’ therefore, is not simply a statement about skin color, but rather, the transcendent affirmation that God has not ever, no not ever, left the oppressed alone in struggle. He was with them in Pharaoh’s Egypt, is with them in America, Africa, and Latin America, and will come in the end of time to consummate fully their human freedom.

James Cone, God of the Oppressed, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997) 126.

The apostolic church

As their distinctive title “apostle” shows us, they were sent out to preach the gospel to the world, a light which had been kindled to give light to all that are in the house (Mt. 5:15)–nothing more. The character given to them is not great or significant in itself. Not even in the highest conceivable sense is it a matter of their own good or ill, of their own honor, or even of the self-reposing structural importance and dignity of the work which they have to accomplish in this character. Their being and their work both point beyond themselves. Their field is the world, and they are only sowers who pass over it. They renounce any self-grounded or self-reposing rightness or importance of their distinctive being and activity. It is the special direction in which they look, to the One who has made them His and whom they have recognized as theirs, which forces them to make this renunciation. It cannot be otherwise than that even in this renunciation they should be a normative pattern to the community gathered by their ministry. As an apostolic church the church can never in any respect be an end in itself, but following the existence of the apostles, it exists only as it exercises the ministry of a herald. . . . As Christ’s community it points beyond itself. At bottom it can never consider its own security, let alone its appearance. As Christ’s community it is always free from itself. In its deepest and most proper tendency it is not churchly, but worldly–the church with open doors and great windows, behind which it does better not to close itself in upon itself again by putting in pious stained-glass windows. It is holy in its openness to the street and even the alley, in its turning to the profanity of human life–the holiness which, according to Rom. 12:5, does not scorn to rejoice with them that do rejoice and to weep with them that weep. Its mission is not additional to its being. It is, as it is sent and active in its mission. It builds up itself for the sake of its mission and in relation to it. It does it seriously and actively as it is aware of its mission and in the freedom from itself which this gives (Barth, CD IV, 724-725).

Reflections on Easter Sunday

The following post is the fourth and final part of a four part easter series I’ve written. See also my reflections on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday.

“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Cor 15:20).

Although the resurrection of Jesus is a distinct event and, indeed, reveals that the most determinative reality of the universe is love, it does not erase or cancel out the suffering and death of Jesus in any way. Far from it. The resurrection is the Father’s “yes” to the Son’s gift of himself; it is the Father’s proclamation that a particular person and embodied life is the content of love. I think Herbert McCabe is correct to say that “the best picture of the resurrection is the cross” (God Matters 106). In this post, I want to emphasize that the resurrection of Jesus does not finally mean that we won’t suffer and die. This is what I mean when I say it does not erase the cross. I think this is important to note because we too easily interpret our hope in Christ as escape from suffering and death. I think exactly the opposite is the case. I want to suggest that the resurrection is not so much about escape from suffering and death, rather it tells us how to go about living and dying. In other words, I want to suggest that the shape of our living (and our dying) must take the form of the cross. In the words of McCabe, “the cross does not show us some temporary weakness of God that is cancelled out by the resurrection. It says something permanent about God: not that God eternally suffers but that the eternal power of God is love; and this as expressed in history must be suffering” (109).

This, however, is not the final word. The resurrection of Jesus is the foundation of our hope for a future of being together in God. It is God’s eternal promise to humanity. The form of Jesus’ life and death is not trivial; it is what love looks like in a broken world. Our participation in the resurrection (and we will all be raised) takes a particular form in the here and now. I want to suggest that it takes the form of the cross, which is nothing less than offering our whole lives to the other, especially the poor and rejected ones of our world, as a prayer with Jesus to the Father.

Reflections on Holy Saturday with Alan Lewis

The following post is the third part of a four part Easter series that I wrote two years ago. See the previous reflections on Good Friday and Holy Thursday.

It is all too common for us to skip over Holy Saturday. Perhaps it is because we don’t want to accept the reality of death much less the death of God. We celebrate Good Friday for what “Christ did for us” on the cross, but even while we do this we tend to ignore the utter Godlessness of the suffering of Jesus. If on Good Friday God suffered, on the Holy Saturday God died. The question about whether God suffered or not in Jesus is an old one. In the early church some denied that Jesus suffered at all, saying that he only seemed to suffer, precisely because it was believed that God couldn’t suffer much less die. Against such a view, we must affirm that Jesus’ suffering and death was very real and that he suffered and died as God.

In his remarkable Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday Alan Lewis notes that the second day, Holy Saturday, “appears to be a no-man’s-land, an anonymous, counterfeit moment in the gospel story, which can boast no identity for itself, claim no meaning, and reflect only what light it can borrow from its predecessor and its sequel” (3). However, Lewis suggests that this Saturday could be a “significant zero, a pregnant emptiness, a silent nothing which says everything” (3).

Building on the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Lewis stresses the supreme importance that when we listen to the Easter story we listen with expectancy. In other words, we must meditate on the cross and burial of Jesus without thinking about the Father’s response. Lewis encourages us to think about the death of Christ without or before the resurrection. Lewis writes, “As the events of that climactic weekend occurred, and as the gospel story recounts them, this did not begin as a three-day happening, destined to end as a story of victory and life. Far from being the first day, the day of the cross is, in the logic of the narrative itself, actually the last day, the end of the story of Jesus” (31). Holy Saturday is not simply an “in-between day that waits for the morrow,” the resurrection is not in sight. Instead, this Saturday is “an empty void, a nothing, shapeless, meaningless, and antilclimactic: simply the day after the end” (31)
. 
Today, we remember the savior of humanity lying in the grave, dead, a dead rotting corpse- utter hopelessness and Godlessness.

All quotes taken from Alan Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).

Reflections on Good Friday with Herbert McCabe

Two years ago I wrote a number of reflections during Holy Week drawing from the late Dominican priest Herbert McCabe’s sermons. You can find his sermons in God Matters. I’ve decided to re-post these (slightly revised) reflections once again here.

I have heard a lot of complaints about so-called penal substitutionary atonement. Now it is important to remember that there is not one way to understand “the atonement” or God’s saving work in Christ. Certainly, some ways of understanding the atonement are better than others. Nonetheless, I do suspect that penal substitutionary atonement is usually misrepresented and not all that well understood. There may very well be problems with this “theory,” but all theories of atonement are problematic precisely because they are always theories. God’s saving work in Christ is truly a mystery. This is not to say that we cannot reflect on it or attempt to articulate what it might be about, but we must understand that our language and our analogies will always fail.

To be sure, we can say that the Father in no way punishes his Son. The Father is nothing but “well pleased” with the Son. I think that we can also say that the Father is not interested in divine child abuse. Yet, the Father “knew” the Son would be killed because he knew his Son was entering a crucifying world, a world that rejects God. As Herbert McCabe noted, “The mission of Jesus from the Father is not the mission to be crucified; what the Father wished is that Jesus should be human…And this is what Jesus sees as a command laid on him by his Father in heaven; the obedience of Jesus to his Father is to be totally, completely human” (93). Thus, Jesus was crucified because he was human not because the Father planned to have him killed for some greater cause. We must always remember and never shy away from the fact that we crucified Jesus, not the Father. We have created a world that is characterized by suffering and death—by oppression, torture, and even crucifixion. We must not become confused on this point: God never causes suffering. God is always God for us, always for human flourishing, always for love.

Jesus was killed not because God wanted him to be killed but because we wanted him to be killed. He posed a challenge to the ruling powers, to the establishment, and to each individual and he continues to do so—and we continue to respond by crucifying him. The cross signifies humanity’s rejection of God and, indeed, of all humanness. It reveals the depth of our sin. Jesus pours his heart out and quite literally his blood for the sake of humanity. This is an invitation to love, to enter into a relationship with a person who is love.

The cross reveals that each of us rejects God; we reject love daily. This is what is meant by “original sin.” The rejection of God is built into the very structures of the society we have constructed. The cross of Christ reveals what we have made with God’s creation, what we have made with the world. We have a made this world a place, structured by fear and violence, in which it is dangerous, perhaps even fatal, to be human. The cross of Christ reveals to us that there is a basic wrong, persistent through history. This wrong is, as McCabe put it, “the rejection of the love that casts out fear, the fear of the love that casts out fear, the fear that without the backing of terror, at least in the last resort, human society and thus human life cannot exist” (97).

It is important to note that Jesus refuses to take up arms, to resort to violence in the building of his new society, the church, which is to be defined by self-giving love, forgiveness, and the sharing of life together. Instead, he trusts in the work of the Holy Spirit. Yet, he was killed. So, Jesus on the cross represents the failure of human life. The cross shows us the reality that all of our efforts to love, to struggle against the oppressors of this world, finally end in failure, even in death. We continue to struggle just as Jesus did out of obedience and love, but even despite some gains we continue to fall short. It is important to remember that whatever the political significance of Jesus’ death may be it did not transform the world—killers continue to kill and torturers continue to torture. The establishment continues to oppress the weak and marginalize the poor. Yet Jesus’ prayer to the Father is to work through his failure. As McCabe said, “Before his death Jesus had tried, but in the end failed, to bring the Spirit of love to a small group of disciples; now through him the Father pours the Spirit through the world; by this the world is to be transformed into a community of love, the Kingdom of God” (100). The Father’s response to the prayer of Jesus is the resurrection.

All quotes taken from Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987).

Reflections on Holy Thursday with Herbert McCabe

Two years ago I wrote a number of reflections during Holy Week drawing from the late Dominican priest Herbert McCabe’s sermons. You can find his sermons in God Matters. I’ve decided to re-post these (slightly revised) reflections once again here.

On Holy Thursday the church remembers Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples and so also the mystery of communion, or what the church has traditionally called the Eucharist. The Eucharist and indeed everything that the church is about points to the “mystery of unity,” that is, the being-together of people. The church proclaims that all of our efforts toward human unity find their apex and indeed culminate as we participate in the life of the triune God. As the late English Dominican Herbert McCabe pointed out, “The ultimate unity of people is only to be found in God, and the real God is only to be found in unity between people” (God Matters, 78). Needless to say, humanity has not reached a point of unity. Today, we solemnly remember our utter estrangement and alienation from one another. As a result of our persistent disunity our concepts of God constantly slip into idolatry. As McCabe put it, “God becomes for us the God of our class, our nation, our race or time, the tutelary deity, perhaps, of the ‘free world’” (78). When we recall the launching of an illegal U.S.-led war in Iraq seven years ago we still hear the voices of those who said, “God is on our side.” Lord Jesus Christ, forgive us, the church, for our complicity in this idolatry and our collusion with nationalist politics. To recognize the disunity of humanity and our own complicity in this is to recognize our role in the pervasiveness of sin, which is our continual denial of God’s loving grace.

In the church’s celebration of the Eucharist the Last Supper is made present, but we are also flung into the future, for the future of the world is nothing less than participation in the mystery and life of the triune God. It is the unity, the communion that we long for; it is being-together in freedom and truthfulness. Holy Thursday is the celebration of being together as people, as human beings, and so we also celebrate the unity that is to come with the Father, in the Son, and through the Holy Spirit. Yet, Holy Thursday, like all the church’s traditional sacraments, only exists because of sin, which is to say that these things are temporary and incomplete.

Our only hope for unity is in God. As the church, our effort toward this unity is nothing other than solidarity with “the poor and the exploited against their oppressors,” for “the only God we know is the God of the poor, the God who takes sides in the struggle, and that any God of consensus who is supposed to belong to both sides is an illusion and a dangerous one” (79). God takes sides. But we do not. And so we can never say “God is on our side.” Let me be clear, this is not because God is somehow neutral to injustice, but because we are, in fact, compromised. Because God is on the side of the poor, so the church if it is to be a sign of the kingdom must be the church of the poor.

What we experience in the United States is not freedom, peace, or unity primarily because it is born out of fear, indifference to truth, and based on violence. The unity that we have as citizens of a nation, that which constitutes the United States as a public, for instance, is a false unity because it is not grounded in the God who is love and truthfulness. The very structure of the United States and the false catholicity that “globalization” seems to offer is built on human antagonism and violence. The depth of human sin is so severe that all our efforts to dismantle structural violence will not finally bring about unity. Indeed, the human race is in need of a much greater transformation, a more radical revolution than the overthrow of systems of injustice: we are in need of forgiveness.

And so, when the local church gathers together on Holy Thursday, the whole church is present, just as the whole Christ is made present in the Eucharist. This gathering is never private. Whenever the church gathers it gathers as a public in its own right. There is no such thing as private worship. The Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, is thus a sign of the mystery of unity. The Eucharist as a meal is a sign of community and hospitality—the hospitality of God. Each and every human being is invited to the table to share in the food that is a sign of our present and future unity in God. And so we give thanks for the gift of life and nourishment, for God’s sustaining love and God’s Word made flesh in whom we were made and to whom we are destined to share in life together.

All quotes taken from Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987).

Another forthcoming Herbert McCabe volume

Over the past few years the good folks at T & T Clark/Continuum have done us the wonderful service of republishing the work of Herbert McCabe and with the help of Brian Davies we now have at our reading disposal dozens of McCabe’s sermons and short essays. McCabe was an English Dominican theologian who identified himself as something of a Wittgensteinian-Marxist Thomist. In the 1960s he was a contributor to Slant a Leftist Catholic magazine associated with the University of Cambridge and the Dominican Order in England. He was also an editor of New Blackfriars.McCabe is simply a joy to read. He’s funny and witty and brings Thomas to life.

So, I am happy to announce that yet another volume of McCabe’s work–I believe the sixth since McCabe’s death in 2001–is set to be released this April. Here is a brief description of God and Evil in the Theology of St Thomas Aquinas:

What should we mean by words such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘being’, ’cause’, ‘creation’, and ‘God’? These are McCabe’s main questions. In seeking to answer them he demonstrates why it cannot be shown that evil disproves God’s existence. He also explains how we can rightly think of evil in a world made by God. McCabe’s approach to God and evil is refreshingly unconventional given much that has been said about it of late. Yet it is also very traditional. It will interest and inform anyone seriously interested in the topic.