Faith, Hope, Love, and Justice

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction: Challenges and Opportunities for Faith, Hope, and Love Today
Chapter One: Faith, Hope, and Love in the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI
On the Role of Christian Particularity in Political Theology
Chapter Two: Protest against Death :Faith, Hope, and Love A Theological Meditation
Beer and Skittles as (Divinely Initiated) Protest?
Chapter Three: The Theological Virtues: “And the Greatest of These Is Love”
The Trouble with Hope and Compensatory Logic in a Kantian Form
Chapter Four: Faith, Hope, and Love and the Challenges of Justice
Love and Justice in Non-Dualistic Perspective
Chapter Five: Faith, Hope and Love: The Challenge of Colorblindness
What about Other Marginalized Communities and Beings?Grace Y. KaoMary
Chapter Six: Incarnating Faith, Hope, and Love Theo-Political Virtues and the Common Good
Hoping against Hope
Chapter Seven: Faith, Hope, and Love in an Age of Terror
Cruciform Atonement
Chapter Eight: Transcendence and Solidarity: Conditions of Faith, Hope, and Love Today
What If Christians Are Responsible for Their Own Decline?
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

Faith, Hope, Love, and Justice

Faith, Hope, Love, and Justice The Theological Virtues Today Anselm K. Min

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2018933103 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction  Challenges and Opportunities for Faith, Hope, and Love Today Anselm K. Min 1  Faith, Hope, and Love in the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI Thomas P. Rausch, S.J. On the Role of Christian Particularity in Political Theology Shane Akerman 2  Protest against Death: Faith, Hope, and Love: A Theological Meditation Ingolf U. Dalferth Beer and Skittles as (Divinely Initiated) Protest? Rhys Kuzmic 3  The Theological Virtues: “And the Greatest of These Is Love” Stephen T. Davis The Trouble with Hope and Compensatory Logic in a Kantian Form Jonathan Russell 4  Faith, Hope, and Love and the Challenges of Justice Francis Schüssler Fiorenza Love and Justice in Non-Dualistic Perspective Joseph Prabhu v

vii

1 18 29

47 59

69 79 99

Contents

vi

5 Faith, Hope and Love: The Challenge of Colorblindness Mary McClintock Fulkerson What about Other Marginalized Communities and Beings? Grace Y. Kao 6  Incarnating Faith, Hope, and Love: Theo-Political Virtues and the Common Good M. Shawn Copeland Hoping against Hope Kirsten Gerdes 7  Faith, Hope, and Love in an Age of Terror Elaine A. Robinson Cruciform Atonement Paul Pistone 8  Transcendence and Solidarity: Conditions of Faith, Hope, and Love Today Anselm K. Min What If Christians Are Responsible for Their Own Decline? Paul E. Capetz

115 127 139

148 163 185 197

219

Index 229 About the Contributors

235

Introduction Challenges and Opportunities for Faith, Hope, and Love Today Anselm K. Min Faith, hope, and love in the theological sense are directed to God as their proper object, derive from God as their source, and are fulfilled only in the full communion with God as their end. Whether you call them theological “virtues” as the Catholc tradition has since the Middle Ages, or prefer not to do so as does the Protestant tradition, faith, hope, and love in the theological sense does constitute the heart of Christianity. All Christian doctrines serve to describe, justify, and elaborate what Christians believe in, hope for, and love as the ultimate saving significance of human existence. Christians are expected to live the implications and demands of faith, hope, and love in the totality of their existence, and the Christian communities are meant to be communal signs of faith, hope, and love to fellow human beings in history. Augustine was able to summarize the whole of Christian life under faith, hope, and love in his Enchiridion. Nevertheless, it has become very difficult to believe, hope, and love in the theological sense today. All three have come under severe challenges from contemporary culture during the last several decades. Problems of evil and suffering, the popularization of Enlightenment rationalism, atheism, and agnosticism, structural injustices, capitalist materialism and hedonism, imperialist conflicts and ideologies, nihilistic culture of the dominant media, religious and moral relativism, all of these in the intensifying context of the globalizing world: all these and more have tended to challenge and erode the integrity of Christian faith, hope, and love, and reduce them to the harmless banalities of complacent, indifferent, spiritually tired middle-class life. Under these circumstances it seems high time to once again think through the meaning of faith, hope, and love as radically and comprehensively as possible. Briefly, there are three large issues we face in this task. (1) How do we conceptualize faith, hope, and love? (2) How are faith, hope, and love related vii

viii

Introduction

to one another? (3) How are faith, hope, and love related to the problem of suffering and injustice rather pervasive in the contemporary world? (4) What can be done to revitalize faith, hope, and love in the presence of the many pressures and temptations—and opportunities—of contemporary culture? So I organized a conference, as I had done on two other occasions,1 as a way of pooling theological resources together to address the issues. The conference, titled “Faith, Hope, and Love Today: Challenges and Opportunities,” was held on the campus of Claremont Graduate University on April 15 and 16, 2016. I invited eight theologians, M. Shawn Copeland (Boston College), Ingolf Dalferth (Claremont Graduate University), Stephen Davis (Claremont McKenna College), Mary McClintock Fulkerson (Duke Divinity School), Anselm Min (Claremont Graduate University), Thomas Rausch, S.J. (Loyola Marymount University), Elaine Robinson (Saint Paul School of Theology), and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza (Harvard Divinity School). They were asked to develop their theologies of faith, hope, and love in the context of contemporary challenges. What was expected was not exegesis but a creative theological engagement with the many contemporary challenges to faith, hope, and love. What follows are eight quite different responses to the question of the conference, which indicates both the diversity and challenge of contemporary theology. It is my pleasant task as the organizer and now editor of the proceedings of the conference to briefly introduce the content of each chapter. I begin with the theological meditations on the meaning of faith, hope, and love today by Pope Benedict XVI as masterfully analyzed by Thomas P. Rausch, S.J. under the title, “Faith, Hope, and Love in the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI.” It has been well known that Benedict XVI, a major theologian in his own right as Joseph Ratzinger, has been deeply concerned over the increasing prevalence of rationalist secularism in the world, and his three encyclicals here analyzed, Deus caritas est [God is love] (December 25, 2005), Spe salvi [Saved in hope] (November 30, 2007), and Lumen fidei [Light of faith] (June 29, 2013), are his pontifical theological responses to the cultural crisis of our time. According to Rausch, Pope Benedict is most disturbed by the increasingly dominant culture of secularism with its attempt to deny the transcendent and find immanent substitutes for faith, hope, and love, where faith has become faith in science, hope has become hope in technical progress, and love has become either purely Platonic or purely sensual. His treatment of faith, hope, and love, therefore, takes the form of a theological critique of contemporary culture and its commitment to autonomous reason hostile to faith and a pastoral attempt to restore a sense of the transcendent as an essential condition for illuminating the darkness of human existence.



Introduction ix

In the encyclical on love, Benedict, echoing the first letter of John, affirms that “God is love” (1 John 4:16) and goes on to explore various meanings of love. In a positive appreciation of eros he recognizes that eros can draw us to the divine because it contains a certain intimation of the divine and the beatifying union with God. Eros cannot be reduced to the instinct of “pure sex” but must be integrated with agape, unselfish love. As creator, God loves creatures “with all the passion of a true love.” God’s love is both totally eros and totally agape. This love is embodied in the humanity of Jesus who came not so much to expiate as to “give himself away” for the sake of lost humanity, giving himself as food in the Eucharist. Founded on this love the Church is a community of love with the responsibility to practice love at every level. Concrete love of neighbor will always remain irreplaceable, even in the most just societies. While having discussed the life of communion with God after death in his theological works, here in the encyclical on hope Benedict focuses on its relation to justice, agreeing with Dostoevsky that evildoers cannot sit at the eternal banquet with their victims as though nothing had happened: injustice will not have the last word. Hope is hope that life will not end in emptiness, that justice will ultimately triumph. In the modern world since the Enlightenment, however, hope in God has been reduced to hope in human progress on the basis of reason and freedom, but without God, unredeemed and sinful, reason and freedom only maximize their capacity for evil, the reason why their many utopian attempts to establish a just society on earth by themselves have ended in failure and violence as witness the French, Communist, and Nazi revolutions. Benedict rejects an individualistic understanding of salvation; our eschatological hope is hope in the healing and redemption of the many divisions of humanity, something only God in Christ can achieve. In the spirit of Horkheimer and Adorno, Benedict is convinced that the hope in the ultimate triumph of justice is the most effective argument for the eschatological faith in eternal life. Lumen fidei, substantially Benedict’s own work although issued by his successor Francis, follows the classic Catholic tradition emphasizing the character of faith as “light” and ecclesial in form, along with the Augustinian insight that love is the a priori condition of knowledge and truth and a treatment of the standard theme, the relation between faith and reason. For Benedict faith is neither a blind belief in something arbitrary nor a merely subjective emotion but a “light” born of the experience of the living God that illuminates every aspect of human existence, revealing the love of Jesus in his triumph over death and opening us to a future not limited to this world. It is something existential, not merely cognitive or doctrinal. It is necessarily ecclesial in form, something lived in the church, in the communion of fellow believers,

x

Introduction

in the unity of the “we” called the body of Christ. It is not an individualistic act. Benedict’s elaboration of faith is further characterized by his typically Augustinian epistemology: knowledge and truth are dependent on love. Truth and love are mutually related because both are held together in the human heart, the core of the human person. Love needs truth: love unrelated to truth is no more than fickle emotion. But truth also needs love, for love is also the source of knowledge. Truth enlightens us when we are touched by love. This is crucial in the relationship between faith and theology. It is faith that guides reason with the love of truth, orients reason to open itself to the divine light, and enables it to come to a profounder knowledge of God. Reason and faith are not only compatible, as traditional Catholic teaching has been saying, as recently as John Paul II’s Fides et ratio; they also strengthen each other, an aspect that needs special attention in light of the radical contemporary separation and even hostility between them. In the second, very challenging chapter, “Protest against Death: Faith, Hope, and Love; A Theological Meditation” by Ingolf Dalferth we turn to the radical Lutheran perspective of justification by faith alone. For him the perennial task of theology is to explore our existential situation as human beings coram deo, a situation that does not really vary with historical changes. How should we orient our life and practice to the presence of God’s creative love in all its dimensions? The most radical challenge we face as human beings is the challenge of death. In a penetrating theological meditation Dalferth tries to understand faith, hope, and love as the enactment of the Christian protest against death based on the trust in God’s creative love. The most decisive fact about human life is not so much our rationality (Aristotle) or personhood free and in communication (Kant) as our fear of death (Nietzsche), and all significant human endeavors are endeavors to escape from this fear of death. The only absolute certainty in life is that we die, and death means the end of all our actual and potential life. We cannot know or imagine what it means not to be anymore. As long as I am alive, I cannot experience my own non-existence. Our fear of death is the cognitive and emotional result of this impossibility of experiencing my own non-existence. We are thrown into a world not of our own making, where we are entirely helpless and passive with regard to both the beginning and the end of our life. Does it, then, make sense to speak of overcoming death? For Dalferth, it makes sense only if there is a numerical, personal identity between the person who is dead and the person who overcomes death. If we follow the Platonist tradition and say that the soul survives the death of the body, we are not taking death seriously enough. If we say that both souls and bodies die but that the souls are re-created for a new life, then the question arises as to what preserves the identity of the first soul with the second. Furthermore,



Introduction xi

the second soul must be somebody no longer subject to death. For Dalferth, “only somebody who lives a life of a different kind and order can do what we who shall die cannot do: to create new life of a different kind out of death.” This somebody is precisely what Christians understand by God, “the one who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist” (Rom. 4:17). Any life after death is both possible and actual only due to God’s actuality and actualizing activity. Dalferth sees two implications of this view. One is that God does not create two kinds of life, one that leads to death and another that originates from death. Rather, the life that leads to death is due, in Christian understanding, to the creature ignoring God by turning away from the divine source of life, which is then remedied by being re-born into God’s eternal life through God overcoming the life-damaging consequences of the sinful life of the creature. The second implication is that it is from death that God creates new life and calls into being that which does not exist anymore. Being dead means the radical end of our life as far as we are concerned, but it is not the end of being in communication with God who can create out of nothing and even from death. The paradigmatic example of overcoming death, for Dalferth, is the death and resurrection of Jesus according to the New Testament witness. Jesus was totally and completely dead with no spark of life lingering on as an immortal soul, yet it is this same identical Jesus who was “raised by God for our salvation.” Faced with the problem of the same Jesus who was dead yet alive, the New Testament found a solution by appealing to a different perspective, that of God, which also involved a different view of us, as expressed in the Easter confession. The resurrection is not something that can be described or witnessed in creaturely terms but a confession of a divine creative activity involving a new orientation in the relation between God, Jesus, and us. God as the sole center of activity, Jesus as God’s self-giving love, and us who are challenged to change from God-ignoring creatures to neighbors of God and of God’s neighbors, that is, what we ought to be coram deo. The confession is not only about Jesus but also about God and God’s relationship with us, expressing a fundamental reorientation and existential re-creation of human life to which we contribute absolutely nothing positive but which is wholly a gift from God, giving us a new identity as children, heirs, friends, and neighbors of God with corresponding rights and obligations, hopes and expectations. It is this radically reorienting creation of a new identity and a new life that gave the early Christians a new perspective on Jesus, themselves, and everything else in a new light, the light of God’s creative love. Dalferth emphasizes the fact that this new orientation is a scheme of orientation that structures not the world but our relation to the world, not its

xii

Introduction

metaphysical being but its existential meaning for us, not the phenomena themselves but how to conduct ourselves in relation to them. Reference to God in theology is not a reference to an explanatory principle but to the focal point of ultimate orientation. God is neither a phenomenon among phenomena nor an immanent explanatory principle of the world. God is the creator radically different from creatures. Life and death are not merely immanent processes of the world but also precisely the sphere of divine creativity. We can become aware of this, however, only through a radical reorientation of our lives to the presence of the self-communicating love of God, a reorientation that “can only happen to us and not be attained by our own powers,” a matter of a gift, not an achievement. This discloses God as our creator and us as God’s creatures, who are not just finite, not infinite, but willed and loved by God. Creation discourse gives a new meaning to everything, to who we are but also to what we can and cannot do. We cannot give life to ourselves or rise from death by ourselves. Yet we are alive, and if we can come into being from non-being through God, it is likewise possible to come into being from no-longer-being through God’s creative love. It is crucial, here, for Dalferth, not to take an ontological, or metaphysical, approach to creation, which only gets us entangled in all sorts of aporias, but a hermeneutical or orientational approach, that is, as a way of looking at the world from the divine point of view, which is radically different from the finite human perspective. To look at the world from the divine point of view is to look at it in terms of God’s comprehensive vision and infinite capacities as well as to look at ourselves precisely as creatures and understand our life coram deo as creatures willed and sustained by God and to be perfected and made true by God. This in turn would require that we live in gratitude to our creator and with respect for the dignity of our fellow creatures. Concretely, what does it mean to live coram deo, from the divine perspective? It means a radically different perspective on the meaning of life and death. Just as early Christians saw in the crucifixion of Jesus an eschatological manifestation of God’s life-creating love, the new perspective enables us to look at death as no longer the end of all things but as an occasion for God to start something utterly new and to look at life as no longer ending in the futility of death but as open and sensitive to God’s own eternal life. God creates new life out of no longer being (death) as God creates life out of non-being (nothingness). Christian hope lies precisely in the trust that God can and will give new life to the dead where their identity will also be preserved in the eternal life with God. God is God because God raises the dead from death, and the hope is that he will do so for all because God did so in the case of Jesus. Dalferth concludes:



Introduction xiii

This is the content and basis of Christian hope, faith, and love: Christians hope that God will raise them from the dead to an eternal life with God (hope); they ground their hope on the trust that God has done so with Jesus Christ (faith); and they put their trust in God because they have reasons to believe that God has done and will do so out of pure love, not because there is anything in us that would give us a right to expect from God to raise us from the dead, but because God has promised to become our neighbor for all eternity (love).

Dalferth draws four implications of this view. The first is that the life to come begins right here in the midst of life in the life of grace characterized by faith, hope, and love, which are modes of living that is open to the selfcommunicating and life-creating presence of God. They are neither a set of special activities alongside of other activities nor “virtues” but simply the Christian way of doing and experiencing anything in the light of the presence of God made possible by God, “in us, without us” as Augustine and Aquinas put it. The second implication is that they are the specifically Christian form of protest against death, destruction, meaninglessness, and nothingness based on hope in God and God alone “who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist” (Rom. 4:17), not based on the alleged immortality of the soul. The third implication is that we do not “have” souls but “are” souls precisely “because God makes us souls by incorporating us into his divine life in a way that enables us to have new relations to others and ourselves in and through God” despite the fact that death means the complete cessation of our physical and mental activities, the end of both our Dasein and Sosein. This requires a new formulation of the immortality of the soul. The fourth and last implication is that this hope is not empty because it is founded on faith or trust in God as the one who raised Jesus from the dead as the first of a new creation. Christian hope and trust (faith) are not merely epistemic attitudes but the way Christians live and practice their life coram deo, and the name for this way of life is love, the love of God and the love of all others as God’s neighbors, a way of participating in God’s love, which is the fundamental creative reality of all there is. For Dalferth, a life of hope, trust, and love is the only meaningful “proof” of God’s existence because such a life is possible only through the love of God, a counter-movement against the forces of death and all its manifestations in the world. The essential feature of Christian life is not what Christians do but what they hope for. Whatever good there is in the world is not the result of what we do but that of “what God achieves in and through that which we do—or fail to do.” For Dalferth, it is not Christians who protest against death by living a life of faith, hope, and love but their God-empowered orientation toward faith, hope, and love that remind them that we cannot do anything meaningful without the saving,

xiv

Introduction

forgiving, renewing presence of God “who gives life to the dead and who calls into being that which does not exist” (Rom. 4:17). If the first chapter presented a Catholic perspective, and the second a Lutheran perspective, in the third, very lucid chapter titled “The Theological Virtues: ‘And the Greatest of These Is Love,’” Stephen Davis presents an evangelical perspective. Beginning with clarifications of some key terms like naturalism, supernaturalism, theism, atheism, and Christian theism, Davis goes to provide “fairly informal” definitions of faith, hope, and love. Faith is a combination of fides, the epistemological or belief aspect of faith, the belief that . . . , that certain claims about God are true, and a non-cognitive or trust aspect, the belief in . . . , the confidence that God is good, that God will win in the end. The opposite of faith is unbelief, lack of trust, or apostasy. Hope is a psychological attitude toward something that is desirable, expected in the future, difficult or arduous to obtain, and metaphysically possible. Christian hope is based on hope in the person of God analogous to fiducia or trust. The opposite of hope is cynicism or despair. Christian love, a little more difficult to define, is not a feeling but an action or a way of living characterized by the willingness to accept others just as they are, to forgive them, and to provide help in times of need. The paradigmatic example of Christian love is Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels, his compassionate acceptance of outcasts, his forgiveness of sinners including those crucifying him, and his laying down his life for our salvation. The opposite of love is hatred, indifference, or unwillingness to forgive. Davis sees a complex interplay among faith, hope, and love. Faith stimulates hope because, as fiducia faith trusts that God will bring about the best, that there will be justice. Faith also stimulates love because faith works through love (Galatians 5:6) and is inseparable from it. Without love there is no faith. On the other hand, hope also stimulates faith by giving it its final goal and strengthens love by giving it endurance during times of difficulties. Likewise, love stimulates faith by strengthening trust and hope by strengthening the will to justice for the person one loves. Why, then, did Paul consider love preeminent among the three? For Davis, Paul did so first because Jesus was above all a person of love and the way of love was a way of understanding the preeminence of Jesus. Secondly, because love in isolation from the other two is still highly admirable, while faith and hope in isolation from love are useless and empty. And thirdly and most importantly, because love is the only one of the three that will last forever in the kingdom of God, in the triune God, in the relation between God and humans, and among humans, while faith and hope will no longer be necessary in that kingdom. In the last section, Davis turns to hope for special attention because hope provides the best informal argument for the existence of God, especially in



Introduction xv

light of such horrendous evils like the forced slavery of African Americans and the Holocaust of the Jewish people, which Davis considers the two worst calamities caused by human beings. Is it possible to hope for justice for these victims? With regard to the future we can try to improve our social conditions so as to eliminate racism and genocide, but human effort alone is not likely to bring this about, and even if, per impossibile, we do remove all racism and genocide, there is no way of doing justice to the millions of victims who are already dead and gone. Without God and the promise of eternal life in which their suffering will in some way be redeemed by receding from memory and being finally defeated in the happiness and joy of divine life, the demand for justice for the victims will remain empty and useless. Without God, the only alternative is to live with injustice and despair always verging on cynicism and indifference. This is not an argument for the existence of God in the classical sense, but a plea for consistency and rationality: if you do want to hope for the possibility of justice for the countless victims of injustice in the world, then you need to believe in a divine being who can rectify and redeem that injustice, which is what supernaturalism provides. The theism Davis is arguing for is Christian theism, which is distinguished from all other theisms by its foundation in Jesus Christ. The hope contained in Christian theism is ultimately based on the life and promise of Jesus Christ. The formal theme of the three preceding chapters was faith, hope, and love in their reference to God as their ultimate source, but in all three chapters the theme of justice has also been echoed as part of the life of faith, hope, and love, especially as a constitutive part of hope, explicitly in Benedict and Davis, where hope for ultimate justice is considered the best argument for God, implicitly in Dalferth, who insists that a life of faith, hope, and love is the only real “argument” for the existence of God, and interprets hope and trust in God as the divine protest against the forces of death and meaninglessness in favor of the fullness of life with God. In the following four chapters we see an explicit emphasis on justice as a constitutive element of faith, hope, and love precisely in their theological character. Given so much suffering and oppression perpetrated by unjust social structures in the contemporary world, questions necessarily arise with regard to how the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love can contribute to the promotion of justice in the world and whether justice can itself be construed as a theological virtue. It is these issues that Francis Schüssler Fiorenza proposes to tackle in the fourth, very wide-ranging chapter, “Faith, Hope, and Love and the Challenges of Justice.” After reviewing the standard classical doctrines of theological, intellectual, and moral virtues in Aquinas and their contemporary revival in terms of virtue ethics in Alasdair MacIntyre, Fiorenza moves on to present his alternative vision that expands and integrates the concepts of

xvi

Introduction

both charity and justice, charity as including justice and justice as including charity, and that makes it possible to consider justice, traditionally a moral virtue, as a theological virtue. He does this by surveying contemporary discussions of justice as a structural issue in Rawls, developing Rahner’s thesis of the unity of the love of God and the love of neighbor, and focusing on the attribute of God as God of justice in the political theology of Johannes Metz and the Latin American liberation theology along with the “preferential option for the poor” demanded by the God of justice. The basic problem with the classical approach is that virtues, whether theological or moral, are conceived as virtues of individuals, and are ill equipped to deal with problems of injustice in a functionally differentiated, bureaucratically complex, and morally and religiously pluralistic society, where justice is more a matter of laws, institutions, and structures than a matter of the virtue of the individual, even if this individual happens to be a prince or a president. Today justice must be conceived as independent of a virtue ethic. Thus, Rawls considers justice primarily as the fairness of the basic structure of society, which remains the subject of justice. For Fiorenza, however, locating justice within the society as such also raises many issues, given the pluralistic condition of modern societies that would make social agreement on distributive justice and fair opportunity subject to inherently complex economic and political judgments and difficult to achieve. Some deny the validity of social economic rights, certainly at the international level, as witness the many debates on the applicability of Rawls’s second principle of difference. Given the urgency of justice today as well as the problems in its implementation under conditions of intractable social pluralism, Fiorenza advocates that we expand our vision of God to include justice and a vision of creation to include the material social world as conditions for experiencing God. In this expansion that makes justice both fully theological, not just natural or moral, and socio-political, not just individual, Fiorenza draws from several sources, the political theology of Johannes Metz, the unity of transcendence and history in Rahner’s transcendental theology, and the preferential option for the poor and the notion of structural sin in liberation theology. For Metz, the Christian God is a God of justice who redeems humanity by promising justice to the innocent victims of history, which makes a separation of love and justice impossible. For Rahner, our transcendence toward God is always mediated by our material, social, and cosmic conditions, which confers unity upon our love of God and our love of neighbor. Liberation theologians have called for the “preferential option for the poor” and the compelling urgency of removing “structural sins,” not just personal sins, making us more sensitive to the plight of the poor who often remain invisible, and making the struggle for social, structural justice an essential part of the contemporary practice of



Introduction xvii

the love of God. For Fiorenza, this does not mean that love is merely reducible to justice. Building on Gene Outka and Nicholas Wolterstoff, he argues that while justice perfects love by expanding the benefits of love to social structures beyond mere sympathy and individuals, love also perfects justice by alerting us to the social causes of poverty and addressing the existential loneliness of sickness and dying that justice cannot reach as well as promoting reconciliation and peace among enemies beyond merely remunerative or punitive justice. Fiorenza also argues that the concept of justice must also be expanded. It must be understood as a way of confronting the demonic forces of destruction in history such as the many genocides and holocausts of the twentieth century involving massive violations of human dignity. It is also a way of alerting us to our active collective responsibility for structural sins, sins of our own making, as distinguished from accidents of fortune and natural disasters. It must also go beyond repairing liabilities and culpabilities of the past, beyond individualism and communitarianism, toward a more prospective approach where we try to tackle structural injustices through public discussions and collective action, toward a conception of reciprocity and equal respect commensurate with the global diversity of cultures, religions, and ethical traditions. One of the endemic injustices in the United States has been racism, and the two chapters that follow try to integrate the struggle for racial justice into the context of faith, hope, and love. In a very provocative chapter, “Faith, Hope, and Love: The Challenge of Colorblindness,” Mary Fulkerson begins with the recognition that these three are inseparably interconnected and goes on to explore the incarnational or “enfleshed” character of the three in the liturgical context of the Eucharist so central to the Christian faith and how our sins often take the form of blindness to embodiment. A chief example of this blindness is “colorblindness” that conceals deep-seated racism and its historical harms in the name of treating people as people, not as colored, by ignoring the issue of color as such. Colorblindness is a matter of unconscious, unintentional, and therefore all the more pernicious habit of sensibility that believes that racism has disappeared because we have made laws against it and that the solution to racism is to ignore or be blind to racial differences, while remaining blind to the still surviving but unconscious effects of racism on the ways of thinking and acting of the white majority. Fulkerson uses the context of the Eucharistic liturgy to both illustrate the problem of colorblindness and to retrieve the liberating potential of the liturgy as the paradigmatic bodily enactment of worship in faith, hope, and love for combating colorblindness. The Eucharistic liturgy celebrates God’s universal love shown in Jesus and is a standing invitation to all—all creation—to come together at the table, where all are welcome, regardless

xviii

Introduction

of their particular identities in gender, class, ethnicity, and other markers of identity. All are meant to become one in Christ with one another by the power of the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, the narrative of the Eucharist, the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus, is a celebration of the “dangerous” memory (Metz) of Jesus in his love for the marginalized of society and an invitation to participate in Jesus’s own redemptive alteration of our social and personal existence in all its sins and wounds through which we are separated from one another. We cannot participate in the Eucharist without being reminded of Jesus’s solidarity with the suffering of the world and without entering into that solidarity ourselves. Who comes to the table and how we practice the dangerous memory of Jesus are the two ways, for Fulkerson, in which we can measure the degree to which our faith, hope, and love connect us to our fellow human beings. America still remains a deeply divided society, racially and economically, and this is especially true of the white middle-class churches. White middleclass Christians may not be overt racists individually or institutionally, which, however, only makes the problem worse. They have so long been habituated into a culture of living only with their own kinds in class and ethnicity and feel uncomfortable with the presence or intrusion of the racially or ethnically Other. They think that racism is overcome when they cease to be racist as individuals or as institutions, thus being totally blind to and reinforcing the residual effects of historical racism embedded in the very culture of their socially homogeneous existence. They are rather complacent and do not seek to change their very culture and open it up in an existentially concrete way to the presence of the non-white and poor, which makes a mockery of the universal invitation of the Eucharistic table where “all are welcome” and the dangerous memory of Jesus whom they honor as their Lord. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, Sunday morning services in American white middle-class churches remain the most segregated hours in America. Truly multi-racial churches are rare. Fulkerson ends her chapter with two stirring examples of ministry to break through the barriers of colorblindness. One is the ministry of Sara Miles, a lesbian journalist who converted from atheism because of her experience of sharing food and drink at the communion table of an Episcopal church. She read it as a call to feed the hungry and started her own food pantry for the homeless of San Francisco. What is striking is that food is given at the Eucharistic table, enacting both the universal call of the Eucharist where all are welcome and the dangerous memory of Jesus with his special solidarity with the poor of society. Here faith, hope, and love are demonstrated in the most concrete way. The other example is the Pauli Murray Project in Durham, North Carolina, a community project to celebrate the memory of Pauli Mur-



Introduction xix

ray (1910–1985), the first African American woman Episcopal priest who dedicated her life to the pursuit of social justice and was designated a saint by the Episcopal Church. An interracial group meets after church services, in a face-to-face meeting, for a public discussion of the issues of racism and sexism, often on the basis of personal stories, to disclose the hidden, still prevalent traces, the still festering social wounds, of racism and sexism beyond their explicitly individual and institutional forms, a most concrete way of practicing “dangerous memory,” through which we become sensitive to the many subtle ways of hurting one another and come closer to one another in our fragile humanity and be formed as one community in Christ. In the next, very enlightening chapter, “Incarnating Faith, Hope, and Love: Theo-Political Virtues and the Common Good,” M. Shawn Copeland illustrates the transformation of faith, hope, and love into theo-political virtues in the lives of two African Americans, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King, Jr. Hamer, born the youngest of twenty children in a sharecropper family in the Mississippi Delta in 1917, suffered poverty, hunger, exploitation, disenfranchisement, and erratic schooling, while growing up. Forced to pick cotton at the age of six, she was exposed to all the indignities and injustices suffered by black people of her generation, and her deep Christian faith made her very sensitive to the problem of justice and responsible for doing something to change the situation. She joined the civil rights movements and participated in the voter registration campaign organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the process she suffered beatings and imprisonment. The story of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life is well known. As pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, he led the bus boycott that thrust him onto the national stage. His unwavering and fearless dedication to the nonviolent way to justice awakened the moral conscience of white Christian America and gave hope to millions of oppressed peoples around the world. To be especially noted in both cases is that it was their deep Christian faith, hope, and love that led them to the civil rights movement with all its risks and sacrifices. For King, the civil rights movement was not just a political movement but a deeply spiritual movement whose goal was not desegregation or integration but the realization of “the beloved community.” Neither King nor Hamer regarded hope as mere progress or liberal optimism. Hope dreams new possibilities, new futures, new social imaginaries, new ways of living together in genuine humanity and solidarity. The hope of the civil rights movement was participation in the prophetic tasks of the Old Testament and the mission of Jesus to the marginalized of society. Christian faith is inseparable from love, and “justice is love correcting that which revolts against love,” meeting the forces of hate with the power of love.

xx

Introduction

For Copeland, the civil rights movement was faith, hope, and love in action and transformed the theological virtues into “theo-political” virtues. Both Hammer and King were deeply prayerful persons with unshakable faith in God, hope in God, and love of God, which inspired them with a vision of a reconciled humanity and the need to heal our divisions and brokenness, and sustained them in their long, often despairing, often very painful struggles against all the reified forces of racism in American society. The struggle for civil rights was to participate in the cross of Christ who overcame our social brokenness with love and in the movement of the Holy Spirit inspiring the struggling humanity to transcend their mutual hatred and narrow identities toward greater and greater solidarity in God. The civil rights movement was a radically theological movement of faith, hope, and love under the conditions of historical injustice crying out for healing and redemption. With so much talk about terrorism in the media today not many will doubt that we are living in an age of terror. We may ask, however, what constitutes terror? Does it consist in the senseless bombing and shooting of people as happened in Paris, Brussels, London, Boston, New York, and San Bernardino in recent years? Is terror identical with terrorism? Is it possible that our preoccupation with terrorism may be a way of shifting our attention away from real terror? What, then, is real terror? In her insightful and penetrating chapter titled “Faith, Hope, and Love in an Age of Terror,” Elaine A. Robinson locates terror in the paralyzing fear of death and dehumanization caused by the scarcity of basic human needs such as hunger, homelessness, abject poverty, mass incarceration, lynching of black bodies, debilitating illness, and other forms of degradation due to systemic injustice and exclusion based on racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism. In this sense terror can be violent without being physical, manifest without mass hysteria, devastating without being overt. It is rooted in the death-dealing structures of existence in which all participate, for which no one individual is responsible, and which is inherited socially and historically. America has been a society of terror from its beginning, as witness the dehumanizing treatment of African and Native Americans. The state of terror is the very antithesis of shalom, the wholeness and fullness of life for all, all the values of the Gospel, salvation itself, which raises a serious theological problem for the churches, which have been complicit in the perpetuation of this all-pervasive terror in American society. How should churches respond to the contemporary problem of systemic terror? For Robinson, they should by rekindling the theological virtues and orienting them toward shalom and the furthering of life. She does this in three steps. First, she examines the nature of Christian symbols and the possibility of their erosion and ideological abuse, especially the symbol of the cross, and advocates substituting the symbol of the incarnation as more appropriate to-



Introduction xxi

day for that of the cross. In light of Edward Farley’s theory of deep symbols, their historical relativity and the possibility of their abuse as instruments of corrupted social power, Robinson argues that in its emphasis on what Christ has done “for me” for the forgiveness of “my” sins the symbol of the cross has been reduced to an instrument of individualistic self-justification, rendering Christians passive in matters of social justice and indifferent to their social responsibility for the victims of systemic terror. For middle-class Americans the cross has also become a mere decoration, an escape mechanism rather than a provocation to resist evil. On the other hand, the incarnation signifies God embracing our humanity in all its particularity and vulnerability, and in the ministry and preaching of Jesus it has become an explicit injunction to participate in his work of healing and transformation. The incarnation is atonement, God’s affirmation of life and reconciliation with human beings, and demands replication of the model of Christ in our lives, acquiring the Christ character of dedication to radical relationality. The symbol of the incarnation is a corrective to the individualism and social indifference of the symbol of the cross, focusing our attention on the social challenges of many forms of systemic terror and our responsibility for their healing and transformation as followers of Christ. Secondly, Robinson explores faith, hope, and love as a source of incarnate life that concretizes the ministry of Jesus for the marginalized of society and God’s life dwelling within the human community and restoring connections in the whole of creation. The three virtues defy the logic of scarcity and individualism and point toward communal, relational abundance. They are direct responses to the logic of terror. Without the grace of God, however, we are not capable of confronting the power of systemic terror because we remain slaves of our narrow self-interest. In order to embrace the incarnate life of radical relationality and resist the pressures of structural evil we need a “lifeline” to God, a source of connectedness to God, others, and the whole of creation, which the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love provide. These virtues are like the “umbilical cord” nourishing us with the grace and presence of God and thereby forming the Christ character in us. They are the conditions for confronting and transforming the terror of systemic scarcity. On the basis of this very striking metaphor of “umbilical cord” Robinson goes on to show how faith, hope, and love, anchored in God in mutually related ways, disorient us with regard to the values of the world and reorient us to the values of the kingdom, giving us the wisdom, the hope, and the love to criticize and confront the powers and principalities of this world that the systems of terror represent. Thirdly and finally, recognizing that the Christ character formed by faith, hope, and love is possible only in community, not individually, Robinson

xxii

Introduction

goes on to reflect on the nature of the church precisely as a community of faith, hope, and love in the context of contemporary challenges. How should the church embody the incarnate life of the Christ character in the struggle to affirm life for all in radical relationality against the death-dealing terrors of systemic injustices and oppressions? For Robinson, today ecclesiology, not Christology, not theological anthropology, is the most pressing concern before theologians. What difference does the church make in the world of rampant terror? The church is not only the spiritual locus of radical relationality but also the concrete site of transformative agency in God’s mission of reconciling and restoring the creation. Addressing the problem of terror in its myriad forms is fundamental to the nature and vocation of the church, the incarnate representation of Christ. This is all the more compelling, given the fact that the American church bears the fourfold wounds of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. In the last chapter titled “Transcendence and Solidarity: Conditions of Faith, Hope, and Love Today,” I try to systematically reconstruct faith, hope, and love as theological virtues based on the insights of St. Thomas Aquinas but also fully mindful of contemporary historical conditions that demand both ecclesial and political forms of bearing witness to their transcendent substance. In the first section of the chapter I briefly characterize contemporary challenges to Christian faith, hope, and love. I highlight three of these challenges, the popularization of Enlightenment humanism, the relativizing impact of the encounter of different religions, and the globalization of enervating cultural nihilism inherent in capitalism. Enlightenment humanism, once limited to a minority of the intellectual elite, has become popular with its deconstructive dismissal of anything transcendent and limiting our attention to the “immanent frame.” The concrete encounter with different religions in all their plurality and otherness has been relativizing our sense of the ultimate and absolute for good or ill. Most important of all, capitalism has been reducing the human subject to the subject—or, rather, object—of desire, any desire, every desire, always variable, always inconsistent, always addictive, leading to the death of the subject capable of intellectual judgment and voluntary commitment. It has also been reducing reality to the world of images, appearances, and illusions. Capitalism produces not only goods and services but our very subjectivity itself. Capitalism has been globalizing this cultural nihilism, which I consider a far greater challenge than humanism and pluralism. It means the disappearance of the subject willing to believe, hope, and love beyond the fleeting moment, posing a threat not only to Christianity but also to religion in general and even to atheistic humanism based on genuine conviction. In the second section I attempt a reconstruction of faith, hope, and love as three fundamental modalities of human transcendence toward God and of



Introduction xxiii

solidarity toward one another as historical conditions of that transcendence. I argue that human existence is essentially a movement of transcendence, the transcendence of the empty, isolated self toward greater fullness of life. There are three modalities of this transcendence in history: knowledge of the objective world, action in society, and relation with others, each of which presupposes believing, hoping, and loving as its condition of possibility. These are also three modalities of human solidarity, which alone make knowledge, action, and relation possible. The need for believing, hoping, and loving is already there in the depth of human nature as created by God. Transcendence toward God beyond history or eschatological transcendence also has three modalities, faith, hope, and love in the properly theological sense, which are beyond the capacity of human nature and solely the work of divine grace. Divine grace, however, does not operate by overpowering or replacing the human subject from the outside but by supernaturally perfecting our subjectivity, our intellect and will by healing them and elevating them to a participation in God’s own life. Faith, hope, and love are “theological” because God is their sole source, but they are also our “virtues” because they constitute the intrinsic principles of our action as perfected by divine grace. God does not deal with us as inanimate tools. The church is the form of solidarity proper to faith, hope, and love as theological virtues, the home where these virtues are nourished. In the third, final section, therefore, I argue that the first order of business in responding to the crisis of faith, hope, and love is to renew our sense of the church as a solidary community of faith, hope, and love, especially through a return to the founding ideals of the Gospel and revitalization of the liturgical life. The church as the body of Christ enlivened by the Holy Spirit must be reawakened to its mission of bearing witness to the transcendent ideals of faith, hope, and love against the challenges of the globalizing world. In the name of its faith in God the Creator it must speak the truth to power, point to the illusions and idolatries of the world bred by cultural nihilism, and help bring the world back to its senses as creatures of God. In the name of its hope in God, the hope that injustice will not have the last word in the eschatological kingdom, the church should especially encourage the vocation to politics, participation in the collective struggle to bring justice to structures and institutions, especially on behalf of the marginalized of society, as the most effective way of practicing charity today and as the most convincing way of bearing witness to its eschatological hope. In the name of love of God and neighbors in God the church must assist in overcoming the many restrictive boundaries of love such as classicism, sexism, racism, and nationalism, in making our love as universal and cosmopolitan as the world is becoming global, and in practicing that love as effectively as possible. For our own time with its particular proneness to despair, insensibility, fatigue, and indifference I highlight the virtue of

xxiv

Introduction

theological hope as the sustaining, healing, and elevating source of historical, political hope in our never-ending struggle for justice, peace, and solidarity in view of God’s promise of universal reconciliation in his kingdom. Thus far we have examined different aspects of faith, hope, and love: the many contemporary challenges facing them, their theological character, their character as virtues, their mutual internal relation, their existential significance for mortal and sinful humanity, their relation to the contemporary urgency of structural justice, racism, sexism, and classism, and the role of the churches. We have done so from eight different ecumenical perspectives, each of which seeks to integrate in some way the theological virtues and the contemporary demand of justice. Each of these chapters, of course, raises many questions of its own, some of which are raised and discussed by the respondents, who move the questions further. If the success of a conference can be measured, as I often think, by the number of questions it provokes and leaves unresolved, the responses and discussions at the conference bear clear witness to its success. Readers of this volume will add their own questions and continue to move the discussion further. In the meantime it is my very pleasant duty and honor to thank all the participants from the bottom of my heart, the presenters, the respondents, the session chairs, and the audience who attended the sessions. As usual, I owe a very special debt of gratitude to my two research assistants. Shane Akerman, who is now completing his doctoral dissertation on the intersection of Trinitarian and political theology, has been indispensable from beginning to end, from the logistics of the conference to the preliminary proofreading of this collection. Yunkwon Yoo, who is now writing his dissertation on Hegel’s social ethics, has been most helpful in preparing the text for submission to Lexington Books by formatting, proofreading, and checking for any residual errors. I remain most grateful to both. I would also like to express my most sincere appreciation for Margaret Jagels. It is the Margaret Jagels Fund for Catholic Studies that made this and the two previous conferences possible. NOTE 1.  Rethinking the Medieval Legacy for Contemporary Theology (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014) is the proceedings of the conference, “Rethinking the Medieval Legacy for Contemporary Theology,” held on the campus of Claremont Graduate University on April 16 and 17, 2010, with the participation of Marilyn McCord Adams (Oxford), Ingolf Dalferth (Claremont), Kevin Madigan (Harvard), Anselm Min (Claremont), Barbara Newman (Northwestern), and Pim Valkenberg (Catholic University of America). The proceedings of the conference on the theme, “What Is



Introduction xxv

the Most Compelling Theological Issue Today?,” held in Claremont on April 20–21, 2012, was published as The Task of Theology: Leading Theologians on the Most Compelling Questions for Today (Orbis, 2014), with the participation of Susan Abraham (Harvard), John Behr (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary), Anselm Min (Claremont), Rosemary Radford Ruether (Claremont), Robert Schreiter (Catholic Theological Union), Francis Schüssler Fiorenza (Harvard), Mark Lewis Taylor (Princeton Theological Seminary), and Mark I. Wallace (Swarthmore).

WORKS CITED Min, Anselm K., ed. Rethinking the Medieval Legacy for Contemporary Theology. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014. ———, ed. The Task of Theology: Leading Theologians on the Most Compelling Questions for Today. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2014.

Chapter One

Faith, Hope, and Love in the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI Thomas P. Rausch, S.J.

In spite of his reputation as a stern enforcer of doctrine, Joseph Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict XVI, has long been concerned to show that Christianity is more than a mere moralism, more than simply a doctrinal faith. As he says at the beginning of his encyclical Deus caritas est, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (no. 1). The most important teachings of his papacy are to be found in his three-volume work on Christology, Jesus of Nazareth, and in his three encyclicals on the theological virtues, Deus caritas est (2005), Spe salvi (2007), and Lumen fidei (2013). I see his treatment of the theological virtues as a critique of the culture of secularity, stressing their transcendent character or their ability to illumine what Charles Taylor sees as the disenchanted world of modernity.1 THE THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES The theological virtues—faith, hope, and charity or love—have been central to his work from the earliest days of his academic career. They are at the heart of Christian life; they shape our vision of the divine, the hope that faith promises, and the love that is both God’s nature and our calling. Benedict scholar Tracey Rowland shows how themes and motifs present in these three encyclicals appear in Ratzinger’s earlier works. And behind them she discerns a long tradition going from Josef Pieper, especially his collection Lieben, Hoffen, Glauben (1986), Aquinas, the Carolingian theologian Paschasius Radbertus (c. 790–865), and Augustine, all the way back to the New Testament.2 1

2

Chapter One

Faith, hope, and charity are linked together as early as St. Paul, who writes to the church at Corinth: “So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13; cf. 1 Thess. 1:3, 5:8; Eph. 1:15–18; Col 1:4–5; Heb. 10:22–24). He was echoed by St. Polycarp, a second century bishop who wrote to Paul’s church at Philippi to strengthen their faith by linking it with love: for faith “is the mother of us all,” while hope follows after, and love goes before—“love toward God and Christ and toward our neighbor.”3 While the place of the theological virtues is deeply rooted in the Christian tradition, Benedict’s perspective is very much a contemporary one. He has long been concerned with the loss of faith in the West, particularly with the post-Enlightenment emergence of an autonomous reason no longer working in harmony with faith or with a philosophy unable to ask ultimate questions. According to Tracey Rowland, his concern is that the theological virtues have undergone what she calls a “secularist mutation” in modern thought, whether through liberalism, Marxism, or Social Darwinism, the effect of which is to deprive them of their specifically Christian meaning: Faith still exists but in Science rather than Christ, love is either something completely Platonic (in the mind) or completely sensual (without a rational component), and hope becomes hope in material and technical progress, which is linked to faith in science, just as faith in Christ was formerly linked to hope in Christ.4

Thus Ratzinger described the liberal faith in continuous progress as “the bourgeois substitute for the lost hope of faith”5 and the replacement of the concept of truth by the concept of progress as the “neuralgic point of the modern age.”6 Very much related to this secularist mutation is Ratzinger’s long-standing objection to political or liberation theology. In 1977, as archbishop of Munich, he exercised his right according to the 1924 concordat between the Holy See and Bavaria to deny Johann Baptist Metz the chair in theology at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilians Universität, drawing a strong public rebuke from Karl Rahner.7 Metz himself had moved away from his mentor Rahner, rejecting his transcendental method to distinguish himself in the movement known as political theology. Ratzinger’s objections to political and liberation theologies go back to his studies of St. Bonaventure (1221–1274) and his theology of history, the subject of his Habilitationsschrift; they were to stamp both his epistemology and his eschatology. His objections were not so much social or political as they were theological. Bonaventure’s understanding of history emerged from his struggle as minister general of the Franciscan order with the “Spiritual Franciscans,”



Chapter One 3

sometimes known simply as the “Spirituals,” disciples of the charismatic Cistercian abbot from Calabria, Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202). Joachim divided history into three epochs or ages. The first was the Age of the Father (ordo conjugatorum), embracing the Old Testament, when God’s people lived under the Mosaic Law. The second was the Age of the Son, beginning with the New Testament when grace was mediated by the rites and sacraments of the church (ordo clericorum). What was about to dawn for Joachim was a third Age of the Spirit (ordo monachorum), starting with St. Francis and his community, representing a new people of God. There was much that Bonaventure found problematic in Joachim’s thought, not least for the tensions it created within the Franciscan order. But he also saw Francis as heralding a new age, perhaps already begun. Like Joachim, he hoped for a new age of salvation within history. Here Ratzinger drew the line. According to Aidan Nichols, Ratzinger found himself unable to accept the medieval Franciscan’s belief that, prior to history’s entry into God’s eternity, there will be a “last age” in which the poverty of the Church’s Jerusalem beginnings will blossom again in a reign of the poor on earth. Before the name “liberation theology” was ever heard of, Ratzinger had to arrive at some judgment about this uncanny thirteenth-century anticipation of liberationist eschatology.8

For Ratzinger this was not consistent with the eschatology of the New Testament. His objections to political or liberation theology are rooted precisely in what he sees as a modern attempt to “immanentize” the eschaton, to use a term of Eric Vögelin,9 that is, to make salvation something within history rather than beyond it. Salvation becomes not the work of God, but that of human beings, while the mission of the church becomes primarily social. This empties theology of its transcendent meaning, ignores Jesus as God’s presence within history, and turns Christianity into an ideology. Further, it ignores that the end of history has already been revealed in the resurrection of Jesus “who is recognized as the last man (the second Adam), that is, as the long-awaited manifestation of what is truly human and the definitive revelation to man of his hidden nature.”10 These themes will surface again in Pope Benedict’s three encyclicals on the theological virtues. We need now to consider how Pope Benedict understands faith, hope, and love in his encyclicals. We will consider them in the order in which they were written, rather than the traditional order of faith, hope, and love. Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus caritas est, was developed from a draft originally prepared for Pope John Paul II. Appearing in 2005, the first year of his pontificate, it treats the relation between faith and love. Faith is a light that reveals God as love and calls us to love one another. Spe salvi, on hope, another

4

Chapter One

perennial theme in Benedict’s work, appeared two years later in 2007. It treats of the relationship between faith and hope, already linked in the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews. For Benedict the hope revealed by faith goes beyond modernity’s secularized notion of hope as progress, the kingdom of God transmuted into the kingdom of man on earth. The last in the trilogy, Lumen fidei, on faith, appeared under the name of Benedict’s successor, Pope Francis, but the encyclical is pure Benedict. DEUS CARITAS EST Several themes structure Deus caritas est. Benedict describes the nature of God as both Logos and love, reclaiming the erotic for the Christian tradition. He describes the church as a community of love, and gives a certain priority to love over justice. Starting from the first letter of John, which says, “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:16), he explores the various meanings of love, including the three Greek words, eros, philia, the love of friendship, and agape, rare in Greek usage, the unselfish love of benevolence. He rejects Nietzsche’s famous accusation that Christianity poisoned eros (no. 3), but his critique is subtle, seeing some truth in Nietzsche’s comment. He acknowledges that, for the Greeks, eros was an intoxicating “divine madness” easily overpowering reason, turning for an example to the “sacred” prostitution practiced in the ancient Canaanite fertility cults that remained a temptation for the Israelites. He sees the Judeo-Christian tradition as purifying eros, not rejecting it. He argues that eros draws us to the divine, implying that God is in some way already apprehended. Once purified, eros draws us to beatitude, the infinite, the eternal (no. 4). Benedict admits that Christianity has tended at times to denigrate the body. But because the human person is both body and spirit, intimately joined, eros cannot be reduced to mere instinct, to “pure sex,” for then it becomes a commodity to be bought and sold. This, he says, “is hardly man’s great ‘yes’ to the body” (no. 5). Rather than seeing eros and agape as opposites, like Anders Nygren,11 Benedict sees them as profoundly related. “Fundamentally, ‘love’ is a single reality, but with different dimensions; at different times, one or other dimensions may emerge more clearly. Yet when the two dimensions are totally cut off from one another, the result is a caricature or at least an impoverished form of love” (no. 8). From here Benedict proceeds to discuss the “novelty” of biblical faith. The gods of the nations were impersonal, without affect. The God of the Bible, seen from a metaphysical perspective, is the absolute, the Logos or primordial



Chapter One 5

reason, the source of all that is and the universal creative principle. The universe is not the product of blind forces, of chance; it has a creator. At the same time, this God is personal, a lover “with all the passion of a true love,” for creation is dear to him. As Aristotle glimpsed, however incompletely, for every creature this God is the object of desire, of love. Moreover, this biblical God loves with a personal love. “God loves, and his love may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape” (no. 9). Thus eros and agape are joined. Benedict notes that the Hebrew prophets describe God’s passion for his people with boldly erotic images, betrothal and marriage, or conversely, adultery and prostitution (no. 9). He goes so far as to picture God as “a lover with all the passion of a true love” (no. 10), in language that sounds more like Andrew Greeley than the always circumspect Benedict. This outgoing love of God becomes embodied in the humanity of Jesus who comes in search of a suffering and lost humanity. Benedict describes Christ’s death, not as a work of expiation, but rather as God giving himself away (no. 12), as he says earlier, turning his love against his justice (no. 10), while the Logos becomes food for us in the Eucharist. The second part of the encyclical is more practical. Benedict treats the church as a community of love. Grounded in the love of God, love or charity becomes the responsibility of the church at every level (no. 20). He traces this through the New Testament and church history, including the story of Julian the Apostate (d. 363) who wanted to restore the religion of pagan Rome but preserve the charitable services of the church, which he continued to admire (no. 24), particularly in the stories of the saints. A final theme is more controversial. Benedict observes that since the nineteenth century, an objection has been raised to the Church’s charitable activity, subsequently developed with particular insistence by Marxism: the poor, it is claimed, do not need charity but justice. Works of charity—almsgiving—are in effect a way for the rich to shirk their obligation to work for justice and a means of soothing their consciences, while preserving their own status and robbing the poor of their rights (no. 26), so goes the argument. Benedict cites Marx with some sympathy. He is not against social justice, turning to injustice in his encyclical on hope (Spe salvi), while his later encyclical Caritas in veritate (2009) was considerably more reflective of traditional Catholic social teaching. But his main point here is that the right ordering of society and the state is a central responsibility of politics, not the church, and that even in the most just society, love will be necessary. Benedict is a realist; while he acknowledges that every generation must work toward building a just social and civil order, he insists that there will always be situations of material need, suffering, and loneliness which make concrete love of neighbor irreplaceable (no. 28).

6

Chapter One

Here we see a theme that runs throughout Benedict’s writings, his rejection of utopianisms and all efforts to create a better world through social engineering.12 This theme will emerge again in Spe salvi. He is cautious about political involvement, which so easily falls prey to an ethical blindness brought on by the exercise of power and the lure of special interests (no. 28). He has little sympathy for the position of American neoconservatives like Michael Novak, the late Richard John Neuhaus, and George Weigel, who have sought to identify American economic liberalism with Catholic social doctrine and virtually ignored Pope John Paul’s encyclical Sollicitudo rei socialis for comparing the deficiencies of both the Eastern and Western blocs at the end of the Cold War and for its critique of liberal free market capitalism.13 If Pope Francis has chosen the term mercy as most descriptive of the divine, for Benedict in Deus caritas est God becomes the supreme example of love, a God who loves passionately even turning against himself, his love against his justice in his love for creation. SPE SALVI Benedict’s second encyclical, in English “Saved in Hope,” is about the redemption or salvation that is our hope. He had treated hope in two earlier works, his book Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life (1977) and The Yes of Jesus Christ (1989).14 In these works he focused on life beyond death, tracing the idea that communion with God is stronger than death from its suggestion in some of the prophets (Isa. 53:9–12), in some brief passages in the Psalms (16:9b–11; 73:24, 26), and in the martyr and Wisdom literature, for example Daniel (12:2), Wisdom (3:1–12), and 2 Maccabees, some of which draw on ideas such as a final resurrection of the dead or of God holding on to the souls of the just. In Spe salvi, however, the focus is on justice, with the clear sense that injustice will not have the final word. As he says, quoting Dostoevsky, “Evildoers, in the end, do not sit at table at the eternal banquet beside their victims without distinction, as though nothing had happened” (no. 44). The encyclical is built around several themes. Benedict sees faith and hope as related. He rejects an individualistic understanding of salvation, seeing it as fundamentally social, and he critiques modernity’s secular turn, which reduces hope in God to hope in human progress, with tragic results. Christian hope comes only from God, who offers what we can’t obtain by ourselves. He begins by noting that in the New Testament the words “faith” and “hope” often seem interchangeable (Heb. 10:22–23; 11:1; 1 Pet. 3:15; Eph. 2:12), so that knowledge and trust in God are joined to hope that life will not end in emptiness. Indeed hope is seen as equivalent to faith (no. 2). Salva-



Chapter One 7

tion is not a given, but rather a promise of a future that is life-changing. To illustrate this, he turns to the story of the African Josephine Bakhita, born in the Sudan around 1869, kidnapped by slave traders, abused and beaten by her owners until she bled; she was ultimately brought to safety in Italy by an Italian consul. Here she learned about a different “master,” the God who created her, that she was a free child of God able to say, “I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me—I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.” Later she became a nun. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II (no. 3). Benedict sees her experience as similar to that of the first Christians, many of whom also had been condemned to slavery and abused. For them Jesus was not a Spartacus or a Bar-Kochba; his message was not social revolution, but a hope that was to transform their lives and their world from within. Here surfaces one of Benedict’s most consistent themes that he illustrates by appealing to Paul’s Letter to Philemon, in which he sends the runaway slave Onesimus, now baptized, back to his Christian master with a changed relationship, no longer master and slave, but brothers in Christ (no. 4). Hope for Benedict cannot be reduced to an individualistic doctrine of salvation which modernity has rightly rejected as promising heaven to the individual and leaving the world to its misery. Too often contemporary American “born again” theology has taken this form. Benedict’s view is different; he sees “heaven” as a symbol that gives a hope that is a “knowing without knowing” (no. 13). But while salvation is a promise to each, its meaning is essentially social. Benedict turns to Henri de Lubac who, drawing upon the vast range of patristic theology, demonstrates that salvation has always been considered a “social” reality. In Benedict’s words: Indeed, the Letter to the Hebrews speaks of a “city” (cf. 11:10, 16; 12:22; 13:14) and therefore of communal salvation. Consistently with this view, sin is understood by the Fathers as the destruction of the unity of the human race, as fragmentation and division. Babel, the place where languages were confused, the place of separation, is seen to be an expression of what sin fundamentally is. Hence “redemption” appears as the reestablishment of unity, in which we come together once more in a union that begins to take shape in the world community of believers.

Thus for Benedict, salvation cannot be reduced to a solitary act of faith; it is always linked to union with a people and can be attained only within this “we.” Using strong language he says, “It presupposes that we escape from the prison of our ‘I,’ because only in the openness of this universal subject does our gaze open out to the source of joy, to love itself—to God” (no 14). How did Jesus’s message get reduced to a narrowly individualistic “salvation of the soul,” rejecting the idea of serving others, Benedict asks (no. 16).

8

Chapter One

In a long analysis of the roots of modernity, Benedict argues that, under the influence of the Enlightenment, Christian hope was transformed into faith in progress, based on a new appreciation of the link between science and praxis, promising a new kingdom, not of God but of man. Two categories became increasingly central, reason and freedom, but shorn of the shackles of ecclesiastical faith and the political structures of the period (no. 18). The French Revolution celebrated the new rule of reason and freedom, while Kant initially hailed its coming in his essay, “The Victory of the Good over the Evil Principle and the Founding of a Kingdom of God on Earth” (1792). Yet two years later Kant moved in a more pessimistic direction, as the revolution in France descended into violence. He suggested that if Christianity were to be rejected, “in a moral respect, this could lead to the (perverted) end of all things” (no.19), or as James Schall paraphrases Benedict’s thought, Kant “suspected that this new kingdom might in fact turn against man.”15 In Europe this new faith in progress did not bring the kingdom to the working class, the new “industrial proletariat.” Friedrich Engels called for a radical change; Marx took up his call, rejecting an other-worldly faith and turning toward a politics of revolution. Benedict is remarkably sympathetic; he does not dispute the truth of Marx’s analysis but argues that his vision was fundamentally flawed by his materialism: “He simply presumed that with the expropriation of the ruling class, with the fall of political power and the socialization of means of production, the new Jerusalem would be realized.” Redemption would come by simply changing the economic conditions. What he forgot was that “man remains always man” and that “freedom always remains also freedom for evil” (no. 21). In an interesting move for a pope, Benedict turns to Theodor Adorno of the Neo-Marxist Frankfurt School for a secular critique of modernity’s uncritical faith in progress. Recognizing the ambiguity of progress, Adorno described it as progress from the sling to the atom bomb (no. 22). Benedict sees reason as God’s great gift to human beings, but when detached from God and the “saving forces of faith” it cannot become truly human (no. 23). Nor can political structures alone guarantee the right state of human affairs. Again he stresses the fragile character of human freedom, which always must be won over to the good (no. 24). Finally he stresses it is not science that redeems human beings; it is love. Even in this life we can experience “moments of redemption,” giving life new meaning, when we experience a great love. But this love too remains fragile and can be destroyed by death. It is only the unconditional love of God revealed in Jesus Christ that can redeem us, a love from which “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us” (no.



Chapter One 9

26). This is the hope of Christians, not an individualistic understanding of salvation, but a relationship with God through communion with Jesus who “draws us into his being for all,” making it our own (no. 28). Pope Benedict and his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, both of whom had lived through the horrors of the Nazi period, had seen at first-hand what happens when a people or a nation try to live without God. In the end, he returns to Horkheimer and Adorno, who reject both theism and atheism. Pointing to a God who reveals his true face in the Jesus who takes our God-forsaken condition upon himself, he says, “I am convinced that the question of justice constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favour of faith in eternal life” (no. 43). LUMEN FIDEI Because Pope Benedict resigned his papacy before he was able to finish his encyclical on faith, which was meant to complement his earlier works on love and hope, the encyclical, called Lumen fidei, appeared in 2013 under the name of his successor, Pope Francis. While Francis acknowledges Benedict’s substantial authorship, saying, “I have taken up his fine work and added a few contributions of my own” (no. 7), the work is mostly Benedict’s. While some passages suggest Francis’s work, I will refer to Benedict as the author.16 Several themes run through the encyclical. It treats light as a metaphor for faith, stresses faith’s ecclesial form, develops Benedict’s Augustinian epistemology, which holds that knowledge and truth are dependent on love, and addresses the relationship between faith and reason. The encyclical begins with the words of Jesus in the fourth Gospel: “I have come as light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness” (John 12:46). It treats light as a metaphor for faith, a metaphor used also by Paul (2 Cor. 4:6). Benedict acknowledges that for many today in a humanity “come of age,” faith is seen as an illusory light, blocking the path to full human liberation (no. 2). It becomes a “leap in the dark,” something emotional or subjective (no. 3). The encyclical’s purpose is to recover faith as a light that illumines every aspect of human existence; born of an encounter with the living God, faith reveals the love of Jesus that triumphs over death and the future opening before us (no. 4). The approach here is existential, not doctrinal; Benedict focuses on the biblical narratives of call and response, promise and fulfillment. Examples include Abraham who hears God’s call that has always been present at the core of his being and sets out into the unknown, Israel who journeys from slavery to freedom, Moses who brings God’s will to the people of Israel,

10

Chapter One

showing us that faith means not immediate vision but living with the mystery that gradually unveils itself, and Jesus who reveals that God’s love is able to conquer even death itself. Christian faith is faith in a God who is so close to us that he entered our history. A second theme is what Benedict calls the ecclesial form of faith. The life of faith means a life lived in the church: “Faith is necessarily ecclesial; it is professed from within the body of Christ as a concrete communion of believers. It is against this ecclesial backdrop that faith opens the individual Christian toward all others” (no. 22). This is another typical theme of Ratzinger. Earlier in the encyclical he had stressed that the individual’s act of faith finds its place within a community, the common “we” of the people who, in faith, are like a single person (no. 14). In an earlier work he speaks of the “we-structure” of faith. Because the faith is essentially communal, mediated by the faith of the church, which receives it and hands it down historically, the “I” of the individual always includes a “thou” and a “we.”17 This is a theme particularly difficult for contemporary Americans, so often eclectic in their religious beliefs, to hear. The third theme is perhaps most important in understanding Benedict’s Augustinian epistemology, the conviction that knowledge and truth are dependent on love. Paragraphs 26 to 28 are difficult to exegete, but among his most beautiful in the encyclical. For Benedict, truth and love are mutually related. He grounds this is a biblical understanding of the human heart: In the Bible, the heart is the core of the human person, where all his or her different dimensions intersect: body and spirit, interiority and openness to the world and to others, intellect, will and affectivity. If the heart is capable of holding all these dimensions together, it is because it is where we become open to truth and love, where we let them touch us and deeply transform us (no. 26).

Love needs truth, which engages our affectivity. Only when it is grounded in truth can it endure over time and sustain a shared journey. If not tied to truth, it falls prey to fickle emotions; “it cannot liberate our isolated ego or redeem it from the fleeting moment in order to bear fruit” (no. 27). But the converse is also true. Truth also needs love: the two are inseparable. Indeed he says that love is the source of knowledge (no. 28). The truth we seek enlightens us whenever we are touched by love. Benedict cites William of Saint-Thierry’s comments on the Song of Songs’ reference to the eyes of the beloved: “The two eyes . . . are faith-filled reason and love, which then become one in rising to the contemplation of God, when our understanding becomes ‘an understanding of enlightened love’” (no. 27). Those who are truly seeking God and are open to love are already on the path to faith (no. 35). Note the inclusive nature of his thought. In addressing the relationship

Chapter One 11



between faith and theology, he says that faith orients reason to open itself to the light which comes from God, “so that reason guided by love of truth, can come to a deeper knowledge of God” (no. 36). To fully understand him here we need to consider his Augustinian epistemology, which we will do later. The compatibility of faith and reason is a final theme of the encyclical, long characteristic of Benedict and indeed of Catholic theology in general. He points to Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter, Fides et ratio, to emphasize how faith and reason strengthen each other. He finds the dialogue between faith and reason to be deeply rooted in the tradition. The early Christians found ancient Greek culture, with its search for truth, an ideal dialogue partner. Joined to the gospel message this philosophical culture of the ancient world played a major role in the church’s evangelical efforts (no. 32). FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY AS THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES If we want to rethink faith, hope, and charity in their Christian theological sense, one of the goals of this conference, we need to take seriously Pope Benedict’s efforts to reclaim them from their post-Enlightenment “secular mutation” which emptied them of their Christian meaning. Faith was reduced to faith in science, hope to hope in technical and social progress, and love to eroticism. In order to view them again in a properly Christian sense, we will have to explore more in depth some of the themes surfacing in Benedict’s three encyclicals. We will consider the difference between acquired and theological virtues, the relation between truth and love as well as between faith and reason. Theological Virtues Catholic theology has traditionally distinguished between natural and theological virtues. Once Aristotle’s Ethics became available in translation, scholastic theologians began to adopt his notion of virtue as a habit or acquired disposition. The later tradition would speak of these as natural virtues. The classical treatment comes from Thomas Aquinas in his Summa theologiae.18 He developed his treatment of the infused or “theological” virtues on the basis of the scholastic distinction between nature and grace, though the idea of a “pure” nature without grace comes not from Thomas but from later commentators. It is important to note that, for Benedict, the theological virtues are properly theological, different from faith, hope, and love as popularly understood; that is to say, they have an infused or “supernatural” character, or perhaps we

12

Chapter One

could say in more contemporary language that in them God’s grace or Spirit is active, communicating a share in divine life. Citing Aquinas, he writes in Spe salvi: Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a “proof  ” of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a “not yet” (no. 7).19

Faith is then more than mere belief; like all the theological virtues it is an experience of grace, a participation in God’s life. This same distinction appears in the controversial 2000 declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus, produced under Ratzinger’s presidency, which distinguishes between Christian faith and “belief ” in other religions (no. 4). Truth and Love Earlier we considered how Benedict sees, not just that love and truth are related, but that knowledge depends in some way on love. This important theme, rooted in his Augustinian epistemology, brings together some of the themes we have already considered, the “supernatural” character of the theological virtues, the “we-structure” of faith, and Benedict’s rejection of modernity’s autonomous reason. Ratzinger’s epistemology, influenced by his study of Augustine and Bonaventure, is more Platonic than Aristotelian, Franciscan rather than Thomist. He saw in Plato’s struggle against the Sophists of his day, with their reduction of truth to technical knowledge, a parallel with the secular rationality of postEnlightenment Western civilization. Like his mentor Augustine, Ratzinger stresses the difference between knowledge (scientia) and wisdom (sapientia), and he sees humility as the necessary road to truth.20 In contrast to the intellectualism of Aquinas, Ratzinger, like Augustine, stresses the role of the will in knowing, giving it a certain primacy over the understanding. As Robert Cushman says in his study of Augustine, “What is known cannot be divorced from what is loved.”21 To know the truth one must love the truth. Ratzinger found Augustine’s epistemology deeper than that of Aquinas, for “it is well aware that the organ by which God can be seen cannot be a non-historical ‘ratio naturalis’ which just does not exist, but only the ratio pura, i.e., purificata or, as Augustine expresses it, echoing the gospel, the cor purum (‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’).”22 He says the same years later as pope in his book Jesus of Nazareth: “The organ



Chapter One 13

for seeing God is the heart. The intellect alone is not enough.”23 As he writes in Lumen fidei, “Each of us comes to the light because of love, and each of us is called to love in order to remain in the light” (no. 32). This is different from the “objective” approach of the scientific method. It is here, Rowland writes, “in his emphasis on the heart or the relationship between truth and love, and in his interest in history and the transcendental of beauty, that Ratzinger is at his most Augustinian and Bonaventurian.”24 He does not identify wisdom and faith, but faith opens one to wisdom, which is faith’s gift. If God cannot be known directly by human beings, they can move toward God by loving the true, the good, and the beautiful, drawn toward these eternal values or “transcendentals” by eros. The transcendentals reveal the real object of eros, the eternal, the fullness of being that they suggest, thus the divine. Faith and Reason Ratzinger has long rejected the autonomous reason of modernity. He argues that there is a necessary correlation between faith and reason; they need to work in harmony. Taken in isolation, each can become pathological; both are called to purify and heal one another.25 In his Truth and Tolerance he wrote: “Reason needs to listen to the great religious traditions if it does not wish to become deaf, blind, and mute concerning the most essential elements of human existence.”26 At the same time, faith needs reason if it is not to fall into some kind of fundamentalism. Christianity brings faith and reason together. It sees God’s wisdom encountered in a person, the man Jesus who is also divine.27 Shortly after the Vatican II ended, Ratzinger faulted its Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes) for attempting a too easy accommodation with modernity that neglected the biblical view, for presuming a kind of dialogue that lost its focus on Christ and separated the world of faith from that of ordinary experience, for identifying Christian hope to a high degree with progress, and for what he described “an almost naïve progressive optimism.”28 Karl Rahner had similar reservations; he found the Constitution “too euphoric in its evaluation of humanity and the human condition,” insisting that all human endeavors often wind up in blind alleys, including those of the church.29 In his controversial address at his old university at Regensburg, shortly after his election to the papacy, Benedict stressed that the rapprochement between biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was both providential and necessary. He has long argued that the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Old Testament, is more than a mere translation. Not a Hellenized version

14

Chapter One

of the Hebrew Scriptures, it is an independent textual witness. Both texts have their own value in the development of biblical faith.30 The encounter with the best of Greek thought, reflected in the Old Testament Wisdom literature, marked an important step in the history of revelation: “A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion,” one that joined the very heart of Christian faith with the heart of Greek thought.31 Nor can this incorporation of the spirit of Hellenistic Greek philosophic inquiry be dismissed as a Hellenization of Christian faith, able to be jettisoned in different cultural contexts. As he says as he reached the end of his lecture, “the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.”32 To be concrete, he raised the issue of faith and violence, citing a remark of Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus: “Not to act ‘with logos’ is contrary to God’s nature.”33 This was his central point, lost in the controversy because his remark seemed to deny that Muslim teaching saw God’s will as bound by rationality. That same year he argued that other religions also were challenged by Western rationality and the questions posed by Christian faith.34 Subsequent events in the Middle East and elsewhere have shown how prescient Benedict was. Benedict maintains that this rapprochement between reason and faith was unfortunately later lost through the Reformation principle of sola scriptura, a move carried far beyond the Reformers themselves by Kant who anchored faith, now cut off from philosophy, entirely in the practical reason, thus denying it access to reality as a whole.35 In his seminal study of atheism, Michael Buckley cites a remark of Martin Heidegger about a “forgetfulness of being” (Seinsvergessenheit), with in Buckley’s words its concomitant inability to ask the question of God at the depth “which alone can give any theological sense to the content of the answer.”36 Being is mysterious; it raises that most fundamental question, why is there anything at all, thus the question of the divine. Forgetfulness of being means that this question never gets asked. We have forgotten our origin in mystery. According to a 2012 Pew Forum Study, people with no religious affiliation (not identified with a particular religion, though they may have some spiritual beliefs in a God or “higher power”) today make up the third-largest global group, 16 percent, coming after Christians and Muslims and just ahead of Hindus.37 Is our world any better for this decline in religious affiliation? Even given the skepticism of the modern university, reason cannot be true to itself if it excludes the question of God. The universe cannot be simply random, the product of chance. The very possibility of science is based on the implicit belief—faith, if you will—that there is an intelligibility to things that



Chapter One 15

implies not mere chance but the order that comes ultimately from a mind, in biblical terms a creator. In a lecture prepared but never given at La Sapienza, the University of Rome, Benedict argued that raising the question of God, the God who is “Reason-Love” belongs to the university’s fundamental role in the search for the true and the good. “Yet if reason, out of concern for its alleged purity, becomes deaf to the great message that comes to it from Christian faith and wisdom, then it withers like a tree whose roots can no longer reach the waters that give it life. . . . then it will not become more reasonable or purer, but will fall apart and disintegrate.”38 CONCLUSION We have seen that, according to the Christian tradition, faith, hope, and charity are infused or “supernatural” virtues, as an older theological language would have it, a distinction built on the scholastic distinction between the natural and supernatural orders. Most Catholic theologians today no longer use these categories; they see nature as both flawed and graced, for the supernatural is grounded in the natural. The Incarnation means that God is to be found in the midst of the human and offers saving grace to those who sincerely seek him (Lumen gentium 16). What does this mean for how we understand faith, hope, and charity from a theological perspective? If we are not to reduce them to secular, even comfortable middle-class virtues, we need to preserve that openness to the Absolute, to the Good, to God. That does not mean necessarily that everyone has to adopt a Christian perspective or that they are bestowed only by sacramental grace. But Benedict’s emphasis that reason finds its roots in the divine Logos and that knowledge and wisdom are in some way dependent on love suggests the need for a genuine commitment to the true and the good, in other words, a personal conversion that moves a person beyond self-interest, opening him or her up to the very mystery of being. Without such a conversion, we remain locked in to ourselves. The need for faith and reason to work in consort makes the same point in a different way. As Benedict has long argued, an autonomous reason, without the light of faith, is blind. It remains closed to the mystery of being. Worse, it is self-destructive. At the same time, faith without reason leads to fundamentalism, which today appears in a multiplicity of forms. So what might the theological virtues have to say to us today? Benedict’s approach to faith is existential rather than doctrinal. Reviewing the biblical narratives, he treats faith as a light in a world closed in on itself, revealing a God who continually seeks a relationship with humankind. Faith must be

16

Chapter One

learned; it means entering into a long tradition born by the biblical narratives. The story of Jesus shows the utter reliability of that relationship, of God’s love. Faith is mediated by the Christian community; it is essentially ecclesial. There is a “we-structure” to faith. Becoming a person of faith requires openness to the truth, indeed a love for truth and goodness, as knowledge is dependent on love. Hope addresses the deepest longings of the human heart, including the hope that justice will one day prevail and evil will be overcome. Hope tells us that our destiny is not oblivion but communion with love itself. Because God is personal, hope can never be reduced to material progress, still less to the social engineering or utopianism that so often collapses into ideology and even violence. Hope is often described by the word salvation, but salvation should not be understood as an individualistic escape from a world of misery, a “being saved” for those who have been “born again.” Salvation means the fulfillment of our fundamentally social nature, bringing us beyond the egoism, alienation, and fragmentation that are the fruits of evil into a new communion with God, the source of all life and with all God’s children. Jacques Dupuis sees as belonging to the reign of God those of other religions who perceive God’s call through their own religious traditions, even if they are not aware of it. Along with Christians, they “build together the Reign of God whenever they commit themselves by common accord to the cause of human rights, and whenever they work for the integral liberation of each and every human person, but especially of the poor and the oppressed,” and by promoting religious and spiritual values.39 If fullness of our salvation is beyond our power to imagine, we can at least understand that our deepest longings will not remain unfilled. For the poor and abused, for all the victims of injustice, hope is for comfort, for justice, for the fullness of life. Nor is creation itself excluded from hope.40 Love is the very definition of the divine, the Logos or creative source of all being and intelligibility; it is also our destiny and the path we must follow to reach it. God’s love draws all creation toward communion with the divine mystery and at the same time is poured out in love for creation. For Benedict it is both eros and agape, the love that draws and the love that gives itself away. God’s love is personified in the person of Jesus, the Logos or Word become flesh. Jesus’s followers, his church, constitute a community of love. Without ignoring the importance of justice, which is primarily the work of the state, Benedict gives a certain priority to love. Justice can never replace the need for love that is so deep in each human person. Important as just structure may be, they alone can never assuage the suffering of material poverty, loneli-



Chapter One 17

ness, or abandonment that remain endemic to the human condition. To take but one example, think of the thousands of immigrants today trying to escape violence or dehumanizing poverty. From the waters of the Mediterranean to the borders of our own country, these desperate people are seen not as those who so desperately need aid and opportunity but as challenges to already over-burdened countries and economies. The theological virtues call us beyond a restricted vision limited to the visible or measurable. They illumine our experience with a light that shows us that we are not alone. They promise a future when every tear will be wiped away and there will be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain (cf. Rev. 21:4). They point to a love that embraces all and calls us to love one another in return.

On the Role of Christian Particularity in Political Theology Shane Akerman

In this response I will elaborate upon Thomas Rausch’s understanding of the theological virtues as a critique of secularity. My intention is to push Rausch’s excellent and timely chapter toward a greater conceptual clarity, by exposing what I take to be an ambiguity in his argument. Through the writings of Pope Benedict XVI, Rausch has warned us of the folly of a purely “natural” reason that is detached from faith in, hope in, and love for God. As Rausch has put it, there must be a recovery of the specifically Christian meaning of faith, hope, and love. But this raises the question of what exactly such a recovery would look like. In the end, Rausch appears to advocate for an implicit or anonymous faith in, hope in, and love for God, such that one may have these specifically Christian virtues without even knowing it. But does this satisfactorily overcome the problem of the secularization of the theological virtues? May one not argue for a return to a more explicit orientation toward God as the highest end? The difference between these two approaches is significant, especially as it relates to the problem of political theology. For here one can raise the question of the role of Christian particularity in the contemporary struggle for justice within secular politics. The claim of this chapter is that the re-theologizing of the theological virtues is necessary to the cause of social justice and can only be fully achieved by an embrace of the particularities of the Christian narrative and the ecclesial communities that foster these virtues. THE PROBLEM OF THE “SECULARIST MUTATION” Aquinas identifies at least three reasons why the theological virtues are theological. The first is that their object is God, second is that they are infused in 18



Chapter One 19

us by God, and third is that they are made known to us only by divine revelation.41 So when one speaks of faith, hope, and love as theological virtues, one cannot be referring to faith, hope, and love in general, but rather faith in God, hope in God, love for God. That God is what makes the theological virtues theological should go without saying, but it is also to be noted that God is what makes the theological virtues virtuous. As many secular critics have noted, faith is not virtuous in and of itself. What separates virtuous faith from mere credulity or gullibility is an object that is worthy of faith. Likewise, what separates virtuous hope from naïve optimism is an object that is worthy of hope. And what separates virtuous love from a blind and arbitrary desire is a love that is well ordered and appropriate to its object. Thus faith, hope, and love are virtues, not merely in themselves, but insofar as they direct us to God as our highest end and source of supreme happiness. But we must still press further. What does it mean to have faith in God, hope in God, or love for God? Rausch opened with a quotation from Pope Benedict, worth repeating here: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”42 God is the object of our faith, hope, and love; but God is not a mere object among objects. God is a person whom we encounter; but God is not a mere person among persons. God is that which provides the horizon of ultimate meaning. As Rausch explained, God is necessary for the intelligibility of the universe itself. And this is not because God is a thing that happens to be true, but because God is subsisting Truth. Reason cannot be uncoupled from faith, for reason itself is ultimately grounded in an act of faith. Nor can reason be uncoupled from love, for God, who is Truth, is also profoundly personal and loving. With this emphasis on the internal relation between reason and love, we are reminded that truth is not simply intellectual, but volitional; not simply objective, but subjective; not merely individual, but social; not merely timeless, but historical. This is why the specifically Christian character of the theological virtues cannot be abandoned, because the particularities of the Christian narrative cannot be discarded in order to arrive at a purely rational core, for at the heart of Christianity we find the God who is both Logos and Love. To lose sight of God as the ultimate horizon of meaning is what is meant by the “secularist mutation” of the theological virtues, which Rausch rightfully laments. Faith becomes faith in science, hope becomes hope in human progress, and love becomes a blind and arbitrary passion. Reason, science, politics, and culture are now seen as standing independently of God. The natural and supernatural, rather than being understood as dimensions of one holistic reality, are considered to be two, freestanding, autonomous realms— if the supernatural is said to exist at all.

20

Chapter One

How, then, do we bring reconciliation to the natural and the supernatural, a separation that expresses itself by the “secularist mutation” of the theological virtues? It seems there are two ways forward. John Milbank, in his Theology and Social Theory, describes the two options of integration as “naturalizing the supernatural” or “supernaturalizing the natural.”43 The first path, “naturalizing the supernatural,” is an approach that sees the process of secularization as itself a movement of the divine. From this perspective, the “secularist mutation” of the theological virtues is a misnomer. Secular faith, hope, and love are not really secular or atheistic, but contain within themselves an unconscious or implicit faith in, hope in, and love for God. On the other hand, there is the path of “supernaturalizing the natural.” From this vantage, reason is always in need of a self-conscious faith in order to be true to itself. Such a perspective recognizes the Christian metanarrative as offering a definitive interpretation of the world and of history that can be supplemented by, but cannot be subordinated to, any other worldview or paradigm. To put the distinction simply: must one know that it is God whom one loves, in order to truly love God? And must one know that it is God in whom one has faith, in order to truly have faith in God? Rausch’s treatment of the issue leaves this somewhat ambiguous. He said that: “[W]e need to preserve that openness to the Absolute, to the Good, to God. [But] that does not mean necessarily that everyone has to adopt a Christian perspective.” Yet, at the same time, Rausch asserts repeatedly that, “Faith is mediated by the Christian community; it is essentially ecclesial.” How can we affirm the inclusivity of the former without abandoning the particularity of the latter? Put another way, does Rausch’s line of argumentation from the writings of Pope Benedict justify the Rahnerian conclusion? Karl Rahner’s conceptualization of an anonymous or unthematic faith is a valuable contribution to the Christian theological tradition. However, Rahner had no intention of indicating that an explicit, thematic faith in, hope in, and love for God adds nothing to a latent, unthematic faith. Thus if the particularities of the Christian narrative and ecclesial community do add a certain depth or substance to the human expression of the theological virtues, then to fully recover from their secularization one must be willing to advocate precisely for the particularly Christian, thematic, and explicit articulation of faith in, hope in, and love for God. We turn, then, to the topic already raised by Rausch, namely, the field of political and liberation theologies. For it is in this arena that the difference between “naturalizing the supernatural” and “supernaturalizing the natural,” is especially prominent.



Chapter One 21

SIGNIFICANCE FOR POLITICAL THEOLOGY As Rausch explained, Benedict’s objections to political and liberation theologies are not so much social or political as they are theological. Perhaps the primary locus of this objection is what is described as the “immanentizing of eschatology.” Those who immanentize eschatology are those who “make salvation something within history rather than beyond it. Salvation becomes not the work of God, but that of human beings, while the mission of the church becomes primarily social.” Such a critique must be very carefully framed, however, for it is certainly not the intention of Pope Benedict to juxtapose salvation within history and salvation beyond history as an either/or. To affirm that salvation is beyond history does not deny that salvation is also experienced within history. Similarly, while we must obviously affirm salvation as God’s work, we do not do so as a negation of the fitting and proper role of human work within salvation. The problem, it would appear, cannot be simply that political and liberation theologians “socialize” the meaning of salvation. After all, Benedict himself affirms unequivocally that the meaning of salvation is fundamentally social.44 In Spe salvi, the Pope writes: “[Eternal life] is linked to a lived union with a ‘people,’ and for each individual it can only be attained within this ‘we.’ It presupposes that we escape from the prison of our ‘I,’ because only in the openness of this universal subject does our gaze open to the source of joy, to love itself—to God.”45 He continues, “While this community-oriented vision of the ‘blessed life’ is certainly directed beyond the present world, as such it also has to do with the building up of this world—in very different ways, according to the historical context and the possibilities offered or excluded thereby.”46 To recognize the immanent or social dimension of eschatology cannot be what is meant by the danger of “immanentizing eschatology.” The danger comes when one fixates on and absolutizes only one dimension. Thus the immanent and the transcendent, the divine and the human, the individual and the social, the otherworldly and the historical, should never be harshly dichotomized. Again, not because there is any kind of ontological equivalence between the world and God, but it is precisely because there is an infinite, qualitative ontological distinction between God and the world, that the two cannot be merely juxtaposed. The theological cannot be treated as a sphere alongside the realm of the political or the cultural. The theological is not one of the many components of the human experience, but a perspective on this totality, a depth-dimension. Benedict’s reservations regarding many forms of political and liberation theologies appear justified. Something is lost if salvation is reduced to its

22

Chapter One

purely immanent and historical dimension and the faith is distorted when it is instrumentalized for political use. Yet it is equally problematic for salvation to become overly individualized and otherworldly. Unfortunately it appears that, despite his laudable descriptions of salvation as fundamentally social, Benedict falls prey, at times, to a depoliticized approach to faith and salvation. Perhaps this is most clearly illustrated by Pope Benedict’s prioritization of love over justice. In Deus caritas est, Benedict gives an extensive treatment of the relation between justice and charity. What he affirms again and again is that the cause of justice is a responsibility of the State. (And politics is here always equated with statecraft.) Benedict writes, “The State must inevitably face the question of how justice can be achieved here and now. But this presupposes an even more radical question: what is justice?”47 He goes on to explain that the definition of justice is a matter of reason and that this is where faith has its role, because faith is necessary for purifying reason. So he writes, “[T]he Church is duty-bound to offer, through the purification of reason, and through ethical formation, her own specific contribution toward understanding the requirements of justice and achieving them politically.”48 He is quick to clarify, however, that the achievement of justice as a “direct duty” is the responsibility of the lay faithful in their role as citizens. Again, this is because “the formation of just structures . . . belongs to the world of politics, the sphere of the autonomous use of reason.”49 But if true reason cannot be separated from the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, then, how can Pope Benedict claim that justice is a matter of reason alone, and therefore should be left to the State? How can he argue for a depoliticized and non-ideological Church if an understanding of true justice can only be had in the light of faith, hope, and love? Benedict is clear that faith is essential for the understanding of the true meaning of justice. The question that remains, however, is whether such a faith needs to be categorical in order to be truly effective. Put another way—is secular justice real justice? Neither option appears to totally satisfy the concerns raised by Benedict. On the one hand, if one says yes—secular justice is real justice—then one is saying that the theological virtues can adequately inform social ethics without an explicit orientation toward God. Yet this contradicts Benedict’s harsh rejection of a pragmatic relativism. Benedict refuses to allow praxis to be given priority over truth, and has therefore been very critical of the notion that we can claim to know what we must do, even if we do not know what is true. On the other hand, if one says no—secular justice is not real justice—then one is saying that social justice can only be true and pure when it is explicitly oriented toward God. Yet this contradicts Benedict’s insistence on a total separation of Church and State. He writes in Jesus of Nazareth, for instance,



Chapter One 23

that the separation of the religious from the political, the separation of God’s people from politics is “essential to Jesus’ message.”50 Thus, for Benedict, the cause of justice, seeing as it is rooted exclusively in the realm of State politics, must remain separate from the religious perspective of faith in, hope in, and love for God. It is at this point where I find Benedict’s line of reasoning to be inconsistent. If the State is in need of the tutelage of the Church to learn the meaning of true justice, then how can one really maintain a separation of religion and politics? What Benedict has written points directly to an urgent need for Christian engagement with politics and indicates that the particularities of the Christian perspective are essential to a full and robust conception of justice. Benedict’s desire for a Church that is above the fray of politics seems an impossible wish in the light of his other insights. Thus the question remains: How essential is the particularity of the Christian perspective, with its explicitly theological dimension? If faith, hope, and love necessarily transform the meaning of justice—then, is the justice of the secular State infused with an implicit faith in, hope in, and love for God? If so, then what does faith’s explicit articulation add, if anything? On the other hand, if true justice must be explicitly theological, then how can the Church relegate the work of justice to the secular State alone? In order to recover from the “secularist mutation” of the theological virtues and to fully retrieve their theological character, we must also retrieve the particularly ecclesial character of these virtues, otherwise we too will be guilty of problematically uncoupling “truth” and “love,” and fall into a trap of an overly-individualized soteriology. The task of political and liberation theologies is thereby justified, for the cause of social justice is in need of something more than faith in science and hope in human progress, it needs a love that goes beyond egoistic passions—and this is what the Christian perspective, in all of its particularity, can offer. NOTES 1.  Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007). 2.  See Tracey Rowland, Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark International, 2010), 71–72. 3. Polycarp, Letter to the Philippians 3.3; cf. Early Christian Writings, trans. J. B. Lightfoot. 4. Rowland, Benedict XVI, 73. 5.  Joseph Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ: Spiritual Exercises in Faith, Hope, and Love (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 41.

24

Chapter One

 6. Joseph Ratzinger, Values in a Time of Upheaval (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 88.   7.  For Rahner’s statement, see John L. Allen, Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican’s Enforcer of the Faith (London and New York: Continuum, 2000), 125–26.  8. Aidan Nichols, The Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: An Introduction to the Theology of Joseph Ratzinger, new edition (New York: Burns & Oats, 2007), 43.  9. Eric Vögelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 120; Vincent Twomey acknowledges a direct influence of Vögelin’s thought on Benedict in Pope Benedict XVI: The Conscience of Our Age (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 52, note 22. 10.  Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 156. 11.  Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), first published 1930–1936; see David C. Schindler’s critique of Nygren’s strict opposition between eros and agape in “The Redemption of Eros: Philosophical Reflections on Benedict XVI’s First Encyclical,” Communio 33, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 375–99. 12.  See Twomey, Pope Benedict XVI, 72–78. 13.  See Rowland, Benedict XVI, 86–90. 14.  Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, second edition (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2007); The Yes of Jesus Christ. 15.  James V. Schall, “The Encyclical on Hope: On the ‘De-immanentizing of the Christian Eschaton,” Ignatius Insight, December 3, 2007, http://www.ignatiusinsight .com/features2007/schall_onspesalvi2_dec07.asp. 16.  For an example of the thought of Francis see his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii gaudium. 17.  See Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 15, 34; see also his Church, Ecumenism, and Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 36–38; first published in German in 1987. 18.  Summa theologiae, I-II, 49–67. 19.  Ibid., II-II, 4, 1; see Reinhard Hütter, “Theological Faith Enlightening Sacred Theology: Renewing Theology by Recovering Its Unity as Sacra Doctrina,” who argues that in Spe salvi Benedict encourages a recovery of the supernatural character of faith, The Thomist 74, no. 3 (2010): 371–72. 20. Joseph A. Komonchak, “The Church in Crisis: Pope Benedict’s Theological Vision,” Commonweal, May 26, 2005, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org /church-crisis-1. 21.  Robert E. Cushman, “Faith and Reason,” in A Companion to the Study of St. Augustine, ed. Roy W. Battenhouse (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1979), 289. 22.  Joseph Ratzinger, “The Dignity of the Human Person, Commentary on Gaudium et Spes,” in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 5, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 155. 23.  Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 92. 24.  Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9.



Chapter One 25

25. Ratzinger, Values in a Time of Upheaval, 42–43. 26.  Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 252. 27. Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 358–62. 28. Joseph Ratzinger, Theological Highlights of Vatican II (New York: Paulist Press, 2009), 219–27 at 227; first published in 1966; see also his Principles of Catholic Theology, 378–81. 29. Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 22 (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 158. 30. Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, 90–95. 31.  Pope Benedict XVI, “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections,” Lecture of the Holy Father, Augla Magna of the University of Regensburg, September 12, 2006, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006 /september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ratzinger, Values in a Time of Upheaval, 41. 35.  Pope Benedict XVI, Regensburg Lecture. 36.  Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 348–49; see Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 18–21. 37.  “The Global Religious Landscape,” Pew Research Center, December 18, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-exec. 38.  Lecture by the Holy Father Benedict XVI at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” January 17, 2008, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2008 /january/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080117_la-sapienza.html. 39.  Jacques Dupuis, Christianity and the Religions: From Confrontation to Dialogue (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 202. 40.  Thomas P. Rausch, Eschatology, Liturgy, and Christology: Toward Recovering an Eschatological Imagination (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012). 41.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II-I, 62. 42.  Pope Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est, no. 1. 43. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 207. 44.  Spe salvi (nos. 13–14). Cf. Pope Benedict XVI, Light of the World (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), 179. 45.  Pope Benedict XVI, Spe salvi, no. 14. 46.  Ibid., no. 15. 47.  Pope Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est, no. 28. 48. Ibid. 49. Emphasis mine. Ibid., no. 29. “ad ambitum scilicet rationis sui ipsius consciae.” 50.  Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 170. Cf. Deus Caritas Est (no. 28).

26

Chapter One

WORKS CITED Allen, John L. Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican’s Enforcer of the Faith. London and New York: Continuum, 2000. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa theologiae. 4 vols. Matriti, Italy: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1955–1958. Benedict XVI, Pope. See: Ratzinger, Joseph. Buckley, Michael J. At the Origins of Modern Atheism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. Cushman, Robert E. “Faith and Reason.” In A Companion to the Study of St. Augustine, edited by Roy W. Battenhouse, 287–314. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1979. Dupuis, Jacques. Christianity and the Religions: From Confrontation to Dialogue. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003. Heidegger, Martin. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959. Hütter, Reinhard. “Theological Faith Enlightening Sacred Theology: Renewing Theology by Recovering Its Unity as Sacra Doctrina.” The Thomist 74, no. 3 (2010): 369–405. Komonchak, Joseph A. “The Church in Crisis: Pope Benedict’s Theological Vision.” Commonweal, May 26, 2005. https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/church -crisis-1. Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Nichols, Aidan. The Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: An Introduction to the Theology of Joseph Ratzinger. New edition. New York: Burns & Oats, 2007. Nygren, Anders. Agape and Eros. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953. Pew Research Center. “The Global Religious Landscape.” December 18, 2012. http:// www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-exec. Rahner, Karl. Theological Investigations. Vol. 6. New York: Crossroads, 1961. Ratzinger, Joseph. Church, Ecumenism, and Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008. ———. “The Dignity of the Human Person, Commentary on Gaudium et Spes.” In Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II. Vol. 5, edited by Herbert Vorgrimler, 115–63. New York: Herder and Herder, 1969. ———. Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life. Second edition. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2007. ———. “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections.” Lecture of the Holy Father, Augla Magna of the University of Regensburg, September 12, 2006. https://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september /documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html. ———. Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. New York: Doubleday, 2007. ———. Lecture by the Holy Father Benedict XVI at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” January 17, 2008. http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en /speeches/2008/january/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080117_la-sapienza.html.



Chapter One 27

———. Light of the World. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010. ———. Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987. ———. Theological Highlights of Vatican II. New York: Paulist Press, 2009. ———. Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004. ———. Values in a Time of Upheaval. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006. ———. The Yes of Jesus Christ: Spiritual Exercises in Faith, Hope, and Love. New York: Crossroad, 1991. Rausch, Thomas P. Eschatology, Liturgy, and Christology: Toward Recovering an Eschatological Imagination. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012. Rowland, Tracey. Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: T&T Clark International, 2010. ———. Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Schall, James V. “The Encyclical on Hope: On the ‘De-immanentizing’ of the Christian Eschaton.” Ignatius Insight, December 3, 2007. http://www.ignatiusinsight .com/features2007/schall_onspesalvi2_dec07.asp. Schindler, David C. “The Redemption of Eros: Philosophical Reflections on Benedict XVI’s First Encyclical.” Communio 33, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 375–99. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007. Twomey, Vincent. Pope Benedict XVI: The Conscience of Our Age. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007. Vögelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.

Chapter Two

Protest against Death: Faith, Hope, and Love A Theological Meditation Ingolf U. Dalferth It is the perennial task of Christian theology to explore the human situation coram deo by examining the orientation of Christian life and practice to the presence of God’s creative love in all its dimensions with regard to God, to the world, to others, and to themselves. Theology does so in response to the challenges and opportunities of its time. But not all of those are new. While human life has many features that change over time and differ from culture to culture, it also has important persistent features that theology cannot ignore. If theology is about the human situation in the light of the creative presence of God, then what theology has to say about faith, hope, and love today will, in important respects, not be altogether different from what it had to say about it yesterday. Whatever it says will have to be true to the existential situation of human life coram deo. This will be the focus of my theological meditations that seek to understand faith, hope, and love as enactments of the Christian protest against death. As the Medieval antiphon (or responsorium?1) says, “Media vita in morte sumus [in the midst of life we are in death].”2 That is our human reality. But Christians go on and add, as Luther did, “media morte in vita sumus [in the midst of death we are in life].”3 They understand the inescapable reality of death to be embedded in the larger reality of God’s creative love. This is what motivated the old tradition of the risus paschalis (Easter laughter). And this is what I seek to understand. ANIMALS CAPABLE OF REASON Human beings are animals. This is not a recent insight. But it has never been the last word about us. Usually it is the opening of a discourse that adds 29

30

Chapter Two

important distinctions and qualifications. Thus, the Aristotelian tradition classifies humans not just as animals, but as rational animals (ζῷον λόγον ἔχον) who live not only in couples (ζῷον συνδυαστικών)4 but in groups as social or political animals (ζῷον πολιτικόν). This is more than an arbitrary addition of aspects. We are not first of all rational beings who in addition also live as couples in social groups. Rather, our reason or rationality (λόγoϚ) has to be understood through the lens of our life as couples or pairs in groups. We are rational precisely in belonging to a social group in which we interact and communicate through signs, language, conventions, and rules. To be able to participate in this common life is what the qualifier “rational” expresses. Reason and rationality are not capacities of the solitary rational decider, but the competence of self-interpreting animals in webs of interlocution (Taylor).5 To be rational is to be able to communicate intelligibly, and to have reason is to be able to understand how others understand us, to take the perspective of the other at our own place, to understand the meaning of a situation in the light of the communicative processes in which we participate as human beings. This is why Kant distinguished between understanding or rationality (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft). Rational understanding (Verstand) and sensual perception (Wahrnehmung) are our cognitive ways of being related to our environment, just as emotions (of the body) and passions (of the soul) are our non-cognitive ways of interacting with our environments. This is what we share with other animals to a greater or lesser degree. We are animals who live in environments, and we try to survive not simply by adapting to our environments but by shaping them according to our needs and desires. But all this is possible for us only because we are not just rational animals or, better, animals capable of rationality, but persons who live in communicative interaction with other persons. It is only as persons that we are free, it is only as persons that we can be moral and religious, and it is only as persons that we have, or can develop, reason (Vernunft). As Schopenhauer has pointed out, “Vernunft” derives from “vernehmen” (hearing and understanding), and it implies others who communicate something to us that we can understand: “Vernunft kommt von Vernehmen, welches nicht synonym ist mit Hören, sondern das Innewerden der durch Worte mitgeteilten Gedanken bedeutet.”6 As beings with understanding we are rational beings; as beings with reason we are persons who can say No to the emotions, drives, desires, and interests that determine our behavior in reaction to the stimuli of our environments; and as persons who can say No and therefore also Yes we belong to a community of communicating spirits that can and ought to determine and order their interactions according to the practical law.



Chapter Two 31

This is what makes us stand out among animals: not that we are rational, but that we are persons. As persons we belong to a community of communicating persons or spirits whose intelligible communications give meaning to our actions and interactions and make the world in which we live our shared lives meaningful and intelligible. As persons embedded in communication with other persons, we are communicating animals, and it is only as such that we have a chance to develop our disposition to rationality (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft). If we ignore this, we are animals that can only mistakenly be called rational. For even if we follow the Aristotelian animal rationale tradition, we are at best animalia rationabilia, as Kant points out, animals who are capable of behaving and acting rationally, but who more often than not fail to do so. But even animals capable of rationality are not yet what Kant calls persons: spirits who exist by communicating with other spirits in a community of free spirits and who thereby become able to develop reason, freedom, morality, and religion. ANIMALS WITH A FEAR OF DEATH For Kant it is our personhood, not our rationality that makes us stand out from the animal world. But even if we ignore this and try to understand ourselves merely as rational animals, we have to depart from the Aristotelian tradition. If we are true to ourselves we must admit that we are at best animalia rationabilia, beings that can be rational, but in fact we are not in general governed by reason, reflection, and rationality, but by emotions, feelings, and affects. We are not rational but affect-driven animals who first feel and then (perhaps) think—if it is not too late to do so. Trying to reverse that order, trying first to think and to be rational, and then to feel and to act, regularly results in disaster: in the extreme case we are dead before we are ready to act. But even in normal cases we are mostly too late when we seek to base our acting on our reflections. We live in dangerous and lifethreatening environments, and only our affects and the cultural conventions grown out of them help us to react quickly enough to the changes that may have deadly effects on us. Therefore, to start with thinking is dangerous, at least for us. We should leave that to God who creates what he thinks and does not have to learn through emotion and affect, feeling and perception what there is. God is not tied to changing environments. He is what he can do and what he can do he does. Whereas God acts through thinking, we first have to locate ourselves in our situations through affect, feeling, emotion and perception before we can

32

Chapter Two

think profitably and concretely enough to make a difference to our life in that situation—if it is not too late for that. Thus, what is distinctive about us is not that we are thinking or rational animals as Nietzsche rightly pointed out. But neither is it our personhood that makes us special as Kant argued. For Nietzsche our distinctiveness as humans is located not in our intellectual capacities but in our affective life. We are animals who live in changing situations beyond our control. We cannot create our world completely in our image, even though we try hard, not only because we lack the technical means to do so but even more so because we have no complete or reliable view of ourselves. We do not know who we really are. And we do not adequately know the environments in which we exist and live our lives. We do not know ourselves, and we do not know our world, at least not to a sufficient degree that would allow us to relate adequately to it. We are a passing flicker of life in a universe beyond our comprehension and control. We have not made ourselves, and we live in a world not of our making. We are nothings in a world of nothingness. For all those reasons Nietzsche was right to describe us as not as rational animals but as animals with a fear of death. If there is any rock-bottom certainty in our life at all, then it is the gruesome fact that we shall die. We are mortal. We all know it. Nobody seriously doubts it. The fact even made its way into the most trivial schoolbook example of syllogistic logic: “If all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal.” Even philosophers who may doubt this know that doubting it will not do away with it or establish a certainty that will last forever. We can only doubt while we are alive. But we shall not live forever. We are mortal. And we shall die. In an important sense, therefore, everything we do or avoid doing in our life is done or not done to fight, to avoid, to overcome, to escape from the fear of death. All our scientific activities, all our cultural creations, all our social constructions, and all our meaning projections can be understood as aiming at finding something that helps us to avoid or to escape the ubiquitous fear and danger of death. The better we know the world and ourselves, the better we can avoid making the most obvious mistakes. But while we can avoid some, we can never avoid all. We fight our fear of death by trying to contain and escape death. But nothing we can do will ever achieve this. We may find ways of continuing our lives as brains in a vat. We may deep-freeze our bodies and brains to survive our finite time until medical science has made even greater progress. But whenever we are defrosted or thawed we shall discover that death is still just around the corner. There is no way of escaping death. The fear of death is a fear that will always be with us. But what is it that we fear when we have fear of death? In a very real sense death is the end not only of all our activities but also of our potential for ac-



Chapter Two 33

tivities. When we die, the complexity of our organism will disintegrate into lower-level activities some of which will continue for some time, until our body starts decomposing and we shall dissolve into the material environment from which we were taken. Some biological processes will stop immediately, others will continue for some time. But in the end we shall be what we have been: stardust among stardust, in whatever shape and form and complexity. So when we fear death we fear the end of all our activities, not only of those that we actually perform or can perform in our communicative interactions with others (the end of our Sosein), but also of our potentiality to perform any activities at all (the end of our Dasein). Death is the end not only of our actual but also of our potential activities. We stop being and acting, and we lose our potential to be and to act. We become nothing. But nothings with a past. NOTHINGS WITH A PAST This is the problem. We have not always been nothing. We have a past and a present that is different. We are alive when we think about our death or suffer from the death of others. But while we are alive we cannot know for sure what it means not to be anymore. We can speak about the death of others (“She is dead”), but only from our experience and not from the dead person’s point of view. Dead persons do not communicate, so there is nothing we could understand. Death marks the end of all communication and of all intelligibility. This sets limits even to our imagination. We can imagine our non-existence hypothetically or in the irrealis mood (“It is possible that I don’t exist” or “If I wouldn’t exist, then . . .”), but we cannot entertain or affirm it in the indicative mood from our own perspective and based on our own experience (“I do not exist”). Grammar provides possibilities that do not always result in something meaningful. “I am asleep,” “I am unconscious,” or “I am dead” are all possible statements, but I cannot make them in the present tense, because to try to do so involves a pragmatic paradox. Grammatically there is nothing wrong with those statements, but while I am asleep, I cannot say so, and when I am dead I cannot affirm it. I cannot speak from experience about my death. I cannot even seriously imagine it. I can imagine that something doesn’t exist, but I cannot imagine that I don’t exist anymore, not because the idea of my non-existence is semantically incoherent, but because the actuality of my non-existence is pragmatically inconsistent with my thinking it: I can imagine possibilities only while I exist, and to imagine my own non-existence conflicts with the condition of the possibility of imagining it. So wasn’t Epicurus right that “death is nothing to us”?7 If death involves neither pleasure nor pain and if the only thing that is bad for us is pain, then

34

Chapter Two

death is not bad for us. Obviously “death” does not mean the process of dying which can be very painful. Nor does it refer to the possibility of killing myself that may or may not be painful. But being dead is different. If we no longer exist, we cannot make either good or bad experiences, feel neither pleasure nor pain, perform neither good nor bad actions. We simply don’t experience or feel or do anything at all anymore. We are no longer part of the web of communicating persons. So death is not something to fear, but neither is it something to strive for. It is neither an evil nor a good. It is beyond that distinction. Epicurus’s argument is formally valid, but whether we accept it as sound depends on whether we accept the understanding of “death” outlined.8 I shall come back to this. However, there is not only a logical problem but also an epistemic one. How can I conceive a possible truth about myself from my first-person perspective without construing it from the point of view from which I see and construe everything actual and possible? And how can I, from that perspective, seriously entertain the possibility of not existing anymore? Of course, it is not impossible to imagine a world without me. There was such a world before I was born; and there will be such a world after I have died. But my own non-existence is not a possibility that I can seriously entertain, because it cannot be actualized as long as I exist, and when it is actualized I do not exist anymore. It is not one of the possibilities I can actualize and experience. Rather, its actualization is the end of all my possibilities. The possibility of my non-existence cannot be grounded in my actuality. However, there are no free-floating possibilities. All possibilities are grounded in something actual. They are possibilities of something or someone or for something or someone, and the referent of those possibilities must be, in the last resort, something actual and not merely possible. Alice may be able to get down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carol’s story, but if Lewis Carol himself were only a fictional character in a story, then there would need to be some actual reality that grounds that fictional world before we could take Alice’s possibility of getting down the rabbit hole seriously. Similarly, if the possibility of my non-existence cannot be grounded in my actuality, then it must be grounded in some actuality different from me. For it is possible that I do not exist anymore. But I cannot imagine this as one of the possibilities that I can actualize and experience. “I do not exist anymore” is not a possible truth I can come up with. I know that sooner or later I shall be gone. But I have no idea how this feels or what it means or what it would be like to be dead. I cannot experience or understand or imagine it from within. Death is an insult and an offense to my imagination, because I cannot envision it as a fact while I am alive, and when it is a fact I cannot envision it or anything else anymore.



Chapter Two 35

Our fear of death is the result of that impossible cognitive and emotional awareness: We who are alive know for sure that we shall not be alive forever. We know something that we both seek to imagine and cannot imagine. We fear something that is absurd and paradoxical. Can’t I imagine not to be here anymore? Of course I can. But only while I am here and only because I can imagine to be somewhere. For if I am not somewhere, how could I imagine to be anywhere? If I try to imagine that I am in a situation in which I can no longer even imagine to be or not to be in that situation, what could that be? To eradicate myself from my world seems as impossible as to decide to come into this world myself. The world is not of my own making, and I did not decide to come into this world. The fear of death is the counterpart of our helplessness with respect to our being thrown into a world not of our making. We did not decide to live here in the first place, and we fear death because we cannot decide not to live here and still know what we do when we don’t live anymore. The beginning and the end of our life is not something in which we are actively involved—actively in the sense of having an option. We did not have an option to come into this world: it was a mere possibility as we know retrospectively, but it wasn’t one of our possibilities. Similarly with respect to the end of our life. We fool ourselves if we think that we have an option to end our life or not. We don’t. We only have the option to end our life earlier or later. But we don’t have the option to not end our life and go on forever. At the beginning and at the end of our life we are not agents but simply those affected—affected by that which brings us to life and takes life away from us again, and affected in the deep sense of not merely being modified in one way or another but by being posited or annihilated as something that can be modified or changed. To come into being is one thing, to undergo change as a being another, and to stop being a third: death is not a state that can be explained as a modification of our being, it is the end of being a being that can have modifications. Not to be is not a mode of being. It is the impossibility of having modes of being. POSSIBILITIES WITH A FUTURE AND WITH A PAST Is it possible to survive death? No, because we may survive dying but not death. Dying can be experienced, and people have come back from dying to life. But they did so before they were dead. Death is different. It cannot be survived. It is the end of all possibilities of returning to life. I have lived. I have died.9 And now I am dead, so dead that one cannot even put it in a first-person perspective, “I am dead,” but only in a third-person perspective, “He is dead.”

36

Chapter Two

Does this mean that it is impossible to overcome death? No, or rather only if we think in terms of what we ourselves can do. The sequence “She has lived and died,” “She is dead,” “She is alive,” where the personal pronouns all refer to the same person, is not per se impossible. It is not a self-contradictory thought that we are dead and are brought back to life. It may or may not be the sort of life we lived before we died. And we surely cannot do so ourselves and by our own capacity. Just as we did not bring ourselves into this life by our own powers, so we cannot leave death behind by our own powers. We cannot make ourselves (our Dasein) but merely co-shape some aspects of our Sosein while we exist, and after death we cannot re-make ourselves in any sense, neither as Dasein nor as Sosein. This is what we share with inanimate things. Pots do not make themselves, and pots that are broken cannot put themselves together again. But the potter may well be able to do so. The pot will always bear the marks of having been broken and put together again. It will never be the same again as before it had been broken. And yet it will be the same pot. As with pots, so with us, and even more so if we change from actuality to possibility. We were a mere possibility (of the universe) before we were born, and we are a mere possibility (in the universe) after we are dead. Possibilities as such never act. Even when we construe them in a Leibnizian sense as possibilities that intrinsically strive to become actual unless they are stopped from doing so by some other possibility (contradiction) or the actual state of the world (incompatibility) there is a notable difference between the two possibilities mentioned. In the first case we were a possibility with a future, in the second case we are a possibility with a past. In the first case there is no identity issue because we do not have an identity yet. But in the second case there is an identity issue because overcoming death cannot simply mean to replace one actuality “A is dead” by another actuality “B is alive” where A and B refer to different persons. The idea of overcoming death only makes sense if it is about the same person, that is to say, if the one of whom it is true that he has lived and died and now is dead is the same one of whom it is said that he is alive now (in whatever sense of that term). Similarity between the one who is dead and the one who is alive is not enough. It must be numerical and personal identity. And it must be an identity that bears the scar of death and hence of a double passivity: the passivity of coming into life at all (being born), and the passivity of coming into a new life with God out of death (being re-born). The traditional way of addressing this problem is of little help. Most views of the immortality of the soul postulate a soul that doesn’t die but becomes the point of reference for a new life—whether in the Platonic sense of a center of our life and agency that has neither beginning nor end or in the Christian



Chapter Two 37

sense of a center of our life and agency that has a beginning but no end. If this view is taken in a strong sense, then our souls continue to live even when our bodies die and decay. If it is taken in a weaker sense, then our souls die with our bodies and have to be re-created to live a new life. In the first case death is not taken seriously and we don’t really die (i.e., cease to sense and experience and lose all capacity for acting): the problem is defined away because it is never possible to say “I have died” for somebody who can truly say “I am alive.” In the second case, reference to the soul does not solve but merely restates the problem. If re-creation is not only about the body, but at the same time about the soul, then we are left with the question posed in the first place: What preserves the identity of the first soul with the second soul across the abyss of death so that one can truly say “I have died”? There is a further problem to which I have already hinted. Coming back to life is an ambiguous phrase. It may mean coming back to live for a bit longer before dying for good. That is the uninteresting case because it is only about more life of the same sort. Or it can mean coming back to a different sort of life, if there is such a thing. In this case the one who bridges the abyss between this life and death and the (possible) future new life has to be somebody who is not himself or herself subject to death. Only somebody who lives a life of a different kind and order can do what we who shall die cannot do: to create new life of a different kind out of death. This is the central feature of the Christian understanding of God: God is the one “who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist” (Rom. 4:17). So if there is a life after death, then its possibility and actuality are both due to God alone: just as the possibility as possibility is grounded in God’s actuality, so the actuality of that possibility will be due to God’s actualizing activity. This has two implications. If God creates life out of death that doesn’t end in death and if there is not more than one God, then it seems to be not too far-fetched to expect that God is also the creator of life before death. But does God then create two kinds of life: a life that leads to death and a life that originates from death? The traditional answer is that God creates one kind of life only and that the finite life leading to death is not due to God but due to the God-ignoring life of the creature: to turn away from God is to cut yourself off from the source of life. Precisely this is rectified by being re-born into God’s eternal life through God overcoming the life-damaging consequences of the God-ignoring life of the creature. This is the drama of sin and salvation that is at the center of all Christian theology. The other implication is that we cannot make the new life out of death possible or probable or actual ourselves. We can only try to understand in which sense life after death is possible, and do everything to change our view of

38

Chapter Two

death by protesting against it as the end of everything. Epicurus’s understanding of being dead as the state in which nothing is experienced or felt anymore does not allow this other view. But neither does the Platonic understanding of death as the separation of soul and body in which the body decays and soul somehow continues to live. Rather, death is that from which God creates new life and calls into being that which does not exist anymore. Death—the state of being dead—has to be understood not primarily or exclusively in relation to us and our capacities of experiencing, but in relation to God and God’s capacity to create out of nothing and even from death. Being dead is the end of being in communication with other persons, but not the end of being in communication with God. This is a different understanding of death. And to this I now turn. A THEOLOGICAL VIEW OF DEATH We cannot bring ourselves back into life after we have died—died in the complete and total way in which Jesus has died at the cross. There was no spark of life lingering on as an immortal soul, and there was no center of feeling, experience, and agency that was still operative after he was taken down from the cross. Jesus was dead as each and everybody of us will be dead. This is the shared conviction of all New Testament writers: Jesus was no exception to us but died as surely as we shall die. And yet some expressed the conviction that they had a sequence of experiences that can be summarized as “Jesus is dead” and “Jesus is alive.” They did not mean that Jesus did not really die on the cross but only appeared to be dead, nor can they be shown to have propagated fraudulent fabrications to mislead others, or to have been misled by mere hallucinations and wishful fantasies. It was the cognitive and emotional dissonance of the impossible experiential sequence “Jesus is dead” and “Jesus is alive” that made them look for an answer that they could not find in their own experience. Since neither of the two incompatible experiences, of Jesus’s death and of his being alive, could be eliminated, the only remaining option was to seek an accommodation between them. There are two possible ways of achieving this. The first option is to dispute the identity of Jesus, arguing for a different referent and a change of subject in the predication of both experiences. But if Jesus was dead and someone else, however similar to Jesus, was experienced as alive, then the Christian faith would be worthless, as Paul emphatically underlined in 1 Cor. 15:14–19. The New Testament witnesses unanimously emphasize the identity of the crucified one with the one who appeared to them, thus confirming the identity of Jesus, whose death they had experienced and who had



Chapter Two 39

subsequently encountered them as the living one: “I was dead, and behold, I am alive” (Rev. 1:18). The other option, given the premise of Jesus’s identity and the irreconcilability of the experiences mentioned, is to seek a solution by reference to a third—a solution from a different point of view (God) that involved a different view of us, and this solution finds its expression in the Easter confession: raised by God—for our salvation.10 The resurrection confession is not a description of an event that somebody has or anybody could have witnessed.11 It is a confession of a divine creative activity that cannot be experienced as such by a creature, because it is not one experience among others but a change of the mode and framework of all human experiencing: the predicate, “raised,” is used in the confession not as a descriptive predicate applied to Jesus in isolation, but as an orienting threeplace predicate that relates Jesus, God, and us (human beings) in a specific way—Jesus was raised by God for our salvation. God is the sole center of activity here, the reference to Jesus gives a specific meaning and significance to this activity spelled out in the New Testament gospels (self-giving love), and we are those to whom this activity is addressed in such a way that we cannot understand and acknowledge it without being dislocated from who and what we are (God-ignoring creatures) to who and what we ought to be coram deo (neighbors of God and of God’s neighbors). Thus the resurrection confession is not merely about Jesus, but about God and God’s relationship to us. It expresses a fundamental re-orientation and existential re-creation of human life that is not of our own making but something in which we find ourselves passively involved.12 Believers consider it an undeserved gift that they ascribe to God as the source of this existential change. They express it as a complete re-orientation and all-pervasive recreation of their lives that gives them a new identity as children, heirs, friends, and neighbors of God with all the rights and duties which that implies, and with all the hopes and expectations of the good that it makes possible and legitimate. And it is this re-orienting creation of a new identity and a new life that makes them see not only the death of Jesus but also themselves and everything else in a new light: the light of the creative and self-communicating presence of the love of God. RE-ORIENTING HUMAN LIFE To see the world in this light is not to explain anything but to give a new meaning to everything due to placing everything in the light of a different web of communication. Recourse to God’s activity here is not explanatory but orienting.13 To explain something is to identify reasons (for actions) or

40

Chapter Two

causes (for events) that make these actions or events more probable than in the circumstances they would have been otherwise. We orient ourselves, on the other hand, by locating others and ourselves in schemes of orientation that structure not the world but our relations to the world. Questions of orientation are quite different from questions of explanation, and they call for different answers.14 Whereas questions of explanation relate to the “why” or “how” of a phenomenon (Why does something occur? Why does something occur in this manner? How did it become what it is?), questions of orientation do not focus on the phenomena themselves, but on the conduct of human life when dealing with the phenomena. They are not questions of being, but questions of meaning, they explain, not why something is as it is, but what it signifies for us. We live not in an abstract world of facts and laws, but in the rich world of everyday life full of shared experience, personal memories, and cultural meaning. This meaning is always precarious. It has to be lived in order to exist. It is not a fixed given but only a reality by being permanently appropriated and reconstituted by us. Reference to God in theology is not reference to an explanatory principle but to the focal point of ultimate orientation. We can only describe what makes a difference in experience, and we can only explain differences that occur in experience in terms of something that also makes a difference in experience (the principle of the homogeneity of cause and effect). If we describe something as red, we mark it off from everything that is not red. If we identify something as a chair, or a table, or a person, we distinguish it from everything that is not a chair, not a table, not a person. If we seek to explain why the chair is broken, we can do so by reference to the weight of the colleague who broke it or by reference to the lousy material of which the chair was made or to some other cause of a similar kind. But whatever we adduce as an explanation it must be something located in experience, for only insofar as both the explanandum and the explanans are phenomena of experience, we can describe and seek to explain such phenomena. However we construe the details of how the principle of causation functions in explanations, unless we can draw distinctions in experience, there are no phenomena to be explained and no phenomena that explain, and hence nothing accessible to science. This approach may work with religion, but not with God. God is not a phenomenon that is marked off from other phenomena in our experience. Therefore there is no explanatory science of God, either in the sense that God is an explanandum to be explained or in the sense that God is an explanans that explains something else. God is not a phenomenon that can be explained scientifically, and reference to God is no help where the scientific explanation of phenomena is concerned. God is not a phenomenon, and theology is not an explanatory enterprise.



Chapter Two 41

Consider the distinction between creative and created activity. It is not a distinction we can draw within our experience. There are not some things that are created and others that are not. If anything is created, then everything is created. Creation discourse is total and all-encompassing and not merely an additional aspect of our natural and cultural, empirical and historical discourses. When we look at everything we do and can experience (the totality of our experiential world) as creation, we subject it to a theological re-visioning that relates what we (can) experience to the presence of God the Creator, and in doing so requires us to say more about it than it does show by itself. Plants and animals are then not merely described as living organisms, but as creatures, and nonhuman and human animals as creatures with different capacities, duties, and responsibilities. Death is then not merely the state in which nothing is experienced or felt anymore (Epicurus) but an occasion for divine creativity. And life is not merely “an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction” that distinguishes “a vital and functional being from a dead body”15 but the sphere of communication in which human creatures can become aware of their being creatures among creatures in the presence of their creator. How do we become aware of this, if we do? Not without redirecting our lives to a new point of view that provides an ultimate orientation: the presence of the self-communicating love of God. This re-orientation can only happen to us and not be attained by our own powers: it is a gift, not an achievement. It discloses God, to whom we owe the gift, to be our creator, and it enables us to understand ourselves, who receive that gift, as God’s creatures. The use of the language of creator and creation indicates a change into a different key and mode of discourse in talking about God, ourselves, and everything else, and this for a very good reason. As creatures we are finite, but finitude is not as such a sign of being created: it is perhaps pragmatically, but not semantically incoherent to affirm to be finite and to deny to be a creature. To understand myself as a creature is to understand my finitude in a new and different way that goes beyond what it shows by itself in our normal webs of interlocution. To be finite is not to be infinite, but to be a creature is to be willed and loved by God. And that’s a different story altogether. Thus, in creation discourse everything takes on a different meaning, a new sense, and a new significance, not only who and what we are, but also what we can do and cannot do. We cannot enter life by our own decision, and we cannot rise from death by our own doing. But we are alive, and hence it is possible to be alive, and if it is possible to come into being from non-being, then it seems not to be impossible to come into being from no-longer being. Neither of this is one of our capacities or activities. Just as being born is not one of our doings, so is being re-born, whether before our physical death

42

Chapter Two

or after it. However, it would not be enough to say that what is impossible for us, is not necessarily so for God. While this is true, it is misleading to contrast our finite capacities with God’s infinite capacities as if they were placed at different ends of the same scale. God is not somewhat better and more powerful than we are; God is infinitely better and infinitely more powerful. The difference between the finite and the infinite is a difference of kind and not merely a difference by degrees. We can read this in an ontological way and get entangled in the metaphysical aporias of infinity (as the tradition mostly did), or we can read it in a hermeneutical and orientating way (as I suggest to do): to look at a situation from God’s point of view is to place everything in a different frame of reference from our own point of view. The difference is not a relative difference by degrees but a categorical difference of kind. We see everything from a limited perspective according to our finite capacities, but we assume God to see it as it truly is from God’s comprehensive perspective according to God’s infinite capacities. As creatures who are aware of being creatures, we cannot understand our life and world as creation without contrasting and relating it to God the Creator. However, the difference between creature and creator is not a difference within our experience (and hence without any explanatory power), but that without which there wouldn’t and couldn’t be any experience (and hence of orienting power). I cannot understand the world as creation without understanding myself as creature. I cannot understand myself as creature without understanding my life coram deo as a life that has been willed by God, is enabled and sustained by God, and will be perfected and made true by God. And therefore I miss the point of my life if I fail to live it in gratitude to my creator and with the respect I owe to the dignity of my fellow-creatures. FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE: THE CHRISTIAN WAY OF LIFE But who and what is God? And how is it possible for us to understand ourselves to live coram deo in a sphere of divine creativity that opens up possibilities and opportunities in our life situations of which we would never have dreamed? Different religions give different answers to those questions. The Christian answer starts from the discovery of the radical ambiguity not merely of life but also of death. Dark is life, dark is death (Mahler). But while life is not merely light but also dark, death is not merely dark but also light. We all know that life isn’t all beer and skittles but guns and roses. Shit happens, and usually at the wrong time. But with death it is just the other way



Chapter Two 43

around. Death is not simply the end of life that silences everything. It can also be seen as the occasion for divine creativity to start something utterly new. This, Christians confess, was the case with Jesus’s death on the cross. Where most people saw nothing but a cruel killing, some, who later were called Christians, saw the eschatological manifestation of the life-creating mystery of self-communicating divine love. This changed their view on everything, including Jesus, God, and death. Seen from our experiential perspective, death is the end of all human capacities to relate and experience and act and communicate. Seen from the perspective of God’s self-communicating activity, death is the occasion for the creation of a new life full of new beginnings. To see it in this way places death and everything else in a different frame of reference and a new and all-encompassing sphere of meaning and significance: the sphere of God’s creative activity of self-communicating love. In it not only death takes on a different meaning, but life also, for the new life that God creates out of death will not be a life that ends in death but is open and sensitive to the presence of the eternal life of God. This makes it possible to understand God as creator. If God can create new life out of nolonger-being (death), then God can create life out of non-being (nothingness). To trust God to be able and willing to do this is an integral part of Christian hope. But it is not its central point. Christians hope not merely that there will always be new life that will replace those who are dead, but that those who have died will forever live with God. Christians trust not merely that God can create life out of non-being, but that God will continue to relate in his divine life to those who are dead in a way that is good and right and just for them. Christians hope not merely that a God-given new life will replace the life of those who are dead, but that the identity of those who have died will be preserved in the communicating web of the eternal life of God in a way that will bring out the truth of their lives. In short, Christian hope is not merely that others will live, but that those who have died will live with God. Therefore, Christian hope is centrally hope in God—a God who does not allow anybody to drop out of his eternal communication of love. Where our communicative interactions come to a definitive end, God’s communication creates new beginnings. The first grounds the truth of “She is dead,” the second the hope in a new life beyond imagination, a hope that Christians express by speaking of a person “being raised from the dead into the life of God.” In short, Christians confess God to be God precisely because God raises the dead from death. They trust God to be able and willing to do so because God has raised Jesus from the dead (cf. Rom. 4:24; 10:9; 1 Cor. 15:14–15; 2 Cor. 4:13–14; Col. 2:12) as the first one who will be followed by others, and that God has done this for no other reason than his caring love for his creation

44

Chapter Two

in general, and the God-ignoring human creatures in particular. This is the content and basis of Christian hope, faith, and love: Christians hope that God will raise them from the dead to an eternal life with God (hope); they ground their hope on the trust that God has done so with Jesus Christ (faith); and they put their trust in God because they have reason to believe that God has done and will do so out of pure love, not because there is anything in us that would give us a right to expect from God to raise us from the dead, but because God has promised to become our neighbor for all eternity (love). This has important implications. Let me mention just four. First, the abyss of death separates our life from the life to come. But the life to come does not begin where our life ends but can start right in the middle of it. This requires us to critically differentiate this life of experience and action, suffering and activity in the light of the eternal life of God into that which points toward the new life with the Creator and that which bars us from seeing this life as pointing to God’s creation. The latter is called sin, the former a life of grace in the presence of God’s creative love that comes to fruition in a life of faith, hope, and love. These are not a set of special activities alongside other activities, nor a set of virtues that are not really virtues because they are worked by God “in us, without us,”16 but rather a special mode of doing everything Christians do, and of experiencing everything they experience, in the light of God’s presence—the presence of eternal life in our finite and death-bound lives. Faith, hope, and love are the mode of living a human life in openness to the self-communicating presence of God who creates life from death. Second, understood in this sense, faith, hope, and love are the enacted Christian protest against a view of our life and world as ending in death, destruction, meaninglessness, and nothingness. They are not the only forms of protest against nihilism, human debasement, and existential hopelessness. But they differ from other forms of protest against death in that Christian hope is always hope in God, and God alone, as the one “who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist” (Rom. 4:17). It is a radical hope in God, not a hope for something permanent in us such as an allegedly immortal soul. Third, from the point of view of radical hope in God we do not have a soul, but we are souls, and we are souls precisely insofar as God relates to us in such a way that in his eternal life our Dasein and Sosein is transformed into our Wahrsein not by what we do but by being embedded in the true- and new-making life and activity of God. The idea of the immortality of the soul must therefore be reformulated as the hope that God, who through Word and Spirit relates to each human being in creating and sustaining us, will not cease to do so when we are utterly dead. To be dead means that we have no Dasein



Chapter Two 45

and Sosein anymore that would allow us to have active relations to anybody or anything including ourselves and God but that we completely decay as organic centers of physical and mental activity. To be a soul means, on the other hand, that the fact that we are dead does not stop God from relating to us—the lived history of our life—in such a way that he re-creates new life open to his divine presence out of death. We are souls because God makes us souls by incorporating us into his divine life in a way that enables us to have new relations to others and ourselves in and through God. Fourth, Christians are convinced that their hope in God is not empty but well-founded because it is based on faith or trust in God as the one who has raised Jesus from the dead as the first of a new creation. This faith is radical trust because it trusts that we get all the good we need from this God so that there is no need for any other God: “I am your God, you don’t need anybody else as a god.” Christian hope and trust (faith) are not theoretical or merely epistemic attitudes (“good qualities of the mind” as Thomas Aquinas puts it). They are the way in which Christians live and practice their life coram deo, and the name for that way of life is love—the love of God and the love of all others as God’s neighbors. Faith trusts God not on the basis of theoretical speculations and metaphysical reflections but because of the life-shattering experience of God’s creative love being actively present in Jesus’s death and resurrection. For if God “gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist” out of pure selfless love, then to live a life of love is a way of participating in the love of God. To do this in a radical way is to put all hope in the creative love of God and deny even the possibility that something could permanently be contrary or contradictory to the love of God. God’s love is the fundamental creative reality of all there is. It is the reality of a divine activity that sparks off corresponding activities in creatures. But in both its divine and creaturely modes it is an activity whose actuality and possibility is grounded in God alone. Therefore, there is no other meaningful “proof” of the “existence” of God than a life of hope, trust, and love, for such a life is possible only through the love of God. This is why a life of hope, trust, and love creates a counter-movement in human life against death and its manifold manifestations in life. Its point is new life, not final death. It aims not at death as the end of all life but at God’s eternal life, not at the destruction of all human possibility and capacity, but at the becoming new of those who live as God’s creatures in the eternal life of the Creator. By refusing to accept the logic of death in the name of the power and reality of divine love, Christian faith, hope, and love form a counter-movement to the prevailing forces of death in our world. They are not expressions of the sentimental wish to make the world a better place (effective altruism), and they do not force fallible human views of a good life on

46

Chapter Two

others who may have a very different view of a good life. Rather they reflect a divine initiative and creativity to which they claim to owe their own being and which they use as a self-critical check on their own forms of practice and actualization. For the life for which they strive is not something they can effect by what they do, but what they do seeks to be the effect of something for which they hope—something that can only be brought about by God’s love or not be brought about at all. Therefore, the essential feature of Christian life is not what Christians do (Christian practice) but for what they hope (Christian hope). Christians practice their hope by trying to live a life in the mode of love. They permanently fail to live up to this love and instead find themselves contributing to making the world a worse place than it deserves to be as God’s creation. Whatever is good in the world is not the result of what we do but the result of what God achieves in and through that which we do—or fail to do. Faith, hope, and love are God’s gifts that enable humans to put their trust, hope, and love in God, to expect everything good from God, and critically judge what they do and can do in this light and learn to live with their failures without losing all hope in faith, hope, and love. Therefore, the only adequate way in which Christians can live a life of love is by hoping and trusting in God who will not give up on them or anybody else. It is not Christians who protest against death by living a life of faith, hope, and love, but it is their orientation toward faith, hope, and love that permanently reminds Christians of what they fail to do and why they cannot do anything meaningful without the saving, forgiving, renewing presence of God who creates good out of evil, who gives life to the dead and who calls into being that which does not exist (Rom. 4:17).

Beer and Skittles as (Divinely Initiated) Protest? Rhys Kuzmic

Death is a real buzz kill, the ultimate challenge to faith, hope, and love. It marks the end, but is this end one of terminatio or τέλος? A great deal hinges on the interpretation of what “end” signifies. Similarly, when Dalferth reminds us that life is not all “beer and skittles,” do we immediately think of washing down a porter over a game of ninepins or perhaps, like me, begin contemplating a pairing of a favorite Belgian saison with the sweet confectionary pellets that comprise, so we are told, “a rainbow of fruit flavors?” But perhaps you are not quite so literal and instead take “beer and skittles” as shorthand for a life of pleasure. Each of these serves as interpretative possibilities (along with countless others) and it is to hermeneutical queries that Dalferth points us with his engaging and intricately complex theological meditation on faith, hope, and love as a protest against death. For, if there is any power or meaning inherent in this theological trio, it must address the ultimate source of anxiety, dread, and futility that casts a pall over the fleeting pleasures of this life, preventing us from enjoying “beer and skittles” undisturbed. Dalferth begins by situating the existential predicament of death within a basic philosophical anthropology rooted in biology (humans are animals) as well as in sociality (humans live in webs of social and political relation). Humans relate to their environment cognitively (through rational understanding) and non-cognitively (emotions/passions) interacting within larger communities as persons who communicate and are capable of both acting (more or less) rationally and further developing traits of personhood such as reason, freedom, morality, and religion. Following Kant, humans are distinguished from other animals by their personhood, and yet human actions are not necessarily motivated by reason. In fact, one may argue that humans are not driven 47

48

Chapter Two

primarily by thinking, rationality, and reason, but by emotions, feelings, and affects. The emotion of greatest import in relation to death is fear, though even fear follows from both emotional and cognitive awareness of the end of our being, the impossible imagining and acceptance of the cessation of our actuality (Sosein) and potentiality (Dasein). To overcome death as both the cessation of our actuality and potentiality requires, as Dalferth reminds us, both numerical and personal identity between the one who was dead and the one who was made alive. Such is the grammar of resurrection. Furthermore, the passive nature of creation (being born) and resurrection (being re-born) points to the activity of an agent outside of us who is not subject to death and lives in a categorically different way than we do. Such an agent fits the Christian understanding of God, described by the apostle Paul as the one “who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist” (Rom. 4:17). If God is the one who stands outside of and yet in relation to non-being (as both creator and re-creator of ὄντα from μὴ ὄντα) then the state of being dead for humans means the end of communicating with other persons, but it is not, Dalferth avers, the last word between humans and God. Such hope that humans will communicate with God posthumously is grounded in the Easter confession that Jesus was raised from what must be understood as “complete and total” death “for our salvation.” As a confession, Dalferth understands the resurrection of Jesus not as a phenomenon to be explained (addressing questions of why and how the event occurred), but rather one to be explored as to its meaning and significance for us (a hermeneutical endeavor). This is, according to Dalferth, a matter of orientation (or a re-orientation of human life in light of the resurrection), which manifests itself in a mode of living. Dalferth rejects probing an explanatory understanding of the resurrection for the express reason that God does not act as a phenomenon that can be demarcated from other phenomena in our experience. A vast gulf exists between creator and creation, the infinite and the finite; one not of degree, but rather one of kind (categorical). But how then does the phenomenon of the resurrection get communicated to us, if at all? Like the act of creation, it is one that can only be experienced passively by humans, depending wholly on the “self-communicating love of God” that re-orients our view of death to a different end (τέλος not terminatio). This re-orientation is expressed in the Easter confession and involves the hope of future resurrection, faith that God has already done so in the life of Jesus, with the newly established τέλος of full communion with God, which is love. But Dalferth does not want to cordon off the teleological communion with God in love only to the resurrected life to come (eschata) because this ultimate point of reference (eschatos) affects Christian practices here and now resulting in a new orientation of love



Chapter Two 49

as a “mode of living” (Dalferth has elsewhere made a distinction between eschata, eschaton, and eschatos).17 Faith and hope must be enacted in human life for they are not purely cognitive activities hovering above as disengaged metaphysical abstractions. However, they do have a basis, which Dalferth locates in “the life-shattering experience of God’s creative love being actively present in Jesus’ death and resurrection.” Dalferth’s fine discussion generates many lines of inquiry, a few of which, I would like to explore here. The first set of issues center on my interest in the concept of orientation he raises in the meditation. Given the various descriptions employed regarding re-orientation (e.g., seeing the world in a new light, God as focal point, the redirecting of our lives to a new point of view or frame of reference), this language can appear suggestive of a primarily cognitive experience of how the resurrection is communicated to humans (unless something like Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “perception” 18 is intended). Revelation is divine self-disclosure passively received as gift. The human response is then found in the counter-movement of faith, hope, and love enacted as a protest against death (not to the fact of death, but to the interpretation of death as the last word in our relation to God and others). Understood as concrete activities we can then evaluate faith, hope, and love in reference to the “divine initiative and creativity” to which they owe their existence, since we need an ultimate reference point for judging the myriad interpretations of what constitutes human flourishing or the good life. But what then are we actually referring back to when we evaluate our present expressions of faith, hope, and love? It seems the reference point is not an experience or an event, but a new frame of reference that transforms all modes of living/experience. If we are talking about a radical categorical shift in how we view the world that affects our comportment, our being-inthe-world, then we seem to be functioning with not only a top-down, unidirectional relationship between God and humans, but also between human thinking, beliefs, and confessions (in particular, the resurrection confession) as shaping our modes of living. The means of self-critically judging our actions is based largely on reference to a cognitive re-orientation, an overarching structure meant to guide and propel human behavior. But, if this caricature is correct then it stands in conflict with an understanding of humans as “animals with a fear of death,” as Dalferth quotes Nietzsche, driven by affect more than reason. Our ultimate point of re-orientation must be communicated (at least) through emotion and feeling, not solely by means of a rational (re) structuring of our being-in-the-world. This first point leads to a second related inquiry. Re-orientation is expressed in the Easter confession, a practice that is communally enacted (qua speech act—so it resists being a purely intellectual endeavor), yet nevertheless

50

Chapter Two

follows a concept laden, discursive approach in its recitation. The confession “raised by God for our salvation” functions as a cognitive distillation and theological summary of a much broader narrative just as the Pauline reference to the one “who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist” (Rom. 4:17) draws on the story of Abraham, who received the promised son from his own good as dead body and from Sarah’s dead womb (Rom. 4:18–19). The precision of the confessional encapsulations aims primarily at the mind, but the narratives upon which they are based speak more to the heart (or at least direct themselves to both cognitive and emotive faculties). I wonder then, is the notion of re-orientation Dalferth employs more akin to a worldview or a social imaginary?19 The former draws on a philosophical anthropology that highlights the intellect as the dominating influence on a human’s orientation, while the latter gives more weight to the non-cognitive dimensions of our being-in-the-world. If re-orientation functions more like a social imaginary, operating on the imagination in a pre-theoretical and affective manner, then one must give more weight to the narratives that underpin confessional constructions. For, are not the stories of Abraham and Jesus what move us, capturing our hearts, giving us a know-how or understanding (Verstehen) that eludes propositional knowledge (Wissen) and propelling us to practices of protest against death, hoping against hope (Rom. 4:18)? The hermeneutical approach, then, may rely in part on a phenomenology attuned to the divinely initiated communication with humans, revealing them as creatures before their creator (coram deo) who share a hope that death is not the last word in their dialogue with God and fellow humans. Not only are the narratives that confessional constructions explicate presupposed, but Dalferth’s approach also depends, it seems to me, on something like a phenomenology or an account of re-orientation. Although Dalferth is rightly hesitant to depict God as one phenomenon of our experience inter alia, the human experience of radical dislocation from the old to a new orientation surely cannot escape phenomenological description. How then would we even recognize that a change in our mode of experiencing had occurred? Embarking on such a phenomenological enterprise could address questions such as: What does a shift in re-orientation look like? Is it akin to a conversion experience? Can it involve a “heart strangely warmed” or is it more like a shift in worldview (where God functions as a regulative principle)? A turn toward phenomenology can benefit the hermeneutical approach, though it is not without its own challenges. Dalferth’s pivot toward the resurrection confession and away from a phenomenology of the resurrection allows him to evade questions of scientific explanation, on the one hand, and to avoid characterizing the narrative as myth or fable on the other. However, as I have argued above, the resurrection confession functions as a super-



Chapter Two 51

structure built upon phenomenological accounts of experiencing the numerical and personal identity of Jesus before and after he was crucified. While a phenomenological account may beg questions of scientific explanation or be relegated to the category of myth or fable, this is by no means an unavoidable binary. Qua narrative, phenomenology serves as a depiction of possibility, which need not be subsumed under scientific boundaries of verifiable and repeatable data drawn from experimentation. Narrative can also open up a world beyond what is disclosed by means of modern science, but not simply by cognitive means alone; rather story expands hermeneutical horizons by imparting a social imaginary. However, if Dalferth had traveled this route he may not have arrived at the notion of faith, hope, and love as modes of living under a new orientation. The choice of “mode” in contrast to “practice” or “virtue” carries significant implications. Whereas practice or virtue contains a more definite circumscription of action, the language of mode appears more nebulous, open-ended, and unbounded. Mode refers to the category of orientation as a whole that directs or at least frames all actions, while practice and virtue describe actions within a given category of action under an ultimate orientation. This entails a move away from theological ethics as a category for describing and judging concrete instantiations of faith, hope, and love not because this new mode of life contains no activities of living, but because they are not our activities. Such actions are divinely initiated works “in us, without us” according to Dalferth’s Thomistic reference. This means that ethical catechesis or moral training in the virtues could be construed as a misguided and ultimately futile approach because it depends too heavily on human agency for its realization. Yet Dalferth does not want to abdicate any role or criteria for judging human action. In ethical discourse, actions can be judged, inter alia, in relation to an agent’s intentionality, the consequences that follow a given action, or to a universal duty shared by the agent. Dalferth, by contrast, speaks primarily of divine agency, which may spark corresponding creaturely activities. All possibility and actuality is grounded in God and may then become actualized in either a divine or creaturely mode of activity. Within the creaturely mode Christians can judge their own claims to reflect the divine love in reference to this ultimate orientation. This would seem to point toward critique of concrete actions, which claim to flow from the divine. It also allows critical acceptance of the perennial Christian failure of living in the mode of love. But this raises an important query: If all possibility and actuality of living in the mode of love is grounded in God such that living in the mode of love constitutes a divine rather than a human activity, does failure in this regard reside in God or humans? Is human failure the result of divine inactivity? Is

52

Chapter Two

all human effort a “chasing after the wind” because only God can bring about the good they desire? To return again to the language of “mode,” it may be helpful to note that one of the benefits of this designation is its broad depiction of a range of activity. “Mode,” to my mind, widens the category of ethical discourse beyond what is often thought that modernity takes to be essential to moral activity, namely, conscious intentionality on the part of an agent. Whereas actions of love reference concrete acts on the part of persons, living in the mode of love could encompass general activities not normally associated with the moral life, like sleeping, walking, looking, listening, tasting, smelling, touching, breathing. If such general activities (active as well as passive) are deemed to be enacted in the mode of love might one (Christian or not) be living in this mode unawares?20 An affirmative answer would also support the soteriological universalism to which Dalferth points when he argues that a radical trust in God results in a denial that anything “could permanently be contrary or contradictory to the love of God.” For divine love, according to Dalferth, serves as the bedrock of all creation. Another benefit of using the depiction of “mode” may address one of the concerns I mentioned above. The difficulty with the group of terms Dalferth employs to describe orientation is that they denote a primarily cognitivebased shift of perspective. Orientation depicts a new reference point, a change in understanding of self and world in light of a different frame of reference, which would refer to conscious mental activity or at least to an alternate structuring of such activity. The language of mode has the potential to take the non-cognitive aspects of human being-in-the-world more seriously and could even be applied to nonhuman actors/participants. Yet, given the entirely passive nature of the human role in the re-orienting encounter with the divine (an encounter which must not be understood as one experience among others), one may question whether a focus on either the cognitive or non-cognitive dimensions of the philosophical anthropology Dalferth sketches has any relevance to the shift in orientation from which faith, hope, and love flow. If the divinely grounded and actualized activity “in us, without us” is purely a divine act of human reception, understood in the same manner as creation, what difference does anthropological inquiry make to reflection on this new mode of orientation (a categorial shift humans have no control over)? Furthermore, how do we distinguish between divine and creaturely modes of activity? It would seem that the modes are related to the overarching category of orientation in Dalferth’s framework. For a human who has passively received this new orientation, her actions can be judged in reference to this new structuring of experience. Are such actions always performed in the human mode of activity if they correspond to their ultimate



Chapter Two 53

reference point in God, or would they then fall under the divine mode? Can the modes overlap? Are all actions that do not fall within the modes of faith, hope, and love attributed, by default, to the mode of sin? Or, more positively, given that divine love may give rise to corresponding creaturely activities, can human actions be deemed participations in God’s agape insofar as they operate within the modes of faith, hope, and love? Related to the preceding queries, we may probe further the eschatological relations of divine and human action as they relate to an inevitable reorientation. Since nothing can remain permanently in conflict with the divine love (given Dalferth’s eventual soteriological universalism), is it meaningful to speak of a contrast at the ultimate level of orientation (and thus place emphasis on such “shifts”), when even a divinely initiated transferal in this overarching frame of reference does not result in all subsequent human actions perfectly conforming to the modes of faith, hope, and love? The shift in eschatos as the primary orienting focal point is meant to prompt change in the life of the Christian here and now, opening up the present to the inbreaking eschata even before the eschaton. But could this eschatological relationship also function inversely? For instance, can human practices before the eschaton, which do not flow from a recognized orientation to the divine eschatos, nevertheless fall under the modes of faith, hope, and love, thus ushering in the eschata? Put differently, the question is whether those operating within an “immanent frame” of reference (to use Charles Taylor’s conception)21 and without God as a transcendent horizon, can engage in acts rooted within the modes of faith, hope, and love. Or perhaps, might any activity in the modes of faith, hope, and love necessarily entail the Christian orientation Dalferth has in view? This question again circles back to the issue of cognitive awareness as it relates to the concept of orientation. Given the profound depth and breadth of his meditation these issues could not be addressed directly; instead Dalferth has given us an immensely helpful clarifying discussion of the grammar of life, death, and resurrection, as well as explained the important distinction between creative and created activity. But since he has raised the question of Christian practices in the mode of faith, hope, and love being judged by their ultimate reference point, it may be worth probing further the nature of the divine-human relationship, with attention to its ethical and soteriological implications as well as its eschatological dimensions. These inquiries all center on our various conceptions of the good life, however we construe what “beer and skittles” mean to us personally. To hold fast to the good life, by means of faith, hope, and love, serves as a protest against the forces of meaninglessness encapsulated in the concept death. But death is not simply an abstract principle to wrestle with; it functions, as Sartre reminds us, as “an event of human life.”22 As

54

Chapter Two

the ultimate boundary phenomenon of human existence, death impinges not only on the self ’s finitude (its Sein zum Tode), but on the finitude experienced in the loss of another. In the documentary film One More Time with Feeling, the musician Nick Cave expresses his own response to the tragedy of his son’s death as a decision made along with his wife “to be happy. It seemed like an act of revenge, of defiance, to care for each other and the ones around us.” Perhaps such an enactment can serve as an illustration of the counter-movement Dalferth is pointing to: an intentional act of protest to live “against the logic of death.” Whether Cave’s act (or even the enjoyment of beer and skittles, however defined) can be attributed to divine love or be considered a practice in the mode of Christian love, Dalferth will have to tell us over another pint. Until then we can all raise a glass to Dalferth’s intricately precise and thoughtfully provocative meditation on these matters of life and death. Cheers!

NOTES 1.  In the Processionale monasticum (Solesmes: Abbaye Saint-Pierre, 1893), 45, it was called a responsorium; in the reprint of 1983 (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press) an antiphon. 2.  “Media vita / In morte sumus. / Quem quærimus adiutorem / Nisi te, Domine, / Qui pro peccatis nostris / Iuste irasceris. // Sancte Deus, / Sancte fortis, / Sancte et misericors Salvator: /Amaræ morti ne tradas nos!” (“In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased? Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.”) Cf. Jean Claire, “L’antienne Media vita dans les premiers manuscrits dominicains,” Collection de l’École française de Rome n° 327, École française de Rome et CNRS, Rome et Paris (2004): 215–27 and Gerhard Hahn and Martin Rößler, “518—Mitten wir im Leben sind,” in Liederkunde zum Evangelischen Gesangbuch. Nr. 9: 69–78, Gerhard Hahn and Jürgen Henkys, eds. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). In Luther’s German adaption (Evangelisches Gesangbuch 518; original: Martin Luther 1524): Mitten wir im Leben sind / mit dem Tod umfangen. / Wer ist, der uns Hilfe bringt, / dass wir Gnad erlangen? / Das bist du, Herr, alleine. / Uns reuet unsre Missetat, / die dich, Herr, erzürnet hat. / Heiliger Herre Gott, / heiliger starker Gott, / heiliger barmherziger Heiland, / du ewiger Gott: / lass uns nicht versinken / in des bittern Todes Not. / Kyrieleison. (In the very midst of life / Snares of death surround us; / Who shall help us in the strife / Lest the foe confound us? / Thou only, Lord, Thou only! / We mourn that we have greatly erred, / That our sins Thy wrath have stirred. / Holy and righteous God! / Holy and mighty God! / Holy and



Chapter Two 55

all-merciful Savior! / Eternal Lord God! / Save us lest we perish / In the bitter pangs of death. / Have mercy, O Lord!) Mitten in dem Tod anficht / uns der Hölle Rachen. / Wer will uns aus solcher Not / frei und ledig machen? / Das tust du, Herr, alleine. / Es jammert dein Barmherzigkeit / unsre Klag und großes Leid. / Heiliger Herre Gott, / heiliger starker Gott, / heiliger barmherziger Heiland, / du ewiger Gott: / lass uns nicht verzagen / vor der tiefen Hölle Glut. / Kyrieleison. (In the midst of death’s dark vale / Pow’rs of hell o’ertake us. / Who will help when they assail, / Who secure will make us? / Thou only, Lord, Thou only! / Thy heart is moved with tenderness, / Pities us in our distress. / Holy and righteous God! / Holy and mighty God! / Holy and allmerciful Savior! / Eternal Lord God! / Save us from the terror / Of the fiery pit of hell. / Have mercy, O Lord!) Mitten in der Hölle Angst / unsre Sünd’ uns treiben. / Wo solln wir denn fliehen hin, / da wir mögen bleiben? / Zu dir, Herr Christ, alleine. / Vergossen ist dein teures Blut, / das g’nug für die Sünde tut. / Heiliger Herre Gott, / heiliger starker Gott, / heiliger barmherziger Heiland, / du ewiger Gott: / lass uns nicht entfallen / von des rechten Glaubens Trost. / Kyrieleison. (In the midst of utter woe / All our sins oppress us, / Where shall we for refuge go, / Where for grace to bless us? / To Thee, Lord Jesus, only! / Thy precious blood was shed to win / Full atonement for our sin. / Holy and righteous God! / Holy and mighty God! / Holy and all-merciful Savior! / Eternal Lord God! / Lord, preserve and keep us / In the peace that faith can give. / Have mercy, O Lord!)   3.  Sermon on Luke 1:39ff (WA 12, 609, 5–9): “Naturam fidei hic discimus. Sic erit in mortis tempore, quando in morte vita est credenda etc . . . Ut Elisabeth Christum etc. Ita nos vitam in morte videmus etc. Et credimus non illud ‚Media vita in morte,’ sed ‚media morte in vita.’” Cf. WA 40, 3; 496, 16f.: „Legis vox terret, cum occinit securis: Media vita in morte sumus. At Euangelii vox iterum erigit et canit: Media morte in vita sumus.”  4. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII. 12 1162a 16–19.   5.  Charles Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 45–76.  6. Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Frankfurt am Main/ Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1996), vol. 1. §8.   7.  Cf. Epicurus, fragment 397 in Epicurea, Hermann Usener, ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1887); and “Letter to Menoeceus,” http://www.epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html.   8.  An argument is valid, if the conclusion cannot be false if the premises are true, and it is sound, if it is valid and all the premises of the argument are true.   9.  Although even this can now be imagined if we think of the possibilities of deep freezing and reanimating that modern technology provides. 10.  Ingolf U. Dalferth, Crucified and Resurrected: Restructuring the Grammar of Christology, trans. Jo Bennett (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 69. 11.  It is not a truth-event that could be ascertained by science, but neither is it the fable of a supernatural miracle that cannot be taken seriously anymore in an age of science. Žižek sees the problem but misses its point: “In our era of modern science, one can no longer accept the fable of the miracle of Resurrection as the form of the

56

Chapter Two

Truth-Event. Although the Truth-Event does designate the occurrence of something which, from within the horizon of the predominant order of Knowledge, appears impossible (think of the laughter with which the Greek philosophers greeted St Paul’s assertion of Christ’s Resurrection on his visit to Athens), today, any location of the Truth-Event at the level of supernatural miracles necessarily entails regression into obscurantism, since the event of Science is irreducible and cannot be undone.” Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 142. The point of the Christian resurrection confession was never to profess a supernatural miracle that must be made to fit a given order of (scientific) knowledge. Its point was precisely to break open any given order of knowledge based on our human experiences of this world by pointing to the creative activity of God. As Josef O’Leary rightly insists: “The miracle of resurrection is not the literal raising of a corpse but the conquest over exactly the dead end beyond which Žižek believes it is impossible to go.” Josef O’Leary, Conventional and Ultimate Truth: A Key for Fundamental Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 192. Even to call it a miracle is misleading because this is still a way of addressing it from the perspective of our experiential orders. But the resurrection confession does not speak of a strange event in the order of events in our world, but of a divine activity that breaks open our experiential orders of created being and shows them to be embedded in the ultimate activity of God’s creative love. There is more to the world than it shows by itself and discloses in our scientific endeavors. The world is God’s creation because the God who creates new life out of death also creates everything else that is and can be out of nothingness. The resurrection confession is about what God has done, not about a strange event in the order of events or a fable about what we think goes beyond anything we can believe on the basis of what experience and science tell us to be possible. The negative point of the confession is to show our orders of knowledge to be limited however far we may push those limits. Its positive point is that these limits are boundaries that point to a beyond of a different kind that can never become a phenomenon in our cognitive orders: the creative activity of God. 12.  Everything is thereby placed in a new frame of reference, meaning, and significance, not only our cognitive and volitional capacities and incapacities, but also our emotional, affective, and spiritual life as well as our bodily needs, abilities, shortcomings, and chances in the biological, organic, social, political, cultural, and religious dimensions of our life. 13.  On orienting vs. descriptive predicates cf. Ingolf Dalferth, “On Distinctions,” International Journal of Philosophy and Religion 79, no. 3 (2016):171–83. The argument in this section follows that publication. 14.  On the concept of orientation employed here cf. Ingolf Dalferth, Die Wirklichkeit des Möglichen. Hermeneutische Religionsphilosophie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), part I; 2010, 1–14, 519–47; Ingolf Dalferth and Stefan Berg, eds., Gestalteter Klang—gestalteter Sinn. Orientierungsstrategien in Musik und Religion im Wandel der Zeit (Leipzig: EVA, 2011); Werner Stegmaier, ed., Orientierung. Philosophische Perspektiven (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005); Werner Stegmaier, Philosophie der Orientierung (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2008). 15. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/life.



Chapter Two 57

16.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I-II, 55, 4. 17.  See Ingolf U. Dalferth, Crucified and Resurrected: Restructuring the Grammar of Christology, trans. Jo Bennett (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 196–97. 18. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962). 19.  See Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 23–30. 20.  This also allows the possibility for nonhuman members of creation to live in this mode by means of the divine initiative. 21. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For Taylor, the immanent frame functions as “the sensed context in which we develop our beliefs” (549) and while it tends to push toward closure, those within it may nevertheless remain open to the transcendent (555–56). 22. Jean-Paul, Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 680.

WORKS CITED Aquinas, Thomas. Summa theologiae. 4 vols. Matriti, Italy: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1955–1958. Claire, Jean. “L’antienne Media vita dans les premiers manuscrits dominicains.” Collection de l’École française de Rome n° 327, École française de Rome et CNRS, Rome et Paris (2004). Dalferth, Ingolf U. Crucified and Resurrected. Restructuring the Grammar of Christology. Translated by Jo Bennett. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015. ———. Die Wirklichkeit des Möglichen. Hermeneutische Religionsphilosophie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. ———. “On Distinctions.” International Journal of Philosophy of Religion 79, no. 3 (2016): 171–83. Dalferth, Ingolf U., and Stefan Berg, eds. Gestalteter Klang—gestalteter Sinn. Orientierungsstrategien in Musik und Religion im Wandel der Zeit. Leipzig: EVA, 2011. Epicurus. Epicurea. Edited by Hermann Usener. Leipzig: Teubner, 1887. ———. “Letter to Menoeceus.” http://www.epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html. Hahn, Gerhard, and Martin Rößler. “518—Mitten wir im Leben sind.” In Liederkunde zum Evangelischen Gesangbuch. Nr. 9, edited by Gerhard Hahn and Jürgen Henkys, 69–78. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004. Life (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/life) (December 16, 2017). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962. O’Leary, Josef. Conventional and Ultimate Truth: A Key for Fundamental Theology. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. Processionale monasticum. Solesmes: Abbaye Saint-Pierre, 1893. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1956.

58

Chapter Two

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main/Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1996. Stegmaier, Werner, ed. Orientierung. Philosophische Perspektiven. Frankfurt am Main: Suhkamp, 2005. ———, Philosophie der Orientierung. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2008. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. ———. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007. ———. “Self-Interpreting Animals.” In Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1, 45–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.

Chapter Three

The Theological Virtues: “And the Greatest of These Is Love” Stephen T. Davis

INTRODUCTION In this chapter I want to do four things. First, I will define in a rough and ready way the terms faith, hope, and love. All these words have uses—and misuses—in ordinary language. But I am interested in the role that these terms play in Christian thought, counting as they do since medieval times as the three theological virtues. Second, I want to explore the relationships among the three in the lives of Christians. That is, I want to ask how faith affects (or ought to affect) hope and love, how hope affects (or ought to affect) faith and love, and how love affects (or ought to affect) faith and hope. Third, I want to see whether we can figure out why Paul famously said, “and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13). Finally, I want to focus especially on hope. I actually want to argue that hope can be used as an argument in favor of belief in the existence of God. But before doing any of that, I need to provide some definitions. Let us use the term naturalism for the worldview which says: (1) the physical universe exhausts reality; everything that exists consists of atoms in motion; there are no non-physical things like God, gods, spirits, angels, or souls; (2) true natural laws always hold, are never violated; and (3) every event that occurs can in principle be explained by methods similar to those used in the natural sciences; while doubtless some events remain poorly understood and unexplained because we do not yet know enough, there are no non-natural events like miracles or permanent anomalies or intractable mysteries. Let us use the term supernaturalism for the worldview which says: (1) the physical universe, together with all its natural laws and regularities, exists because God created it; (2) since God created the natural laws and regularities, God has the ability, and perhaps occasionally the intention, to intervene in the natural order and bring 59

60

Chapter Three

about events that apart from the divine intention would not have occurred; and (3) these events are accordingly scientifically inexplicable. Let’s call theism the theory which says that God exists, where God is understood (minimally) as the all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good creator of the heavens and the earth. Atheism, the view which says that no such being as God exists, is of course an implication of naturalism. Christian theism is theism plus crucial specifically Christian doctrines, especially incarnation, Trinity, and resurrection. Finally, let me introduce the word justice. This is an important concept in both philosophical and theological ethics, but I do not want to explore the many ways in which it is used in those contexts. Nor will I attempt a rigorous definition of the term. I think justice is something that in most contexts all people long for. We all know, or know of, people who suffer terribly through no fault of their own. I am using “justice” to refer to things like good triumphing in the end, victimized people getting recompense, people being treated fairly, or sorrow being replaced by joy in the lives of sufferers. DEFINING OUR THREE TERMS Let us move to brief attempts to define the three theological virtues. I will make no exegetical attempt to analyze thoroughly how the terms are used in scripture or in the theological tradition. In all three cases I will simply offer my own fairly informal definitions. First, as for faith, I will understand Christian faith to be a combination, as the medieval scholars said, of fides and fiducia. Fides is the epistemological or belief aspect of faith; it is belief that, in other words, belief that certain claims are true. This is an important part of Christian faith because being a Christian must involve accepting that certain claims are true, for example, that God exists or that Jesus is the Son of God. But surely fides by itself is not enough; doubtless there are plenty of people who can sincerely affirm the truth of crucial Christian cognitive claims but are not Christians. Accordingly, Christian faith must also include fiducia, which is a noncognitive attitude that is close to the English word trust. If fides is belief that, fiducia is belief in; it is trust or confidence that God is good, that God’s purposes are benevolent, that God will win in the end. Faith as fiducia is trust in a person, in this case, the person of God. It is analogous to the trust that most people have in their spouse or mother. Faith as a theological virtue, then, is a mental state wherein one affirms the truth of essential Christian claims about God, Christ, humanity, and salvation and trusts one’s life confidently to God. But faith is not just a mental state:



Chapter Three 61

genuine faith must also be acted upon. We demonstrate our trust in God by embracing hope rather than despair, and by prayer, worship, and especially obedience (Rom. 1:5; 16:26). As John Hick said years ago of the two aspects of faith: “they occur together and depend closely upon one another; fides and fiducia are two elements of a single whole, which is man’s awareness of the divine.”1 Sometimes, in trying to understand a concept, it helps to note its opposite, if there is one. If faith has an opposite, I suppose it would be unbelief, lack of trust, or (for a one-time believer) apostasy. Second, I will now try to clarify what hope is. I take it to be a psychological attitude directed toward something. An object of hope has four characteristics.2 First, it is something desirable to the one who hopes, something she considers good. We never hope for a tragedy to occur or for any kind of bad news. Second, it must be a future event. It would make no sense to hope that it was a fine day yesterday or to hope that Lincoln was not assassinated in Ford’s Theater in 1865. (It is possible to have hope about an event that you know has already happened as long as you are ignorant of what has in fact happened, e.g., whether your team won the game last night.) Third, it must be something difficult or even arduous, not a trifle. In most circumstances, it would not make sense to hope that tomorrow I will be able to think about baseball if I want to do so or to be able to brush my teeth in the morning. Fourth, it must be something that is at least metaphysically possible to attain.3 It would not make any sense for me to hope that tomorrow I will be signed by the Yankees as a pitcher or will win the Nobel Prize in Philosophy. (There is of course no such prize.) So hope is a psychological attitude of longing and anticipation toward something that is desirable, that is in the future, and that is difficult but possible. Hope is optimistically to wait for that thing. Christian hope is to look forward expectantly to what God is going to do in my life, in the lives of my loved ones, and in the history of the world. I want to emphasize that hope is preeminently hope in a person, in this case the person of God, rather than in an outcome, although we do hope for that too. Hope for something is analogous to fides; hope in a person is analogous to fiducia. One of the things we commonly hope for is, as we might say, negative. We hope that nothing will go wrong. We hope that there will be no major tragedies or calamities for ourselves, for our loved ones, or even for humankind. But, unfortunately, our lot in life seems to be that we do often enough experience such calamities. So far as I can tell, very few folks are fortunate enough to make it through life without being battered by it. People get laid off from work. Loved ones die. We are diagnosed with cancer. An earthquake demolishes our home. War turns people into refugees. An infectious disease

62

Chapter Three

strikes a community. There is no food to eat. These are all human stories with which we are familiar. If hope has an opposite, I suppose it would be cynicism or despair. And despair is certainly appropriate when there is no God in whom to place hope. I will return to this point later. Third, we encounter great difficulties when we turn to love. This is in part because the word is used so widely and is so popular in our culture that it is hard to get a firm grip on love as a theological virtue. I want to argue that Christian love (agape) is not primarily a feeling or even an experience. For example, it is not the giddy and deeply attractive experience of “falling in love” with someone. Love, as a theological virtue is, on the contrary, an action or a way of living. It is possible to have agape toward God, toward family and friends, and toward others. I think three things are implied, or ought to be implied, when we say that a person X loves a person Y. First, it means that X accepts Y just as he or she is, does not disdain or ignore Y, spends time with Y, converses with Y. Second, it means that X is willing to forgive Y of things that Y has done that were harmful or hurtful to X. X does not carry grudges or nurse secret hurts or hang on to resentment of Y. Third, it means that X is willing to help Y when help is needed or appropriate. It is important to note that the place we preeminently look to see paradigm examples of love as a theological virtue is not love between and among our fellow human beings. As it says in 1 John 3:16, “We know love by this, that he [Jesus Christ] laid down his life for us.” And (1 John 4:10): “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” In other words, we know the nature of love through Jesus. Again, love is acceptance, forgiveness, and help. We see them all in Jesus. Let us briefly consider these three aspects of love. ACCEPTANCE One of the things that almost everybody notices about Jesus is that he was a loving, accepting, compassionate person. One of the earliest stories that I recall hearing about Jesus was his encounter with Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1–10). It made a deep impression on me, even as a child, that the Son of God would make friends and hang out with a hated and ostracized tax collector. In the Gospels, Jesus’s accepting love extended to all sorts of people—educated and ignorant, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, men and women, righteous and sinful. The people with whom Jesus dealt lovingly in the New Testament included a strange crew of outcasts, oddballs, and sinners. How wonderfully odd



Chapter Three 63

and unexpected this is. You might otherwise have expected that a religious leader like Jesus would have limited his contacts to observant Jewish males. Forgiveness While being crucified, Jesus prayed to God on behalf of those who were crucifying him, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). And although it is not explicitly stated in the Gospels, it is clear that Jesus forgave Peter the terrible sin of denying him three times on the night that he was arrested. At the conclusion of the fourth Gospel (John 21:10–23) we see Jesus first implicitly reminding Peter of his betrayal of Jesus (notice that his question—“Peter, do you love me?”—is asked three times), but then clearly forgiving him. Help The Christian notion of incarnation entails that God sent his Son into the world for the benefit of human beings. Jesus came into the world to teach us how we are to live, to show us how far we have distanced ourselves from God, to serve for us an ideal example of love for others, and to die on our behalf. As it says in John 15:13, “No one has greater love then this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” If love has an opposite, I suppose it would be hatred, indifference, or unwillingness to forgive. Now, as I say, I have tried to provide some approximate content to the concepts of faith, hope, and love as theological virtues. But how are the three theological virtues related to each other? RELATIONSHIPS AMONG THE THREE The answer is that there is a complex interplay among the three, which I will now try to spell out. I will discuss the relationships among them as I think God intends them to be. That is, I fully realize that in most Christians, faith, hope, and love are not fully or correctly developed, and accordingly that the relationships among them are not as they should be. Again, my questions are: How should faith be related to hope and love? How should hope be related to faith and love? And how should love be related to faith and hope in the lives of Christians? Faith, in my opinion, ought to be a stimulus to hope. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for (Heb. 11:1). Faith as fides allows us to accept the

64

Chapter Three

truth of Christian claims about God’s existence (you cannot have hope in God unless you believe that God exists), God’s omnipotence (God’s ability to bring about justice), and God’s perfect goodness (God’s desire for the same). Equally important, faith stimulates hope because if you trust in God (fiducia) it will lead you to believe that God will bring about the best, that there will be justice. Faith, in my opinion, ought also to be a stimulus to love. In the first place, faith works through love (Gal. 5:6) and is love’s foundation. Fides allows one to accept the idea that “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Moreover, in the Epistle of James it says, “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (2:17). The main “work” of faith is of course love of God and of other people. I do not interpret James’s famous statement as a denial of the Pauline and Reformation principle of justification by faith. Why? Because Christians hold that true faith will always result in love; accordingly, if there is no love, there is no faith either. Moreover, even Paul can write, “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love” (Gal. 5:6). Hope, in my opinion, ought to be a stimulus to faith. Hope stands firm in faith (Rom. 4:18) and gives faith its final goal. Without faith, hope is desperation, hoping against hope, like hoping that continental drift will cease, or like the convict on death row who hopes for a last-minute telephone call from the governor, pardoning him. Doubtless, there are desperate people who have hopes like that, and I have no desire to disparage such folk. I only wish to say that hope as a theological virtue needs faith in a loving God in order to be properly grounded. Hope ought also to be a stimulus to love. We know that our hope is trustworthy because we know God’s love (Rom. 5:5); hope allows love to endure. A truly hopeful person will not only believe in justice but work for justice in the world. Hope means that I will do my best to better the world by my acceptance of others, forgiveness of others, and help of others. Love, in my opinion, ought to be a stimulus to faith. Because faith is fiducia, no real love is possible without faith. Loving God presupposes belief that God exists and is worthy of love; love of others presupposes that as children of God whom God loves they are worthy of trust, acceptance, forgiveness, and help. Love ought also to be a stimulus to hope. If I love someone, I will long and hope for justice for that person. As Paul says, love “hopes all things” (1 Cor. 13:7). Can there be people who have only one or two of the three theological virtues, or even none of them? Can there be people who have one or two or even all three of them in insufficient degrees or partly mixed with their opposites? Of course there can be such people. But my argument is that this is wrong; this is not what God wants. Such folks need to grow spiritually.



Chapter Three 65

WHY IS LOVE THE GREATEST OF THE THREE? Why did Paul write, “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13)?4 I think there are three reasons why Paul considered love preeminent. The first has to do with the life of Jesus, whom we Christians are supposed to emulate as much as possible (Phil. 2:3–8; 1 Cor. 11:1). Of course Jesus was a person of faith and hope. As for faith, we see his trust in his heavenly Father in the way he constantly found time alone for prayer. We also see it in his acceptance of God’s will in Gethsemane. Hope is a bit more difficult to see in Jesus because he apparently had a great deal of foreknowledge, especially about the eschatological future, and you can hardly hope for what you know. But he clearly did not know everything about the future (Mark 13:32), so his epistemic attitude toward the coming fullness of the kingdom of God must have included elements of hope. But my point here is the fact, as noted in section “Defining Our Three Terms” above, that Jesus was above all else a person of love. To say that love is the greatest of the theological virtues is a way of underscoring the preeminence of Jesus. Second, let’s consider the value of the three theological virtues in isolation from the others. Faith, without hope and love, seems to be empty. As Paul himself says, “If I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 13:2). And we have already noted the comment in the Epistle of James, “Faith without works [and the central Christian “work” is love] is dead.” So faith, all by itself, is almost useless. And hope, without faith and love, amounts to desperately grasping at straws. But love, although it is incomplete without hope and faith, is still highly admirable. We honor and respect people who accept others unconditionally, are willing to forgive others, and are ready to help others, whether or not they have faith and hope. Third, and perhaps most importantly, “love never ends” (1 Cor. 13:8). Faith will not always be necessary; in the kingdom of God, Paul writes, “I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12). Nor will hope always be necessary; in the kingdom of God “we will see face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). But love among the persons of the Godhead, between humans and God, and among humans will last forever. So it is the greatest of the theological virtues. HOPE AS AN ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF GOD Let us now turn specifically to hope. As noted, I want to argue that hope supports the existence of God. That is, I want to argue that if you want to be a person of hope, you should eschew naturalism in favor of theism.

66

Chapter Three

Here is a question: What are the worst calamities that have ever befallen humankind? Doubtless only God knows the answer to that question, but I am going to suggest two candidate events. They would be African slavery and the Holocaust. One aspect of these events that makes them horrible is that they were caused by human beings, not by natural events like hurricanes or diseases or famines. Another horrible aspect is the huge number of human beings who suffered and died. It is commonly accepted that the Nazis murdered about six million Jews and about five million people who fit in other “undesirable” categories. I have never seen any figures on how many Africans were taken into slavery during the years of the slave trade, but it must have been in the millions. A third horrible aspect is that the victims of these events did not deserve what happened to them. They had done nothing to deserve being enslaved or murdered; they were persecuted just because they were black Africans or just because they were Jews who lived at the wrong place at the wrong time. Human beings are, or at least want to be, hopeful creatures. One of the things almost all of us hope for, as noted above, is justice and compensation, especially for people who have suffered terribly. But in the light of horrors like slavery and the Holocaust, it seems that our grounds for that sort of hope on behalf of the innocent victims are limited indeed, unless God exists. Without God we can only hope that on some future day we can succeed in so designing our educational, social, political, economic, and diplomatic systems that no more slavery and no more acts of genocide occur. I have no doubt that all right-minded people should work to achieve those ends. But are they attainable? Those who believe in inevitable human progress might find such a hope plausible. Others, like me, will find the idea absurd—about like hoping that terrorism in the world will cease next week. But notice that even if we were able to achieve those lofty goals, that would not help compensate or provide justice for the victims of slavery or the Holocaust. Certainly, if atheism is true, there is no hope whatsoever for any experience of reparation or even joy for them. They are dead and gone. That sort of hope only makes sense if a God exists who provides some sort of blessed afterlife. Someone who longs for justice, who holds that God does not exist, and who agrees with me about the inability of humans to bring about a better world must (or so it seems to me) accordingly despair. Can great evils like slavery and the Holocaust be redeemed? Well, not if redeeming those events means making it such that they never occurred. It is too late for that. Today, in April of 2016, it is too late for any person, even God, to make it such that they never occurred. Nor can those events be redeemed if redeeming them means showing that, in the long run and from the proper point of view, those events were really good. Probably certain goods did emerge from slavery and the Holocaust. But did those goods outweigh



Chapter Three 67

and justify those tragic events? Were these events, despite appearances, actually good? Of course not. Such an idea is ridiculous, even obscene. But in one sense evil can be redeemed. Our hope for justice for the innocent victims can be satisfied—but only if God exists. If no God exists, evil cannot be redeemed at all. But if a perfectly good and all-powerful God provides a limitlessly good afterlife in which horrific earthly experiences fade further and further from memory and eventually pale into insignificance in the light of the goodness then revealed and experienced, then evil in that sense will have been redeemed. It will have been defeated by something infinitely greater.5 Many people will dismiss such an argument about hope as sheer silliness. And certainly naturalists are allowed to declare with bravado their creed— that this life is all that there is, that death is the final and complete end for human beings, and that we had best just get used to the idea that we live in a radically unjust world. There simply is no redemption of evil—so they will insist—or compensation for its victims. So what I am suggesting is not a theistic proof, at least not in the classical sense. In his versions of the cosmological argument, for example, Aquinas based his arguments on certain assumptions that he thought all sensible people must accept. They were assumptions like Every event has a cause, or Some things move, or Some things live and then die. I am offering no such assumptions. My argument is not of that sort. But there is no denying that most human beings have a deep longing for justice and a hope that things will turn out well. I believe that for most people the evils of this world increase, rather than decrease, that longing. Wishes do not make things come true, of course. But for those of us who wish to avoid despair, that hope is appealing. For those of us who already believe in the Christian God, it is not only a hope but a conviction. But my argument today is that for those who want to hope for justice and compensation for innocent victims of slavery and the Holocaust, your only way for that hope to be rational is to embrace supernaturalism. Perhaps this is why the book of Hebrews declares, “We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul” (Heb. 6:19). I need to point out that hope is not inconsistent with realism. Sometimes in life we just have to play the cards as they lay. We must deal with present realities—including painful or tragic ones—as they are. But for Christians, we deal with them in the light of what we take to be God’s promises about the future. CONCLUSION So this is an argument in favor of belief in theism, that is, belief in an allpowerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good God. I earlier said that Christian

68

Chapter Three

theism is theism plus crucial Christian doctrines, especially incarnation, Trinity, and resurrection. But do we have here an argument in favor of belief in specifically Christian theism? In one sense, probably not. It is quite possible for non-Christian theists (Jews or Muslims or theistic Buddhists, for example) to take the above argument as support for belief in the God that they believe in. Still, the deepest difference between these religions and Christianity is Jesus Christ. And as a Christian, I would argue that we know of and experience the three theological virtues preeminently through Christ. So the hope that my pro-theism argument is based upon is trust in the person and promises of Jesus Christ. As he himself said, “and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:3).

The Trouble with Hope and Compensatory Logic in a Kantian Form Jonathan Russell

In this response I want to develop several lines of inquiry into Stephen Davis’s quite admirably clear chapter, which explores both his understanding of the interrelation of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love and his use of hope as a purported argument in favor of God’s existence. As such, as any table setting for an analytic philosopher of religion’s coming argument must include, he begins by defining his terms, drawing distinctions between naturalism and supernaturalism, as well as atheism, theism, and Christian theism. Had I the space and time, I would prefer simply stopping at this point and pulling at the quite rigid and simple distinctions made here, particularly the quite mechanistic characterization of the natural world and altogether interventionist characterization of “God,” but to argue with definitions alone would be to stay in the foyer and not even enter the party, so to speak. As such, after discussing what I think is an implicit prioritization of faith in Davis’s development of the virtues, I will turn to his argument from hope, offering an insight (the apparently Kantian function and form in the argument), an inquiry (is Davis a doxastic voluntarist?) and an intervention (an interventionist God will not do). THE PRIORITY OF FAITH Aside from one traditional distinction (the medieval division between fides and fiducia), Davis’s understanding of the virtues is largely an informal explication of his own thoughts on the matter with occasional verse quotations for support. His is an expressly non-exegetical approach and as such we are left to simply reflect (as he has) on the coherence of the resulting terminological meanings, interplay, and scriptural references. While (as he argues) there are clear 69

70

Chapter Three

interstimulating relations between all the virtues, I want to argue that there is subtle prioritization of faith in Davis’s account that crops up in various places. As a summary of faith’s interplay and much of his discussion later on, Davis writes: Faith as a theological virtue, then, is a mental state wherein one affirms the truth of essential Christian claims about God, Christ, humanity, and salvation and trusts one’s life confidently to God. But faith is not just a mental state: genuine faith must also be acted upon. We demonstrate our trust in God by embracing hope rather than despair.

Here, I think, we see a glimpse into the interplay but subtending priority of faith as belief and trust in Davis’s account. Faith is a mental state in which we affirm propositional content (fides) and trust in a person (fiducia), but it cannot stand alone. It must be demonstrated and authenticated in actions (recall that love is primarily an action for Davis), which includes embracing hope. Here, succinctly distilled, the logic of Davis’s interplay is clear. Love for Davis is primarily non-mental in the sense that it is not a “psychological attitude” like hope, not a feeling or even experience, but an externally enactive way of living—accepting, forgiving, and helping. So, to summarize, each virtue will stimulate the others, but faith appears primary in so much as it is “love’s foundation” and love of God “presupposes belief in God.” Hope likewise is “properly grounded” in faith. Faith is that in which it “stands firm.” As such, there is an interrelation, faith is dead or empty without love and hope, but not non-existent. It is dead, inanimate, unauthenticated, lacking demonstration and thus “almost useless.” Faith is not founded by the others, but an empty foundation without them. As the foundation, it must “result in love,” that is, express itself through love, building up into action. Here again, there is an interstimulation, but a seeming foundational priority for faith that must necessarily be authenticated. In this way, Davis is in lock step with the traditional justification by faith conceptual scheme. Beyond this—beyond Davis’s opinions as to the ideal interplay, which I am arguing has a subtle prioritization of faith as a foundational mental state—we learn that love is the greatest of the virtues because, theologically, it will never end, eschatologically outlasting the interplay with hopes fulfilled and faith (its prior foundation) transformed into full knowledge. FUNCTIONALLY KANTIAN Turning to Davis’s argument from hope, I think there is a sense in which we might read Davis as effectively Kantian in the sense that God and the after-



Chapter Three 71

life function analogously to the way in which God and immortality function in practical reason for Kant. Put simply, in Davis’s argument, God and the afterlife appear as necessary conditions—necessary postulates—of practical hope. Postulates for Kant are theoretical propositions that function as subjectively necessary suppositions.6 For Davis, God and the eternal afterlife seem to function similarly, that is, as theoretical posits which serve as guarantors of hope for happiness, or in Davis’s argument, hope for justice as recompense. In essence, they appear to function to make rational, and practically livable, existing (or the future possibility of ) hope. As he writes, “your only way for that hope to be rational is to embrace supernaturalism.” Shortly, I will turn to the question of whether this doxastic voluntarism—if you want to rationalize that hope, choose God—but before this, however, I want to explore this functionally Kantian form of the argument in brief detail. For Kant, God and inferential arguments about God’s existence lie beyond the possibility of critical philosophy to provide. Therefore, as in his pre-critical period, he denies that arguments can prove God’s existence. Davis’s argument is likewise not an inferential argument. The supposition and function of God’s existence does, however, play a key role in Kant’s formulation of practical reason (the life of the will), and it is in this sense that I think Davis’s God functions analogously. God and the immortality of the soul, for Kant, are postulates of practical reason in that they are subjectively necessary suppositions for achieving the summum bonum (the highest good). The way in which they serve this function cannot be explored here in detail, but together they serve to found the hope for the fulfillment of the moral life (immortality as the temporal extension which enables continued perfection and God as the guarantor of the connection between happiness and the moral life). They are, for Kant, subjectively necessary in that they are needed presuppositions of practical reason. Immortality and God are “needs” in so much as they conjoin the duty of the moral life with the hope of fulfillment and happiness. God and immortality then are that which enable such fulfillment. However, they are postulates in the sense that they theoretically issue forth as appended to some a priori moral law. Hence, they are theoretically necessary for practical reason in a derivative sense. Davis’s argument appears quite similar to Kant’s account in many respects, but with a crucial difference. For Davis, God and the afterlife are (as Kant would have it) certainly not argued for inferentially, but rather introduced as that which are able to conjointly bring compensatory justice (a moral good) and therefore rationally ground practical hope. Thus, in both cases God and the afterlife are introduced as guarantors of hope for some moral end—justice in Davis’s case and the summum bonum in Kant’s. In both cases they provide the practical and theoretical foundation for hope. Similarly, in both cases they

72

Chapter Three

are argued to be subjectively necessary, that is, as that alone which can serve to found, make rational, and make practically possible an existing moral end or goal. In these ways, God and the afterlife function similarly in Davis’s argument and Kant’s account of practical reason. For Davis, God and the afterlife are guarantors of justice qua recompense that requires such eternality and are thus likewise the guarantors of our hope for it. However, there is a key (indeed, glaring) difference in the sense in which they are necessary. For Kant, the existence of God and immortality are theoretical postulates in that they issue from a direct relation to a necessary a priori moral law and in this way are rationally derived. There is no argument for our choosing to believe or accept them, but rather an explanation of their rational subjective necessity. Davis, of course, understands his discussion to be an argument (albeit a non-traditional one) and therefore God and the afterlife issue forth as that which the addressee is encouraged to choose to accept or believe in for the sake of rationally grounding their hope. God and the afterlife are subjectively “necessary” in the sense that only they can practically ensure hope’s fulfillment. In this way, to call Davis’s argument an argument for God’s existence appears incorrect, properly speaking. It is, rather, an argument for choosing theism for the sake of shoring up hope—God is hope’s best hope. Hope is not arranged within premises leading to the conclusion that God exists. God’s existence is rather that which Davis argues has a kind of subjective necessity if one wants to be a person of hope. Along these lines Davis argues that theism is something we should choose if we “wish to avoid despair.” This is beyond just doxastic voluntarism for the sake of rational grounding (the functionally pseudo-Kantian Davis). We are encouraged to choose to believe not because God exists, but because (quite apart from any arguments for or against the rationality of God’s existence) we have a better chance of avoiding despair. Is this a kind of “Davis’s Wager” (a functionally pseudo-Pascalian Davis), wherein it is better to believe and therefore avoid despair than chose not to and have to hope against hope? It surely appears so in many senses. Are we to believe Davis thinks we can make existential commitments for hope’s sake, such that we can rest more easily in the slave’s future compensation if we choose to postulate an allpowerful God to gird our hope? DAVIS’S DOXASTIC VOLUNTARISM Perhaps it would be correct to characterize Davis’s understanding of God as similar to other analytic philosophers often gathered under the heading of theistic personalism, where God is somewhat differently understood than in clas-



Chapter Three 73

sical theism, that is, as a person, a being who is “all powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good”—a variety of perfect being theology. Indeed, he refers several times to the “person of God.” As a disembodied person, God under this characterization is analogous to the supreme res cogitans, a Cartesian mind of sorts. My suspicion (and I would argue that Descartes and Locke are somewhat of the recent conceptual patron saints of the theistic personalism paradigm) is that Davis understands human personhood quite analogously as well, with the addition of the body of course.7 We are psycho-physical wholes that have a soul substance and a body substance. As we have seen, Davis’s emphasis on faith as necessarily being (at least partially) assent to certain propositional content is foundational to his understanding of Christian life. Perhaps issuing from the inheritance of the quite mentalistic orientation of Descartes where the body is merely configurations of matter and the mind is that alone which wills and acts voluntarily, there is a difficulty, I think, in the way in which certain errors occur when such an emphasis on cognitive mental states is arranged within arguments designed to get people to assent to certain propositions, in this case, about God. This is where I think the nature of belief is misconstrued as voluntaristic: chosen by the believer (doxastic voluntarism). Consider Davis’s words, “I want to argue that if you want to be a person of hope, you should eschew naturalism in favor of theism.” In other words, you should choose to believe in X, where X is (for Davis) a particular perfect being theology. Essentially, he argues that there are no grounds for hope unless you believe (cognitively) in a perfect being that could provide an afterlife to generate an economy of recompense for those that have suffered unjustly. Now, we will return to Davis’s compensatory logic shortly, but I want to flag here the mental priority (beliefs in propositions must ground hope) and the voluntarism (beliefs, in this case about God, are chosen). Essentially, the argument attempts to convince the addressee to choose to believe some proposition X because some additional psychological state Y will be properly grounded—can be “satisfied”—thus avoiding despair. Here, the order of the virtues in Davis’s account (detailed above) operates as a kind of corrective or apologetic supplement to what we might call a “dangling hope,” dangling in the same way certain grammatical forms are dangling unless properly connected to other forms. The argument, however, is ambiguous as to the ordering of hope’s relation to belief in God. At times Davis presumes there is a degree of hope possessed by the addressee, or, let us say, at least potentially possessed by her depending on her psychological makeup, life experiences, and so on. In a sense, this desirable psychological state (hope), had or not, is then held up as that which can be made rational, satisfied, or properly filled out, by belief in God. Here again, hope is held up as some good, and thus not used as reason for the existence of God (an inferential argument),

74

Chapter Three

but rather as a good that is assumed worth preserving—worth founding and fostering—and therefore belief in God (and what God can do) is offered as that which can properly found, or prop up, an otherwise dangling hope. At bottom, I think the difficulty with this is the presumption that beliefs are the kinds of things we choose—the kinds of things that via propositional content we willfully adopt—as if my coming to assent to something is a Cartesian mental act of will. Beliefs introspectively, at least from my perspective, appear more like states I find myself with, things that, in a certain sense, happen to me based upon my habituated life within the world. I do not choose to give intellectual assent or existential commitment to belief in God because of psychological benefits or syllogistically arranged premises. Put simply, we do not hold our beliefs, but are rather held by them. Take the claim I heard once that belief in God is more like belief in your car than you might think. The point is that beliefs are dispositions to act—ways we have been formed into and find ourselves. Imagine the case of the car. Did you ever choose to trust your car or believe that its engine would safely take you somewhere rather than explode in your lap? No, you sat in it, anxious at first, wary of the power at your fingertips, and drove it. You tested and explored it and one day found that you trusted it. You found yourself with a disposition to act as if it were trustworthy. You never sat at the wheel, white-knuckled and willful, and made a decision to believe and put your trust in it (and all of this was rendered such only in a through the car-familiar or car-unfamiliar context from which you came). As such, in the context of contemporary explorations of non-Cartesian, embodied understandings of mind, beliefs can be understood as contextual constraints or structuring causes: dispositions neurologically shaped into us, into the neural-bodily scaffolding of the complex systems that make us up by our lives in the world.8 Such an embodied conception might go some way toward a more messy interplay that de-prioritizes faith as an internal Cartesian mental state. Indeed, such an account (the fuller development of which goes beyond the scope of this chapter) not only better matches the phenomenological experience of beliefs and other propositional states, but raise questions about the very nature of the apologetic enterprise itself, further confirming the sense in which it might be better understood as a collection of post hoc justifications of beliefs rather than as means to choosing beliefs. AN INTERVENTIONIST GOD WILL NOT DO Turning briefly to Davis’s understanding of God in the context of his argument, I think there is a potential tension within his account of the omnipotent,



Chapter Three 75

interventionistically-enabled God and his compensatory logic of the afterlife. Davis’s model of recompense, however eternal, however equitable, might still leave God morally repugnant, to put it plainly. He has defended the Free Will Defense to the problem of evil elsewhere using what I will call the global premise which states that: All moral evil that exists in the world is due to the choices of free moral agents whom God created and no other world which God could have created would have had a better balance of good over evil than the actual world we have.9

Essentially, on the whole, given the reality of free moral agents, while God could intervene at any given moment, because God has found the best global balancing of the scales possible, God need not be culpable for not intervening in the Holocaust or the transatlantic slave trade. God can and does occasionally intervene in the natural order, as Davis states, just not in these contexts— not, for example, for the 12.4 million people (not the hundreds of thousands Davis estimates) turned into human property in the transatlantic slave trade.10 Not also for the countless millions living in social death after official slavery, under the old and now new Jim Crow. However, he says here that such calamities cannot be justified by any greater good theodicy such that “in the long run . . . those events were really good.” Therefore, as individual calamities they do not add good to the scales, but are they justified in terms of the global premise from his earlier work, just not individually? Clarification is needed, but given God’s interventionistic, omnipotent ability and his previous argument from free will, it appears that Davis thinks so. With regard to this interventionistic ability itself, there seems to be a profound tension in God’s being able but choosing not to intervene such that no amount of eternal recompense could justify having let those suffer and die only to receive eternal recompense later. This is not because numbers can’t be balanced, but because the very idea of balancing and a compensatory logic, no matter how generous, in the midst of moral questions of the value of life has a profound degree of inappropriateness, even more so when God can and does, in other contexts, intervene. Such a God who offers a payback for one’s suffering—however blessed—when that God could have intervened, is not good. Indeed, such a logic was used against black bodies in the midst of their living death to pacify them. As James Cone writes, “[t]he White Christ gave Blacks slavery, segregation, and lynching and told them to turn the other cheek and to look for their reward in heaven.”11 For my part, an interventionist God will always have such repugnancy. No amount of payback, however generous, no amount of abundant recompense or other economic exchange policy offers a kind of hope worth having if that God could have, in the twinkling of an eye, stopped such past and present tragedies. A divine ledger to which God will

76

Chapter Three

be faithful is not hope. To invoke (from another Claremont luminary) Philip Clayton’s not-even-once principle: if God intervenes once, in any context, God is morally obliged to intervene all the time.12 Indeed, against interventionism, I would take one step further, in agreement with Thomas Jay Oord, that in order to make Clayton’s principle consistent with God as essentially loving, such a disallowance of interventionism must not only be simply a voluntary self-limiting, but must be an essential self-limitation—an essential kenosis: “God cannot unilaterally prevent genuine evil.”13 Can that interventionistically-enabled God really be the God of love who on Davis’s own account is “willing to help . . . when help is needed?” Such a theology requires the icy caveat that for cases like slavery and the Holocaust the world is better balanced for having had them. For my part, I think not and it is no wonder that the God of compensatory logic is not the God of the black liberation tradition—the theological tradition born from the experience of black life in the Americas—the God we might best turn to if we want to face opportunities and challenges in the context of past and present anti-blackness and social death. Hope, however construed, however founded, must eschew God as the omnipotent accountant. For those turned into economic property it is doubtful that a compensatory logic will offer the hope they need. NOTES 1.  John Hick, Faith and Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957), 186–87. 2.  I am largely following Aquinas’s analysis of hope here. See his Summa theologiae, I-II, 4, 1. 3.  As Jerry Walls argues in “The Wisdom of Hope in a Despairing World.” See Paul Moser and Michael McCall, eds., The Wisdom of the Christian Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 244–64. 4.  And thus Aquinas writes that “charity [love] is the mother and root of all the Virtues.” Summa theologiae, I-II, 62, 4. 5. As Marilyn Adams argues in Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 105. 7.  For a helpful introduction to these similarities and themes within the analytic philosophy of religion upon which I am drawing here, see Brian Davies, Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 9–16. 8.  For an example of such a post-Cartesian, embodied account of beliefs and other propositional attitudes, see Nancey Murphy and Warren S. Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 221–37.



Chapter Three 77

  9.  Stephen T. Davis, “Free Will and Evil,” in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, ed. Stephen T. Davis (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 76. 10.  Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 5. 11. James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 119. 12.  Philip Clayton and Steven Knapp, The Predicament of Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 44–68. 13.  Thomas Jay Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 167.

WORKS CITED Adams, Marilyn. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa theologiae. 4 vols. Matriti, Italy: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1955–1958. Clayton, Philip, and Steven Knapp. The Predicament of Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Cone, James H. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011. Davies, Brian. Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Davis, Stephen T. “Free Will and Evil.” In Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, edited by Stephen T. Davis, 73–107. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Hick, John. Faith and Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Edited and translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Murphy, Nancey, and Warren S. Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. New Revised Standard Version Bible. The Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, 1989. Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015. Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. London: Penguin Books, 2007. Walls, Jerry. “The Wisdom of Hope in a Despairing World.” In The Wisdom of the Christian Faith, edited by Paul Moser and Michael McCall, 244–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Chapter Four

Faith, Hope, and Love and the Challenges of Justice Francis Schüssler Fiorenza

The relation of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity to the virtue of justice is a central theological and ethical issue. Traditionally, faith, hope, and charity are considered to be theological virtues, whereas justice is looked upon as one of the cardinal or moral virtues. The challenges of justice in this context are multiple and central. They question the extent and validity of the traditional distinction between the theological and cardinal virtues. They also challenge the relegation of justice to a non-theological cardinal or practical virtue subordinate to the proper theological virtues, as classically understood. In addition, the modern understanding of justice as located within the basic structure of society challenges its traditional conception as an individual moral virtue. Modern notions of justice focus not on an individual ruler’s virtue, but on the structure and subject of society. Such conceptions of justice seek to take into account that contemporary societies are often religiously and ethically pluralist; their members often adhere to diverse and contrasting understandings of the good. The modern understanding of justice itself runs into ambiguities in its understanding and uncertainties in its application. Therefore, what is needed is a more comprehensive vision of justice and its relation to the theological virtues. Such a vision must enlarge the understanding of justice, its practice and structure, and must expand it in an appropriate and broader vision of charity. In this way, justice as well as charity can be seen as central to the theological virtues and adequately face the complexity of modern pluralist societies where severe inequalities and injustice are often present. The differences among the intellectual, theological, and moral virtues were a subject of considerable discussion within the Roman Catholic tradition, especially during the medieval period, extending to contemporary interpretations of this tradition. What does it mean that a theological virtue is a virtue (a 79

80

Chapter Four

habit or disposition) if it is infused or if it is a gift of the Holy Spirit? How do acquired human virtues, as acquired habits, relate to a supernatural infusion, gifts, or end?1 To what extent is charity, as a theological virtue, supernatural, infused, and a divine gift, whereas justice, as a moral virtue, belongs to the natural and acquired realm, and is infused to a lesser degree? An important shift has taken place in modernity in the understanding of justice. In many philosophical, ethical, and political essays, justice is often understood not so much as a matter of virtue but as a matter of social structure. This shift in understanding is decisive and important especially in modern societies that have developed a division of political powers and have become functionally differentiated, bureaucratically structured, and morally as well as religiously pluralistic. This shift has led to a modern turn to locate justice within societal structures and to an increasing concern for distributive justice. Such a shift has been criticized by several ethicists for abandoning virtue ethics, and they chide their conceptions as an ill-begotten result of the Enlightenment. I shall argue for a different view: modern conceptions of justice are indeed a necessary and important part of our understanding of society and the presence and role of individuals as well as groups within society. Moreover, the understanding of justice in relation to the basic structure of society does not do away with the importance of an interpretative understanding of justice and practice; indeed, it brings to the fore the need for genuine dialogue and public discourse within a diverse and pluralistic society. These challenges bring to the surface the relation of theological virtues to justice and raise the question not only of the nature of justice within society, but also whether virtue should be counted not simply among the cardinal virtues but also among the theological virtues. My discussion is not focused on the details of the medieval debates about the specific nature of the theological virtues or the background of these debates, but on how the understanding of justice has changed and how justice should be seen as both a social and theological virtue. THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE THEOLOGICAL AND THE CARDINAL VIRTUES Within the tradition of Roman Catholic theology, a fundamental difference has existed between the theological virtues and the intellectual as well as the moral virtues. The theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity are clearly distinguished from the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. In a traditional understanding of the theological virtues, there is the tendency to think of faith as concerned with what we believe or the objects of knowledge as objects of belief. In this understanding, faith is an



Chapter Four 81

epistemological virtue dealing with the transcendent object of faith. Hope relates to what we expect or anticipate, or hope for, dealing with our expectation of the eschatological reality of what we believe. Charity underscores the love we have for God. Obviously, the interrelations among these virtues are much more complex. William of St.-Thierry, a twelfth-century theologian, confesses in his Meditations, “I am bold to say that I do not truly know whether I hope for something other than that which I believe. You, Lord, are my belief, you are my hope.”2 The classic treatment of the theological virtues in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae (ST for short) offers a much more complex view. Virtues are specific qualities. Though often called habits, “dispositions” might be a better term than the word “habit” for translating the Latin term habitus. Virtues are dispositions that arise from certain acts, but they dispose us to act in certain ways. Disposition thus expresses an inclination as well as a capability. As such the virtues enable us to act in a certain way and dispose us to do so. Thomas gives three reasons for the theological virtues to be “theological.” The first reason is that God is their object. As theological virtues, they “direct us rightly to God” (ST, I-II, 62, 1). Nevertheless, an interpretation of this statement should observe that Thomas in the same article of that question in the Summa explains that the reason and will of humans by nature go out to God since God is the cause and end of nature (ST, I-II, 62, 1 ad 3). This suggests that virtues are perfections of human nature. The second reason is that God is the cause of these virtues. They are not produced by our activity but by God’s action. In Thomas’s words: because they are infused in us by God alone (ST, I-II, 62, 1). The third reason is that we know of them because of divine revelation. St. Paul mentions the theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity) in his letter to the Corinthians. The problem is the virtues cannot be divided up, just as the human person cannot be divided up. A well-known commentator on the theological virtues, Josef Pieper, argues that either hope is a theological virtue or not a virtue at all (with reference to ST, I-II, 62, 3 ad 2). Hope is an orientation toward the good that fulfills human nature and its source in the reality of grace. It is directed toward supernatural happiness in God. He further argues that justice is directed toward the good; when it is no longer directed toward the good, it ceases to be justice. However, hope can be directed to what might be objectively bad and yet remain a real hope. Hope is a God-given turning to God and that is what makes it a theological virtue.3 Ratzinger in his small book dedicated to Pieper shows the intricate relation between faith as trust and the virtue of hope as well as between charity and hope.4 It is often noted that charity is the most important theological virtue. This of course can be understood in various ways.5 Thomas refers to charity as

82

Chapter Four

“the mother and the root of all virtues” (ST, I-II, 62, 4) and affirms that “all other virtues somehow depend on it [charity]” (ST, I-II, 62, 2 ad 3). One commentator maintains, “charity is called not the crown (the finishing touch) of the virtues but their mother and root. It begins with charity.”6 Aquinas notes, “Charity comes into the definition of all virtues, not because it is essentially identical with them, but because somehow they all depend upon charity.”7 This raises the question: how is it that all the moral virtues depend upon charity and yet still have their specific individual character as virtues? Thomas makes a comparison with prudence. Prudence integrates and safeguards the cardinal virtues. An analogy, in modern society, is electricity; without it so much cannot operate. One needs electricity not only to run machines, but also with the use of computers it is necessary for calculating, writing, communicating, and even reading (if eBooks take the place of books). To the extent that charity affects other virtues, then the interpretation of charity has to be related to its effect on the virtue of justice.8 Such an interpretation has to take into account the nature of justice and should avoid a dualism between the theological virtues and the cardinal virtues. Such questions were debated. Ambrose viewed virtue as a way of arriving at eternal happiness. Following Augustine, Peter Lombard defines virtues as good habits that enable us to live correctly. Whereas Peter Abelard defines virtues as disposition acquired by humans, Hugh of Saint Victor places them in a theological context by interpreting them as a divine gift and as the fruit of divine grace.9 However, usually, the theological virtues are contrasted with the cardinal virtues, which are considered natural virtues. The cardinal or moral virtues appear as hinges or links to practice. Prudence is first because it involves the intellect’s application of reason to practice, enabling one to judge what is right and wrong in the given situation. Justice involves giving to persons their rightful due. Fortitude gives one the strength to endure courageously and to persevere steadily with one’s decision in the face of obstacles. Finally, temperance keeps our desires and passion in check so that we avoid excess and obtain balance with equanimity. I want to make a couple of observations about Thomas’s understanding of the cardinal and theological virtues and their relation to one another. My observations could be considered critical, though that is not my central intent, which is descriptive. First, the cardinal virtues are, as moral virtues, considered to be social virtues. However, the list and description of the four cardinal virtues has one interesting feature: as a group they are more individualistically rather than socially or societally interpreted. Prudence concerns an individual’s intellectual ability to judge and to apply reason to a particular situation; temperance prevents the dominance of one’s pas-



Chapter Four 83

sions that hinder the making of prudent judgments, and fortitude concerns an individual’s ability to persevere, and, except for justice, these virtues are somewhat individualistically interpreted: the individual’s ability to judge concretely, to control the undue influence of passions, and to endure in the face of obstacles.10 Moreover, if justice is, at least, social, the description of justice appears, if one were to use a modern vocabulary, to be described in terms of perfect duties (which stand in contrast to imperfect duties). Perfect duties entail a specific obligation or duty that an individual person or even institution owes to another. It is a matter of giving back to another what is owed, no matter how we feel toward the others. Even religion, which is understood as a much broader concept for us, is treated as a part of what humans owe God. Thomas’s treatment of justice in the Summa does not seem to include the broader issues of what we might today list under justice.11 However, such larger issues are somewhat present—though not to the extent present in modern or contemporary discussions of justice in society—in his treatise on kingship (incomplete)12 and his commentaries on Aristotle’s ethics.13 Moreover, even the treatment in Thomas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics focuses much more on the individual relations and transactions of legal justice. It deals much more with interpersonal relations dealing with status, rank, authority, subordination, and servitude. My second observation deals with the theological virtue of charity. Though it is the mother, end, and focus of all theological virtues, there is an explicit and detailed treatment of the social implications of charity—almost more than in treatment of justice as a moral virtue. Thomas discusses mercy (misericordia) in question 30 of II-II in the Summa theologiae as one of the effects of the virtue of charity. The other two effects of love are joy and peace. However, as Thomas argues in his response, mercy is an effect of love that differs from joy and peace because the latter are not virtues, but mercy is a virtue in its own right. Mercy is “compassion in our heart at another’s misery, whereby we are compelled to help that person if we can” (ST, II-II, 30, 1).14 Misericordia is related to eleos. It is not simply a passive experience of sadness, but it includes action to relieve suffering. Thomas’s argument is double: the sensitive appetite of sadness is passion but not a virtue. It also involves the rational appetite or the will. Misericordia is therefore, for Thomas, “a cognitively rich structure of passion in relation to beliefs about evil and suffering that lead us to action.”15 Thomas’s diverse treatments of justice and charity lead me to discuss its difference from contemporary understandings of justice. Central for the dissimilarity between modern and medieval approaches to justice is the interpretation and role of societal structures as integral to justice.

84

Chapter Four

MODERN UNDERSTANDINGS OF JUSTICE AS INDEPENDENT OF VIRTUE One of the decisive features of some modern understandings of justice is that it is conceived independently of a virtue ethic. This tendency is bemoaned by many, most notably by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue.16 However, his analysis and proposal has been also severely challenged. Jürgen Habermas counters, “MacIntyre makes it too easy for himself from a critical perspective by selecting an untypical and rather easily criticizable example of a universalistic position.”17 Secondly, and more importantly, “his appeals to the Aristotelian concept of praxis gets him into trouble as soon as he tries to extract a universal core from the pluralism of equally legitimate forms of life that is unavoidable in modernity.”18 Jacques Ranciére in his essays on equality makes a similar point. He observes that contemporary authors appeal to the ancient polis and its ideals. They seek to retrieve a classic vision of the polis, civic virtue, and community. They, however, overlook that significant classes, groups, people, and genders were excluded or placed in a very subordinate role in the ancient polis.19 Martha C. Nussbaum, though often associated with a virtue ethics, critically observes that virtue ethics is a misleading and confused category in several ways.20 Kant’s moral philosophy does not exclude the importance of the character of the moral agent, contrary to MacIntyre’s polemic. Likewise, MacIntyre overemphasizes the role of functional order and says, “that we need to get this functional order through some sort of political authority” and de-emphasizes the role of rational deliberation in Aristotle.21 Virtue Ethic and the Education of the Prince The relation between a virtuous and a political conception of justice comes to the fore in both ancient and medieval traditions of the literary genre known as the “Mirror of the Prince.” The contrast between the understanding of society and the role of justice within modern conceptions of justice can be compared and contrasted with the orientation expressed in the literary genre aimed at the education of a virtuous prince. This genre listed the virtues and described characteristics necessary for a good ruler to rule in a just manner. It personified justice in the character of the ruler, whereas modern approaches look at the structure of society. The ancient literary genre can be traced back to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome and continues until the eighteenth century.22 This literary genre flourished with a Christian accent during the patristic and medieval periods.23 During these periods different accents and developments to the genre took place. One direction sought to include a biblical-theological



Chapter Four 85

approach and to integrate catechetical themes. Another direction isolated “the four cardinal virtues . . . from the purely theological aspect in the direction of a moral philosophy.”24 There are geographical differences as well as divisions of the genre into monastic, conciliar, and monarchial versions. Their aim was to educate a Christian prince in virtue so that he could rule justly. Thomas’s plan for the kingship essay began in 1266. Its original intention fit the literary genre of the education of a prince since it was intended for Hugo II, who died in 1267 at fourteen years old. Thomas had completed the work only as far as section II, 2; the rest was later finished by his student, Ptolemaeus von Lucca. It does, however, show Thomas’s political theological views. His advice is that the ruler should foster the good through the appointment of officials, to issue laws and decrees that restrain immorality and encourage virtuous actions, and to keep the kingdom secure from its enemies. Thomas’s views fit in with the increasing emphasis on monarchial government in the medieval period of the monarchy and the use of organic metaphors to make the point. The ruler operates as the soul in relation to the body and reason in relation to the lower members.25 Thomas’s student, Aegidius Romanus, maintains that a monarchial rule is best to guarantee the inner connection of the community. Strikingly, Thomas uses the notion of friendship to express the importance of communication and unity between the ruler and society. (It should be noted: friendship plays an essential role in his discussion of the theological virtue of charity and its social implications.) Nevertheless, at the same time, Thomas’s views reflect some of the discord in Italy at the time.26 The danger of tyranny comes where the political rule is exercised by many. Thomas is aware that Aristotle spoke of diverse governmental arrangements that included monarchial, aristocratic, and democratic. However, he appeals not to Aristotle’s politics but to the example of Moses and the seventy-two elders of the Israelite tribes. What is clear is that the virtue ethic that was in development in the “Mirror of the Prince” took place in a growing context of a monarchical and hierarchical understanding of rulership. Thomas’s emphasis is hierarchy, organic and social unity. Ideas of political diversity and pluralism are not only not highlighted, but are viewed with suspicion in the light of the situation in Italy.27 The two most well-known examples are probably those written toward the waning of this genre. Desiderius Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince28 and Nicolo Machiavelli’s The Prince were written within three years of one another (1516 and 1513), though Machiavelli’s work was not published until 1532.29 Machiavelli’s work could in many respects be seen as a contrast image to the tradition of the genre. His exemplification of Cesare Borgia’s tactics that make him willing to sacrifice republican ideals for the sake of political powers

86

Chapter Four

can be seen as a cynical treatise instructing a ruler to sustain the power that he has taken over. However, it should be noted that contrasting interpretations of Machiavelli’s The Prince exist.30 They take his discourses into account in order to show his view as much less cynical than popularly understood. There is a noticeable difference between our situation and the medieval period, where the literary genre of the education of the princes was prevalent. If we turn to the present, and inquire regarding the various U.S. presidencies, we would not ask who was more virtuous (Carter, Reagan, Bush senior, Clinton, Bush junior, or Obama). Instead we would (or should) ask how one would evaluate them regarding justice in their diverse social programs or the policies regarding health, taxation, unemployment, retraining, and immigration. This complexity goes even beyond politics. A person might be an astute business person, perhaps involved with hedge funds or an investment group that makes its profit by buying up companies, cutting them into smaller companies, and selling them off. The results might create wealth for the investment group, but a loss of employment for workers. That person might, in his personal life, be otherwise admirable. A problem emerges because in the increased bureaucratization of life, there is an increased differentiation and diverse functionalization.31 The practice of virtue might take place in one’s personal area of life, but not in more societal functions of life. The importance of locating justice within social structure is crucial and determinative in a differentiated society and culture. Justice and the Basic Structure of Society John Rawls’s Justice as Fairness: A Restatement32 provides a good example because it revises his classic Theory of Justice.33 It takes into account some of the revisions explained in Political Liberalism,34 but not the most controversial elements of The Laws of Peoples.35 Rawls is very clear that he understands “justice as fairness” as political, and the basic structure of society is its primary subject. In his view, it is important to know how social institutions work and the nature of the principles required to regulate them over time so that background justice is maintained from one generation to the next.36 His theory is insistent that the basic structure is controlled over time; it cannot ensure that earlier just distributions of any kind of asset can continue and that free and fair transactions between individuals and associations can endure so that justice can still provide fair equality of opportunity, and so on. The location of justice in the subject is the interpretative framework of his two principles of justice and their adoption and application through a fourstage process. The first is that “each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible



Chapter Four 87

with the same scheme of liberties for all.” This first principle of justice has priority; it belongs to the stage of the constitutional convention that spells out the constitutional essentials. The second principle deals with social and economic inequalities. Rawls subdivides it into two conditions: one is the fair equality of opportunity that stipulates that social and economic inequalities have to satisfy the principle that all offices and positions are open to all. All should have fair equality of opportunity. The other, called the difference principle, requires that all inequalities are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society. (His difference principle can be contrasted with a distributive principle based on average utility, or with a social minimum, or to a maximum rule for decision making.37) Rawls is very clear that the two principles should not be understood as if only the first, dealing with liberties, expresses political values, whereas the second principle does not. On the contrary, the basic structure of society has two poles. The first principle of the basic structure deals with equal basic liberties in a constitutional regime, the second deals with “the background institutions of social and economic justice in a form most appropriate to citizens seen as free and equal.”38 Nevertheless, and crucial for understanding Rawls, the division takes place in the context of four stages. The original position is considered the first stage; the basic liberties are assured in the next stage, that of the constitutional guarantee of these rights. The second principle of justice belongs to the legislative stage (third stage): it enacts laws within the framework of the constitution that work out the principles of justice within the societal and economic structures. The fourth stage entails the application of these laws through policies and administrators as well as the interpretation of the laws by judges. Since the second principle applies to the legislative stage and its application, Rawls comes to a sober conclusion: Whether the aims of the second principle are realized is far more difficult to ascertain. To some degree these matters are always open to reasonable differences of opinion; they depend on inference and judgment in assessing complex social and economic information. Also, we can expect more agreement on constitutional essentials than on issues of distributive justice in the narrower sense.39

It is at this point that the focus on the subject of justice breaks down. Decisions are open to reasonable differences of opinion and different judgments and inferences in assessing complex social and economic issues. If, as I have argued, an understanding of political justice focused on virtue, which holds up the virtuous prince as the ideal mirror of justice, insufficiently deals with societal and economic structures, then one can see that the locus of justice within the subject of society has as its weakest point the issue of distributive justice and even the question of fair opportunity.

88

Chapter Four

Rawls’s philosophical work argues that a theory of justice should show the way in which institutions should work. In one of his final works, The Laws of Peoples, he argues that it is important to show “that the existence of reasonable pluralism allows for a society of greater political justice and liberty. To argue this cogently would be to reconcile us to our contemporary political and social condition.”40 In addition, when Rawls applies his theory of justice to the international sphere and the diversity of nations in The Laws of Peoples, he argues that the difference principle should not serve as a global distribution principle. It is on this point that a difference between Rawls and his students arises, as the latter have argued that global resources should be ordered toward benefiting the least advantaged people in the world.41 It appears that within Rawls’s conception of justice the difference principle has nowhere near the priority of the first principle of freedom or even that of equal opportunity despite claims to the contrary. His contention that the difference principle should not have a global distribution function has led to the objections of some of his students who have, in the name of justice, advocated the importance of global justice. Whereas Thomas Pogge,42 Allen Buchanan,43 and Charles Bietz44 have been critical of Rawls, Samuel Freeman has defended his view. Different Applications of the Difference Principle: Local and International Since this difference principle is an important element of how justice is understood as located in societal structures, one needs to reflect on the viability of social rights and on the attempts (especially by some of Rawls’s students) to strengthen the significance of the difference principle in the interpretation of economic distributive justice. It should be noted that some object to the viability of social rights and social economic justice within a particular state or nation. As an issue, it is even more contested on the international scene. Despite the inclusion of social rights in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and in the various conventions following, these conventions on social rights remain contested. In regard to the application, even to local conditions in one’s own state or society, two objections are still raised. The first is an institutional critique: economic and social rights must correlate with precisely formulated duties. Onora O’Neil argues that welfare rights, as well as social, economic, and cultural rights, must be institutionalized if they are to be rights.45 A similar critique is the “feasibility critique” (in some ways not unrelated to the institutional critique). It argues that it may not be feasible to achieve many of the economic, social, and welfare rights for everyone.



Chapter Four 89

In response to the criticism, Amartya Sen’s approach to justice takes a different track than Rawls does. Through his analysis of human capability, Sen seeks to give a description of the self and of basic human goods that is more textured than Rawls’s two basic principles of justice. Insofar as human rights entail moral aspirations, calls to action, as well calls to social change, the institutional as well as the feasibility criticisms underscore an important problem. However, they underscore the importance of seeking changes that go beyond merely urging people to have a greater awareness, or to develop certain social attitudes, or certain habits of mind. They also demand legislation that develops institutions and institutional changes necessary for the implementation of the duties required by these obligations. Such legislation promotes that institutions be required to fulfill the requirements of economic and social rights. In the case of the institutional as well as feasibility critique, one has to realize that even though human rights advocates might want human rights to be maximally realized, this goal may not be met, but it does not evaporate. Instead one realizes that such goals can only be gradually and increasingly put into practice over time.46 However, the debate about international justice is much more complex. Cosmopolitans expect distributive justice to encompass all peoples of the world. Some have argued that Rawls’s difference principle should serve as rule for global distribution and resources should benefit the least advantaged. Rawls rejects this thesis. One reason is that a global legal structure is lacking in which such appeals would make legal sense and which would take into account the voices of specific democratic peoples. Another reason is that one should not understand the difference principle primarily as a means of distribution, but rather as a structuring of property and economic institutions to encourage opportunity and ownership.47 Obviously, the debates about Rawls’s conception of justice on an international level point to important difficulties. AN EXPANDED UNDERSTANDING OF TRANSCENDENCE AND CHARITY Given the two contrasting approaches to justice, we return to our initial problem: what are the challenges of justice for the theological virtues? My analysis so far suggests that an approach to justice that focuses on justice as a virtue of the individual, especially the ruler or prince, is less helpful in dealing with the problem of justice within the structure of modern societies. At the same time, as our exposition of Rawls has shown, it is clear that the difference principle, though helpful, is less firmly anchored in theory and practice on a global level and in many cases also on a national level. The disparities

90

Chapter Four

of inequality between the rich and poor in individual nations and societies, as well as between nations and different areas of the globe, remains a challenge. What is needed is an expanded vision of transcendence that includes a vision of God as justice and a vision of God’s creation in which human persons experience transcendence intersubjectively within a material and social world. Deus est Justitia (God Is Justice) In his advocacy of a new political theology, Johann Baptist Metz has underscored an essential element of the Christian belief in God.48 He maintains that “for the Christian faith, justice is not only a political or only a social-ethical subject, but a strictly theological one.”49 Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical (on the three theological virtues) emphasized God is love (Deus caritas est). While this is obviously true, there is another biblical name for God that the Christian message proclaims: God is Justice (Deus justitia est). Justice belongs to the Christian confession about God and his Christ. Metz writes, “Justice as God’s name may seem unimportant for discourse about the Platonic God of Ideas, but it is indispensable for the God of History which the Bible witnesses.”50 Faith in the Christian God is not a faith in the One beyond history and change. Instead, a faith in God is rooted in the discourse of God in the Scriptures that takes into account history. The history of salvation at the basis of Christian belief is a belief not only in experiences of suffering and death but also in the experience of hope and overcoming of injustices. Dominant in the biblical history is the suffering of the innocent victim, unjust suffering, and the death of the wise and just person and just prophet. However, the Christian message of salvation is a message of redemption and justice. The implication of this interpretation is that the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love are not directed to a God about whom the most one can say in introducing God’s attributes is that we do not know who or what this God is, but only what God is not. Instead, the Christian faith in God is the belief in the Creator God and the hope that this God is a God who saves the innocent and unjustly treated. The Creator God is a God who, as a Redeeming God, creates Justice. The exercise of charity and justice brings out in practice what discipleship in this God means. Transcendence of God as a Cosmic and Societal Self-Transcendence of Justice Karl Rahner’s theological view of Christian faith interprets the understanding of the human person in relation to God as an expression of God’s creation understood as self-communication. The implications of such a theological



Chapter Four 91

view is that the human person is “a bodily, material and social being who can always only have a relationship to God in the material constitution of his existence. By the very fact that a human person is only the theo-logical and theo-nomous being only by being the cosmic being.”51 Karl Rahner’s Spirit in the World, his doctoral dissertation, offers a philosophical-theological interpretation of Thomas Aquinas, partially influenced by and partially in response to Kant and Heidegger, and at the same time brings to the fore the kernel of Rahner’s theology that lasts throughout his writings.52 The important point of Rahner’s theology is that humans, as spiritual-material beings, are embedded within a history of salvation and an evolving cosmos. Human knowledge takes place within the world. The experience of transcendence, as well as attainment of self-transcendence, needs to be interpreted within an intersubjective, historical, social, and cosmic perspective. God’s creation is God’s self-communication and humans strive within this creation to achieve the redemptive justice of a God who is both creative and redemptive. This metaphysical and theological vision has ethical implications for Rahner. In his view, Christian commitments are “never concerned with a merely interior ethics of intentions,” but are constituted and made by “the one, bodily and hence also socially-bound man.”53 His essay, “Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” develops the intrinsic relation between the love of the neighbor and the love of God.54 Rahner gives both a biblical and a philosophical-theological foundation. The biblical foundation is exemplified by the “Parable of the Last Judgment” in Matthew 25:31–46. Actions done to help the hungry, thirsty, foreign strangers, those who lack clothing, or the sick and imprisoned, are equated with actions toward Jesus himself. These actions are decisive for salvation. This parable represents more than a rhetorical and metaphorical exaggeration but underscores a central and longstanding ethical tradition within Christianity from its very beginning. However, Rahner’s essay goes beyond a mere exegesis insofar as he develops the philosophical and theological basis that places the love of God within a metaphysical, social, and cosmic perspective. Rahner asks whether the love of neighbor, understood as caritas, is only one of many secondary moral acts that follow from the love of God as a command or imperative (actus imperatus), or if it is more directly linked. Rahner asks: “Or is there a more radical unity between God, the love of God, and of neighbor (taken as caritas) in such a way that the love of God itself is always also already love of neighbor in which our neighbor is really loved himself ? We can now answer: the categorized explicit love of neighbor is the primary act of God.”55 Rahner’s philosophical and theological view can be compared with another student of Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas.56 The aim of Levinas’s

92

Chapter Four

philosophy was to make ethics instead of ontology a first philosophy. After Jacques Derrida had criticized Totality and Infinity for having a metaphysics, Levinas wrote Otherwise than Being in order to underscore the primacy of ethics. Levinas’s emphasis on this primacy and the encounter of the Face of the other has, however, led some to question whether Levinas’s approach is too individualistic and does not sufficiently develop a societal conception of justice. Levinas in part concedes this critique when he acknowledges that it is the introduction of the third person where justice comes into question. It is clear that Metz’s theological emphasis on God as justice and Rahner’s location of the experience of transcendence and the love of God within an intersubjective, salvation-historical, and cosmic perspective presents a more comprehensive social and political theological perspective. The implication I want to draw from Metz and Rahner is that there are theological reasons for understanding God as justice. The experience of transcendence has to be understood in the framework of a Christian understanding of the history of salvation, which sees salvation linked within a cosmic, material, and societal world. If the theological virtues are understood correctly within this framework, they should express the transcending experience and hope in God as justice that comes to the fore in relation to others and to our social and material cosmos in which we are embedded. When justice is classified as a cardinal virtue, dealing with obligations of subordinates to those in authority, or to debts owed to others, and when only charity is classified as a theological virtue and a gift of the Spirit, then the religious and transcendent dimensions of justice are overlooked. Preferential Option for the Poor and Structural Sin The notion of the “preferential option for poor” has come to prominence in Latin American liberation theology.57 The conference of Latin American bishops at Puebla, which reaffirmed the basic direction of the earlier conference of bishops at Medellín, entitled a chapter of the final document “A Preferential Option for the Poor.”58 The preferential option for the poor has undergone considerable development and acceptance within Roman Catholic theology and its social teachings.59 However, it has also been criticized. Does the preferential option represent a subjective perspective rather than a more objective ethical view? Does it too closely mirror, despite all the differences, a Marxist class division of society? Should there be instead a preferential option for all? Does it underemphasize the personal role of sin? It is perhaps with some of these criticisms in mind that Pope John Paul II took up the idea, but with the modified phrase “preferential love of the poor”—a phrase



Chapter Four 93

appearing in subsequent papal documents. Whether or not this is, in fact, the intent of the different formulation can be debated. Rather than focus on the difference of terminology, I want to underscore two very different and distinct elements that make the appeal to a “preferential option” important. One is epistemological; the other is structural and practical. The advantage of liberation theology is that it has brought these two principles together. It has taken up the classic emphasis on charity as an epistemological principle and brought it together with the societal and structural elements entailed in a situation that can be described as sinful. The epistemological point concerns the problem of knowledge and the generation of knowledge in the search for truth and justice. Pascal in Pensées writes, “Truth is obscure in these times, and falsehood so established that unless we love the truth, we cannot know.”60 Pascal’s affirmation has been contested by Jean-Luc Marion, with reference to Augustine and von Balthasar, that the truth has a radiance and glory that overwhelms us. It is the truth that requires of us love and we love by conforming ourselves to its purity and radiance.61 Yet, influential on much of twentieth-century Catholic theology and the background to “la nouvelle theology” has been Pierre Rouselot’s The Eyes of Faith in which the interconnection between knowledge and love has come to be seen as important.62 However, one can find an analogous basis for it not only in classical notions about the role of faith and charity in knowledge but also in the hermeneutical insight into how one’s life-relation to what is to be understood has a significant impact on one’s understanding.63 This life-relation is part of a hermeneutical circle (perhaps, hermeneutical spiral is more accurate), explicated so well by Heidegger, Bultmann, and Gadamer. It underscores the interrelation between one’s life-relation to a subject matter and one’s understanding of it. The importance of the preferential option for the poor exists because so many of the injustices to the poor and their conditions are invisible to many others. Today, in the United States, as I prepare the final version of this chapter, the issue of the invisibility of racism has reemerged. One segment of the population often experiences and interprets racism so differently from other groups. It becomes important for white people, the majority group in the United States, to become aware of the devastating consequences of their racism against native Americans, blacks, Hispanic immigrants, and others. This should lead them to focus on present practices and patterns that continue the racism against others in society. The institutional and practical element of the preferential option for the poor has been exemplified in the work of Paul Farmer, a professor of medi-

94

Chapter Four

cal anthropology at Harvard and founding director of Partners In Health.64 He notes both the epistemological and the structural, when he observes that “[t] oday, the world’s poor are the chief victims of structural violence—violence that has thus far defied the analysis of many who seek to understand the nature and distribution of extreme suffering. Why might this be so? One answer is that the poor are not only more likely to suffer; they are also less liable to have their suffering noticed.”65 What Farmer’s statement underscores is that the poor and their suffering are often invisible. One cannot just appeal to friendship and common humanity as that which moves us to come to the aid of the person or groups suffering. As is well known, if there is a tsunami or an earthquake that the international media focuses on, then there is attention to those suffering and donations and aid is given. However, once the event is off the evening news, then it is almost as if it does not exist. Moreover, there is enormous suffering that does not even come to the sight of others and hence is almost totally neglected. In addition to the invisibility of the poor, one has to take into account the structural nature of sin. Too often social sin is seen primarily as an effect of sin which is primarily an act of an individual who freely rejects the good. Instead, as Anselm Min has so correctly emphasized: “Structural sin and personal sin, then, are not two coequal realities; rather structural sin functions as the totalizing context and condition within which personal sin occurs.”66 Paul Farmer expresses the importance that liberation theology has had for his work in health care, especially in his work in Partners In Health and the sister organizations in Haiti and Peru. Farmer is very careful to argue that recourse to the option for the poor and structural causes of illness and disease does not come up with a particular economic strategy, a particular social system, or a preference for one form of development. Instead, Farmer suggests that medicine has to learn much from the struggles of the poor, oppressed, and those in suffering. He cites three main trends: charity, development, and social justice. “Each of these,” he writes, “might have much to recommend it, but it is my belief that the first two approaches are deeply flawed.”67 He quotes from Janet Poppendieck’s study on food distribution. She writes: The resurgence of charity is at once a symptom and a cause of our society’s failure to face up to and deal with the erosion of equality. It is a symptom in that it stems, in part at least, from an abandonment of our hopes for the elimination of poverty. [. . .] It is symptomatic of a pervasive despair about actually solving problems that has turned us toward ways of managing them: damage control, rather than prevention? More significantly, and more controversially, the proliferation of charity contributes to our society’s failure to grapple in meaningful ways with poverty.68



Chapter Four 95

It is understandable that charity is looked at as the obstacle in a world faced with the structural problems of poverty, inadequate nutrition, and the ravages of diseases, which could have been prevented if the focus were on structural change. If justice for the poor requires that one look at the structural causes of poverty, the systemic causes of illness, and the impact that malnutrition has on health, it does not necessarily also entail that one view charity negatively. One can argue for a positive role for charity even when justice is given its proper priority in dealing with some societal issues. The criticism of charity as harmful raises the issue of the relationship between justice and charity. In his classic analysis, Gene Outka has helpfully classified and divided the response into three different approaches: love and justice can be (1) opposed, (2) distinguished, or (3) identified.69 I would like to suggest one model that combines two and three. Justice and love mutually perfect one another. Justice perfects charity and its benefits upon a society insofar as it goes beyond the mere sympathy that one might feel for someone’s pain. It considers the social structures and systemic causes of that suffering and pain. Yet charity also perfects justice insofar as charity, expressed in the notion of the preferential option for the poor, alerts us to the causes of poverty and impoverishment. Moreover, there are elements of suffering and pain that only charity can reach. Even someone with adequate healthcare may face the loneliness of sickness and be facing alone the isolation of dying. In these cases, charity has a significant role to play.70 In addition to this role of charity, Nicholas Wolterstorff has brought into consideration the important work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.71 Though some may have criticized aspects of the working-out of the committee in different communities, nevertheless one can compare it favorably to the killings that took place in Iraq. This comparison highlights an important contribution of the work of reconciliation. One could make the case that a reconciliation leading to peace helps create justice, especially if one does not consider justice simply remunerative or punitive. TOWARD AN EXPANSIVE UNDERSTANDING OF JUSTICE However, there is still an important role for justice that goes beyond love and mercy and it is integral to an adequate understanding of justice. It is this expansive view of justice that provides an understanding of justice that correlates with the theological proposal of Johann Baptist Metz and Karl Rahner. Justice has the role of confronting the demonic forces of destruction in human history and society. The twentieth century witnessed the atrocities before

96

Chapter Four

and during the World Wars on a global scale: The Great Depression earlier in the century, the genocide of the Armenians and Holocaust of the Jews, as well as the suffering of many through the destruction of cities, often destroyed through firebombing aimed at civilians to undermine support for their government. To understand justice means to understand the forces of destruction within societies that the advocacy of justice seeks to prevent and hinder.72 The crimes against humanity, the violations of human dignity, are such that they can be viewed as the demonic in human life. The evil perpetuated against humans appears to be so great that one has difficulty in understanding how people could perpetuate them. It is in response to such evils that humanity, throughout the world, experienced in World War II that the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights begins with the affirmation of human rights against such injustices. Later in the document and in the social conventions does it move to social welfare issues. Justice has a disclosive, distinguishing function: it distinguishes between what results from chance, accidental misfortune, or bad luck and what results from social processes and societal institutions for which persons and collectivities are responsible.73 When we attribute disadvantage, suffering, and harm to bad luck or accidental misfortune, then we do not feel obligated to remedy the social, cultural, and economic causes that led to the suffering. Instead, as Judith Shklar has noted, we view it as “passively unjust.” For example, in a society that culturally and religiously relegates women to a secondary place and deems them not even worthy of education, then parents who give birth to a female child may bemoan that they have had the misfortune to have a female as a child. They accept it as fate, when they should develop the wisdom and courage to struggle for a society in which fair and equal opportunities exist for women. Some misfortunes, such as drought, diseases, famines, and flooding from rain, are natural disasters. However, they are often made worse by intentional failures to dedicate the necessary economic and social resources that could dampen the effects and even prevent some of the disasters and diseases. Insofar as the virtues enable us to distinguish between what might be a misfortune and what is the result of a failure to change cultural values and societal preparedness, it provides a fundamental aspect that underlies all other virtues in how we approach life and society. Justice as a prospective responsibility. Iris Young has, in her work on political ethics, sought to counter the traditional understanding of justice as retrospective, with a view that is prospective.74 She argues against the conceptions of justice in Onora O’Neill75 and Thomas Pogge,76 claiming that they too often argued for global responsibility to the poor through an understanding



Chapter Four 97

of responsibility based upon liability and culpability. The liability, obligation, or fault provides the reason for responsibility.77 She objects that such an understanding of responsibility is backward-looking and fixes responsibility in terms of a connection through existing obligation or liability. Instead, she proposes that we need a forward-looking political responsibility. The transition away from a retrospective to a prospective understanding of responsibility is important for dealing with structural injustice. Structural injustice is often not the result of an individual’s responsibility. As Iris Young observes, unjust “structures are produced and reproduced by large numbers of people acting according to normally accepted rules and practice, and it is in the nature of such structural processes that their potentially harmful effects cannot be traced directly to any particular contributors to the process.”78 Instead, what is required is a shared resposibility that is forward-looking and can be exercised by joining with others in collective action to change institutions and processes, so as to create and enable processes that will produce less unjust outcomes. Young argues that such a process is also public. “People who understand that they share responsibility in relation to injustice and justice call on one another to answer before a public. The political process consists in the constitution of a public in which members raise problems and issues and demand of one another actions to address them.”79 In this view, Young sought to move beyond modern liberalism and communitarianism. Individuals do not exist as atomistic autonomous persons, nor are they completely absorbed in a unified or homogenized nation. An expansive understanding of justice should spell out the diverse elements of justice. Justice involves more than paying what is properly owed or due. Instead, as John Rawls has shown, justice has the role and purpose of promoting a “well-ordered society.”80 Insofar as a society seeks to develop public procedures, institutions, and practices that enable reciprocity and respect, these procedures should entail equal respect and reciprocity for those with diverse conceptions of the good, not just religious, but also moral and ethical. These entail reciprocity and equal respect of those with different conceptions of the good. It is not a specific virtue of a particular conception but a reciprocity toward others. Their equality is acknowledged insofar as equal respect is given to their conceptions of the good. However, when one goes beyond the nation-state and expands charity and justice on a global or international level, one has to go even further beyond traditional conceptions of the common good because one is dealing with a diversity of different cultures, traditions, ethics, values, and religions.

98

Chapter Four

CONCLUSION In conclusion, I have asked whether justice presents challenges to our understanding of the theological virtues themselves and their distinction from the cardinal moral virtues. Ultimately, I want to argue that an expanded understanding of justice and charity can lead to an understanding of God as justice and the virtue of justice as a theological virtue. As such it is combined and expands charity just as charity expands justice. I have moved to this conclusion by discussing in the first two sections, the traditional understanding of the division of the virtues, the advocacy of a virtue ethic, the classic attempt to deal with justice within the genre of the “Mirror of the Princes,” and Rawls’s understanding of justice as located in the subject of society. In the third and fourth sections, I proposed an expanded understanding of transcendence and charity as well as of justice. There I pointed to Metz’s emphasis that God is justice and to Rahner’s philosophical-theological interpretation of how human persons are open to transcendence as embodied within God’s material creation. Their knowledge and activity takes place within the material world and society. They know and experience transcendence within an intersubjective, social, and cosmic reality. I take up the critique of charity and point to how liberation theology, by combining an epistemological as well as a structural understanding of the preferential option for the poor, attempts to meet these criticisms. Finally, I link that approach with an expanded understanding of justice, not as retrospective (based on fault, or liability), but rather as prospective responsibility that can only be shared and implemented in a way that collectively affects societal structures. Such a prospective responsibility entails a virtue that works to overcome the structural injustice and demonic forces of destruction that we face.

Love and Justice in Non-Dualistic Perspective Joseph Prabhu

Virtues have two interrelated aspects, personal and social. Seen personally, they represent desirable traits of character that a person should have, like courage or fortitude. And seen socially, they express standards of excellence and social attitudes typical of a particular time and place. These two aspects are clearly interconnected. It is because early capitalist society emphasizes the importance of savings and investment in a burgeoning commercial world that Benjamin Franklin, one of the representatives of that world, can valorize thrift and frugality. Thrift is seen as a virtue in early capitalist society but is scorned by Aristotle in fourth-century BCE Greek society as unworthy of a Greek gentleman, who should rather be grand and generous in manner and in style. Aristotle in turn praises magnificence and wit as exemplifying high-spiritedness in social life, qualities and standards which Puritan society, with its emphasis on sobriety and watchful restraint on emotional expression, regards with deep suspicion. Jesus emphasizes the virtues of meekness and poverty of spirit with an eschatological awareness of the transience of earthly existence and the recognition of eternal destinies. But these virtues are largely bypassed in a commercial society like our own, where self-advertising and self-promotion are strongly encouraged and where having a “brand” is seen as an accomplishment. Not only does the list of virtues change over time and space, but particular virtues acquire different emphases and shades of meaning. The virtue of love, for example, has different connotations in the Aristotelian polis, in romantic movements like those involving the Troubadours, and in general Christian understanding. In the polis, love connotes philia, or deep friendship; among the Troubadours, love becomes courtly love shading toward eros or romantic love; and in the Christian understanding, love means agape or self-sacrificial love. There clearly is a stark difference between these different notions of 99

100

Chapter Four

love. Eros or romantic love pushes toward self-fulfillment, whereas agape connotes self-denial. These semantic changes are significant and obviously expressive of the social context of the time. Both the historical period and context-situatedness of the virtues and the semantic shifts across cultures and societies are important points to consider in a conference entitled “Faith, Hope, and Love Today,” and specifically in response to the fine chapter by Francis Fiorenza entitled “Faith, Hope, and Love and the Challenges of Justice.” In light of what I have said so far, we should fully expect that the meaning and ethical thrust of faith, hope, and love are different today than they were in the past. In accordance with this line of thought, the main thesis that Fiorenza wants to proffer and defend is that we need a more comprehensive vision of justice than that provided by the traditional Christian account of the virtues. In that account justice is regarded as one of the cardinal or moral virtues which are distinct from the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, that, in the traditional understanding, are connected more directly with God and with God’s grace than the moral virtues. Fiorenza questions this hierarchy while arguing that justice should also be regarded as a theological virtue. At the heart of this proposal lies a significant shift of theological vision: while in the traditional perspective God is most frequently associated with love, Fiorenza argues that God in the modern perspective should equally be associated with justice and righteousness, and furthermore a particular idea of justice of combating social injustice and oppression as spelled out in the political theology of Johannes Metz and in the liberation theologies that have come out of Latin America recently. This proposal, moreover, is not just additive in nature to the extent that adding justice to the list of theological virtues also changes the meaning and significance of these virtues. Fiorenza’s proposal is thus both additive and revisionary, although in this particular chapter he confines his focus to the changed meanings of love and justice when considered in combination. Fiorenza avers that justice and love stand in a complementary relationship to each other. In practice and in social life, love without justice tends to be merely pious or sentimental, whereas justice without love can be harsh and lacking in compassion. But this complementarity should not conceal the tension that exists between justice and love, which can also pull in opposite directions. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa serves as a good example of this tension. If the demands of truth and retributive justice were strictly followed, there would likely have been still more tension and hostility in South Africa, as the pain of old and still present wounds took its toll. But conversely, if there had been too easy and forgetful a reconciliation, the wrong of injustice to those who had been harmed and dispossessed would have created its own havoc. The balancing of the seemingly opposed



Chapter Four 101

demands of love and justice gave a deeper meaning and content to both virtues. Fiorenza draws attention to both the complementarity of and the tension between love and justice. I take one important strand of Fiorenza’s argument to be the hermeneutic one, where the life world and horizon of the present mediate those of the past. In this hermeneutic dialogue of past and present, the horizon of the present is both relativized and deepened. Hans-Georg Gadamer coined the term “Horizontsverschmelzung,” the meeting and “fusion” of horizons. When this methodology is applied to the tradition of the virtues, one gets to observe the changing meanings, roles, and functions of virtue-concepts. Thus, to expand on an earlier example, thrift is seen as an important virtue by Benjamin Franklin in the context of early capitalist society, where the investment of savings leads to material prosperity, whereas thrift is scorned by Aristotle as unworthy of a Greek gentleman in the fourth century BCE, because his basic needs of food, shelter, and sustenance are met by slaves so as to free him from material need and allow him to pursue the “higher” goods of social life. Likewise, Fiorenza gives us an interesting and illuminating history of the changing role and function of the theological and cardinal virtues in the formulations of Thomas Aquinas (hereafter Thomas), the education of the prince during the early and later medieval period in Europe, and finally in the modern era. In a brief response, it is impossible to comment on the many aspects of Fiorenza’s rich proposal. Therefore, I shall confine my reflections to the contrast between the traditional Christian account of the virtues as expounded in Thomas and the modern post-Enlightenment one, as a way of making some general points about the tradition of virtue concepts as a whole, but also of supporting Fiorenza’s main proposal and drawing out some of its implications. I wish to make three main observations which are interconnected: (1) theological; (2) moral-philosophical; (3) epistemological. THEOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS The rationale for the hierarchical ordering of the virtues in the traditional account into theological and cardinal virtues is that the former are supernaturally infused whereas the latter are merely natural or moral virtues that prepare the ground for such infusion. Implicit in such an account is a firm hierarchy of the supernatural and the natural. Along with this comes a very individualistic definition of justice as the natural virtue that guides the human will to give God and others what is their due. What is due to God is our full love and devotion, and what is due to our neighbor is the recognition of

102

Chapter Four

his or her rights as a human being seen in light of the common good. The supernatural infusion of the Holy Spirit helps us in the exercise of the virtue of justice, just as the exercise of justice accords our neighbor his or her rights as a creature of God. I have said before that virtues can be seen as standards of excellence and as such they mirror the theological worldview that they both reflect and actualize. Fiorenza endorses the liberation theological perspective that systematizes the classic text of Matthew 25:31–46: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” In the liberationist account of modernity, which Fiorenza and I both favor, justice is not seen primarily as a virtue, far less as an individualistic one, but rather as a matter of social structure—of institutions, policies, political and legal instruments, and the practices they enable and make possible. Fiorenza says, “What is needed is an expanded vision of transcendence that includes a vision of God as justice and a vision of God’s creation in which human persons experience transcendence intersubjectively within a material and social world.” With this shift of definition and focus comes a theological modification which I might define as broadly incarnational. In this incarnational picture the work of justice is the work of God carried out through human beings. That is one implication of making justice as central to God’s nature as love. Humans are now seen as God’s coworkers in building and sustaining the kingdom of God, “on earth as it is in heaven.” Natural and supernatural orders of existence reflect each other in a non-dualistic manner. Instead of the dualistic and hierarchical of the supernatural and the natural, I am proposing a non-dualistic framework. I’m not sure if Fiorenza would endorse this proposal of mine. At any rate, I see it at least as compatible with the “expanded vision” he recommends. The crucial point in the non-dualistic model that I am proferring is the difference between distinction and separation. The supernatural and the natural, heaven and earth, are indeed distinct and not the same conceptually, but neither are they separate or ontically different as in a strict dualism. Christianity as an incarnational religion stresses the idea that the infinite becomes finite so that the finite can become infinite. The distinction between the infinite and the finite, the supernatural and the natural, is maintained, but their dualistic separation is annulled. The non-dualism of the Divine and the Human, of heaven and earth, carries radical implications. The work of justice, and indeed of all work that contributes to the common good, is no longer seen as merely natural or moral, but rather divine work carried out through human agency. We humans are invited to be co-creators with the Divine in the ongoing construction of reality, in the continuation of



Chapter Four 103

the Incarnation inaugurated by Jesus but now continuing on in the redemption of the world through the work of both justice and love. This theological shift reinforces the structural rather than the individualistic understanding of justice that Fiorenza, following the liberation theologians, proposes. It is in some sense a category mistake to see justice just as a virtue reflecting an individual disposition to grant God and our neighbor their due—or if not a mistake, at the very least an inadequate characterization. Justice in this perspective is far more than that, and indeed is quite differently seen. In saying that it is part of the basic structure of society in its institutions, social policies, and political and legal instruments, justice is conceptualized now structurally and institutionally rather than as an individual virtue. It is not in this perspective just a virtue, as traditionally understood, nor merely individual. PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS Kant’s 1797 treatise Die Metaphysik der Sitten (The Metaphysics of Morals) is a locus classicus for the modern treatment of justice. The work has two distinct parts: The Doctrine of Right, which covers the rights that people can and should have in a republic, and The Doctrine of Virtue, which deals with the virtues people ought to have and the moral education needed to inculcate them. Justice in the modern sense belongs conceptually to the doctrine of right rather than the doctrine of virtue. Following him, Hegel accords an even smaller conceptual space to the notion of virtue in his Philosophy of Right. And succeeding Kant and Hegel, most of the modern discussion of justice has to do with individual and community rights and the systems of law that adjudicate these rights whether expressed in constitutions, social contracts, or positive law. Consequently, modern notions of justice are more appropriately studied in political philosophy and the philosophy of law, rather than in ethics, as seen in two of the most renowned modern treatments of justice, that of John Rawls in his Theory of Justice, and that of Jürgen Habermas in his Between Facts and Norms. Both of them locate the main concerns of justice in social contract and in law rather than in individual traits of character or moral dispositions. This is by way of saying that if it is questions of justice that are our central focus, then the language of virtue is an inadequate language in which to conceptualize them. Even Alasdair MacIntyre, who tries to rehabilitate the tradition of the virtues, does so in the realm of ethics, where he argues that Rawls’s conception of justice does not adequately allow for the notion of desert. But even if we are to concede that there might be some ethical criticisms to be made of Rawls’s and Habermas’s theories of justice, that does not really

104

Chapter Four

affect the central argument of this section, that the proper conceptual home of modern notions of justice as embodied in ideas of rights, liberties, contracts, and distributive mechanisms lies in political and legal contexts rather than in ethical ones. By contrast, the language of the virtues as traditionally understood belongs primarily to the sphere of ethics. Is there some relation between the political, legal, and ethical spheres such that the concept of virtue can be expanded beyond its traditional individualistic scope to political and social contexts? That is precisely the attempt of Hegel in his Philosophy of Right, where he develops the notion of Sittlichkeit in contrast to Kantian Moralität. Sittlichkeit is the arena of shared values and norms in a community that attempts to balance diverse individual and social interests with the demands of unity, so as to avoid the twin dangers of libertarianism on the one hand, and authoritarianism and totalitarianism on the other. It is clear that in a modern pluralistic democracy like ours, political virtues such as a tolerance of diversity, the acknowledgment of free speech, recognition of individual rights, all of which protect individual liberties have to be balanced by virtues like social solidarity and civic-mindedness which recognizes the priority of the common good over special interests, virtues that work to promote unity. Seen thus in their socio-political and not just individualistic capacities, virtues serve to build up shared values that support and sustain the essential norms of a democratic, pluralistic society. For both Kant and Hegel the virtues seen in this socio-political role serve as an essential pedagogical tool. In suggesting that, however, they are also signaling that the virtues play the logically secondary role of upholding the norms and structures of a democratic polis, which provide their telos and significance. EPISTEMOLOGICAL/PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS The first two sections of my response have proposed two main themes: (1) a non-dualistic theological vision that sees the work of justice as continuing the redemptive thrust of the Incarnation; and (2) seeing the virtues as instrumentally essential to the task of supporting the modern notion of justice as embodied in the structure of society. These two themes in conjunction signal not just a moral, but an epistemological shift of perception. The sources of knowledge and education are not just the theology developed in ecclesiastical circles and in universities, but the concrete life and praxis of the faithful. The website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) features the document “Sharing Catholic Social Teaching: Challenges and Directions.” The document begins with the pronouncement that “Catholic social teaching is a central and essential element of our faith. Its roots are in the



Chapter Four 105

Hebrew prophets who announced God’s special love for the poor and called God’s people to a covenant of love and justice.” The same document, however, goes on to lament that “far too many Catholics are not familiar with the basic content of Catholic social teaching. More fundamentally, many Catholics do not adequately understand that the social teaching of the Church is an essential part of the Catholic faith.”81 That assessment is only too accurate when according to the reasonably reliable polls of the Pew Research Center garnered from exit polling data, 52 percent of Catholics overall and 60 percent of white Catholics voted for Trump in the 2016 U.S. elections.82 That is to take just one example of a widespread ignorance of Catholic social teaching among the faithful. It is difficult to believe that anyone who had seriously pondered such teaching could have in good conscience voted for Trump. If the perspectives on love and justice that Fiorenza has outlined are not to be merely the achievement of academic theologians, but made part of the fabric of Christian life in general, and Catholic life in particular, it is clear that we need a pedagogy that makes Catholic social teaching more of a lived reality than it is. This suggests the need for a democratization of the Church in two directions: (1) a greater and more widespread dialogue between theologians on the one hand and clergy and bishops who, at present, provide most of the preaching in churches and the supervision of religious education to catechists and lay teachers; and (2) a far greater sharing in the lives of so-called “ordinary” people and the poor and the oppressed in particular. This proposal of democratization is inspired by the example of the “base communities” in the heyday of liberation theology, where clergy, theologians, and lay folk interacted with one another on relatively equal terms. The general educational philosophy of these communities was provided by the late Paolo Freire, whose classic text The Pedagogy of the Oppressed 83 offered the key maxim underlying that philosophy: it is praxis that should guide theory and not the other way around. And this praxis itself has a characteristic methodology: observe, listen deeply to the cries both of the earth and the poor, analyze, and then act for freedom, dignity, and the liberation of the oppressed. Democratization and praxis: keywords for making the non-dualistic theological vision I proposed earlier a palpable reality. NOTES 1.  For a survey of diverse approaches within Aquinas (coexistence, unification, proportionate) to this relation between acquired and infused, see Angela McKay Knobel, “Two Theories of Christian Virtues,” American Catholic Philosophical

106

Chapter Four

Quarterly 84, no. 3 (2010): 599–618. For a discussion about some of problems of this relation, see Jean Porter, “The Subversion of Virtue: Acquired and Infused Virtues in the ‘Summa theologiae,’” The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 12 (1992): 19–41.  2. Meditations, no. 10, trans. Sr. Penelope (Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1971), 147.  3. Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope and Charity (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1997), 99–101.   4.  See Joseph Ratzinger, Auf Christ Schauen: Einübung in Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe (Freiburg: Herder, 1989).  5. Anthony Falanga, Charity, the Form of the Virtues According to St. Thomas (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1948); Robert Coerver, The Quality of Facility in the Moral Virtues (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1949); and Denis Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997).   6.  Paul van Tongeren, “How Theological Are the Theological Virtues?” in Faith, Hope and Love: Thomas Aquinas on Living by the Theological Virtues, eds. Harm Goris, Lambert Hendriks, and Henk Schoot (Leuven: Peeters, 2015), 59.  7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II-II, 23, 4 ad 1. See also articles 7 and 8 of the same question.   8.  For some of the discussion, in addition to Pieper, see Romanus Cessario, The Virtues, or the Examined Life (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2002), part I on the Theological Virtues, 1–95. See also Thomas P. Rausch, Faith, Hope, and Charity: Benedict XVI on the Theological Virtues (Maweh, NJ: Paulist, 2015) for an exposition of Benedict XVI’s theological virtues.  9. Odo Lottin, “Les première definitions et classifications des vertus au Moyen Âge,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 18 (1929): 369–407. See Mark Jordan, Care of Souls and the Rhetoric of Moral Theology in Bonaventure and Thomas (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1993), 27–46, where he shows the broader context of Thomas’s treatment of the virtues, especially in the Summa theologiae. 10.  For Albert the Great the number and division of the cardinal virtues was problematic, but Thomas divides them according to different passions and the orientation outside of us. See Leo J. Elders, La vie morale selon saint Thomas d’Aquin: une éthique des vertus (Paris: Éditions Parole et Silence, 2011), 123–62. 11.  For a more complete and positive interpretation of Thomas Aquinas, see Jean Porter, “The Virtue of Justice (IIa IIae, qq. 58–122)” and Martin Rhonheimer “Sins Against Justice (IIa, IIae, qq. 59–78)” both in Stephen J. Pope, ed. The Ethics of Aquinas (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), respectively, 272–86 and 287–303. See also the doctoral dissertation by Jean Porter’s student, Thomas J. Bushlack, Politics for a Pilgrim Church: A Thomistic Theory of Civic Virtue (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015). 12.  Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship to the King of Cyprus, trans. Gerald B. Phelan, revised by I. Th. Eschmann (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949). 13.  Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, trans. Richard J. Regan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007). Translation is from Leonine edition. Thomas’s commentary itself is incomplete. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s



Chapter Four 107

Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C. I. Litzinger, with a foreword by Ralph McInerny, (Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1993). 14.  Thomas’s description of mercy as sadness at the misery of another is close to Augustine’s City of God, IX, 5. 15. John O’Callaghan, “Misericordia in Aquinas,” in Faith, Hope and Love: Thomas Aquinas on Living by the Theological Virtues, eds. Harm Goris, Lambert Hendriks, and Henk Schoot (Leuven: Peeters, 2015), 229. See also David Decosimo, Ethics as a Work of Charity: Thomas Aquinas and Pagan Virtue (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2014). 16.  Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) and his Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). 17.  Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse, trans. Ciaran P. Cronin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 150. 18.  Ibid., 150. 19. Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 2007). 20.  Martha C. Nussbuam, “Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?” The Journal of Ethics 3, no. 3 (1999): 163–201. 21.  Ibid., 196. 22.  Pierre Hadot, “Fürstenspiegiel,” in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum Bd 8 (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1970), 555–632. 23. Hans Hubert Anton, ed., Fürstenspiegel des frühen und hohen Mittelaters (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006). 24.  Gerd Brinkhus, Eine bayerische Fürtsenspiegelkomilation des 15. Jahrhunderts. Untersuchungen und Textausgabe (Munich: Artemis, 1978), 8 (my own translation). 25.  Tilman Struve, “Die Begründung monarchischer Herrschaft in der politischen Theorie des Mittelalters,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 23 (1996): 289–323; and Hans Leibeschutz, “Mittelalter und Antike in Staatstheorie und Gesellschaftslehre des heiligen Thomas von Aquino,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 61 (1979): 35–68. 26. See De regno I, 5, Jeremy Catto, “Ideas and Experience in the Political Thought of Thomas Aquinas,” Past and Present 71 (1976): 3–21. 27.  See ibid., 13ff. 28. Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Neil M. Cheshire and Michael J. Heath (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 29.  Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 30.  Compare the contrasting interpretations: Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli (New York: Oxford University, 1998) and his Machiavelli’s God (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2010) with Harvey Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses on Livy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University 1979). 31.  Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. I, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984) and vol. II, Lifeworld and System, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1987).

108

Chapter Four

32.  John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 33. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). This edition includes the revisions made for the 1975 German translation and 1988 French translation. 34.  John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). The 1996 paperback edition contains additional preface and “Reply to Habermas.” 35.  John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 36. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 52 and 54. 37.  Ibid., 42–43. 38.  Ibid., 48. 39.  Ibid., 48. 40. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 12. 41.  See Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) and his review of Rawls, “Rawls’s Law of People,” Ethics 110, no. 4 (July 2000): 669–96. 42.  Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Polity, 2008); and Thomas Pogge and Darrel Moellendorf, Global Responsibilities (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2008). 43.  Allen E. Buchanan and Margaret Moore, States, Nations, and Borders: The Ethics of Making Boundaries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 44.  Charles R. Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights (New York: Oxford University, 2009). 45.  Onora O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). She writes: “But the point of difference is that they must be institutionalized: if they are not there is no right” (132). 46.  Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 372–85. For a comparison between Martha Nussbaum and John Rawls, see the excellent study by Grace Y. Kao, Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011). 47.  Samuel Freeman, Rawls (New York: Routledge, 2007). 48.  His “new political theology” has been used to underscore the difference between his understanding of political theology and the political theology advocated by Carl Schmitt, in which Schmitt appealed to the notion of exception as essential to sovereignty. A sovereign has the “right” to dispense with basic constitutional laws. This argument supplied Hitler with the rationale for dispensing with the basic freedoms entailed in the Weimar Constitution. 49.  Johann Baptist Metz, “Two-Fold Political Theology,” in Political Theology: Contemporary Challenges and Future Directions, eds. Michael Welker, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, and Klaus Tanner (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 2013), 17. 50. Ibid. 51.  Karl Rahner, “The Unity of Spirit and Matter in the Christian Understanding of Faith,” Theological Investigations, vol. 6 (New York: Crossroads, 1961), 161.



Chapter Four 109

52.  Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968). 53.  Rahner, “The Unity of Spirit and Matter in the Christian Understanding of Faith,” Theological Investigations, VI (New York: Crossroads, 1961) 160. 54.  Karl Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” Theological Investigations, vol. 6 (New York: Crossroads, 1961), 231–48. 55.  Ibid., 247. 56.  Levinas went to Freiburg in1929 to study with Husserl but also studied with Heidegger. Rahner returned to Freiburg in 1934 to study philosophy with Heidegger. 57.  Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973), 287–306. 58.  Text of Third General Conference of Latin American Bishops, Evangelization at Present and in the Future of Latin America: Conclusions (London: St. Paul Publications, 1980), 1134–65. A more readily available collection of texts is: John Eagleson and Philip Scharper, Puebla and Beyond: Documentation and Commentary (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979). 59.  Donal Dorr, Option for the Poor and for the Earth: From Leo XIII to Pope Francis, revised and expanded edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983). This excellent treatment of the history of the option for the poor has been expanded twice in 2016 to included Pope Benedict XVI’s writing and in 2016 to Pope Francis. 60.  Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1958), 863. 61.  Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, trans. Christina Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University, 2008), 141. 62.  Pierre Rousselot, The Eyes of Faith, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Fordham University, 1990). Originally published as “Les yeux de la foi,” Recherches de sciences religieuse (1910): 241–59, 444–75. 63.  See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward S. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), section 28. 64.  Paul Farmer and Gustavo Gutiérrez, In the Company of the Poor: Conversations with Dr. Paul Farmer and Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013). Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005). 65. Farmer, Pathologies of Power, 50. 66.  Anselm K. Min, The Dialectic of Salvation: Issues in Theology of Liberation (Albany: State of New York Press, 1989), 108. See also his Solidarity of Others in a Divided World: A Postmodern Theology after Postmodernism (New York: T&T Clark International, 2004). 67. Farmer, Pathologies of Power, 153. 68.  Janet Poppendieck, Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement (New York: Viking, 1998), 5. 69.  Gene Outka, Agape: An Ethical Analysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1972). 70.  Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “Justice and Charity in Social Welfare,” in Who Will Provide? The Changing Role of Religion in American Social Welfare, eds. Mary Jo Bane, Brent Coffin, and Ronald Thiemann (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000),

110

Chapter Four

73–96 and earlier, “The Works of Mercy: Theological Perspective,” in The Works of Mercy, ed. Francis Eigo (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1991), 31–71. 71.  Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice in Love (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2011). 72.  Stuart Hampshire’s chapter “Justice and History” in his book Innocence and Experience (Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press, 1989), 49–78. 73.  Judith Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 74. Iris Marion Young, “Responsibility and Global Labor Justice,” Journal of Political Philosophy 12, no. 4 (December 2004): 365–88. 75.  Onora O’Neill, Faces of Hunger (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985) and Towards Justice and Virtue, 99. Compare with Robert Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 76.  Thomas Pogge, “A Universalistic Approach to International Justice,” in Internationale Gerechtigkeit und Interpretation, ed. Giuseppe Zaccaria (Munich: WT Verlag, 2002), Section 2.1; Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations. 77.  In some respects, her criticism is not unlike what I have objected to in medieval treatments of the virtue of justice in terms of personal obligations of debt to another or an obligation of servitude to a superior to the neglect of societal issues. 78.  Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 100. 79.  Ibid., 122. 80. For a comparison between Young and Rawls, see Hennie Lötter, “Rawls, Young, and the Scope of Justice,” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 46, no. 94 (December 1999): 90–107. 81.  Sharing Catholic Social Teaching: Challenges and Directions (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1998). 82. See “How the Faithful Voted: A Preliminary 2016 Analysis,” Pew Research Center, November 9, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09 /how-the-faithful-voted-a-preliminary-2016-analysis. 83.  Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2000).

WORKS CITED Anton, Hans Hubert, ed. Fürstenspiegel des frühen und hohen Mittelaters. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006. Aquinas, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by C. I. Litzinger. Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1993. ———. On Kingship to the King of Cyprus. Translated by Gerald B. Phelan and revised by I. Th. Eschmann. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949. ———. Summa theologiae. 4 vols. Matriti, Italy: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1955–1958. Beitz, Charles R. The Idea of Human Rights. New York: Oxford University, 2009.



Chapter Four 111

———. Political Theory and International Relations. Revised edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. ———. “Rawls’s Law of People.” Ethics 110, no. 4 (July 2000): 669–96. Bradley, Denis. Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Brinkhus, Gerd. Eine bayerische Fürtsenspiegelkomilation des 15. Jahrhunderts. Untersuchungen und Textausgabe. Munich: Artemis, 1978. Buchanan, Allen E., and Margaret Moore. States, Nations, and Borders: The Ethics of Making Boundaries. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Bushlack, Thomas J. Politics for a Pilgrim Church: A Thomistic Theory of Civic Virtue. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015. Cassario, Romanis. The Virtues, or the Examined Life. Münster: Litt Verlag, 2002. Catto, Jeremy. “Ideas and Experience in the Political Thought of Thomas Aquinas.” Past and Present 71 (1976): 3–21. Coerver, Robert. The Quality of Facility in the Moral Virtues. Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1949. Decosimo, David. Ethics as a Work of Charity: Thomas Aquinas and Pagan Virtue. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2014. Dorr, Donal. Option for the Poor and for the Earth: From Leo XIII to Pope Francis. Revised and expanded edition. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983. Eagleson, John, and Philip Scharper. Puebla and Beyond: Documentation and Commentary. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979. Elders, Leo J. La vie morale second saint Thomas d’Aquin: une éthique des vertus. Paris: Éditions Parole et Silence, 2011. Erasmus, Desiderius. The Education of a Christian Prince. Translated by Neil M. Cheshire and Michael J. Heath. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Evangelization at Present and in the Future of Latin America: Conclusions. Third General Conference of Latin American Bishops. London: St. Paul Publications, 1980. Falanga, Anthony. Charity, the Form of the Virtues According to St. Thomas. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1948. Farmer, Paul. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Farmer, Paul, and Gustavo Gutiérrez. In the Company of the Poor: Conversations with Dr. Paul Farmer and Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013. Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler. “Justice and Charity in Social Welfare.” In Who Will Provide? The Changing Role of Religion in American Social Welfare, edited by Mary Jo Bane, Brent Coffin, and Ronald Thiemann, 73–96. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. ———. “The Works of Mercy: Theological Perspective.” In The Works of Mercy, edited by Francis Eigo, 31–71. Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1991. Freeman, Samuel. Rawls. New York: Routledge, 2007. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2000. Goodin, Robert. Protecting the Vulnerable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

112

Chapter Four

Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973. Habermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. ———. Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse. Translated by Ciaran P. Cronin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. ———. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon, 1984. ———. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. II, Lifeworld and System, translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon, 1987. Hadot, Pierre. “Fürstenspiegiel.” In Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, 555– 632. Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1970. Hampshire, Stuart. Innocence and Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward S. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Jordan, Mark. Care of Souls and the Rhetoric of Moral Theology in Bonaventure and Thomas. St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1993. Kao, Grace Y. Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011. Knobel, Angela McKay. “Two Theories of Christian Virtues.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 84, no. 3 (2010): 599–618. Leibeschutz, Hans. “Mittelalter und Antike in Staatstheorie und Gesellschaftslehre des heiligen Thomas von Aquino.” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 61 (1979): 35–68. Lötter, Hennie. “Rawls, Young, and the Scope of Justice.” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 46, no. 94 (December 1999): 90–107. Lottin, Odo. “Les première definitions and classifications des vertus au Moyen Âge.” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 18 (1929): 369–407. Machiavelli, Nicolo. The Prince. 2nd ed. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. 3rd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. ———. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. Mansfield, Harvey. Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses on Livy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1979. ———. Machiavelli’s Virtue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Visible and the Revealed. Translated by Christina Gschwandtner. New York: Fordham University, 2008. Metz, Johann Baptist. “Two-Fold Political Theology.” In Political Theology: Contemporary Challenges and Future Directions, edited by Michael Welker, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, and Klaus Tanner, 13–20. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 2013. Min, Anselm K. The Dialectic of Salvation: Issues in Theology of Liberation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.



Chapter Four 113

———. Solidarity of Others in a Divided World: A Postmodern Theology after Postmodernism. New York: T&T Clark International, 2004. Nussbuam, Martha C. “Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?” The Journal of Ethics 3, no. 3 (1999): 163–201. O’Callaghan, John. “Misericordia in Aquinas.” In Faith, Hope and Love: Thomas Aquinas on Living by the Theological Virtues, edited by Harm Goris, Lambert Hendriks, and Henk Schoot, 215–32. Leuven: Peeters, 2015. O’Neill, Onora. Faces of Hunger. London: Allen and Unwin, 1985. ———. Towards Justice and Virtue. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Outka, Gene. Agape: An Ethical Analysis. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1972. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Translated by W. F. Trotter. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1958. Pew Research Center. “How the Faithful Voted: A Preliminary 2016 Analysis.” November 9, 2016. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the -faithful-voted-a-preliminary-2016-analysis. Pieper, Josef. Faith, Hope and Charity. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1997. Pogge, Thomas. “A Universalistic Approach to International Justice.” In Internationale Gerechtigkeit und Interpretation, edited by Giuseppe Zaccaria, Section 2.1. Munich: WT Verlag, 2002. ———. World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Polity, 2008. Pogge, Thomas, and Darrel Moellendorf. Global Responsibilities. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2008. Poppendieck, Janet. Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement. New York: Viking, 1998. Porter, Jean. “The Subversion of Virtue: Acquired and Infused Virtues in the ‘Summa theologiae.’” The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 12 (1992): 19–41. ———. “The Virtue of Justice (IIa IIae, qq. 58–122).” In The Ethics of Aquinas, edited by Stephen J. Pope, 272–86. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002. Rahner, Karl. Spirit in the World. 2nd ed. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968. ———. Theological Investigations. Vol. 6. New York: Crossroads, 1961. Rancière, Jacques. On the Shores of Politics. Translated by Liz Heron. New York: Verso, 2007. Ratzinger, Joseph. Auf Christ Schauen: Einübung in Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe. Freiburg: Herder, 1989. Rausch, Thomas P. Faith, Hope, and Charity: Benedict XVI on the Theological Virtues Maweh, NJ: Paulist, 2015. Rawls, John. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. ———. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. ———. A Theory of Justice. Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

114

Chapter Four

Rhonheimer, Martin. “Sins Against Justice (IIa, IIae, qq. 59–78).” In The Ethics of Aquinas, edited by Stephen J. Pope, 287–303. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002. Rousselot, Pierre. The Eyes of Faith. Translated by Joseph Donceel. New York: Fordham University, 1990. Sen, Amartya. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Shklar, Judith. The Faces of Injustice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Struve, Tilman. “Die Begründung monarchischer Herrschaft in der politischen Theorie des Mittelalters.” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 23 (1996): 289–323. Tongeren, Paul van. “How Theological Are the Theological Virtues?” In Faith, Hope and Love: Thomas Aquinas on Living by the Theological Virtues, edited by Harm Goris, Lambert Hendriks, and Henk Schoot, 45–60. Leuven: Peeters, 2015. United States Catholic Conference. Sharing Catholic Social Teaching: Challenges and Directions. Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1998. Viroli, Maurizo. Machiavelli. New York: Oxford University, 1998. ———. Machiavelli’s God. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2010. William of St.-Thierry. Meditations. Translated by Sr. Penelope. Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1971. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Justice in Love. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2011. Young, Iris Marion. “Responsibility and Global Labor Justice.” Journal of Political Philosophy 12, no. 4 (December 2004): 365–88. ———. Responsibility for Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Chapter Five

Faith, Hope and Love: The Challenge of Colorblindness Mary McClintock Fulkerson

Faith, hope, and love offer a compelling “trinitarian” set of commitments that in many ways capture the essence of Christianity. Simply put, the term “faith” invokes commitment in the form of belief and confidence, “hope” refers to trust and openness toward the future, and “love” indicates a posture of compassion and care. To call them “trinitarian” is simply to suggest that at best all three commitments intersect with each other. The expression “faith without love is dead” is a classic warning against their separation. How we love and who we love, given our finitude, are never deep or wide enough, so hope for improvement is crucial to our love and entailed in our faith. Of course these commitments take different form in different circumstances. Ideally, however, they resonate with the features of a Creator God of radical grace displayed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, a God who continues to be present through the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, to take such an incarnational perspective means that crucial to this presence is embodiment. This is not just to say that there must be real Christian people who commit to and live these three intersecting values—which is certainly the case. But faith, hope, and love cannot occur without bodies, and bodies are more than simply conveyers of beliefs. Indeed, the role of bodies is quite complex. To consider how faith, hope and love are enfleshed via bodies, I wish to explore ways that human sin, as subtle or implicit forms of bias, can be operative in Christian communities that devoutly claim trinitarian beliefs, but are blind to the role of bodies in the enactment of these convictions.1 Following attention to the function of bodies, and a prominent example of such blindness, I will focus on a key ritual that would appear to perform these very values of faith, hope and love—communion, or Eucharist. In short, what is

115

116

Chapter Five

going on when the intersection of faith, hope, and love with bodies is taken seriously in a ritual central to Christian faith?2 WHY BODIES MATTER When bodies are taken to be modes of communication they are usually considered to be simply conveying a message that is most typically communicated through practices of inscription, that is, the ways we communicate verbally. Or Christians typically think that bodies function to enact our beliefs. In contrast, a number of scholars show how bodies are much more complicated and distinctive when it comes to communication. Bodily communication also occurs through a kind of corporeal “knowledge” that can be understood as bodily habituation, which is “a knowledge and a remembering in the hands and in the body.”3 Bodily habituations range from bodily skills like playing tennis or dancing, to bodily “proprieties” through which groups are habituated into certain bodily postures that are considered proper for their gender, class, or race. Thus we are usually blind to or unaware of our bodily habituations, both in the sense that we do not typically have to pay attention to them in order to “do them” correctly, but also with regard to our creative “skills” and those that enact biases. For an example of bodily habituations that enact biases, Womanist Teresa Fry Brown tells of being raised “not to act ‘uppity’ in front of whites” or to show her intelligence. This bodily propriety of submissiveness served as a needed “protective device” for African Americans as it consisted of postures aimed at reassuring whites of their belief in black inferiority.4 And bodily submissiveness by persons of color has been a more conscious habituation for them, but it is inseparable from the obliviousness of many whites. As bell hooks puts it, “white people can ‘safely’ imagine that they are invisible to black people since the power they have historically asserted, and even now collectively assert over black people, accorded them the right to control the black gaze.”5 This kind of “ownership of space” is itself a bodily habituation, and noticeably, these bodily “knowledges” are not typically part of our conscious reflections if we are white, especially given our power.6 Such examples of bodily habituations simply suggest that human “knowledge” and activities are often more complex and entail more unconscious forms of awareness than we typically recognize or acknowledge. A community can share convictions and commitments that are truly intended and believed in, but that do not always correlate to its bodily habituations. Now we turn to the setting of worship and more examples of how faith, hope, and love intersect with bodies.



Chapter Five 117

WHY WORSHIP MATTERS While it is impossible to explore all versions of practicing faith, hope, and love, attention to a regular church ritual provides an important avenue toward thinking critically about these commitments. As a central formative practice of faith, liturgy opens to view significant versions of “faith, hope, and love” along with their limitations and constructive potential. Indeed there is much support for the claim that worship is the primary setting for both celebrating Christian life at its best and effecting it. As Timothy Sedgwick puts it, “The privileged place of worship is not simply because worship expresses a vision of the Christian life. Rather, worship is privileged because in worship conversion and reconciliation are both celebrated and effected.” He goes on, “Worship embodies the movement of faith that animates all Christian understanding.”7 Now this is not to insist that all proper forms of faith, hope, and love happen in worship. Nor is it to romanticize or absolutize the form liturgies take. While Sedgwick is one of many scholars who make worship the central, indeed, primary (mediating) subject matter of Christian faith and, by implication, theological reflection, he does acknowledge its limitations. The understanding of faith “is not given in worship itself. All understandings reflect other understandings of the world.”8 Indeed, this crucial insight rightly indicates that other narratives and social realities shape human perceptions of worship. However, as a defining, and (for some) a sacramental liturgy, such practices as Eucharist do supposedly communicate and perform fundamental, indeed, essential meanings of lived Christianity. In contrast to such worship practices as preaching and prayer, Eucharist allows for a move beyond the cognitive ways we understand and perceive reality, and invites attention to bodily and pre-reflective media of human experience and modes of communication. While preaching and prayer can invoke feeling and emotion, they are performed as verbal communications, that is, practices of inscription. Eucharist is, or becomes, a habituation. Recognition of Eucharist as a bodily practice, in many ways that are not always acknowledged, will open up possibilities for recognizing the many subtle, even unintentional ways that such convictions as faith, hope, and love may be enacted, supported, and sometimes undermined in ways beyond the stated intent. Following attention to the normative vision of communion and its potential limitations given its common bodily display with regard to social wounds or forms of brokenness, we will explore other examples that suggest enactment of the Eucharistic vision where faith, hope, and love may be more fully embodied. The wound to be explored with respect to the Eucharistic practice is currently known as “colorblindness.” Intended by most whites to indicate that “I don’t see color, just people,” or that “race doesn’t matter to me,” this osten-

118

Chapter Five

sibly positive approach is problematic because it fails to recognize ongoing residuals of historic racism and the fact that whiteness designates automatic privileges while persons of color still experience prejudice and racialized oppression. Consequently, avoidance is not the most constructive posture. One of the primary elements of colorblindness is its assumption that “[t]he elimination of attention to racial difference is the key to better race relations. Racism, racialization, and racial discrimination are not significant problems for people of color today.”9 Colorblindness as a wound is not widely recognized by whites, who are more likely to perceive it as white acceptance of persons of color, at least in theory, rather than recognizing that colorblindness entails ongoing avoidance of attention to race and its deeply embedded harms. “COMMUNION/EUCHARIST: FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE” Clearly Christian worship is saturated with themes of faith, hope, and love. While it is impossible to draw upon every kind of worship service, the call to love our neighbor as our self is quite biblical and inevitably part of most, if not all, liturgies. The great commandment is to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:30–31). Worship is not a gathering to debate intellectual premises or share scientific evidence. Worship occurs through the openness of faith and hope as basic existential postures of belief and trust in the God we worship. This sense of worship indicates that it is certainly not about exclusionary convictions, or the avoidance entailed in colorblindness, or at least it is not supposed to be. Here is where practices such as communion deserve some attention. While the terms “faith, hope, and love” are clearly invoked in other worship practices, such as preaching, singing of hymns, and reading of scripture, the sacrament of communion is deeply emblematic of the three commitments and their intended intersections. A powerful ritual of faith, hope, and love is found in the sacrament of communion or Eucharist as practiced in mainline Protestant communities. And it is its potentially radical implications that make Eucharist a powerful lens through which to disclose the actual bodily impact of “faith, hope, and love” and the way in which wounds are thereby addressed. Rituals of communion differ across denominations; however, a central theme is always faith, a faith in the Lord God, faith that “Christ has died; Christ has risen” and faith in a Christ who is somehow present in the bread and cup of communion.10 That hope is also crucial to the liturgy is indicated



Chapter Five 119

throughout by appeals to God’s promises that Christ has not only died and is risen, but that “Christ will come again.” Such appeals include that God’s kingdom will come, that God’s will be done “on earth as in heaven,” that God will “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil” (The Lord’s Prayer). In confessions hope is expressed in the plea that God will forgive: “Forgive us, we pray. Free us for joyful obedience, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” And the giving of the bread and cup closes with a prayer that God will “grant that we may go into the world in the strength of your spirit, to give ourselves for others, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.”11 While faith and hope are crucial to the liturgy of communion, the way in which love is not simply invoked, but also portrayed and performed is especially disclosive. What is distinctive about Eucharistic practice is that its purpose is to “gather people around the table” to share bread and wine in remembrance of Jesus’s last supper with his disciples. An obvious but rarely mentioned feature of this ritual is that it originated in a rather ordinary human practice. Of course gathering with Jesus is not really “ordinary,” but gathering around a table, sharing food and drink was (and continues to be) a completely everyday practice for all kinds of people. Central to this liturgy is love, for such a gathering is not intended to reinforce an individualistic faith, but to bring people together to share the grace and love of God through Jesus. Importantly, it is a love to be directed toward all of God’s creation. Thus, the ritualization of gathering to eat around a table is designed to enact a physically communal practice that claims to be for all people. All are welcome. As is frequently invoked, in God’s kingdom “a great multitude . . . from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues” will come to stand before the throne of God, singing praises (Rev. 7:9). And as the service prayer claims, “By your Spirit make us one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world.”12 Again, all are welcome. So the critical question for its practice is who comes to the table? Another essential element to this liturgy is how to interpret or narrate it. While the liturgical texts include biblical readings, prayers, and other discourses, essential to its narration is the remembering of Jesus. “On the night in which he gave himself up for us, he took bread, gave thanks to you, broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: ‘Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’”13 So crucial to its significance is the way in which this memory is understood and performed. The “remembering of Jesus” can, of course, take many forms. Most obviously, it occurs in the reading of biblical passages about Jesus. He was anointed by God’s spirit “to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are

120

Chapter Five

oppressed, and to announce that the time had come” when God would save God’s people. Jesus “healed the sick, fed the hungry, and ate with sinners.”14 Jesus is remembered in the communion ritual itself via the invocation of his life, death, and resurrection. The important question here is not simply whether enough is being remembered about Jesus or whether it is accurate remembering. Instead, what matters is how the recovery of the past—re-membering—is functioning with regard to the contemporary situation and the kind of “faith, hope, and love” it invokes. Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection were and clearly continue to be about addressing wounds. So is Eucharistic re-membering simply reiterating familiar phrases and narratives that make us feel good about honoring Jesus? Or should it function to allow us to see the contemporary situation in a new way, a way that opens it up to redemptive alteration? And if redemptive alteration, is it about redeeming individuals or about the alteration of social realities along with individuals? Is Eucharistic re-membering simply repetition, or is it potentially functioning as what liberation theologian Johann Baptist Metz calls “dangerous memory”?15 Bruce Morrill insists upon the crucial role of recovering the memory of suffering, echoing the crucial insights of Johann Baptist Metz with regard to “dangerous memory”: modern religion “needs to be deconstructed by an awareness of suffering in history and reconstructed through a praxis in solidarity with those who now suffer or are dead.”16 As Shawn Copeland puts it, “Solidarity begins in anamnesis—the intentional remembering of the dead, exploited, despised victims of history. This memory cannot be a pietistic or romantic memoria, for always intentional recovery and engagement of the histories of suffering are fraught with ambiguity and paradox.”17 This is a compelling way to understand re-membering Jesus insofar as it invokes attention to how the God we worship in Jesus Christ is about redemption of social brokenness which is contemporary, even as that brokenness is very much shaped by the ongoing power and residuals of historical injustice and oppression. “COMMUNION AND THE WOUND OF COLORBLINDNESS” Two themes are significant with regard to the relation between Eucharistic liturgy and the way in which faith, hope, and love might connect to community—who comes to the table?—and how is “remembering Jesus” a dangerous memory that requires attention to a particular form of contemporary social brokenness? An example of ongoing wounds or social brokenness worth attention is colorblindness. This wound has long been acknowledged; indeed,



Chapter Five 121

one of the most “sectarian” aspects of the church in general is illustrated by Martin Luther King’s familiar saying that 11:00 on Sunday is “the most segregated hour in this nation.” Racial homogeneity remains a dominant feature of U.S. churches; and the percentage of African Americans and Hispanic Americans who support diversity is definitely higher than that of whites.18 One of the ongoing racial dilemmas characterizing our society is racial division, according to sociologist Michael Emerson and philosopher George Yancy: by “‘racial division’ we mean that socially created racial groups are physically, socially, and psychologically separated from one another.”19 While the huge challenges that their analysis presents cannot be easily taken on and redressed by churches, attention to possibilities is important, particularly racial division. As separation of the “races” rooted in the deeply embedded history of slavery and the Jim Crow era (from Reconstruction through 1965), racial division continues after segregation, even today in the post-Civil Rights era. By and large neighborhoods are not significantly interracial, even though public schools are more racially mixed. And, of course, a place that continues to be racially divided, even if that term does not signal explicit prejudice, is the church. Only 5–8 percent of churches are significantly multiracial, defined as where at least 20 percent of the congregation is comprised of a racial group that differs from the dominant one.20 Such contemporary forms of racism as division are: not overt attempts to oppress those who are different from the majority group. Rather, they are concepts that indicate the insensitivity that majority-group members have toward efforts to eliminate the effects of historical and/or institutional racism. The concept of “racism” that pervades these modern ideas is clearly not the overt hostility of yesteryear. Rather, it is the effects that such ideas may have on the lives of people of color that matter, as these modern versions serve to prevent proactive programs of racial redress.21

In other words, even as predominantly white churches invoke and may preach for racial unity and inclusiveness, they simply assume that persons of color will start coming to their services and will join them and make little if any attempt to attend to racism’s effects. So it turns out that the practices of gathering at the table are not typically enacted by persons from different races, classes, or countries. Even as the welcome call is for “all nations” participants are pretty similar when it comes to race, class, and country. Given the very low percentage of significantly multiracial churches, the bodies many of us whites are habituated into feeling comfortable with and therefore claim to love and welcome are rather familiar in all these ways. While this is not the result of malicious intent or prejudice, in some ways it has more significance than we would assume. Theologian

122

Chapter Five

Edward Farley highlights the crucial importance of the intersubjective or communal face-to-face relationships in our formation. Drawing upon the work of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, Farley highlights the “face-toface,” or the interhuman relationships as creating shared worlds; apart from this we cannot share “a reciprocity of perspectives, negotiation of differences for collaboration on projects, self-interpretations of individual, complex organizations and institutions of society.” And the interhuman occurs through the “incidents, interactions, and enduring patterns of life already organized by language, rituals, and institutions. In other words, we experience the interhuman only in conjunction with the social.”22 While residual racism is evident in the social institutional structures of the nation, this contributes to the formation of interhuman relationships, whether racially homogeneous neighborhoods, work worlds or churches. This colorblindness thus occurs in face-to-face relations that are hard to recognize because they are so deeply habituated, shared with your group, and therefore “normalized.” Indeed, ignoring the intersubjective allows for “racism” to be defined either as an individual malicious act or a social-institutional inheritance that misses the importance of ongoing face-to-face relationships for changing/ addressing this brokenness. Attention to white habituation into colorblindness, then, is a way to recognize that however welcoming they may be, white dominant churches are most likely only comfortable with a few bodies of color. While anecdotal, a newly formed white church that decided to become welcoming of all colors experienced an African preacher one Sunday who brought with him a number of his own black congregants. One of the white families complained to the white minister that the church was getting “too black,” even though persons of color were still the minority numerically.23 Another hypothetical example illustrates the effects of the deeply embedded “cultures” of intersubjectivity, which are never confined to attitudes toward race. Take upper middle-class church folks who have agreed that “we should help the poor and the needy.” This is not rare at all, especially given Jesus’s preference for the poor and the outsider. However, many of these are people who are used to being with people of their own class, and thus have been habituated into particular kinds of behavior and dress. For them being on the street with homeless people might be experienced as not only unusual but in unexpected ways, uncomfortable. As Professor Charles Campbell puts it, “[d]espite genuine concern among Christians for poor and homeless people, and despite countless sermons calling us to advocacy on behalf of the poor we cannot but confess that the church’s engagement with poor people is at best spotty.” Our congregations are clearly dominated by “socially homogeneous enclaves, distinguished by racial and socio-economic aspects as well as by denominational affiliation.”24



Chapter Five 123

Two crucial insights that suggest needed changes are, then, first, attention to developing more communal, face-to-face relations with groups “not like us” in order to habituate ourselves into comfort with the stranger. We must take seriously who comes to the table. Secondly, the expansion of memory so that we open ourselves up to the harms of the past and how they still operate in our larger society. How is dangerous memory connected to faith, hope, and love? “NOVEL PRACTICES OF COMMUNION” Admittedly, examples displaying a full and adequate recovery of social memory have not even begun to be covered here. Let me point out that Shawn Copeland has provided a deeply moving account of this memory in relation to Eucharist, which would be crucial to the creation of what she helpfully calls a “counter-imagination” for our communities.25 In closing, however, I will explore two examples of Christian practices that are not officially labeled as Eucharist or communion, yet display some of the deep meanings of this liturgy. With a particular focus on bodies and what is missing in the traditional practice of communion, with regard to who gathers at the table and how memory is performed, the examples are suggestive rather than absolute or definitive. A first example is found in the ministry of Sara Miles, a lesbian San Francisco journalist in her mid-forties who happened to wander into a church one Sunday and took communion.26 Although she had been raised as an atheist her entire life, Miles was so moved by the communion service at St. Gregory’s of Nyssa Episcopal Church that she was basically converted. It was not doctrine or moralistic values that she found enthralling. What compelled her was the practice of sharing food and drink. She saw this not as a mysterious sacrament, but as a display of real sharing of food and being part of a body of human beings. In response, Miles started a food pantry and basically understood it as a voluntary church of sorts. The call to feed the hungry sometimes overwhelmed her, but she continued to expand the pantry. A piece of bread and a sip of wine represented for Sara Miles a kind of communal gathering that signaled basic human needs and what is needed for creatures of all kinds to support one another. She did generate some conflicts with the church that owned the property because Miles wanted the church itself to enact the pantry as a kind of worship. She did not want the pantry to be conceived as a nonspiritual secondary “help the poor” kind of exercise. However, her creativity continued and persevered and Miles expanded these food places throughout the city. As complexifications continued, including persons seeking safety from violence, for Sara Miles, “That’s what church was for.”

124

Chapter Five

Now this example illustrates a challenge to more traditional understanding of faith, at least insofar as Miles’s practices do not require or invoke correct beliefs of any sort. What they do demand, inherently, is a faithful honoring of marginalized people who are desperately in need of access to food. This did not work out as an easily accomplished transformation of the Episcopal Church that she tried to “convert.” There was anger and disagreement from a number of church folks over the use of space and the times it was used. Nor were the homeless and hungry people all nice and appreciative recipients. She tells of complicated and even scary encounters with gangsters, rich people, and child abusers throughout her ministry.27 But the food ministry continues. In Sara Miles’s practice, love of neighbor is a deeply profound commitment in a world where the poor and the outsider are minimally supported, and rarely on the screen of upper middle-class church-goers. This ongoing ministry has service with meals every Friday as well as a variety of options. Love is importantly enacted as the provision of survival needs, rather than simply the preaching or verbal expression of love of the neighbor. Food is crucial to human life, and the provision of free groceries is clearly an essential expression of truly caring for those in need. The reality of hope is witnessed by the fact that this ministry, founded in 2000, expanded and has been going for sixteen years. What is deeply compelling is not only the provision of such essential gifts, but that these gifts are “given” around the table that is St. Gregory’s Eucharistic altar. Jesus’s last supper is surely being enacted in this ministry. The ways in which different kinds of people come together for this “ritual” is a compelling enhancement of the limited homogeneity of much of middle and upper middle class Eucharistic performance; who comes to the table has been radically enhanced. A powerful example of the function of memory is found in the Pauli Murray Project, which began as a community-based initiative aimed at promoting open dialogue about the pressing issues of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and their historical roots in Durham, North Carolina. Designated a saint by the national Episcopal Church, Murray (1910–1985) was an African American lesbian who grew up in Durham. She was a civil rights activist, a lawyer, and the first African American woman Episcopal priest. A woman who employed her faith to address injustice in many arenas, Murray’s life offers a unique model for all persons, regardless of gender, race, class, or sexual orientation. The project lifts up her life and legacy to inspire thinking about needed social change. The Pauli Murray project has organized many public conversations around racism, sexism, and the other marginalizing social realities that Murray experienced.28 The naming of these realities and recovery and confession of their history in Durham’s history and the history of North Carolina has been an important way to practice “dangerous memory.” These



Chapter Five 125

conversations have elicited many fascinating personal stories from persons of different races. For Christians, Pauli Murray’s vision of faith models a way to understand social justice as God’s mission for the church.29 Participation in the Pauli Murray Project has offered opportunities for a church to enhance the mission of social justice and to form persons of faith through rigorous thinking about the intersections of Scripture, the lived Christian tradition, and contemporary contexts, thus to connect faithful life to contemporary forms of brokenness in church and world, both inside and outside of the sanctuary. When it comes to memory as a key element of communal practices, Pauli Murray said, “True emancipation lies in the acceptance of the whole past, in deriving strength from all my roots, in facing up to the degradation as well as the dignity of my ancestors.”30 In this quote, Murray was referring to her own personal journey. The challenge for church and larger social dialogue has been to acknowledge our own pasts with respect to racism, sexism, and heterosexism, in short, to connecting faith to brokenness to help open up possibilities for change. The Pauli Murray group created a call to educate ourselves through learning about each other’s families, educational experiences, racial and cultural differences and how these have impacted and continue to impact our lives as Christians. It is about gaining a better understanding of one another and the effect of oppressive and privileging systems on our lives, learning how to appreciate our differences and to enhance our respect for one another so that we can be blended together as a Christian community. Here is where the practice of “dangerous memory” is a crucial alternative to colorblindness. Addressing the wounds of historic injustices requires recovery and public acknowledgment, especially by dominant groups, of what have often been hidden, unacknowledged histories. Public discussions of Pauli Murray’s history have elicited such sharing and acknowledgment. However, addressing these wounds also requires community, face-to-face relationships that endure over time, where trust and honesty can begin to happen. Churches would seem to be ideal places for such risky but potentially redemptive conversations. Given that the percentage of significantly interracial Protestant churches is amazingly low, as a multi-racial/multi-cultural congregation, New Creation UMC has been a unique community for such conversations to happen.31 The much-needed witness of a multi-racial/multicultural church needs to be lived out with more than simply a gathering of those who are “different.” Given the wound of “colorblindness,” or the view that legislation has “fixed” racism, is prominent in the United States,32 it is important that communities begin to acknowledge the histories and harms that have and continue to mark our differences, and this is what the Pauli Murray Project is about.

126

Chapter Five

The Pauli Murray group at the Durham United Methodist Church has been gathering for almost six years to use Murray’s life story as a lens through which we can share our own awareness of race, class, and sexism. This interracial group meets to discuss Murray’s writings and share lunch, as well as our own experiences. Insofar as communion is remembering Jesus in the form of “dangerous memory,” then, these regular gatherings of the Pauli Murray group after the “official” church service is over creatively enact this communal dangerous re-membering. CONCLUSION Faith, hope, and love are clearly complex and challenging commitments for humans, and there is no single or simple way to enact them. As defined earlier, faith is a commitment in the form of belief; hope is about trust and openness toward the future; and love is about compassion and care. Faithful remembering of Jesus is about the honoring of all bodies, and there are clearly no simple or fixed ways to do that. In contrast to the sometimes reified practice of communion, practices such as Sara Miles’s pantry and the Pauli Murray Project bring together people from different races and social locations. Different kinds of bodies thus “gather at the table” in innovative ways. While not explicit in creedal or cognitive beliefs, the enactment of faith as a commitment is enacted in these practices, and is surely there as people continue to participate. Even as an atheist, Miles’s passion for this new kind of gathering with the outsider displays a real conviction—faith—that intersects with hope and love. The enactment of hope can be seen in Miles’s continuing support for the pantry, what was sometimes a struggle and a project met with resistance. The Pauli Murray Project signals hope as the invisiblizing of African American women’s history is being challenged by this ongoing practice of recovery and honor. The living out of love is clearly being enacted in projects that are about support for marginalized groups such as the hungry, indeed, recognizing that so-called “feeding the poor” is actually “being church,” as Miles says. Expanding love to the recovery of long-repressed history of activism for justice is a challenge to those of us whites who have long been colorblind and engaging in practices of avoidance. We are not simply changing our attitudes, but being formed in ongoing communal relationships that matter. Remembering can, in some ways, be seen here as a re-membering. Not to romanticize this, but to re-member is to create new ways to understand and participate as we all hope for a redemptively altered community where all bodies are truly welcome.

What about Other Marginalized Communities and Beings? Grace Y. Kao

Mary Fulkerson has written a beautiful chapter on the potential that Christian worship, in general, and the central ritual of communion or Eucharist, in particular, holds for embodied expressions of faith, hope, and love. I appreciated her attention to various “forms of brokenness in church and world,” the ways our “bodily habituations” reflect our status in society (or lack thereof  ) and reinscribe it, and the dangers that the “wound” of colorblindness holds for authentic healing and community. As a fellow feminist, I also welcomed her offering of specific examples, whether models or failures, of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love in practice and found myself concurring that the life witness and ministries of Sarah Miles and Pauli Murray are worthy of emulation.33 My specific questions to Fulkerson move in two discrete directions and are more exploratory than critical in nature, in ways that gently query and expand the boundaries of her work. The first takes its point of departure from her description of the Eucharist as a liturgy of love that is “directed toward all of God’s creation.”34 The question here is just how inclusive Fulkerson intends for repeat performances of the rite to be or become—is her inclusivity only or primarily directed toward the great diversity of human beings or does her reference to creation create space for a broader kind of expansiveness? The second arguably hews closer to the heart of her chapter and concerns her lament for racial division in the church and larger society. The question here is whether Fulkerson’s critique of enduring racial segregation is only or primarily directed toward historically white churches in the United States, or if the logic of her argument should be brought to bear on racially homogenous non-white churches as well. In what follows I will unpack these two questions in turn while interlacing my own thoughts on such matters.

127

128

Chapter Five

AN ECOLOGICAL EUCHARIST? When reflecting on the biblical description of God’s kingdom as ultimately being comprised of members “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues,” Fulkerson appropriately asks just “who comes to the table?” on this side of the eschaton, meaning who is being brought “together to share the grace and love of God through Jesus?” Her answer is that all should be made to feel welcome, as she is disturbed by the ways in which racism, sexism, heterosexism, and common assumptions by “upper middle-class churchgoers” that only the “nice and appreciative” properly belong, serve instead to homogenize (not diversify) worship gatherings. In affirming Fulkerson’s vision of radical inclusion and hospitality, I now wish to press her on the afore-mentioned point she made but did not develop—how Christians might eucharistically come to embrace an arguably more radical other, so that the love embodied in this key Christian ritual becomes truly “directed toward all of God’s creation.” The late theologian Stephen Webb offers one provocative suggestion— and one I would encourage Fulkerson and like-minded others to seriously consider. While Webb shares Fulkerson’s understanding that the invocation of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection is central to the Eucharist’s “message” (i.e., “what the Eucharist conveys”), he especially directs our attention to its “medium”—the actual food eaten at the Last Supper.35 While I lack the space to reconstruct Webb’s argument in full, his central contention is that contrary to conventional interpretations of the event, the flesh of an animal likely was not served at the fateful meal for a variety of reasons connected to Jesus’s ministry, including the high drama surrounding meat. Meat, in short, was then (and arguably still is) bound up with hierarchy, rank, and wealth in that killing an animal for food required prior decisions to be made about which animal to slaughter and how to carve and distribute the portions, with the best-quality cuts usually reserved for those of highest status.36 Webb’s “vegetarian Eucharist” thus complements and broadens Fulkerson’s inclusiveness in two distinct ways: first, by emphasizing egalitarianism in terms of sex (not just race or class), since animal slaughter and preparation was then a highly male-gendered activity, and second, by modeling harmonious (or at least nonviolent) interspecies relations and thus embodied solidarity between and among fellow creatures of the same God. To be clear, Webb’s encouragement for us to think of the Eucharist as a vegetarian meal is not intended to change what should be served, but rather the significance we attach to it in prompting us Christians to “think more seriously about what [we] actually eat on Sunday mornings.”37 For instance, might the Eucharist prompt us Christians to reflect on reducing our complicity in a



Chapter Five 129

variety of ecologically destructive food practices, including the vast amount of industrial meat we as a society produce and consume? If so, we Christians who do not require the death of animals to be well-nourished might be led to significantly alter our meat-heavy diets not only for the sake of the billions of nonhuman animals yearly who lead lives of misery on “factory farms” (i.e., Concentrated Animal Feeing Operations [CAFOs]) to become our food, but also for the rest of creation given the emerging scientific consensus that our current global food system surrounding meat threatens wildlife, erodes biodiversity, pollutes air and water, and is otherwise environmentally unsustainable.38 Whether or not Fulkerson would be amenable to the lesson Webb draws from the Eucharist, his ecological focus would surely conform with her plea that we allow the Eucharistic meal to “communicate and perform fundamental, indeed, essential meanings of lived Christianity,” particularly insofar as our “bodily habituations” discharge an obligation presumably incumbent upon all Christians—to be good stewards of God’s creation. THE DOWNSIDE OF THE MULTIRACIAL CHURCH, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO ASIAN AMERICANS Arguably closer to the heart of Fulkerson’s chapter is her grief about enduring “racial division” in our society, particularly in the body of Christ—a situation that she elsewhere describes as “sectarian.” The “only” in her observation that “only 5–8 percent of churches are significantly multiracial” strongly suggests that Fulkerson’s ideal conception of the local church is one that is racially integrated. Though Fulkerson implies in some passages and explicitly states in others that the target of her criticism is mono-racial white Protestant churches in the United States, the question remains whether she is similarly bothered—or logically should be—by the ongoing reality of racially homogenous churches comprised not of whites but primarily of blacks, Hispanics, or Asian Americans.39 For nothing in principle would prevent her critique of racial homogeneity from being transported to those contexts: just as white Protestants in predominantly white churches become habituated into worshipping with mostly co-racials and thus come to feel uncomfortable in the presence of racial others, a similar phenomenon would presumably obtain for blacks in, say, in AME or Church of God in Christ churches, Hispanics in, say, urban Latino evangelical or Pentecostal churches, or Asian Americans in, say, raceor ethnic-specific nondenominational evangelical churches or those affiliated with the mainline (viz., UMC, PCUSA, American Baptist). In short, neither white churches nor those other mono-racial ones could regularly facilitate the kind of Buberian-Levinasian-Farleyan “face-to-face” encounters and cross-

130

Chapter Five

racial “interhuman” relationships that Fulkerson envisions Christian worship settings as ideally fostering for the betterment of both church and society. Wherever Fulkerson stands on the matter, I submit that there are good reasons to pause before uniformly commending the multiracial church as the model to which all Protestant churches in the United States should aspire. This is to say that even if God’s kingdom is to be populated by folks from all walks of life, the eschatological vision of the multitude need not translate into every local congregation striving to embody the vast pluralism of the body of Christ in the here and now. Why not? What could possibly be wrong with encouraging all Christians to join in regular worship and fellowship with their brothers and sisters in Christ of different races and ethnicities, so as to repent of the sins of racism, inertia, or complacency and better reflect the intention and destination of the universal church? One compelling reason—the focus of the remainder of my response— is due to a notable asymmetry between the two afore-mentioned types of mono-racial churches in the United States: white churches on the one hand and those comprised of one race of people of color on the other. If both types were to heed Fulkerson’s promptings, no doubt dominant members of majority white churches would have to yield a portion of their power and privilege to (racial) others as they move toward becoming a multiracial congregation and accordingly learn to adjust to real difference. But the transition to a multiracial church would arguably come at a higher cost for racial-ethnic minorities if the starting point were not white congregants in a well-intentioned majority white church, but already marginalized parishioners in a historically black, Hispanic, or Asian American one. Non-white churches in the United States have long served as a refuge for members to “be themselves”—to preach and worship in their distinctive ways, discuss issues of special concern to them (including how to manage racial discrimination), eat their culturally particular foods, wear the clothing and hairstyles most comfortable to them, and raise up new generations of community leaders—all largely apart from the white gaze. Were we to now call upon Christians of color to diversify their comparatively safe niches for the sake of Christian unity, we would effectively be asking them to make a heavy—and arguably disproportionate—sacrifice. In addition, as we examine the racial-ethnic make-up of Asian American churches in particular more closely, we see that while the central contrast for Fulkerson was between mono-racial vs. multiracial churches, the more relevant contrast in Asian American Christian contexts is arguably between those that are mono-ethnic vs. those that are pan-Asian. More specifically, for a sizable number of Christians of Asian heritage in the United States, even proposals or institutional attempts to get Asians to worship together regularly with co-racials would prove to be too tall an order for three primary reasons.



Chapter Five 131

First, culturally speaking and notwithstanding common misunderstandings to the contrary, there is no “essence” or common core of Asianness that would organically draw all Asians in the United States together: we lack a singular or unifying historical event (like slavery for African Americans), a common language other than English to reference (akin to the role that Spanish plays for Hispanics), and even a common philosophical tradition upon which to draw (e.g., Confucianism is dominant mostly in East Asia, though not necessarily across all parts of Asia).40 Second, historically speaking, the majority of pan-Asian American churches in existence today were not so constituted in the beginning, but have deeper roots in and thus longstanding ties to either a mono-ethnic parent church (viz., Korean, Japanese, Chinese) founded by immigrants or a mono-ethnic ministry spearheaded by white missionaries in mainline denominations.41 Third, as numerous scholars attest, these ethnicspecific immigrant churches served—and continue to serve—four important sociological functions: (1) they function as mini-social service agencies in helping successive waves of immigrants adjust to their new lives in America, (2) they serve as substitute ethnic neighborhoods and thus the hub of community life as members gather regularly with one another, sometimes multiple times a week, (3) they confer social status and leadership opportunities to parishioners—coveted goods in light of the common immigrant experience of downward social mobility, and (4) they play a significant role in preserving cultural traditions (language, food, holidays, values) for next generations.42 Thus, if these mono-ethnic churches were to become either pan-Asian or even genuinely multi-racial, these sociological functions would not prove nearly as effective and might even cease to exist. From the perspective of the firstgeneration, then, any call for the mono-ethnic church to diversify on racial or ethnic lines would most likely be perceived as a threat or loss, particularly since institutionally the shift would only happen over time if or when the second or subsequent generations downplay their ethnic particularity, acclimate more to mainstream culture, lose facility in the immigrant Asian language, and seek greater autonomy by severing or dramatically reducing their institutional ties to their roots.43 Quite arguably, then, the racial-ethnic homogeneity in such churches should not be thought of as obstacles to overcome, but an asset and selling point to the very niche they serve. This is not to say, however, that the most appropriate congregational setting for all Asian American Christians is necessarily mono-ethnic. After all, the real or perceived provincialism and insularity of first generation mono-ethnic churches are contributing factors to the not insignificant numbers of secondgeneration young adults who eventually leave their home churches for something else. According to the much-discussed “silent exodus” phenomenon, the two most popular alternatives have historically been white churches or an

132

Chapter Five

abandonment of Christianity altogether.44 As scholars including Russell Jeung, Sharon Kim, and Rebecca Kim have shown, however, growing numbers of next generation Asians are seeking three other options, including planting or joining existing mono-ethnic “hybrid third spaces” that are neither purportedly clones of their parent churches nor white churches, planting or joining existing pan-Asian churches, or pushing beyond Asian pan-ethnicity in the direction of genuine multiculturalism and multiracialism.45 Rather than assert or imply that all Protestant churches in the United States should ideally attempt to configure themselves under any particular racial-ethnic make-up, then, it would seem more sensitive to local context, historical particularity, and the given needs of any one church body to humbly acknowledge that it will take tremendous vision and wisdom to know what racial-ethnic mix would best serve either their—or their surrounding community’s—ministerial needs. Beyond drawing upon the experiences of Christians of color, in general, and Asian Americans, in particular, to highlight the asymmetry between white and non-white homogenous churches on the matter of moving toward racial integration, I wish now to address Fulkerson’s central aim, the “challenge of colorblindness.” Here again the Asian American context provides an interesting contrast to the positive link Fulkerson draws between the holding of colorblindness as a posture or attitude and the lack of racial diversity in predominantly white churches.46 More specifically, some sociological studies have suggested that pan-Asian churches that have adopted a colorblind approach to their building of multicultural/multiracial congregations—where they purposely ignore or obscure racial diversity and difference—have paradoxically been more successful at attracting a more diverse membership than those pan-Asian churches that have been explicit and intentional about highlighting race and racial difference within their church.47 The point here is not to commend colorblindness as a church growth strategy, but only to emphasize once again the importance of taking context seriously, as what is or might be the case in white churches may simply not hold across churches comprised primarily of non-whites. CONCLUSION As Fulkerson has shown, the communion or Eucharist, in particular, and Christian worship, in general, does indeed hold great potential for Christians to demonstrate their faith, hope, and love in embodied ways. Among the many aspects of Fulkerson’s chapter that merited further discussion, the approach I have taken here was to gently push the boundaries of her ethic of inclusion in my first point and to play something akin to a devil’s advocate



Chapter Five 133

in my second; the latter in underscoring not what can be gained from reducing racial division in the local church, but what can be lost. It may well be the case that historically white churches have a greater burden to overcome in taking active measures to diversify than their non-white racially homogeneous counterparts. Whatever the case, it is arguably context-specific counsel, not universal or hasty prescriptions, that is needed to discern the best path forward. NOTES   1.  It is clear that there is no church that does not fail in some way to live faith, hope, and love in relation to God. I am highlighting a significant, frequently ignored form of bias, one that is typically denied by many Christians who would deny that they are in any way racist.   2.  I will offer a Protestant version of communion, not at all claiming that any one version is the “correct” one. However, there are some widely shared elements of the ritual that will be looked at.   3.  Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau have written about bodily habitus. I will draw upon social anthropologist Paul Connerton for these categories. See Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).   4.  Teresa L. Fry Brown, God Don’t Like Ugly: African American Women Handing on Spiritual Values (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2000), 53.  5. bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (New York: Routledge, 2015), 41.   6.  My former colleague Prof. William Hart provided me with the concept “white ownership of space.” Clearly, the group without power has to be aware of their bodily practices in such a situation in order to stay safe.   7.  Timothy F. Sedgwick, Sacramental Ethics: Paschal Identity and the Christian Life (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 15.   8.  Ibid., 16. Examples of other scholars who centralize worship include Stanley Hauerwas, Donald Saliers, and Gordon Lathrop.   9.  Two other features of racism: “1. Attention to racial designations is the key cause of racial hostility in our society. . . . 3. Resentment of race-based preference programs is a significant cause of the racial hostility in our society.” Michael Emerson and George Yancey, Transcending Racial Barriers: Toward a Mutual Obligations Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 38. 10.  These examples of liturgy come from “A Service of Word and Table II,” in The United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville, TN: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1996), 10. 11.  Ibid., 8, 11. 12.  Ibid., 14. 13.  Ibid., 10.

134

Chapter Five

14.  Ibid., 9. 15.  Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. and ed. J. Matthew Ashley (New York: Crossroad, 2007), 87–96. 16.  Bruce T. Morrill, Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory: Political and Liturgical Theology in Dialogue (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2000), 49. 17.  M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 100. 18.  Bob Smietana, “Sunday Morning Segregation: Most Worshipers Feel Their Church Has Enough Diversity,” Christianity Today, January 15, 2015, http://www .christianitytoday.com/news/2015/january/sunday-morning-segregation-most -worshipers-church-diversity.html. 19.  “Racial inequality” refers to economic, political, and other forms of inequality by racial group; “racial alienation” refers to deep distrust between racial groups. “We use racial division, inequality, and alienation almost interchangeably throughout the book not because they mean same thing but because they are all core components of the problem.” Emerson and Yancey, Transcending Racial Barriers, 11. 20.  Curtis Paul DeYoung, Michael Emerson, George Yancy, and Karen Chai Kim, eds., United by Faith: The Multiracial Congregation as an Answer to the Problem of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 21.  Emerson and Yancy, Transcending Racial Barriers, 27. 22.  Edward Farley, Good and Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 47. 23.  Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 88. 24.  Stanley P. Saunders and Charles L. Campbell, The Word on the Street: Performing the Scriptures in the Urban Context (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2000), 161. 25. Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 107–28, 125. 26.  Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008). 27.  “Prologue,” in Take This Bread. 28.  I have been a member of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice Board of Directors from its beginning. There have been many public conversations, most at the downtown public library in Durham, NC. The most recent speaker was at Duke Univ., Feb. 23, 2016, Patricia Bell-Scott discussing her book The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Justice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016). 29.  This vision resonates powerfully with the church that has had a Pauli Murray group going for six years, New Creation UMC. Its mission statement says, “New Creation UMC is a multicultural Christian community seeking peace and justice to fully embrace the community around us. We commit to make disciples of Jesus Christ through racial hospitality, passionate worship, spiritual formation and reconciliation as we receive and share God’s all-encompassing love.”



Chapter Five 135

30.  Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (New York: Harper & Row, 2011), 61. 31.  Only 7 percent of mainline churches are communities in which no more than 80 percent of the membership identifies as the same race. Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 10. 32.  Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the U.S. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Pubs., 2010). 33.  I delivered an earlier version of this response at Claremont Graduate University’s “Faith, Hope, and Love Today: Challenges and Opportunities” conference on April 15, 2016. I wish to thank Anselm Min for the invitation to participate, Joseph Prabhu for his introduction, Mary Fulkerson for her chapters, and my fellow conference participants for the rich dialogue that ensued. 34.  Mary Fulkerson, “Faith, Hope, and Love: The Challenge of Colorblindness,” emphasis in original. All subsequent references to Fulkerson will be to this chapter. 35.  Stephen Webb, Good Eating (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001), 144. 36.  Webb acknowledges that the Jewish Passover serves as the context for the Last Supper in the Synoptic Gospels, thus suggesting to generations of biblical readers that lamb was indeed served. But Webb finds significant that there is no explicit mention of meat-eating in those accounts and that the Gospel of John places the event chronologically earlier, with Jesus’s death coinciding with the slaughter of lambs in the Temple. The Gospels accordingly depict Jesus as “using food to make a theological point” for Webb, as “serving lamb would have confused the issue of how his path of deliverance differed from the temple rituals” (Webb, Good Eating, 151). As prompted by two questions from the audience at the conference about Webb’s unconventional reading, I should clarify that the call for Christians to rethink their dietary practices does not hinge on what Jesus and the disciples actually ate at the Last Supper, given the negative ecological consequences of global livestock production today and legitimate animal welfare concerns of the creatures who are bred and raised on “factory farms” for human consumption. For more on these points, see Matthew C. Halteman, “Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation” (Washington, DC: Humane Society of the United States, 2008) and Grace Y. Kao, “For All Creation,” in To Do Justice: A Guide for Progressive Christians, eds. Rebecca Toddie Peters and Elizabeth Hasty-Hinson (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 97–107. 37. Webb, Good Eating, 148; cf. 159. 38.  These studies include Henning Steinfield et al., “Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options” (Rome: United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, 2006), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Mitigation of Climate Change” (Cambridge University Press, 2014); UNEP, “Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production: Priority Products and Materials, A Report of the Working Group on the Environmental Impacts of Products and Materials to the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management”

136

Chapter Five

(2010). Beyond harm to the nonhuman realm, factory farming has also been linked to environmental racism and environmental injustice more broadly as well as the exploitation of worker’s rights. See, for example, Wendee Nicole, “CAFOs and Environmental Justice: The Case of North Carolina,” Environmental Health Perspectives 121 (2013): A181–89 and Lance Compa, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants” (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2005), https:// www.hrw.org/reports/2005/usa0105/ (last accessed on August 30, 2016). 39.  To be clear, Hispanics have not been defined as a race by the U.S. Census since 1980, but I am doing so here in part because recent surveys have suggested that as much as two-thirds of Hispanic adults say that being Hispanic is part of their racial background. See “Chapter 7: The Many Dimensions of Hispanic Racial Identity” in Multiracial in America: Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers, Pew Research Center, June 11, 2015, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/06/11/multiracial-in -america. 40.  See Grace Y. Kao and‎ Ilsup Ahn, eds., Asian American Christian Ethics: Voices, Methods, Issues (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015), 6–7. 41.  See “Chapter 1: The Contexts of Asian American Christian Leadership” in Timothy Tseng et al., Asian American Religious Leadership Today (Durham, NC: Duke Divinity School, 2005) for a brief history survey of Asian American Christianity in the United States. 42. See, for example, Sharon Kim, A Faith of Our Own: Second-Generation Spirituality in Korean American Churches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 23–26. 43. For a deeper reflection of what is lost either when second and subsequent generations leave their “home” mono-ethnic immigrant churches, see Jonathan Tran, “Living Out the Gospel: Asian American Perspectives and Contributions,” Annual of the Society of Asian North American Christian Studies 2 (2010): 13–56 and 69–73. 44.  The “silent exodus” phenomenon has been much discussed and interrogated since Helen Lee’s eponymously titled article in the August 12, 1996, edition of Christianity Today. 45. For these important studies, see Russell Jeung, Faithful Generations: Race and New Asian American Churches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Sharon Kim, A Faith of Our Own: Second Generation Spirituality in Korean American Churches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Rebecca Y. Kim, God’s New Whiz Kids? Second-Generation Korean American Evangelicals on Campus (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 46. That is, Fulkerson insists that churches must explicitly “attend to racism’s effects” if non-white persons are to start attending their services—that simply “invoke[ing] and . . . preach[ing] . . . racial unity and inclusivity” is not enough. 47.  See Sharon Kim, A Faith of Their Own, 149 and 156 for studies done by Gerardo Marti (2005) about Mosaic Church in Los Angeles and Kathleen Garces-Foley (2007) about Evergreen Church that have been more successful at attracting a diverse membership when employing a color-blind strategy.



Chapter Five 137

WORKS CITED Bell-Scott, Patricia. The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Justice. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the U.S. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Pubs., 2010. Brown, Teresa L. Fry. God Don’t Like Ugly: African American Women Handing on Spiritual Values. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2000. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Copeland, M. Shawn. Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. DeYoung, Curtis Paul, Michael Emerson, George Yancy, and Karen Chai Kim, eds. United by Faith: The Multiracial Congregation as an Answer to the Problem of Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Emerson, Michael O., and Christian Smith. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Emerson, Michael O., and George Yancey. Transcending Racial Barriers: Toward a Mutual Obligations Approach. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Farley, Edward. Good and Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990. Fulkerson, Mary McClintock. Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. New York: Routledge, 2015. Jeung, Russell. Faithful Generations: Race and New Asian American Churches. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Kao, Grace Y. “For All Creation.” In To Do Justice: A Guide for Progressive Christians, edited by Rebecca Toddie Peters and Elizabeth Hasty-Hinson, 97–107. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. Kao, Grace Y., and Ilsup Ahn, eds. Asian American Christian Ethics: Voices, Methods, Issues. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015. Kim, Rebecca Y. God’s New Whiz Kids? Second-Generation Korean American Evangelicals on Campus. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Kim, Sharon. A Faith of Our Own: Second-Generation Spirituality in Korean American Churches. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Metz, Johann Baptist. Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology. Translated and edited by J. Matthew Ashley. New York: Crossroad, 2007. Miles, Sara. Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion. New York: Ballantine Books, 2008.

138

Chapter Five

Morrill, Bruce T. Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory: Political and Liturgical Theology in Dialogue. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2000. Murray, Pauli. Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family. New York: Harper & Row, 2011. Nicole, Wendee. “CAFOs and Environmental Justice: The Case of North Carolina,” Environmental Health Perspectives 121 (2013): A181–89. Pew Research Center. “Multiracial in America: Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers.” June 11, 2015. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/06/11/multiracial-in -america. Saunders, Stanley P., and Charles L. Campbell. The Word on the Street: Performing the Scriptures in the Urban Context. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2000. Sedgwick, Timothy F. Sacramental Ethics: Paschal Identity and the Christian Life. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987. Smietana, Bob. “Sunday Morning Segregation: Most Worshipers Feel Their Church Has Enough Diversity.” Christianity Today, January 15, 2015. http://www .christianitytoday.com/news/2015/january/sunday-morning-segregation-most -worshipers-church-diversity.html. Steinfield, Henning et al. “Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options.” Rome: United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, 2006. Tran, Jonathan. “Living Out the Gospel: Asian American Perspectives and Contributions.” Annual of the Society of Asian North American Christian Studies 2 (2010): 13–56 and 69–73. The United Methodist Hymnal. Nashville, TN: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1996. Webb, Stephen. Good Eating. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001.

Chapter Six

Incarnating Faith, Hope, and Love Theo-Political Virtues and the Common Good M. Shawn Copeland The notion of virtue connotes the excellence (areté) or perfection of a thing, and in its most mature articulation intends as its end or telos the realization of the proper potential of the agent (or thing). Virtue possesses an essential connection to function (performance), thus the agent (or thing) is evaluated as good or bad according to how well the agent (or thing) fulfills its function. In the strict sense, virtue denotes a habit further added to a faculty or power of the soul that disposes it to carry out with readiness acts conformable to human rational nature. This understanding of virtue emerges from the ethical and political thought of Plato (Socrates) and Aristotle, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.1 For these philosophers the relation of virtuous life to the understanding and realization of a common good was ineluctable; indeed, a virtuous life formed the very standard for the common good. The course of a person’s life, then, ought to be charted by seeking after, assenting to, and living in accordance with that which is reasonably most choiceworthy, excellent, or worthwhile, that is, with the flourishing of one’s potentialities of the human soul, with the practice of virtue. Moreover, this understanding linked virtue and virtuous living not only to happiness, but also to the most elusive of virtues, justice. In order for justice to be established in the city-state, it must be found in the human soul. Yet, only when each constituent part of the soul, that is, reason, spiritedness, and desire, has acquired its specific virtue or perfection, then the soul serves the health and order of the whole. As a consequence, each citizen is properly ordered toward every other citizen of the city-state, with each one assigned what is intrinsically good for him and her and hence, what is intrinsically good for the city. Each one finds his and her own good in the good of the 139

140

Chapter Six

well-ordered city-state. The principle of the common good, then, is the virtuous living of the whole community.2 The definition of virtue sketched above reflects a grasp of virtue as valued and practiced by Western peoples and cultures. While other peoples might recognize the intent of such a definition, they well might express and strive to realize virtue according to a different cultural taxonomy.3 Still, despite one’s particular understanding and conceptualization, virtue is best found and discussed in the concrete. Its incarnation forms the crucial condition of the possibility of realization of a common good. And, as Rosetta Ross observes, “Sometimes the absence of lively engagement by faithful people in public life results from the absence of moral exemplars.”4 The remainder of this chapter considers faith, hope, and love as theo-political virtues incarnate in the lives of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.5 A SON OF “SWEET AUBURN,” A DAUGHTER OF THE DELTA6 The general outline of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life is, by now, fairly well known: deep Christian roots watered by three generations of ministers and his own response to God’s call at the age of eighteen; a relatively comfortable, but segregated, middle-class upbringing; an outstanding academic career at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, then Rochester, New York’s, Crozer Seminary, and doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University; his 1953 marriage to Coretta Scott, and their decision to return to the segregated South, to Montgomery, Alabama, where King took up duties as full-time pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. King’s leadership in the Montgomery bus boycott thrust him into an unparalleled role in national and international affairs. Passionate, prayerful, paradoxical, King’s unflinching commitment to nonviolence and his ability to articulate and demonstrate a philosophy of action awakened the moral conscience of America and gave hope and courage to thousands of oppressed peoples around the world. Fannie Lou Hamer was born Fannie Lou Townsend on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She was the youngest of twenty children of Lou Ella Bramlett and James Lee Townsend. The Townsends were sharecroppers and, according to Hamer, her father served as a Baptist preacher and her mother did domestic work in white peoples’ homes.7 Poverty, hunger, exploitation, disenfranchisement, and erratic schooling shaped the experience of most African Americans in the Delta, the cotton-rich, fertile flatland between the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers. Hamer often referred to the Delta as home of the “ruralest of the ruralest and poorest of the poorest.”8



Chapter Six 141

The chronically hungry and youngest Townsend was pulled into the arduous labor of picking cotton at the age of six by the cruel promise of the owner of the plantation on which her family lived and worked: if she would pick thirty pounds of cotton, he would give her treats (“cracker jacks and cake”).9 By the age of thirteen, young Fannie Lou was picking between two hundred and four hundred pounds of cotton a day for one dollar.10 Given the demands of seasonal labor, Fannie Lou Townsend’s formal schooling was sporadic and ended at the age of twelve; at the same time, reportedly she “loved school” and her mother encouraged her. Economic pressure forced her to leave school, but she “continued developing her reading skills through Bible study.”11 When she was about twenty-four years of age, Fannie Lou Townsend married Perry (Pap) Hamer, a tractor driver on the W. D. Marlowe Plantation. For twenty years, the rhythms of family life and plantation work filled Hamer’s days and nights, but she was ever alert to the indignities and injustices that blacks endured. Quite importantly, Hamer came to understand her Christian faith as rendering her responsible for others. She met those responsibilities not only by adopting and caring for two children whose families could not provide for them, but also by defending and protecting field workers. Years later, speaking about this period, she remarked, “I asked God to give me a chance to just let me do something about what was going on in Mississippi.”12 The opportunity presented itself when young civil rights workers sought her participation in voter registration campaigns conducted by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). FROM A MOUNTAIN OF DESPAIR, A STONE OF HOPE The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was motivated intellectually and religiously by a deep hunger and thirst for justice, by a willingness to incarnate hope, and by “the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.”13 Through organizing and agitating for the effective exercise of civil rights by disenfranchised black Americans, King, arguably, had in mind something more than the political merely—rather, something quite biblical, quite theological, quite eschatological. Indeed, for King the civil rights movement was a “spiritual movement,”14 “a movement based on hope.”15 Its authentic telos was neither desegregation, nor integration, but the realization of “the beloved community.”16 Neither King nor Hamer identified hope with mere progress or liberal optimism. To quote William Lynch, hope is not “an emergency virtue [hauled

142

Chapter Six

out] for a crisis.”17 Rather, hope is the decisive virtue directing the religious, cultural, and social experience of black people in history. The active hope of those people was directed toward “a future good considered as arduous and difficult, but possible to achieve.”18 They focused their hope on the concrete recognition, realization, and flourishing of their humanity.19 Yet, this very recognition, realization, and flourishing did not depend upon them alone; rather, this required the full participation of all citizens of the Republic, who along with the descendants of the enslaved Africans might constitute a nation. Between 1863 and 1963, to the degree that black women and men had hope, they moved into a new future, albeit a future quickly circumscribed by cruel and divisive signs of segregation—“whites” and “colored.” Those signs fixed to the doors of restaurants, hotels, restrooms, and schools, hung on water fountains and bus seats carved a negating social imaginary that defied the intended meanings of the Emancipation Proclamation as well as those of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Yet, hope dreams new possibilities, inspires different futures, generates new social imaginaries.20 Hope synthesizes freedom, decision, and action; it expresses itself actively and creatively in history through prayer, resistance, and survival, through change and conversion, through self-respect and self-sacrifice, through art and literature, through love and friendship, through solidarity in action. Inasmuch as the civil rights movement incarnated hope, it enacted a Christian social praxis rooted in the prophetic task as mediated by the Old Testament and fidelity to the mission of Jesus. King held that the “projection of a social gospel” was the only “true witness of a Christian life” in a segregated and oppressive nation.21 In a sermon given in 1963 at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, he criticized the black church’s excessive preoccupation with the otherworldly: There is something wrong with any church that limits the gospel to talkin’ about heaven over yonder. There is something wrong with any minister . . . who becomes so otherworldly in his [sic] orientation that he [sic] forgets about what is happening now . . . forgets [about] the here. Here where men [sic] are trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. Here where thousands of God’s children are caught in an air-tight cage [of poverty]. Here were thousands of men and women are depressed and in agony because of their earthly fight . . . where the darkness of life surrounds so many of God’s children.22

Early on in the bus boycott, at a meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), King stressed the religious motivation of nonviolent social protest.



Chapter Six 143

[I]n all our doings, in all our deliberations here this evening and all of the week and while—whatever we do, we must keep God in the forefront. Let us be Christians in all of our actions. But . . . it is not enough for us to talk about love, love is one of the pivotal points of the Christian faith. There is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love. . . . Standing beside love is always justice, and we are only using the tools of justice.23

And, he emphasized repeatedly the importance of love: To meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul free.24

King joined justice and love to creative exercise and practice of hope, and by love he meant agape.25 For King, the social mission of the church required that it embrace the dream of the “beloved community” with agape its regulating ideal.26 Only through agape, he insisted repeatedly to his followers, “could they elevate their souls and also creatively transform society.”27 In Bernard Lonergan’s terms, King not only took responsibility for his own life and his life in a segregated and dehumanizing world, not only urged others— black and white—to engage in this task for themselves, but also organized a way for individuals and communities to assume collective responsibility for constituting themselves as a new nation.28 What King proposed was not “human concern for the future . . . on the basis of individual and group egoism,” but the embrace of “heroic charity,”29 of self-transcending love. THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT— FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE IN ACTION What might it mean to wait? What might be involved in waiting? In the Hebrew Bible, to wait means to hope, to hope means to wait. In Hebrew linguistic usage, “to wait” denotes activity, rather than passivity as it often implies in English. Four Hebrew verbs refer to “wait”; the two most relevant here are yachal, meaning to await with expectation and with hope; and qavah, meaning to wait for with [in] the tension of enduring waiting; to wait for; to expect. To wait is to hope; to hope is to wait—actively. Paulo Freire regards hope as “an ontological need.”30 We cannot live without hope; we cannot be human without hope. African Americans had been waiting, hoping for substantive and thoroughgoing change in American political culture

144

Chapter Six

for more than a century. They lived in and practiced the virtue of hope—they resisted despair. One way of appreciating the civil rights movement is to appreciate it as setting a nation before its freedom (its destiny). The movement expanded our “perceived horizon of possibility, broaden[ed] our landscape of reality in such a way as to set our present circumstances in wider perspective and thereby rob it of its absoluteness.”31 It offered Americans a new way of understanding the common (human) good, of understanding faith, hope, and love as theo-political virtues. Such an account of hope liberates and invigorates, reorients us toward the future; helps us to understand that God does not absolutize the present, thus, we should be wary of taking the present with “excessive seriousness.”32 As Fannie Lou Hamer picked cotton or worked as the plantation timekeeper, she questioned the inequities of her circumstances: “Sometimes I be working in the fields and I get so tired I’d say to the people picking cotton with me, hard as we have to work for nothing, there must be some way we can change this.”33 Hamer became involved in the civil rights movement in 1962, after she learned that black people could vote. She was forty-four years old when she began the shift from grief to grievance, “from suffering injury to speaking out against that injury.”34 With determination, Hamer made her first attempt to register, and, although this was unsuccessful, she would return to take the test. Moreover, she led voting registration efforts and taught citizenship classes. All this brought reprisals, not only against her personally and her family, but against other blacks, who engaged in action for political change. “Harassment by local officials reached petty extremes. One month, the Hamers received a $9,000 water bill—in a house with no running water.”35 The most excruciating reprisal came with her arrest and that of four other women in June 1963. Along with several citizenship schoolteachers, Hamer was returning from a meeting in Charleston when the bus stopped in Winona, a small town near Greenwood, Mississippi. Several of the teachers, including Hamer, were arrested and jailed. Soon, Hamer was recognized and singled-out. Forced to lie face down on a cot, she was beaten savagely by a black inmate, whom the police coerced to carry out their plan, while a second prisoner was ordered to sit on her legs to keep her immobile. “By the end,” Charles Marsh writes, “the flesh of her beaten body was hard, one of her kidneys was permanently damaged, and a blood clot that formed over her left eye threatened her vision.”36 Initially, it was difficult for Hamer to lead the imprisoned group in prayer and singing, but in hope she gathered herself and began to sing “Paul and Silas Were Bound in Jail.”37 During the days that followed, Hamer struck up a conversation with the wife of the jailer. The white woman showed her some kindness and Hamer thanked her. In the conversation that followed, Hamer pointed the woman



Chapter Six 145

to a few biblical passages (Proverbs 26:26 and Acts 17:26). These passages, Marsh contends, intentionally underscored the unity of humankind and worship of the one true God, who “made the world and all things there in, seeing that he [sic] is Lord of heaven and earth gives to all life and breath” (Acts 17:24–25).38 This brutalization left Hamer in considerable recurring pain and emotional turmoil, but she did not back down: People need to be serious about their faith in the Lord; it’s all too easy to say, “Sure, I’m a Christian,” and talk a big game. But if you are not putting that claim to the test, where the rubber meets the road, then it’s high time to stop talking about being Christian. You can pray until you faint, but if you’re not gonna get up and do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.39

Rosetta Ross notes that Hamer understood the social activism of the civil rights movement as the “consummation of her faith.”40 Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. We Negroes had hoped and we had faith to hope, though we didn’t know what we had hoped for. When the people came to Mississippi in 1964, to us it was the result of all our faith—all that we had hoped for. Our prayers and all we had lived for day after day hadn’t been in vain. In 1964 the faith that we had hoped for started to be translated into action. Now we have action and we’re doing something that will not only free the Black man in Mississippi but hopefully will free the white one as well.41

And in another speech in 1971, Hamer said: My whole fight is for the liberation of all people because no man [sic] is an island to himself: when a white child is dying, is being shot, there’s a little bit of America being destroyed. When it’s a Black child shot in America, it’s a little bit of America being destroyed. If they keep this up, a little of this going, and a little of that going, one day this country will crumble. But we have to try to see to it that not only the lives of young and adult Blacks are saved in this country but also the whites.42

Hamer’s activism developed and she focused on the social and economic conditions of the people of Sunflower County. In particular, she helped to found the Freedom Farms Cooperative, which provided food and shelter and alternative employment. Hamer always understood herself as a Christian; she was, she insisted, “brought up in the church from an early age [and] was taught to love.”43 King reflected, wrote, and spoke often of Christian love, of agape. Only through the way of agape, King insisted repeatedly to his followers, “could

146

Chapter Six

they elevate their souls and also creatively transform society.”44 Growing up in the segregated South, King experienced the bitter sting of racial ostracism and exclusion. King acknowledged that for several years he struggled with the question, “How can I love a race of people who hate me?”45 Only after he entered college, spent summers outside the segregated South, and participated in interracial groups did King begin to “conquer [his] anti-white feeling.”46 Still, Ansbro writes, as a seminary student King had begun to conclude that Jesus’s ethical teachings (“Turn the other cheek,” “Love your enemies”) were effective only in resolving individual conflicts, but useless in conflicts of social, racial, or national scope. It was a sermon by Howard University president Mordecai Johnson on Mahatma Gandhi’s life and philosophy that challenged King’s position and prodded him to read several books on Gandhi.47 Years later, King would comment, “Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale.”48 King considered agape to be “understanding, redeeming good will for all men [sic]. It is an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and creative. It is not set in motion by any quality or function of its object. It is the love of God operating in the human heart.”49 This is what Lonergan thematized as religious conversion on the fourth level of intentional consciousness, speaking of it as God’s gift of love flooding the heart through the Holy Spirit; the heart of stone becoming the heart of flesh, and the heart of flesh becoming effective in good works.50 Agape sought a full and complete transformation of the whole of one’s living and feeling, thoughts and words, deeds and actions. “Agape,” King maintained, “is disinterested love.” This kind of love seeks the good of the other, of the neighbor. The neighbor is found in each and every person whom one meets. Agape loves the other for his or her sake. “Consequently,” King stressed, “the best way to assure oneself that love is disinterested is to have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution.”51 Agape holds and caresses the interrelatedness of all life, thus it seeks to preserve and create community; it is love in action. At one point, King expressed the dynamic and creative power of agape in near-Trinitarian terms: “The cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community. The resurrection is a symbol of God’s triumph over all the forces that seek to block community. The Holy Spirit is the continuing community-creating reality that moves through history.”52 King argued that desegregation was not enough. In itself, desegregation was “empty and shallow”; it led to “physical proximity without spiritual affinity.”53 On the one hand, desegregation was enforceable by law, but it



Chapter Six 147

would not change attitudes and human hearts. On the other hand, mere (or sheer) legislation can never enforce integration; its achievement can be realized only through the “unenforceable obligations” that transcended human law. Purified “inner attitudes, genuine person-to-person relations, expressions of compassion,” a willingness to suffer and endure persecution—these sprang from “commitment to an inner law, written on the heart.”54 Authentic integration, King reckoned, could be achieved only through agape. CONCLUSION Nearly forty years after the death of Fannie Lou Hamer and nearly fifty years after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., their incarnation of faith, hope, and love challenges us to realization of authentic social transformation rooted in personal and communal sacrifice and in change of mind, heart, and living. Authentic integration has been mocked and segregation—now economic and political, and, therefore, racial—is the tenor of our time. On the broad canvas of theological reflection, I have been trying to illumine the ineluctable link between theology’s thoroughgoing public relevance and the yearning of black people for the reign of God. Or, to use older, still valuable theological language, I have been trying to demonstrate the intimate relation between life, the good or virtuous life lived, and eternal life. Or put differently, “the ascent of the soul towards God is not a merely private affair but rather a personal function of an objective common movement in that body of Christ which takes over, transforms, and elevates every aspect of human life.”55

Hoping against Hope Kirsten Gerdes

Although the hope for despair may seem a lonely hope, it is in fact a hope oriented towards and accountable to a community. This is . . . a community not yet in existence, a community of those who now despair singularly— an eschatological community. Yes, this eschatological community is postracial, but what a post-racial community would look like is impossible to see from the perspective of the present—and racism digs in deeper every time well-meaning whites forget that.56 –Vincent Lloyd

M. Shawn Copeland’s chapter challenges us to meditate on the lives and the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fannie Lou Hamer, not solely as an act of remembrance or even as mere model of the theological virtues, but in order to catalyze our own actions through becoming the embodiment of faith, hope, and love. Indeed, it must be becoming, as one’s perfection—that is to say, completion—of aretē is reached through the development and practice of proper habits. Thus, Copeland names faith, hope, and love as theo-political virtues to emphasize the responsibility we hold to actively seek justice and the common good. In briefly outlining the Greek origins of the idea of virtue as it relates to the polis, Copeland links contemporary political discussions about virtue, particularly with regard to the civil rights movement, to its long history in the Western tradition. Using King and Hamer as concrete examples—the embodiment of the theo-political virtues—she traces how they practiced these virtues in anticipation of a future different from their present. Ultimately, the call is for us not only to see, but to live, what she terms “the intimate relation between life, the good or virtuous life lived, and eternal life.” Her thoughtful chapter sparked several 148



Chapter Six 149

questions, which address three of the overarching themes I see therein: the ancient Greek political tradition; the contemporary situation of U.S. political theology; and, lastly, the call to action. While I accept the fundamental argument of Copeland’s chapter, the questions I raise in these three areas suggest that faith, hope, and love as theo-political virtues must be read in light of our post/modern context of fractured and individualistic subjectivity for their collective and revolutionary potential. Copeland’s discussion of virtue and the Greek polis is rooted in her reading of Aristotle. She cites from both Nichomachean Ethics and the Politics in establishing the individual in terms of the polis: “The human being ‘is by nature an animal intended to live in a polis’ and whosoever is without a polis, without a city (or state or nation) is an aberration or a beast or a god.” She goes on to explain that while the polis was prior to the individual, the common good of the polis was “the cumulative good of the individual citizens” and therefore could not be “in opposition to the individual’s private good.” She offers Aristotle’s most restrictive definition of citizen—that of the free man, who contributes to the political process directly. While it is true that Aristotle is distinguishing between the various categories of people inhabiting the city-state, Aristotle’s text implies that there are less restrictive definitions of citizen possible. Literature scholar Timothy J. Reiss reminds us in his work, Mirages of the Self(e), of the import to this conversation of the Citizenship Law of Pericles.57 This law, which was passed in 451 BCE, and repassed in 401, restricted citizenship in Athens to children whose parents were both Athenian citizens, which meant that children born from an Athenian man and a non-Athenian woman could no longer claim citizenship.58 Classicist Thomas R. Martin asserts that this law did, indeed, enhance the status of Athenian mothers, and while they were excluded from politics, they were still able to control property and protect their interests through lawsuits via a male legal guardian.59 Reiss is quick to point out that there is no question that Athenian women citizens did not share in the same duties and responsibilities in the polis as did Athenian free men.60 Yet he critiques as anachronistic the claim that because women and slaves had been excluded from the polis that they were not considered people: “These facts imply that ‘exclusion from the political community’ may be a phrase whose censorious tone entails anachronistic assumptions.”61 The facts to which he refers in the preceding paragraph is the apparent shared importance between polis and oikos.62 He describes the oikos as the domestic arena where education first occurred and which held the city’s foundation.63 Martin corroborates this with a description of the women’s role in the polis as manager of the oikos.64 Typically, the oikos included the immediate family members, any household slaves, and the land on which was bred and grown those materials necessary for the family’s subsistence,

150

Chapter Six

including livestock, grains, fruits, and vegetables. While the husband was representative (kyrios) of the oikos to the polis, the wife ran the oikos and participated in the religious rituals, both publicly and privately, for the family. Where Reiss’s thesis intersects with Copeland’s brief summary of ancient Greek notions of virtue is around this idea of what constitutes “public” and “private.” Reiss argues that understanding what is meant by “public” and “private” in ancient Greece is not as simple as applying the modern notions of those terms to the ancient Greek context, as the so-called “split” between the two is firmly rooted in modernity.65 The private was “the index and the end of men’s struggle for position” within the public.66 Reiss’s point here fits into his argument about the experience of personhood in ancient Europe as a being subjected to the circles comprising one’s existence through “passible relation.”67 While he agrees with common understandings of women and slaves being “considered socio-politically and sometimes morally different” than free men, he does not at all agree with the assertion that the texts we have from this time support a “supposal that women and slaves were considered non-persons.”68 He goes on to argue that however draconian Aristotle’s formulations of “citizen” and “slave” were, his view did not dominate for centuries and thus the “places” of women and slaves were more ambiguous in ancient society than Aristotle’s text would imply.69 While Copeland rightfully acknowledges that relying on Plato’s and Aristotle’s notions of virtue and the common good in contemporary society are not without its challenges, the challenges she identifies—namely, the problematic limiting of citizenship to certain (male) classes of people—rely on misrepresentations of Aristotelian thought. This is not to dispute Aristotle’s limiting of the polis to Athenian men, though it is important to note Reiss’s review of ancient texts that demonstrates Athenian women were also considered citizens, but with their domain as the oikos instead of the polis, a “private citizen,” perhaps. However, these concepts of “public” and “private” reveal how differently ancient Athenians experienced personhood from our modern experience of selfhood. Copeland states that Aristotle’s “exclusive definition of citizenship poses crucial questions in contemporary reflection on the political,” but does not specify what those questions might be, particularly in how they might be critically related to Aristotle’s description and emphasis on eudaemonia. So while Copeland is not claiming that women and slaves were non-people, but rather non-citizens, it is important to note where particularly Athenian women would have exercised power—namely, the oikos—and how that might relate to the practices of virtue. How affected should our acceptance of, or inspiration from, the classical Greek ideals be given the problems of Aristotle, and how is this complicated or assisted by Reiss’s discussion



Chapter Six 151

of the importance of oikos for the polis? Can we merely substitute a modern notion of citizenship and rights into Aristotle’s framework? Additionally, while Copeland aptly emphasizes the positive aspects of Aristotle’s vision of human flourishing, its relation to and grounding in his vision of the common good is not clearly explored. Copeland asserts that common good of the state is the cumulative good of its individual citizens: even though the polis is prior to the individual, the individual does not exist for the common good of the state. As Aristotle’s notion of the common good is quite distinct from modern utilitarian notions as the sum of individual happiness resulting from maximal individual freedom, it requires further explanation, particularly when read alongside Reiss’s argument regarding the anachronistic split between public and private. While it may be true that Aristotle saw the common good as the cumulative good of individual citizens, he also saw the whole as more than merely a sum of its parts. The ideal, of course, would be each individual contributing his or her aretē, rooted in his or her class’s telos (whether male or female slave, Athenian woman, or Athenian man), to the functioning of the city, including polis and oikos. This model is what makes the body analogy by the apostle Paul in the New Testament poignant for his Hellenistic Gentile readers.70 The virtuous individual in Aristotle’s formulation is an individual divested of self-interest in terms of acquiring power or wealth—created goods—and is rather invested in those goods that can be shared in common without diminishing.71 For this reason, Aristotle’s polis rests on his concept of friendship.72 What might it mean, then, for the classical Greek understanding of the common good to be unable to be in opposition to the individual’s private good? How do we translate this understanding of oikos as the basic unit of the polis into a politics that places the common good firmly in the camp of communities of people as opposed to self-interested individuals? These questions regarding Copeland’s discussion of the common good and the development of virtues in turn lead to questions around her discussion of King’s and Hamer’s lives as models of theo-political virtues. She highlights how hope structured the civil rights movement—a hope, she explains to us with the help of St. Thomas Aquinas, that “dreams new possibilities, inspires different futures,” and “generates new social imaginaries.” She argues that King’s mission of justice is regulated by the ideal of agape love in order to practice hope. Since biblical hope is never passive, both King’s and Hamer’s actions lived out hope through love—they asked a nation built on the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy73 to change, and paid for it with their bodies (and King directly paid with his life). Copeland reminds us that King’s message of love and hope through nonviolent resistance was accompanied by “the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive,” as King put

152

Chapter Six

it in his “I Have a Dream” speech. This raises two potential lines of inquiry. The first has to do with how and whether the call to embody theo-political virtues manifests differently in the contemporary #BlackLivesMatter movement as compared to the civil rights movements of which King and Hamer were part. Specifically, I wonder how these theo-political virtues might fit with or be reflected in the blatant and vocal rejection of respectability politics on the part of many millennial activists of color. In August 2015, Salon published an op-ed from Shannon M. Houston entitled “Respectability will not save us,” in which she argues against another op-ed published in the Washington Post from civil rights activist Barbara Reynolds, who critiqued #BlackLivesMatter for being “confrontational and divisive.”74 I quote Houston at length here: Allow this to be one more voice crying out into the wilderness: Respectability will not save us. And even if it could—even if we had proof that dressing up in our Sunday best and never using profanity and always wearing belts to keep our pants up and never throwing a rock at a police officer guaranteed us safety or equality—it would not be intelligent for us to accept or embrace the notion of respectability. Although Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham coined the term in her seminal text “Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church,” the concept of respectability is rooted in a binary set up not by our ancestors, not by those Church women of the late 1800s, but by the very people who enslaved blacks. Those enslaved were told an encouraging, deadly lie that there were ways to evade the hatred and the violence of whites.75

Houston’s critique of Reynolds recalls Victor Anderson’s 1996 essay, “Beyond Ontological Blackness,” or as he puts it, beyond the blackness that whiteness created, as well as the Afro-pessimist critiques of scholars like Frank B. Wilderson, Jared Sexton, Sadiyya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers, who present critiques that highlight the ways anti-blackness is ontological. King’s own words are frequently used by whites attempting to suppress the voices of people of color, whites who often forget we—and I include myself here as complicit in the system of white supremacy—are the ones who killed King despite his repeated, dogged faithfulness to nonviolence. Perhaps here I could refer to Copeland’s nod to the landscape of paradox in which we find ourselves. What does it look like today to live the theo-political virtues of faith, hope, and love in such a way as to dismantle the economic, social, and political systems that persist in their life-denying stranglehold on our communities? Can we ask with Walter Benjamin in his “Critique of Violence” whether revolutionary violence is necessary to explode these current conditions (keeping in mind that he did not see violence manifested exclusively as physical harm)? Does it violate the spirit of King’s and Hamer’s messages to reserve the right to self-defense in the face of police brutality?



Chapter Six 153

The other line of inquiry following Copeland’s consideration of King and Hamer is about the requirements of self-sacrifice in living out these theo-political virtues, and it is connected to the third major theme I find in Copeland’s chapters: the call for action. Echoing King’s words regarding faith in the redemptive nature of unearned suffering, Copeland writes in her conclusion that the lives of King and Hamer “challenge us to realization of an authentic social transformation rooted in personal and communal sacrifice, in change of mind, of heart and of living.” Both womanists and feminists have critiqued the concept of sacrifice as redemptive; I do not need to rehash the critique here.76 But I will revisit Copeland’s own womanist theology of suffering in “Wading Through Many Sorrows”: that suffering is not to be spiritualized but can be redemptive specifically for black women when they make meaning out of their suffering in partnering “with God for the redemption of black people.”77 Additionally, she emphasizes that this suffering must also be resistant to the structures of exploitation and degradation. Central here is the agency of black women—that they are active in their own processes of meaning-making and resistance. This is related to Karen Baker-Fletcher’s analysis of King in which she stresses that King’s call for sacrifice is not a sacrifice of one’s self, that sacrifice is not an end in and of itself . . . Yet King did not call such an accomplishment [of ways for all people to get along with each other] merely the victory of justice, but insisted that such moments of community across differences were a victory of GOD’s Agape, an in-breaking of the Beloved Community.78

Karen V. Guth asserts with Baker-Fletcher that nonviolence, then, is not strictly an affirmation of suffering but “of voluntary suffering for a just cause,”79 which could be a quite poignant reflection on Hamer’s activism and the resulting effects she endured. Does the call to sacrifice for justice and for social transformation always bear the risk of falling into a spiritualizing of suffering and sacrifice? Can and how might this be prevented? Copeland mentions in a footnote that the Catholic tradition teaches that the theological virtues are “divinely infused” and known only through divine revelation. If faith, hope, and love, as theo-political virtues, are known only—or even primarily—through divine revelation, and these virtues are necessary for responding to the call to action, the question of agency emerges as vital to political theologies of liberation. I cannot offer a response to these questions sparked by Copeland’s chapter except through the lens of my own position in these interlocking systems of oppression. However, if hope is to be a theo-political virtue, then its connection to a theological understanding of hope is essential. In his essay, “For

154

Chapter Six

What Are Whites to Hope?,” Vincent Lloyd asserts, “As a theological virtue, hope is a disposition to have one’s passion directed towards the good—where the good is that which images God, the highest good.”80 He continues, “Understanding hope as a theological virtue rejects the individualism of other conceptions of hope.”81 The danger of hope, particularly for whites, according to Lloyd—and it is important to acknowledge that he is speaking directly to those benefiting from the system of white supremacy—is that even in acting for a “good” goal, “when the privileged act in concert . . . the result is to further privilege.”82 Lloyd asserts in answer to his essay’s titular question that whites are to hope against hope, to hope for the impossible: to renounce privilege.83 Yet he simultaneously asserts that this hope be accompanied by despair so that it does not become a fantasy—another way to re-inscribe privilege.84 Taking seriously Lloyd’s caution that it is an impossible hope to renounce my privilege, and one that should orient me toward a not-yet-existing community,85 I return to Copeland’s words, that the lives of King and Hamer “challenge us to realization of an authentic social transformation rooted in personal and communal sacrifice, in change of mind, of heart and of living.” In his 1962 essay “Letter to My Nephew on the 100th Anniversary of Emancipation,” James Baldwin similarly echoes this call to the task of love and liberation: To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger . . . You don’t be afraid. I said it was intended that you should perish, in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go beyond and behind the white man’s definition . . . You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention and by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men [sic] are your brothers [sic], your lost younger brothers [sic], and if the word “integration” means anything, this is what it means, that we with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.86

In a world as broken as ours by structural evil, the theo-political virtues are only as valuable as their ability to inspire us to critique, tear down, and revolutionize these corrupt systems. Would that we all experience a love that forces us to see reality and inspires the drive to change it. NOTES 1.  See Plato, Republic, trans. Joe Sachs (Newbury Port, MA: Focus Publishing, 2007); Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), idem., Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958); Augustine, The City of God, trans. and ed., Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976); Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas: Selected Political Writings, ed.,



Chapter Six 155

A. P. D’entreves, trans., J. G. Dawson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959); Summa Theologiae, trans. Blackfriars (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).  2. Plato, Republic, 439d-441a. Socrates exhorted Glaucon to a life of the pursuit of virtue: the outcome of that quest he said is the “whole risk for a human being” (618c).   3.  See Jonathan Lear, “The Virtue of the Chickadee,” in Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 80–82.  4. Rosetta Ross, Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2003), xiv.   5.  Roman Catholic teaching considers these as theological virtues, gracious and gratuitous divine gifts that orient human beings to supernatural happiness (the Beatific Vision). Because faith, hope, and love surpass the limitations of human nature, these virtues cannot be acquired by habit or practice. Indeed, their immediate and proper object is God; thus these virtues are divinely infused and are known only through divine revelation. “The theological virtues are the foundation of Christian moral activity; they animate it and give its special character,” Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Part Three, Life in Christ: Section One, Chapter One, The Dignity of the Human Person, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a7.html/.”  6. John Wesley Dobbs referred to the African American neighborhood east of downtown Atlanta, Georgia, as “Sweet Auburn.” This area was designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1976 due to its historical significance: Located on Auburn Avenue is King’s birth home as well as Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King was baptized and where he and his father were pastors. The Mississippi Delta ranks as “one of the world’s most prolific cultural centers. . . . African Americans . . . have carried the message of Black working-class consciousness, pride, and resiliency into national and international arenas. . . . [T]heir vision of social, economic, and cultural affirmation and justice is the mother of several global languages and philosophical systems commonly known as the blues, jazz, rock and roll, and soul,” Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (London: Verso, 1998), 2.   7.  Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 1; Ross, Witnessing and Testifying, 90–91.  8. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 2.  9. Ross, Witnessing and Testifying, 95. 10. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 4. 11.  Ibid., 5–7. 12. Ross, Witnessing and Testifying, 97. 13.  Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1991), 219. 14.  King, “Walk for Freedom,” in A Testament of Hope, 84. 15.  King, “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” in A Testament of Hope, 52. 16.  King, “The Current Crisis in Race Relations,” in A Testament of Hope, 87. 17.  William F. Lynch, Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), 33.

156

Chapter Six

18.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, (ST), I-II, 40, 1. “Now a thing is possible to us in two ways: first, by ourselves; secondly, by means of others, as stated in Ethic. iii. Wherefore, in so far as we hope for anything as being possible to us by means of the Divine assistance, our hope attains God Himself, on whose help it leans. It is therefore evident that hope is a virtue, since it causes a human act to be good and to attain its due rule” (ST, I-II, 17, 1). 19.  “Four conditions distinguish the object of hope. First, that what we hope for is something good; since, properly speaking, hope regards only the good. Second, that what we hope for lies in the future; for hope does not regard that which is present and which we possess already. Third, that what we hope for must be something arduous and difficult to obtain, for we do not hope for something trivial, which lies within our power to have at any time. Fourth, that the difficult thing may be obtained: for one does not hope for that which one cannot attain at all. Hope differs from fear which regards evil, from joy which concerns a present good, and from desire which regards the future good absolutely” (ST, I-II, 40; 25, 1). 20.  ST, I-II, 32, 3 and 34, 4: Hope is conducive to action. 21.  King, “The Playboy Interview,” 345, in A Testament of Hope. 22.  James H. Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 147–48. 23.  Martin Luther King, Jr., “Address to the First Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) Mass Meeting,” in A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., eds. Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepherd (New York: Warner Books, 2001), 11–12. 24.  King, “An Experiment in Love,” in A Testament of Hope, 17. 25.  See, James H. Cone, “Calling the Oppressors to Account: Justice, Love, and Hope in Black Religion,” in The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption, eds. Quinton Hosford Dixie and Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 74–85. 26.  John J. Ansbro, Martin Luther King, Jr., The Making of a Mind (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984), 187; see also Aquinas, ST, I-II, 17, 3, “Whether One Man May Hope for Another’s Eternal Happiness.” 27. Ansbro, Martin Luther King, Jr., The Making of a Mind, 1. 28.  Bernard Lonergan, “The Absence of God in Modern Culture,” in A Second Collection, eds. William F. J. Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrrell (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), 115; see “Natural Right and Historical Mindedness,” in A Third Collection, ed. Frederick E. Crowe (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), 170–72. 29.  Lonergan, “The Absence of God in Modern Culture,” in A Second Collection, 115–16. 30.  Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope (London and New York: Continuum, 1994), 3. 31.  Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, “The Shape of Time,” in The Future as God’s Gift: Explorations in Christian Eschatology, eds., David Fergusson and Marcel Sarot (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 61. 32.  Walter Brueggemann, Tradition for Crisis (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1968), 124. 33. Ross, Witnessing and Testifying, 98.



Chapter Six 157

34.  Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3. 35.  Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York: Simon Schuster, 2001), 254. 36.  Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 19. 37. Ross, Witnessing and Testifying, 100; Marsh, God’s Long Summer, 11–12; Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 51–54. 38. Marsh, God’s Long Summer, 23–24. 39.  Ibid., 23. 40. Ross, Witnessing and Testifying, 124. 41. Ibid., 112. 42. Ibid., 117. 43. Ibid. 44. Ansbro, Martin Luther King, Jr., The Making of a Mind, 1. 45.  Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 18–19. 46. Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America, 26. 47. Ansbro, Martin Luther King, Jr., The Making of a Mind, 2. 48. King, Stride toward Freedom, 97. 49.  King, “An Experiment in Love,” in A Testament of Hope, 19. 50.  Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), 105 and 106. 51.  King, “An Experiment in Love,” in A Testament of Hope, 19. 52. Ibid. 53.  King, “The Ethical Demands for Integration,” in A Testament of Hope, 118. 54.  Ibid., 123. 55.  Bernard Lonergan, “Finality, Love, Marriage,” in Collection, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 27. 56.  Vincent Lloyd, “For What Are Whites to Hope?” Political Theology 17, no. 2 (2016): 180. 57.  Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Self(e): Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 55. 58.  Of course, there is no real discussion of what happened when an Athenian woman had a child with a non-Athenian man. This is not unimportant for this discussion, but does not refute Reiss, either. 59. Thomas R. Martin, Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 113–14. 60.  Reiss, 54–55. 61.  Ibid., 55. 62. Ibid. 63.  Ibid. Likewise, Josiah Ober argues that the oikos was “the primary productive unit of polis society.” See Ober, “The Polis as Society: Aristotle, John Rawls and the Athenian Social Contract,” in The Ancient Greek City-State: Symposium on the Occa-

158

Chapter Six

sion of the 250th Anniversary of The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, July, 1–4 1992, ed. Mogens Herman Hansen (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1993), 133. 64.  Martin, 135. 65.  Reiss, 55. 66.  Kate Cooper quoted in Reiss, 55. 67.  Reiss, 56. 68.  Ibid., 54. 69.  Ibid., 57. 70. See, for instance, Kei Eun Chang’s argument in The Community, the Individual, and the Common Good that the body metaphor “promotes the reciprocity of the community and thus demonstrates the mutual benefit of working for the whole” (42). Chang, The Community, the Individual, and the Common Good: To Idion and To Sympheron in the Greco-Roman World and Paul (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013). 71.  For more on this notion, see Thomas W. Smith, “Aristotle on the Conditions for and Limits of the Common Good,” The American Political Science Review 93, no. 3 (1999): 625–36. 72.  For example, see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1137b34–1138a2. 73.  This term comes from the work of bell hooks. See, for example, the chapter “Understanding Patriarchy,” The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Atria Books, 2004). 74. Barbara Reynolds, “I was a civil rights activist in the 1960s. But it’s hard for me to get behind Black Lives Matter,” Washington Post, August 24, 2015, accessed April 14, 2016: para. 3, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything /wp/2015/08/24/i-was-a-civil-rights-activist-in-the-1960s-but-its-hard-for-me-to-get -behind-black-lives-matter/?postshare=5221440433170944. 75. Shannon M. Houston, “Respectability Will Not Save Us,” Salon, August 25, 2015, accessed April 14, 2016: para. 9, http://www.salon.com/2015/08/25 /respectability_will_not_save_us_black_lives_matter_is_right_to_reject_the_dignity _and_decorum_mandate_handed_down_to_us_from_slavery. 76.  See, for instance, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Ties That Bind: Domestic Violence against Women,” in Women Resisting Violence: Spirituality for Life, ed. Mary John Mananzan (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996); and Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). 77.  M. Shawn Copeland, “Wading through Many Sorrows,” in Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue: Black Theology in the Slave Narrative, eds. Dwight N. Hopkins and George C. L. Cummings, 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 171. 78.  Karen Baker-Fletcher and Garth K. Baker-Fletcher, My Sister, My Brother: Womanist and Xodus God Talk (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002), 53.



Chapter Six 159

79.  Karen V. Guth, Christian Ethics at the Boundary: Feminism and Theologies of Public Life, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 163. 80.  Lloyd, 177. 81.  Ibid., 178. 82. Ibid. 83.  Ibid., 179. 84. Ibid. 85.  Ibid., 180. 86.  James Baldwin, “Letter to My Nephew,” The Progressive, January 1, 1962, para. 10–11, http://progressive.org/magazine/letter-nephew.

WORKS CITED Ansbro, John J. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Making of a Mind. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984. Aquinas, Thomas. Aquinas: Selected Political Writings. Edited by A. P. D’entreves and translated by J. G. Dawson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959. ———. Summa Theologiae. Translated by Blackfriars. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by David Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. ———. Politics. Translated by Ernest Barker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. Augustine. The City of God. Translated by and edited by Henry Bettenson. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976. Baker-Fletcher, Karen, and Garth K. Baker-Fletcher. My Sister, My Brother: Womanist and Xodus God Talk. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002. Baldwin, James. “Letter to My Nephew.” The Progressive, January 1, 1962, http:// progressive.org/magazine/letter-nephew. Bauckham, Richard, and Trevor Hart. “The Shape of Time.” In The Future as God’s Gift: Explorations in Christian Eschatology, edited by David Fergusson and Marcel Sarot, 41–72. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. bell hooks. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Atria Books, 2004. Brock, Rita Nakashima, and Rebecca Ann Parker. Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. Brueggemann, Walter. Tradition for Crisis. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1968. Chang, Kei Eun. The Community, the Individual, and the Common Good: To Idion and To Sympheron in the Greco-Roman World and Paul. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

160

Chapter Six

Coakley, Sarah. Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Cone, James H. “Calling the Oppressors to Account: Justice, Love, and Hope in Black Religion.” In The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption, edited by Quinton Hosford Dixie and Cornel West, 74–85. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. ———. Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991. Copeland, M. Shawn. “Wading through Many Sorrows.” In Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue: Black Theology in the Slave Narrative, edited by Dwight N. Hopkins and George C. L. Cummings, 157–71, 192–97. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003. Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schüssler. “Ties That Bind: Domestic Violence against Women.” In Women Resisting Violence: Spirituality for Life, edited by Mary John Mananzan, 39–55. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Hope. London & New York: Continuum, 1994. Guth, Karen V. Christian Ethics at the Boundary: Feminism and Theologies of Public Life. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015. Houston, Shannon M. “Respectability Will Not Save Us.” Salon, August 25, 2015. http://www.salon.com/2015/08/25/respectability_will_not_save_us_black_lives _matter_is_right_to_reject_the_dignity_and_decorum_mandate_handed_down_to _us_from_slavery. King, Martin Luther, Jr. A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepherd. New York: Warner Books, 2001. ———. Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Harper & Row, 1958. ———. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by James M. Washington. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1991. Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Lee, Chana Kai. For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Lloyd, Vincent. “For What Are Whites to Hope?” Political Theology 17, no. 2 (2016): 168–81. Lonergan, Bernard. “The Absence of God in Modern Culture.” In A Second Collection, edited by William F. J. Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrrell, 101–16. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974. ———. “Finality, Love, Marriage.” In Collection, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 4, 17–52. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. ———. Method in Theology. New York: Herder & Herder, 1972. ———. “Natural Right and Historical Mindedness.” In A Third Collection, edited by Frederick E. Crowe, 169–83. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985. Lynch, William F. Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974.



Chapter Six 161

Marsh, Charles. God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Martin, Thomas R. Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Ober, Josiah. “The Polis as Society: Aristotle, John Rawls and the Athenian Social Contract.” In The Ancient Greek City-State: Symposium on the Occasion of the 250th Anniversary of The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, July, 1–4 1992, edited by Mogens Herman Hansen, 129–60. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1993. Olson, Lynne. Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970. New York: Simon Schuster, 2001. Plato. Republic. Translated by Joe Sachs. Newbury Port, MA: Focus Publishing, 2007. Reiss, Timothy J. Mirages of the Self(e): Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Reynolds, Barbara. “I was a civil rights activist in the 1960s. But it’s hard for me to get behind Black Lives Matter.” Washington Post, August 24, 2015. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/08/24/i-was-a-civil-rights -activist-in-the-1960s-but-its-hard-for-me-to-get-behind-black-lives-matter/?post -share=5221440433170944. Ross, Rosetta. Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2003. Smith, Thomas W. “Aristotle on the Conditions for and Limits of the Common Good.” The American Political Science Review 93, no. 3 (1999): 625–36. Williams, Delores S. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993. Woods, Clyde. Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. London: Verso, 1998.

Chapter Seven

Faith, Hope, and Love in an Age of Terror Elaine A. Robinson

THE CONTEXT The horrors play out with regularity. Smoke filled corridors, grainy images of shattered facades, and scattered bodies. The sounds of sirens and screams; hands frantically digging through rubble. Paris. Brussels. London. Boston. New York. We live in an age of terror. “We” are the Western, industrialized, colonizing powers of modernity. In particular, for the purposes of this chapter, “we” represents the United States, which is, perhaps, the last in the line of modernity’s national powers.1 While the intellectual credibility of the modern assumptions of the West has diminished, we are yet to delineate well the contours of the emerging era. We are shaped by our intellectual assumptions and beliefs, though these inevitably arise in response to the situation and context of people’s lives in particular cultures. Few still believe in steady progress through the wonders of science and technology, culminating in a utopian society. We question the notion of an autonomous rational self, an intelligent moral agent, as the heights and depths of human existence and the central character in the creation of the good. Individualism runs rampant; social capital is on the wane or, at least, in the process of reconfiguration. Political rhetoric has declined to the level of a bar brawl with supporters striking out physically at the opposition. The level of income inequality is astonishing, and the grip of the “one percent” grows tighter. The world and the United States remain contested spaces of conflict, despite the ways in which technology has made us all neighbors. Indeed, it appears we are held captive by the dying throes of the modern assumptions and late capitalism, creating a milieu of pervasive, inescapable terror. As we shall subsequently argue, the modern mindset has, in many ways, structured the injustices and exclusions embedded in the contemporary society. 163

164

Chapter Seven

In arguing the existence of an age of terror, I do not equate terror with terrorism, though the spread and prevalence of terrorism indeed cast a long shadow on the age of terror. Terrorism serves as a focal point commandeering the attention of many citizens, as if it is the greatest danger our society faces. Certainly, terrorists play a role in generating and sustaining a state of terror, but I maintain that terrorism and highlighting terrorist acts shift the focus away from the most pressing, most dehumanizing forms of terror that are contrary to the fully human existence proclaimed by the Gospel. We should also resist conceiving of terror as somehow equated to violence, though violence, too, plays a significant role in an age of terror. Even so, terror can exist in the absence of physical violence. While the theology of Miroslav Volf can provide insights into the age of terror, my telos is not to suggest an analysis of violence with an eye on reconciliation as the cessation of violence. I do not intend to employ a Girardian explanatory theory rooted in a scapegoat mechanism, as if one grand narrative could account for the complexities of societal and religious expressions generative of terror. My argument also diverges from the sense of Tillichian existential angst rooted in the modern tradition of the autonomous rational self, as I will propose a collective and communal quality to terror, as well as a material physicality that Tillich often denies. Though clearly some existential angst does exist, it represents merely a shard of terror’s archaeology. Terror, in its most basic sense, is characterized by extreme, even paralyzing fear in the presence or perceived presence of danger or evil.2 From a Christian theological perspective, the presence of evil must be taken seriously. Terror is systemic. It is psychological. It is spiritual when conceived of in relation to evil. Terror admits a collective quality at a time when social capital—perhaps a counterweight to terror—has diminished or, at the very least, has morphed in its nature and expression in the United States.3 But terror, like evil, is not simply in our minds. It must not be reduced to a psychological state akin to mass hysteria. Terror becomes enfleshed in our world and within the United States in particular forms requiring sophisticated, intentional responses. The way of Christ demands that we act to overcome evil and death wherever possible by means of the goodness and power of God. Our task is to replicate God’s life-furthering mission in the face of terror. Overcoming death-dealing structures of existence and promoting the cessation of terror is what the Hebrew scriptures call shalom—a concept known and embodied by Jesus of Nazareth. Commonly translated as “peace” or the cessation of conflict, a fuller accounting of shalom leads toward a nuanced translation that includes healing, wholeness, and the fullness of life for all of creation. It represents the universe as God intends it to be. In significant ways, shalom encapsulates the theological concept of salvation;4 it is what the resur-



Chapter Seven 165

rected Christ offers to his disciples (Luke 24:36; John. 14:27 20:21). Shalom is the telos of faith, hope, and love in both the present and the eschatological sense. Unlike terrorism, which has a dramatic and visible expression that lends such acts to iconic imagery viewed ad infinitum on social and other media, terror is a more subtle phenomenon shrouded in deniability and the logic of personal culpability. Systemic sin and the resulting evil belong to others, to the past, and to the oppressed. Yet, in the United States, terror exists and no one is exempt from participation. A number of different systemic, institutional forms of terror cry out not only to be acknowledged, but to be dismantled. Terror is eviction and homelessness. Terror is mass incarceration targeting select populations. Terror is the diminishment of public education draining urban communities of hope in the future. Terror is the lynching of black bodies in the streets of America, often by police forces ostensibly existing to secure the public good. Terror is debilitating illness when health care remains largely unaffordable and inaccessible for a large segment of the population. Terror is the lack of mental health care resources leading to a burgeoning prison population and homelessness. Terror is capital increasingly concentrated in the “one percent,” eroding the middle class while further diminishing the access to living wages for the working poor. Terror, rather than an external phenomenon perpetrated by persons who are readily labeled as “not us,” as “them,” as “other,” is a function and force of late modernity and late capitalism whose harbinger is the implosion of society rather than realization of the American dream or utopian society. It is the antithesis of the Gospel message of shalom, wholeness and happiness (blessedness) for all of creation. Americans may argue for a strengthened defensive posture vis-àvis terrorist groups “abroad,” but the greatest danger to the flourishing of life lies within our institutions and systems, including the church. As Miroslav Volf aptly suggests, “those who seek to overcome evil must fight it first of all in their own selves”—though I might amend “selves” to “communities” or “societies.”5 To further distinguish the concept of terror within the United States and its collective quality from the misguided emphasis on terrorism, terror within the United States has often been defined in terms of demented individual actors who defy the logic of a rational moral agent and are, therefore, anomalous. Violent acts within the United States fall prey to the notion of an autonomous individual lacking the presumed rationality representative of the modern mindset. Lee Butler, in his construction of a pastoral care approach to terror, points toward this individualization of terror. He illustrates the ways in which domestic terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh and John Allen Muhammad are portrayed as anomalous instances of “deranged” persons perpetrating

166

Chapter Seven

acts of terror from within. After all, who in their right mind would attack the United States? Here we could include more recent examples as well, such as the violent actors at Virginia Tech, in Aurora, and at an elementary school in Newtown. Although in contradistinction to the present argument, Butler equates terror with terrorism and focuses on psychological trauma, his central point is nonetheless pertinent: we must acknowledge and address “the terror that inhabits the American psyche,” and was introduced at the founding of the nation.6 In the origins of the United States, racial and ethnic persons,7 women, the poor (i.e., men without property), and persons of differing sexual orientations8 were excluded from participation and subject to genocide. Although it should be unnecessary to cite the long history of genocide within the United States beginning with the annihilation of Native peoples and enslavement of Africans and then African Americans, countless Americans continue to deny, ignore, discount, or sidestep this historical reality and any personal entanglements, including unearned privilege, with the past or its consequences. From a historical perspective, the United States has a lengthy record of dehumanization, which continues in various forms today. “To live with terror,” claims Butler, “is to live with a constant fear so intense that there is no place where one feels safe.”9 Regrettably, for many people, the church (though not all churches) is not a safe place. To those facing homelessness, incarceration, depression or other mental illnesses, abject poverty, the failure of school systems, a lack of adequate health care or nutritious food, constant unemployment or underemployment, and the disapproval, paternalism, or indifference of the church, the terror of daily life is not perpetrated by distant, unknown individuals filled with hatred of the United States. Such terror is not wrought at the hands of a single, deranged individual. Terror is not simply a psychological condition, though it relentlessly attacks the human psyche. Rather, terror is an all-encompassing force rooted in the systemic scarcity of the most basic necessities of life and the failure of institutions to act in ways that facilitate the possibility and reality of abundant life for all. This represents a failure of the church at its most essential level. It is the disposition of evil, and it is the face of terror in the twenty-first century, at least within the United States. The pervasive nature of terror as systemic scarcity is a theological problem, located in difficult dimensions of theodicy and compelling an ecclesiological response. Despite this reality of terror as a context that shapes the day-to-day existence of many, I do not suggest that the conditions of society are worse than those which existed in previous generations. As political rhetoric of returning to the “greatness of America” permeates the media in the 2016 election cycle, any sense of the nation’s previous greatness must be interrogated in light of



Chapter Seven 167

the history of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism (or the concentration of capital) that lie at the very foundations of the nation.10 These isms are, of course, sources and conditions of exclusion, marginalization, and dehumanization that enable life to be shaped on behalf of some and at the expense of others. Such sources and conditions are contrary to the message of the Gospel, the God story of fully human existence, flourishing in community, and healing and wholeness for all of creation. In the face of systemic scarcity, the Gospel signifies life abundant, not simply in a spiritual sense, but in the sense of the basic material provisions necessary for a life of flourishing. In light of the condition of terror which shapes the context of contemporary U.S. society, considering the theological virtues might appear nonsensical or out of touch with reality. As a graduate student two decades ago, I was sometimes critiqued for asking the question of goodness when others dwelt in theodicy. They are, of course, two halves of the same coin. Do we enter into the theological problem through the presence or perceived presence of evil as it leads to the condition of terror? Or can we explore the conditions under which the beneficence of God might become manifest in greater measure? Perhaps our best avenue is to investigate both theodicy and the possibility of God’s way transforming situations of evil, despair, and death. As a Christian theologian, I believe in the power and reality of God. I hope in God’s promises of abundant life and radical relationship. I seek to be possessed by and actively express to others the life-furthering love that is God. In other words, reconsidering the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love might provide a basis for a Christian response to the terror produced by relentless, debilitating systemic scarcity and its counterpart, unearned privilege. My argument below develops in three movements which draw upon the contemporary context, scriptural warrants, and theological interlocutors, including my younger scholarly self as expressed in These Three: The Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love.11 In the first part, I address the symbolic nature of Christian belief and practice, arguing that the central symbol of the cross reinforces the systemic oppression and scarcity of the current age of terror. Instead, foregrounding the incarnation forms the Christ follower to be an agent of transformation in specific contexts. Upon this basis, I then turn to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love as a source of incarnate life, of God’s life dwelling within the human community, as well as restoring connections among the whole of creation. These virtues defy the logic of scarcity and individual gain and point toward communal, relational abundance. This second movement addresses the age of terror in light of the diminishment or disregard of faith, hope, and love. In the final part, I turn to a brief ecclesiological reflection as not only indicative of the central theological problem of the twenty-first century, but also as an opening to revitalizing the

168

Chapter Seven

work of God in forming the Christ character through the theological virtues, so that the church might enter into and dismantle, in tangible ways, the terror within which too many people, both within and beyond the U.S. borders, are consigned to exist. The church, as the incarnate representation of Christ in the world, exists to be an agent and site of shalom. It exists to stand in the midst of evil, fear, and systemic scarcity as a witness to life and that abundantly. BEGINNING AGAIN WITH THE INCARNATION If the claim proffered above is even partly accurate; namely, that the church and those who profess to follow Christ participate in the production of terror in the United States, how might we construct a theological response rooted in reclaiming, rekindling, employing, or deploying the theological virtues toward the telos of shalom and the furthering of life? It is a dangerous question. Given, on the one hand, the multitudes in desperate need of hope and the basics of human life in the face of oppressive, death dealing systems of terror and, on the other, the comfortable minority and complacent swath of Americans who have the luxury of viewing terror as the acts of deranged individuals or distant enemies with improvised explosive devices, how do we recover the theological virtues so as to avoid spiritualizing life in Christ and to resist reinforcing the status quo through a displacement of transformation to the by-and-by? This is what makes theological inquiry into faith, hope, and love a dangerous pursuit. Our theological inquiry must be so clear, so tightly woven, so unmistakably connected to the Gospel and the real lives of people that it serves as an agential, transformative force in the specific, dehumanizing conditions of this age, society, and world. Theological inquiry cannot be divorced from an ethical commitment to furthering God’s mission in the real world.12 Perhaps one way to navigate faith, hope, and love in an age of terror begins with taking a step back from the cross and its contemporary symbolic resonance. Compelling and transformative Christian belief and practice are unmistakably rooted in the efficacy of the “deep symbols” and “words of power”— per Edward Farley—which define and enliven them.13 As Tillich succinctly expressed, symbols both point toward and participate in that toward which they point. They perform a vital function within communities, including communities of faith. For Farley, Deep symbols . . . arise within and express the historical determinacy of a community. The community’s particular character, tradition, and situation are the locus of deep symbols. This means that deep symbols are historical, and as



Chapter Seven 169

historical, they are relative to a particular community and thus are changeable. They can rise and empower and they can lose their power and disappear.14

He further delineates four central characteristics of these deep symbols: “normativity, enchantment, fallibility (relativity and corruptibility), and location in a master narrative.”15 In his use of this language of a “master narrative,” Farley points toward the sense of a symbolic universe that arises within a historical community and shapes its self-understanding. As communities and contexts change, these symbolic frameworks can lose their power. In their normative function, deep symbols “are ideals that exercise a certain transcendence over a community and its members. . . . They embody a kind of vision of what the community or its members should be and do.”16 Enchantment refers to “the way finite reality participates in sacred power, the infinite creativity” or, in other words, the sense of mystery, connectedness, and interplay of good and evil.17 The final characteristic, the sense of fallibility, suggests that deep symbols are: (1) historically relative as products of particular communities, times, and contexts that may not carry the same power in later historical and social contexts, and (2) morally corruptible “as idols and as instruments of corrupted social power.”18 Farley concludes that when deep symbols fail, they serve as “instruments of corrupted power, [and] can mirror the society’s stratification of privilege.”19 Farley’s proposal provides a valuable framework for reconsidering the symbol of the cross and crucifixion within the symbolic universe of Christian theology in an age of terror. Could the cross, today, serve as an instrument of corrupted social power more than to point toward and participate in the reality of God? Once we understand that symbolic meaning can ebb and flow, we can identify at least two distortions of the symbolism of the cross at work in the present age of terror. First, too often the Christian life is reduced to the appropriation of the crucifixion, posited in terms of what Jesus Christ “has done for me,” for the forgiveness of “my” sins. Shaped by the modern mindset, the cross bears this individualizing function, whereby faith in Jesus is reduced to a personal confession and reception of justification. Given that the individual has appropriated the salvific reality offered in the crucifixion of Jesus, nothing more need be done. Rather than pointing toward and participating in the fullness of God, this distortion both denies the radical relationality restored in the incarnation—the inescapably communal nature of the Christian way—and functions not to justify, but to self-justify. We might say that the cor curvum in se, the heart turned in upon itself, is reinforced rather than reoriented. The individualization of the crucifixion thus leads to the cross as a symbol and an instrument of self-justification. In an age of terror, the cross symbolizes and justifies the denial of systemic sin, as the individual points to the forgiveness

170

Chapter Seven

of personal sin and assumes the defensive posture of not participating in or bearing responsibility for oppression and its counterpart, unearned privilege. There is a second distortion of the symbolic value of the cross present in an age of terror. James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree assists us in exposing this distortion, though my conclusion diverges from Cone’s. For Cone, the juxtaposition of the cross with the lynching tree raises the central concern of justice: “How to reconcile the gospel message of liberation with the reality of black oppression.”20 Cone suggests that for African Americans faced with the dehumanizing and death-dealing reality of lynching at the hands of white, often “Christian” Americans, the cross served as a source of strength and hope, as “an amazing experience of salvation, an eschatological promise of freedom that gave transcendent meaning to black lives that no lynching tree could take from them.”21 The cross gave African Americans power in the midst of powerlessness and oppression: “The more black people struggled against white supremacy, the more they found in the cross the spiritual power to resist the violence they so often suffered.”22 For African Americans confronted with the terror of lynching arising out of a system of white supremacy, the symbolism of the cross functioned to give life and to affirm their humanity. The cross represented not the death of the lynching tree, but redemption and life.23 Cone’s argument is powerful and poignant. It challenges us to recognize the symbolic power of the cross in the presence of death-dealing systems of oppression and dehumanization. In no way do I wish to deny the significance of the crucifixion as a deep symbol and a life-furthering resource among African Americans faced with the terror of lynching. As a privileged white woman, I certainly traverse the following ground with care and an openness to critique. Nonetheless, in the present age of terror where white supremacy and systems of oppression have become far more subtle and insidious, the symbolic value of the cross participates in and, perhaps, even reinforces the terror rather than exposing it as evil. The cross was an instrument of torture utilized by the Roman authorities, and in the death of Jesus, the religious leaders and those oppressed by the Roman Empire participated in the terror. When, today, the cross functions as jewelry and home décor, it reflects not the terror of oppression and dehumanization that human beings perpetrate upon one another, often in the name of God, but rather, an escape mechanism that allows Christians to linger passively in comfort rather than to actively resist evil. This form of distortion may be functional in contemporary black churches as well as white congregations. Many contemporary churches fail to attend to justice, to the biblical demand to care for the widow, the orphan, the stranger. Many contemporary churches ignore the plight of the poor, the homeless, the



Chapter Seven 171

incarcerated, the death-dealing systems of our society in favor of emotional comfort and demand-free faith. A recent commentary on the website Fusion is illustrative. Tyree Boyd-Pates, a millennial voice, writes, “I stopped going to church about six months after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. My church at the time, a Pentecostal black church in South Los Angeles, had made no mention of police brutality or Black Lives Matter, and I couldn’t help but interpret their silence to mean that my life didn’t matter much either.”24 He goes on to say that after church-hopping from black to white churches and back again, the Christian message he encountered was devoid of concern for justice and the furthering of life in the face of death-dealing systems. Boyd-Pates’s critique coincides with that of the Black Lives Matters activist Shamell Bell, “who stopped attending her church after it didn’t take the time to acknowledge the Charleston church shooting last year,” leading her to believe that “Jesus was in the streets and so should we [be].”25 If the cross does not serve to provide for resistance, to turn our hearts outward from self-justifying and complacent existence, it has lost its power to point toward or participate in the divine reality. Its normative function becomes a reinforcement of social power and moral corruption and, as such, its primacy among contemporary Christian symbols requires the critique of costly grace. While providing an anesthetizing level of personal comfort among those with privilege—whether real or imagined—the crucifixion becomes a symbol of death, even torture, in the context of the church’s failure to recognize and engage the terror of systemic scarcity. When we prioritize death as the center of life in Christ, while turning a blind eye to our participation in homelessness, addiction, mass incarceration, substandard education, and even contemporary forms of lynching,26 the need to reconceptualize our symbolic universe becomes evident. My point is not to suggest eliminating the cross from our symbolic universe, but rather, consciously foregrounding the incarnation as a corrective. Traditionally, of course, the cross symbolizes the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth as the location or moment of atonement, which is a theological necessity if we hold that reconciliation requires God’s intervention.27 But we move too readily to the appropriation of forgiveness, forgetting or ignoring the fact that we, ourselves, condemned Jesus to death. We, ourselves, could not grasp God’s message of life and shalom, but turned the message into one of death. It was not simply the ancient world that was threatened by God’s message, it is every generation and person whose life is privileged by participation in systems of human making and for whom God’s message of abundant life for all is threatening, particularly when it requires laying down one’s privilege. Atonement, however, need not be located in the cross, but is effective in Jesus’s incarnation. I do not suggest that privileged Christians

172

Chapter Seven

should dispense with the crucifixion, but that its contemporary associations, its diminished power as a deep Christian symbol, and its participation in corrupted social power must be identified. The reclamation or reconstruction of the cross can be undertaken once symbolic primacy is accorded to the incarnation, to include the ministry of Jesus. The symbol of the incarnation can redirect the focus of Christian belief and practice and can challenge the corruption of the crucifixion in this age of terror. Our theological understanding of the incarnation is rooted in the Antiochene school of thought with its emphasis on the two natures of Jesus in which humanity and divinity are united or, we might suggest, reunited. In this joining of God and human, there is not only a soteriological reality but also a moral concern, as the point of incarnation, God’s intervention in the person Jesus, enables sin to be overcome. In other words, God and humanity are reconciled, they embrace in this one particular point that precedes the cross. Thus, the Chalcedonian formula claims that Jesus Christ is “truly God and truly human” in which each nature is preserved. Salvation is not deification, but expresses the possibility of becoming fully human, unthwarted by sin, in radical relationship to God and the whole of creation. The incarnation, then, points us toward two significant theological concerns that may enable us to reconceive Christian belief and practice as a transformative force in an age of terror and to reclaim the function of the theological virtues: (1) incarnation as the locus of atonement, and (2) particularity as the locus of discipleship and, more explicitly, agency in an age of terror. Both the gift of reconciliation or atonement found in the incarnation and the demand of agency or active discipleship in the particular conditions of existence precede the crucifixion and should be the central concern for theological and ecclesial discourse today. First, the atonement can be located in the incarnation, rather than the crucifixion. The incarnation is the moment when God first said, “This is my body given for you.” God affirms the goodness of flesh and human existence and reconciles, in this one point, the sinfulness of humanity as it turns to embrace the divine. It is God’s affirmation of life, well before Jesus’s death and the reaffirmation of life in the resurrection. The failure of humanity to accept and claim the reconciliation present in the incarnation does not delimit its efficacy. The incarnation represents the gift of reconciliation or radical relationality in this joining of God with the particular human, Jesus. Second, the incarnation demands the replication of God’s embrace of particularity, embodiment, and relationship that is less readily recognized in the universalizing function of the crucifixion. Gustavo Gutiérrez writes of the incarnation as “an irruption smelling of the stable.” Incarnation is organic, earthy, and material. It meets us on the margins with the offer of abundant



Chapter Seven 173

life in the face of systemic scarcity and unearned privilege. Gutiérrez explains that, “[t]he incarnation is the irruption of God into human history: an incarnation of littleness and service in the midst of power and arrogance of the mighty of this world; an irruption that smells of the stable.”28 The demand of God to enter into the particularity of our own existence in order to confront unjust powers and to bring healing and wholeness to a suffering world is represented throughout the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The demand Jesus places on his followers, as described in the Gospels, is to join him in the work of healing and transformation: to feed the hungry, to heal the sick, to invite outsiders to be in relationship, to tear down systems that marginalize and exclude. It is not a call to transform the world, which is the overarching work of God, but to act in the face of specific suffering and evil encountered in the lives of people and communities. Significantly, in the words of Matthew 25:40—“just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me”—there is an inversion present in the outflow of the Gospel as it engenders abundance, for the recipient is the incarnate Jesus. The incarnation points us not only toward acting as the body of Christ, but also toward recognizing Jesus, or perhaps the imago Dei, already present in and among those persons suffering under unjust systems of terror. The infant God-human, the point of reconciliation, requires our embrace, our love, our care if the infant is to live and thrive. Over and again, as followers of Jesus become agents of transformation, the incarnate life is replicated and reproduced. The incarnation thus serves to focus the follower’s attention on the concrete existence of those whom he or she encounters and toward the radical relationship that is characteristic of the incarnate One. In sum, the distortion of the cross leads to universalizing the Christian way as an individualized moment of justification; the symbolic renewal of the incarnation leads to the particularity of existence in need of transformation as a communal reality into which we all are inextricably woven with the living God. Rather than Christology pointing us toward the often dehumanizing claim of the privileged and the legal, social, and ecclesial institutions of the society that all persons are the same, Christology leads us to an affirmation of difference in the concrete situation of God’s affirmation of particularity. The incarnation, fulfilled in the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, demonstrates the follower’s task is to enter with Jesus into the specificity of existence to attend to societal conditions: the injustices, the hatred, the oppressive systems, the exclusions, as well as the lack of faith, hope, and love—all the while recognizing that the excluded and oppressed are not somehow less fully human than we, for there, too, is Jesus. Theologically, the particularity of our lives and the situation of terror precedes the universality emphasized

174

Chapter Seven

in the crucifixion. To enter into this incarnate gift and its demand, to receive incarnate life that leads us to confront the evil of terror as systemic scarcity, a connection to God must be made and sustained. The theological virtues of faith, hope, and love entwine to form an umbilical cord, a lifeline to God, existing for the sake of entering into the world’s particularity, in order to overcome evil and to make real and present the radical relationality that characterizes and fosters abundant life. When followers of Christ claim the reconciliation proffered in the incarnation and accept the demand of entering into tangible acts of healing and wholeness in the world with Jesus and to Jesus, the Christ character takes shape within them, and the salvific work of God in Christ in the Holy Spirit in the world, shalom, is cultivated and expands. This incarnational reality is replicated among us and through us. The Christ character represents the fullness of human flourishing within concrete, material existence, and it is inescapably communal. It is the expression of fully human existence in which we inhabit radical relationality and become agents of transformation in the specific sites in which we live. Faith, hope, and love empower and enliven the Christ character within us and enable us to participate in God and the good life in which all may flourish. THE THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES IN AN AGE OF TERROR In this age of terror, in a time when societal injustices and systems of deprivation and unearned privilege are flourishing at the expense of human life and the well-being of the planet, how do we hold onto faith, hope, and love as qualities of an abundant life, a life that not only receives abundantly, but gives abundantly? While modernity might have posited that human beings could discover a universal set of moral principles leading toward a utopian community on earth, there is little evidence that human beings, unaided by grace, are capable of creating and sustaining human flourishing and the radical relationality offered in Christ. Without the grace of God which reorients existence toward praxis and justice, human communities, including the church, consist of self-interested individuals whose hearts are turned inward upon themselves (cor curvum in se). As we turn instead to embody incarnate life, to receive the grace of God in the form of the theological virtues, the possibility of radical relationality emerges. Faith, hope, and love become the source of connectedness, a lifeline to God, others, and the whole of creation. They create the conditions under which terror in the pervasive form of systemic scarcity might be confronted and transformed.



Chapter Seven 175

More than a decade ago, I first considered the meaning of the theological virtues in light of the contemporary American society. The theological virtues of faith, hope, and love are the connective tissues that nourish us with the grace and presence of God, forming in us the Christ character. Though my constructive position now regards the demand of praxis as increasingly crucial, I continue to view these three “as intertwined threads that connect us to God like an umbilical cord, unseen yet very real, providing us with nourishment and enabling us to grow to maturity and to be active, concerned citizens of both the city of God and of humanity.”29 Although I am not persuaded that an Augustinian rendering of two cities with its binary distinction is particularly useful, I continue to hold the metaphor of the umbilical cord as descriptive, both for its organic nature that keeps us grounded in the particularities of embodied life and for its sense of a radical relationality that exists between Mother and child. To draw the metaphor farther, anatomically, an umbilical cord has three intertwined vessels: two arteries which carry deoxygenated blood and one vein which carries oxygenated blood to the fetus’s heart. These three vessels provide the unborn child with the necessary oxygen and nourishment, while removing harmful toxins and oxygen-depleted blood. The two arteries leading outward from the fetus might be conceived of as faith and hope which we direct toward God, while the vein that carries oxygenated blood to the fetus might be considered the virtue of love received from Love itself. It is the very source of life. These three vessels, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love function as our lifeline to God, infusing us with the possibility of a transformed and transforming way of living. They are inherently relational qualities that cannot be separated from each other or severed from the divine if we hope to flourish as human beings and engender flourishing for the whole of creation. Of course, each of the three virtues serves a different function in the incarnate life of the Christ follower, and each is challenged by various forms of disenchantment, dispute, or diminishment in the context of this age of terror. In brief, faith shapes what we know to be true and good. It is a confidence that God’s way is in our best interest, despite more immediate or tangible claims to the contrary. Faith serves to disorient us as it challenges societal standards of the good life and to reorient us toward the divine reality. Hope shapes how we live and act in the midst of a suffering and unjust world. It provides the momentum for our journey and serves as a compass by which we travel toward God, anchored in God’s nature and promises. Faith and hope function existentially, as they enable us to resist human norms and constructs that generate systems of terror and, instead, to pursue the way of love. As we

176

Chapter Seven

direct our faith and hope toward God, we are possessed by love. For faith and hope to exist, they must be infused with love. Love is the fullest expression of God’s self-giving and creative action. It is the source of radical relationality, shalom, the whole of creation receiving and giving life abundantly. Love has an ontological character; it is the essence of what it means to be fully human. Together these three virtues vivify the Christ character and take us into the world as agents of transformation, to incarnate God-life in the world. Yet, because the incarnation points toward and participates in particularity, our analysis must consider the conditions under which faith, hope, and love might find expression in the context of the United States in the twenty-first century. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). Faith is accepting that God’s way is in our best interest, despite modernity’s predisposition toward individualism and scientific proof. We place our confidence in the claim that following Christ will lead us to a life of flourishing, not only for ourselves but for the whole of creation. But what does faith do or accomplish as a component of the Christ character? We can identify two important functions of the virtue of faith. First, faith bears a disorienting and reorienting capacity. In her essay, “Conversion: Life on the Edge of the Raft,” Sallie McFague demonstrates how scripture and, in particular, the parables function to subvert or disorient the one who chooses faith in Christ. Faith is akin to traveling on a raft: it lacks certainty, stability, and convention. As McFague writes, “By constantly threatening the security of our human-made worlds, we become open for the experience of transcendence; we become vulnerable to God.”30 Conversion, as an ongoing process of transformation through faith in Christ, disorients the believer in that we no longer place our confidence in the accumulation of material wealth, in our own endeavors, in government or the church, or any other sociological entity, as leading us to the good life. Rather, societal standards are subverted, and we are reoriented to God’s way, the unseen reality of divine life, as the path that leads to flourishing. This disorienting and reorienting quality of faith implies an epistemological function, in the sense that by faith we know God both intellectually and experientially to a degree that is otherwise inaccessible to us. Without faith, we can only choose the world since it is all we know. Faith then is the entryway, the starting point, through which the Christ character might begin to take shape within us and by which radical relationality is present, if only in part, as we come to recognize life in God as fundamentally different from the world constructed by human beings. Yet, the modern mindset and the contemporary setting deny the value of faith and make its reception difficult. Three prevailing modes of thought undermine the role of faith. First, the individualism that reduces faith to Jesus as “my personal” Lord and Savior.



Chapter Seven 177

Second, the rationalism that denies the reality of anything that cannot be subjected to scientific testing and verification. Third, the misplaced confidence in the promises of capitalism and the “American dream” which seem all too fragile for the majority of citizens, though many continue to place their trust in the elusive accumulation of money and material belongings as the source of the good life and human flourishing, even if at the expense of others. All three of these trajectories lead to systemic inequalities and the diminishment of life for countless persons. Faith placed in anything other than God ultimately participates in promoting a culture of terror. Faith in God contrasts with the modern assumptions of the autonomous self and the moral possibilities of rationality, science, and technology. It suggests there is more to human life than the individual, and something profound and real beyond that which we can measure and analyze with the human intellect. In an age of terror, the faith of Jesus in the wilderness confronted with the temptations of material goods, human immortality, and power over others proves instructive. Each of the temptations represent a rational choice of seeming benefit to Jesus as an individual, though undoubtedly to the detriment of others if accepted. Jesus rejects these temptations as the substance of flourishing. Indeed, the temptation scene itself represents the point at which the sinfulness of self-interested nature is overcome. It is the only text in which Jesus is alone rather than in community, thereby placing him in the concrete situation where he might choose self-interest, that is, sin. But Jesus rejects the temptations that sever community, relationship, and the flourishing of the whole and, instead, points toward another way to exist in the world. Indeed, his refusal of personal gain at the expense of others becomes for us a symbol of God’s action in Jesus to break the grip of sin and self-centeredness. The Christ character as it takes shape in the world today recognizes that each choice becomes one in which the flourishing of the whole may be proclaimed, upheld, and furthered in the face of death-dealing possibilities. By faith, the world’s norms are upended. We come to understand that whether privileged or suffering under systemic scarcity, the restoration of radical relationality provides all of us with the fullness of life. In addition to the communal, other-interested nature of faith, this theological virtue should be understood as a process rather than a product. Faith is not a one-time act that leads us to possess healing and wholeness in full. Rather, it is an activity we engage in across the course of our lifetime, without arriving at the destination. Such is the claim of Hebrews 11 in its recollection of the great people of faith including Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Moses, Rahab, and others: “Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised” (Heb. 11:39). Faith is strengthened by showing hospitality to strangers (13:2), remembering those who are in prison (13:3),

178

Chapter Seven

and remaining free from the love of money (13:5), among other things. The outpouring, transforming faith of the believer, the ongoing choices we make across the course of a lifetime, point toward the unseen in which we place our confidence. To show hospitality once or twice to a stranger or any form of concern for others on occasion is not faith in God. Rather, faith in God is a daily habitus of believing that the flourishing of the whole is in our best interest. In order to cultivate the incarnate life, the Christ character, faith requires the virtue of hope working in tandem. From Genesis to Revelation, the scriptures bear witness to hope as it shapes God’s people to be agents of transformation. While faith functions epistemologically to disorient and reorient our understanding of the good life, hope reorients us to act differently in the world, it reconstructs what we are to do. By faith we turn away from self-interested existence. By hope we turn toward the world as agents of transformation, anchored to God’s nature and promises (Heb. 6:19). Because the fullness of life is present but not yet realized, the virtue of Christian hope has a distinctively future orientation that maps out our steps toward that end. As Josef Pieper reminds us, it “includes a negative and a positive element: the absence of fulfillment and the orientation toward fulfillment.”31 In the midst of an age of terror, rather than becoming paralyzed or unmoored, we are empowered to act as the incarnate Christ by means of this hope. Hope thus serves as the momentum for our Christian journey and the compass we use to orient ourselves toward the fullness of life in God. But where is hope located in an age of terror? What does hope with its orientation toward the nature and promises of God have to do with or to say to mass incarceration, Black Lives Matter, the impoverished, the homeless, and others living in systems that cultivate, perpetuate, and reinforce despair and hopelessness? What does Christian hope mean in communities lacking the basics of life due to systemic injustices? Too often the message of Christian hope has been couched in the prosperity gospel or in the great good of heaven if we only live moral lives and make the right choices in the here-and-now. Real hope is thus displaced rather than an active, transformative force in the society. In my book, I offered a matrix of factors, located in the assumptions of modernity, which serve to undermine the cultivation and functioning of Christian hope as transformative agency. These factors include: “(1) time as a factor of compression and immediacy, (2) space as shaped by the phenomenon of global contraction and expansion, and (3) culture as a backdrop of diversity and fluidity. To these factors, we can add a principle of ‘acceleration,’ the media moment.”32 These factors shape the ways in which we engage and experience the world and undermine our ability to inhabit the virtue of hope. Time seems inordinately compressed in our society; the pace of life is relentless and appears to be increasing exponentially. Multitasking is a neces-



Chapter Seven 179

sity, and 24/7 “connectedness” creates the illusion that everything is urgent and important. Moreover, society is now structured in terms of immediate response and fulfillment. Whether “Doctor on Demand,” a takeout order, or a question that seeks an answer, there is an “app” for that. Recent studies suggest the immediacy of life, the ability to scan without deep engagement, may actually be reshaping our neural pathways.33 How do we learn to hope when so often we can simply have? Why would we hope in God when hope in the world seems as if it might bring fulfillment for me and mine? Or, at least, how do we hope in the midst of the illusion of instantaneous gratification? Of course, for those who cannot enter into the structures of this material fulfillment, it is hopelessness rather than hope that often arises. The second structure of hopelessness is space as a principle of location and perspective. Our social and geographic location affects how we view and understand life and its possibilities. Where we are born inevitably shapes what we may hope, and for many, the hope for a life of flourishing seems out of reach from the beginning despite our shifting perspective of the world. We sense that space has contracted over the past century as human life—even the entirety of living creatures and the earth itself—has become ever more visibly interconnected. Yet, simultaneously, space has expanded as technology enables us to engage and be affected by global forces. The terrors of the world are simply too great, too far-reaching, too interwoven for us to bear or to combat. We find ourselves caught in the push and pull of space, and this phenomenon disrupts the modern notion of the human being as moral agent constructing a utopian society. But as we are confronted increasingly by the reality of systemic injustices that diminish hope within communities around the globe and in the United States, the human creature appears not as the answer but the primary source of hopelessness. We have created systems of privilege and scarcity, rather than producing abundant life for all. As such, the space we inhabit often presses us toward hopelessness. Culture, as a third structure of hopelessness, is an ordering or organizing principle that “reflects a basic but fluid and dynamic set of practices and beliefs” that form in us certain values and perspectives on how to negotiate the world. “We enter into common narratives, speak with particular metaphors, perform certain ritual acts, respond in specific ways that accord with our basic beliefs about God, self, others, and the world.”34 But what happens when the symbols and language that shape the practices of the Christian life have lost power and meaning, while societal symbols and language are ascendant in forming what we do and value? In other words, for hope to reemerge, Christian theology has the task of re-creating the language and symbols that convey the power and meaning of the way of Christ in the world. Once again, this suggests the need to step back from the symbolic value of the cross and

180

Chapter Seven

reclaim the incarnation, the Christ character, and the virtues of faith, hope, and love. Yet, such a project of reclamation and reconstruction is complicated by the ubiquity of the media and, increasingly, social media which are, perhaps, the actors most formative of contemporary society with values quite distinct from those embodied in and expressed by the Christ character. Media and advertising—powerful tools of capitalism—often create the most gripping symbols of power in today’s culture. The Apple logo, for example, represents innovation, newness, superiority, and status. There exists an almost eschatological fervor when intimations of the next generation product arise. Such advertising and media symbols shape the lives of Americans in contrast to Christian symbols, such as the cross, that resonate with the old and feeble, like grandmother’s tarnished piece of jewelry, pointing toward death or at least obsolescence, rather than the potential for abundant life in the next great release of Apple technology. Media also serve to bombard us with the images of terror from distant places that propel us toward building walls, deporting the “other,” and devising other xenophobic responses which turn our attention from acting to dismantle the particular forms of terror existing within our own society. In sum, the theological virtue of hope anchors us to God, providing a compass by which we might navigate through the contours of this world, not only strengthened by hope but also moved to act on behalf of those who suffer the consequences of terror. It functions to reorient how we live in the world. This active hoping is characteristic of Jesus of Nazareth, whether inviting the marginalized into the fullness of life in community, healing a woman excluded from community as a result of a hemorrhage, or a man excluded due to blindness, or simply demonstrating that God offers life to those who suffer the terror wrought by systemic sin: to women, children, Samaritans, tax collectors, and poor fishermen.35 Authentic hope opens up possibilities and avenues for life to flourish. It “provides us with a means to survive, to stand, and to participate in transformation in the midst of destruction and decay.”36 Delores Williams evokes this sense of God’s hope “making a way out of no way”37 with her interpretation of the figure of Hagar. For Williams, despite the “wilderness-experience” or “near-destruction situation,” God helps the woman find resources that provide for survival, even resistance and transformation.38 This does not imply passively waiting for God to act, but rather, it reveals the demand placed upon the Christ character to provide for survival, resistance, and transformation of unjust situations, to bear witness to the real, and to stand as figures of hope against dehumanizing, devaluing systems. The Christ character offers hope through actions that reveal the transformative potential located in God’s promises and nature. In the midst of terror, we catch glimpses of a different, radically relational, abundant life emerging among us.



Chapter Seven 181

While the virtues of faith and hope shift our knowing and doing in the world, they are incomplete without the third in the triad of theological virtues: love. Love is the ontological basis of the Christ character; it expresses who we are to be; it is the fullness of the incarnate God-life taking shape in the world. The theological virtue of love, however, is shrouded in societal representations as essentially an emotional connection between two people, one that often waxes and wanes. But love, as described in the scriptural witnesses and, especially, in the New Testament contradicts the ubiquitous expressions found in our society. As a virtue of the Christ character, love functions in relation to the realization of shalom, the healing and wholeness of the whole of creation. The United States, as a largely monolingual English-speaking entity, cannot readily grasp the nuances of love. In the Greek language of the New Testament, as with many languages, “love” is not limited to a single, all-encompassing word, but represented by three different forms of love: eros, philia, and agape. Though eros, the love of creation, was opposed by early Christians as expressed in the excesses of pagan culture, in the current context, eros can be understood as the love of the created world and all living things, though the distortion of idolatrous love is always possible. Eros points toward a proper care for all creatures, the planet, and its resources. Love of other human beings, philia, best represents hospitality, mutuality, and solidarity among peoples. When distorted, self-protective xenophobia or elevating others to god-like status can arise. But without the presence of agape, the fullness of love cannot take shape within the Christ character. It is agape that orders our loves and prevents the potential distortion of eros and philia. Agape is God’s very self—if God is love (1 John 4:8)—poured out for the sake of life abundant in concrete situations. It is the most enduring and significant quality of the Christ character. Only love enables the Christ character to incarnate the very presence of God in the world. Love incarnate in Jesus flows outward restoring radical relationality and the well-being of all. It creates the conditions under which shalom might be realized. The Great Commandment does not express an emotional commitment, but demands that we love the world as God so loves it: healing, building communities, raising people from death-dealing circumstances, being present to all, seeking the flourishing of all. The Christ character not only receives and embodies love, but becomes the power of love in the world incarnate on behalf of the excluded, suffering, and oppressed, seeking to dismantle the terror of this age, and in a sense, to overcome evil with love. The virtue of love as it takes shape in the Christ character is manifest in radical relationality, in the restoration of life as intended, and in the reconciliation of all things. Reconciliation, however, is not some form of fusion either of all people into sameness or of the believer into God. It does, however, intimate

182

Chapter Seven

that each atom and molecule of existence has the possibility to flourish in the manner in which God created it to be, fully and uninhibited, or unthwarted by systemic evils. Reconciliation represents the healing and wholeness of shalom finding expression in particular economic, social, and political circumstances, even if, in an ultimate sense, this world can never be fully healed until Christ comes in final victory. Finally, reconciliation bears the imprint of justice, in which the Christ character takes responsibility for the transformation of concrete conditions as a gift and demand emerging from God’s own heart. To be in radical relationship is to seek and desire deeply the flourishing of each person and all of God’s creation. The virtue of love opposes evil wherever it undermines or prevents the fullness of life and well-being for all. Faith, hope, and love weave together as a single cord constitutive of the Christ character, the incarnate reality of God, which is, by its very nature, radically relational. The immanence of the incarnation—of God continually pouring out God’s self into concrete existence through the theological virtues—emerges as a theological aperture. It represents a theological opening in which foregrounding the incarnation and the virtues of faith, hope, and love leads us to consider the central theological concern of our day, ecclesiology. If the incarnate life, received through faith, hope, and love is a radically relational reality, then at the point of reception we are inescapably intertwined with the community of believers, the body of Christ as well as the whole of God’s creation. There is nothing in creation that is to be separate from this telos of radical relationality. As such, Christ character is never realized individually, but always and only in community, just as shalom can only be realized when the whole of creation is restored and flourishes. The church’s task, then, is to embody the incarnate life of the Christ character in the world, dismantling terror and fostering abundant life. THE PROBLEM AND NECESSITY OF ECCLESIOLOGY AND THE INCARNATE LIFE In the first section, I argued that we live in an age of terror, defined in terms of the systems of injustice, disenfranchisement, and inequality that permeate the society of the United States and represent a form of evil that thwarts the goodness of God. Terror must be conceived as systemic scarcity that undermines life abundant for countless persons and much of the natural world. In the second section, my argument considered the symbolic priority of the incarnation as a means of addressing the age of terror, given the diminishment of the cross as a symbol of power. Then I turned to a consideration of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love which represent an umbilical cord



Chapter Seven 183

connecting us to God and providing the basis for communal flourishing. The reception of these gifts infuses us with the incarnate life, with fully human existence taking shape within us. The Christ character not only enlivens our moral capacity, but also represents radical relationality, realized existentially in a partial and fragmentary sense. The restoration of radical relationality weaves the individual into community within the communion of believers, the body of Christ, which may be present in the church as spiritual reality but cannot be equated with the institutional or sociological concept of the church. Moreover, the restoration of creation requires the reconciliation of the human creature to God, others, and the planet, as the human being is the source of much suffering within creation. Even so, churches in the United States seldom reflect or embody the Christ character as described above, shaped by the theological virtues with an incarnate existence in particular locations whose mission is to increase radical relationality through, in part, the transformation of societal conditions and the dismantling of systemic sin generative of terror. Every intellectual, ecclesial, or human era has one or two central theological problems. In the early church it was most certainly Christology. In the twentieth century, the problem of God rose to the forefront, not only in response to liberal Protestantism’s emphasis on human capacities characteristic of modernity, but also in wrestling with theodicy as wars became increasingly destructive. Liberation theologians, perhaps, brought theological anthropology into sharp focus—alongside the trajectory of theodicy—with the pivotal question of the systemic marginalization and oppression of human beings. Today, I would argue, ecclesiology is the most pressing concern before theologians. What difference does the church make in the face of terror? Is it part of the problem or, perhaps more aptly framed, how does the church function as part of the problematic nature and existence of terror when the Gospel proclaims abundant life? The church, as the point of reception for the incarnate Christ character, is not only the spiritual locus of radical relationality, but it should also be the concrete site of agency on behalf of God’s mission to reconcile and restore the creation. As such, addressing the age of terror and the evils of this age is fundamental to the church’s nature and vocation. Unlike the crucifixion, which, today, can lead to passivity and comfort with the status quo or to an endless concern for the church as institution, the incarnation emphasizes that the church exists in the world as an agent of God’s love, justice, and reconciliation. Foregrounding the symbol of the incarnation breaks open ecclesiological possibilities in an age of terror. In these few paragraphs, I can only sketch some ecclesiological threads as a starting point for a reconstructive process. First, I have highlighted the problematic symbolism of the cross in contemporary culture and argued that the incarnation should take precedence, theologically. Ecclesiologically, the continued emphasis on the cross, a symbol

184

Chapter Seven

that seems to serve corrupted social power as a symbol of self-justification, means the church in the United States tends to exhibit a crucified form more than an incarnate (or resurrected) one. The cruciform nature of the church, the church that must die in order to embody resurrected life, bears the fourfold wounds of hatred and injustice within the body: racial oppression, gender oppression, economic oppression, and sexual orientation oppression. These wounds reinforce rather than dismantle sources of systemic scarcity and unearned privilege. The cruciform church prefers judgment to reconciliation. The cruciform church prefers power to mutuality. The cruciform church creates division rather than bringing healing and wholeness to a society rife with terror. The fourfold wounds fester in the face of self-justification and selfrighteousness; the virtues of faith, hope, and love lead toward healing those wounds and new life for the body. In the relationality and particularity of the incarnation lies the possibility of recovering a deep symbol that can counteract prevailing narratives. Theological discourse can and should play a central role in the continuing reformation of the church as an active, transformational presence in the world shaped by faith, hope, and love. The incarnation leads away from a universalizing impetus and toward taking seriously particularity and the church’s engagement of concrete situations on behalf of God. This outward movement parallels repentance as it draws the heart away from merely personal concern, even internal churchly concern, toward faith, hope, and love expressed toward the whole of God’s creation. The reemergence of the Christ character as central to the church’s nature and mission cannot occur without addressing, concretely, the four wounds that deny the possibility of radical relationality. The words of Miroslav Volf bear repeating: “those who seek to overcome evil must fight it first of all in their own [communities].”39 The church, as the locus of incarnate life, exists to reveal over and again, the way of love as supported by faith and hope. In an age of terror in which suffering, marginalization, dehumanization, and death are all too prevalent for large segments of the American population, reclaiming the theological virtues provides an opening to transform the systematic scarcity that diminishes life. The theological tasks of symbolic renewal and ecclesiological reconstruction can provide the critical reflection needed to engender reformation and facilitate a path toward realizing shalom, if only in a fragmentary sense. We can continue to crucify Christ because God’s way of abundant life for all is a threat to our own self-interest and selfjustifying existence, or we can enter into the particularity of the incarnate life expressed in and through the Christ character and allow the lifelines of faith, hope, and love to facilitate abundant life for all.

Cruciform Atonement Paul Pistone

Elaine Robinson argues that we live in an age of systemic terror; and roughly speaking, the solution to this systemic terror is shalom. What characterizes shalom is holistic well-being, empowered by the presence of God and marked by justice, peace, health, and celebration.40 Shalom, according to Robinson, can be thought of as salvation. To achieve this salvation we should focus on the symbol of incarnation rather than of the cross. The cross tends to symbolize individual salvation. The incarnation symbolizes radical relationality and reconciliation. A shalom community is one of radical relationality. We must recognize our interdependence on others before shalom can take place. Faith, hope, and love are the traits that empower individuals to overcome structural terror and usher in shalom. With this brief summary in mind, let’s move to analyzing some of Robinson’s specific claims. In doing this, (1) I express some disagreement over Robinson’s discussion of the symbolism of the cross; (2) I argue that her characterization of atonement and its relation to incarnation is insufficient; and finally, (3) I suggest that Robinson’s characterization of faith renders at least one principal function of hope useless. I begin by addressing some concerns over her discussion of the symbol of the cross. Robinson stresses that we must realize that we are all interconnected. And that to overcome terror41 we must embrace shalom and establish a shalom community. I agree that we should stress radical relationality; and if we want to do this, we should emphasize the symbolism of the incarnation. But I do not think we should emphasize the symbolism of the incarnation at the expense of the cross and what it stands for. Robinson concedes here. She does not want to remove the symbol of the cross from our symbolic universe, but given her account of what the symbolism of the cross has become, she gives the reader every reason for removing it. 185

186

Chapter Seven

Robinson characterizes the cross as a symbol of social terror. She claims that the cross is a symbol which promotes oppression, the social elite, individualism, moral corruption, and a form of Christian nihilism.42 It seems reasonable to assert that if the cross promotes social evils (social terror), then like other symbols which promote evil, it should be removed. Robinson, however, does not think the cross should be removed. Given the preceding conditional statement, it follows43 that the cross doesn’t promote social evil or that promoting evil is not a good enough reason to abandon the symbol.44 However, the promotion of social evil is a good enough reason for removal. While some good may come out of this symbol, it seems, if Robinson’s characterization is correct, the cross is hindering salvation (which I take to be more morally weighty than the benefits it produces). If the above disjunction45 is fair, then it follows that the cross does not promote social evil—at least disproportionately. I think this could be better stated in these terms: a requirement for the removal of the cross is its promotion of social evil (or a disproportionate promotion of social evils over social goods).46 But it is hardly clear (i.e., it is unlikely) that the cross actually promotes these types of attitudes (stated above) and social evils. It follows that the cross should not be removed47—but not for the reasons Robinson gives. Given Robinson’s discussion of the cross, it seems clear that we should abandon it. But I find her discussion of the evils of the cross unpersuasive and guilty of a hasty generalization. While it seems we all know some people who view the cross in a highly personal way, divorced from social action, it is unclear that this caricature extends beyond anecdote. I would like to see some empirical support for her empirical claims. Further, it seems that the cross is a stronger symbol of atonement than incarnation. The cross includes incarnation and, coupled with the resurrection, it represents: overcoming oppressive systems, solidarity with the oppressed, and victory over death. I happily admit that because some in the church tend to forget about radical relationality, in some instances it may be better to focus on Christ’s incarnation. This symbol will stress our interconnectedness and the concrete aspects of salvation here-and-now; but it is powerless without the cross. The symbol of the cross includes all the elements of incarnation and resurrection; it is a superior symbol. Some may claim that the cross is a dead symbol and should be replaced.48 Tillich stated: Like living beings, [symbols] grow and they die. They grow when the situation is ripe for them, and they die when the situation changes. . . . Symbols do not grow because people are longing for them, and they do not die because of scientific or practical criticism. They die because they can no longer produce response in the group where they originally found expression.49



Chapter Seven 187

Robinson indicates that when a symbol dies a new symbol must take its place. But it is hardly clear that the cross is a dead symbol. It seems unlikely50 that replacement of a symbol is better than reviving a symbol. (This is an empirical question and can’t be settled in our armchairs.)51 Moreover, it is unclear that the incarnation could replace the cross. It does not have the same meanings. The cross, as I mentioned, stresses victory over death, life, solidarity, justice, eternal life, fullness of humanity, and virtue. The incarnation is a much thinner symbol than the cross, and it is far from clear why we should prefer it. This is not to say that the incarnation isn’t a rich symbol. God taking on a humble human nature and entering our world for our salvation is a deeply moving and powerful symbol, but the cross also points to (or participates in) this content. The symbol cannot be created because of desire (if Tillich is right), it grows organically from circumstances. It seems that the incarnation as a symbol is being designed artificially. We cannot invent symbols, as Tillich stresses, and it seems that is what Robinson is doing. Yes, of course the incarnation is already a symbol. But symbols “grow out of the individual or collective unconscious and cannot function without being accepted by the unconscious dimension of our being. Symbols which have an especially social function, as political and religious symbols, are created or at least accepted by the collective unconscious of the group in which they appear.”52 Robinson’s symbol of incarnation is not accepted in the way Tillich reasonably articulates a symbol to be. We cannot make the incarnation stand for things people do not see it standing for—even if we could show, as Robinson attempts, that the incarnation plus virtue, is sufficient for atonement. The way Robinson discusses the incarnation is chimeric. It borrows content from other parts of Christianity (e.g., Jesus’s social teachings and the cross). While it is true that many do not see the incarnation the way Robinson suggests, this may be her point. She may be making a pedagogical point, which is to shift our focus onto the incarnation. I agree with this motive. The incarnation is a beautiful and powerful symbol which stresses humble connectedness. But it cannot naturally represent what she argues it does without borrowing content from other symbols within Christian theology. Here I move away from discussing the cross as a symbol and focus on Robinson’s treatment of the atonement. Robinson mentions that incarnation is the locus of atonement; she says, “the atonement can be located in the incarnation, rather than the crucifixion.” Further, while discussing the incarnation she states, “God affirms the goodness of flesh and human existence and reconciles, in this one point, the sinfulness of humanity as it turns to embrace the divine.” I agree there is a very important and evident aspect of incarnation which represents atonement. For our sake God became human. The divine

188

Chapter Seven

took on radical relationality within the particularity of his creation. As the creed states, for us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again.

But more is required for reconciliation than incarnation. Incarnation is a necessary condition for reconciliation but it is not a sufficient condition. If incarnation was sufficient for atonement, then the cross wasn’t necessary. And this, I take it, is the point. The cross may be thought here to be an accidental occurrence in history.53 It is, therefore, not required for the atonement. But while this is certainly a position one may take regarding the atonement, one must address reasons for holding this. As the creed states, “For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” It also states that for our salvation he came down from heaven. It seems you need both incarnation and crucifixion. It is reasonable to hold that God in all his power could have made a world in which he reconciled creation to himself without the cross; but there is evidence that God used the cross in the actual world. Historically, Robinson’s theory (which appears to be a version of the moral exemplar theory) is only partially correct. Many of the church fathers tended to hold to a ransom theory in addition to a moral exemplar theory. The ransom theory, however, assumes the necessity of the cross. Further, in addition to the creedal and historical evidence there seems to be a fair amount of biblical support for substitutionary atonement, which includes the cross. Take, for example, the famous suffering servant passage often thought to be referring to Jesus (Isa. 53:6, 10). Here it states that the Lord laid our iniquity on him. In Matthew 20:28 we see that Christ gave his life as a ransom for many; In Romans 5:8 we see the great love of God that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. In 2 Corinthians 5:21 it says God made him who had no sin a sin offering for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God; 1 Peter 2:24 states that He bore our sins in his body on the tree; 1 Peter 3:18 states that Christ died once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. Hebrews 10:4–17 claims we are made holy via the sacrifice of the body of Christ. It should be noted that Christ had to become human to make an atoning sacrifice as high priest (1 John 4:10). The sacrifice, of course, is his body. Only Christ’s sacrifice was sufficient for atonement (Heb. 9:25–26). Moreover, in Leviticus 1:4 we see the substitution motif. The sacrificial animal can make atonement for the person making the sacrifice. By placing one’s hand on the animal, sins are transferred to the animal. In Leviticus



Chapter Seven 189

16:15–19 we also see a model of substitutionary atonement; the goat is killed for the sins of others. Later in Leviticus 16:20–22, Aaron is to place his hands on the live goat and confess the sins of Israel. At this point, the sins will be transferred to the live goat who will then take the sins away with it. It is clear that many of the New Testament writers connected the substitutionary motif with Christ (cf. Heb. 9–10; Rom. 3). Connecting these passages with the symbolism of the Passover, substitutionary atonement (including the cross) becomes more difficult to deny.54 Because of the Passover lamb, God spared the homes of the Israelites (Ex. 12:27), as the blood stands for the blood of the firstborn within the household. This is seen as an act of redemption. Much later Christ is called the “Passover lamb” (John 1:29, 36; 1 Cor. 5:7); Christ’s blood is seen as purifying us (Rev. 7:14). He atones for our sins (1 John 2:2), and he links his own body and blood to the Passover (Matt. 26:17–30). Given the sacrifice motif offered in the Old Testament and its clear presence in the New Testament, as related to Jesus’s death on the cross, any explanation of the atonement that removes the cross has poor explanatory power.55 Further, the cross is intimately connected to the resurrection. Without the resurrection Christianity is false (1 Cor. 15). Much more could be said about the Greek preposition anti and huper and we could go on about why a good God would require the cross. Moreover, I could argue that many of the arguments people launch against the penal substitution view are guilty of onto-theology and thinking of God in univocal terms, but I only have so much space. The point I am making is that in light of the vast amount of evidence for substitutionary atonement56 (involving the cross), it is not enough to simply dismiss the necessity of the cross and replace it with the incarnation. Robinson makes the statement that since incarnation proceeds crucifixion and represents radical relationality, it symbolizes reconciliation. Here I have a few points of disagreement. Robinson mentions sequence. But sequence seems to be a non-sequitur. She claims that “the Chalcedonian formula claims that Jesus Christ is ‘truly God and truly human’ in which each nature is preserved. Salvation is not deification, but expresses the possibility of becoming fully human in relation to God and the whole of creation.” While I would agree that salvation is becoming fully human (in a loosely Aristotelian sense), it hardly follows that because the incarnation precedes crucifixion, incarnation is the mechanism of salvation or is the better symbol of reconciliation. Salvation requires reconciliation with God; and for this reconciliation to occur Christ had to become human,57 as Robinson mentions. In this sense, through the incarnation Jesus reconciled humanity with divinity. But we have a scope issue here. What does this (abstract) sort of reconciliation have to do with particular (concrete) humans? Yes, Jesus had a human nature (wide scope) and a divine nature, but every particular human (narrow scope) has a

190

Chapter Seven

sin issue. The abstract notion of human nature (within Jesus) unifying with divine nature seems to be too wide to apply to particular cases. Its application is applied to natures not individuals. Every person58 has the same nature (i.e., human) but everyone is quite distinct. Focusing on the abstract notion of natures does not attend to particular sin problems. Sin is an absence of something where it ought to be.59 It, for example, is a lack of proper order, or injustice within the city of the soul (and the city itself ). It is far from clear how Jesus’s incarnation by itself properly orders my soul or (without corruption) can be a symbol for salvation. This may be exactly the problem Robinson is pointing at; we focus too much on individual salvation and see Christ as “our personal savior.” This is a legitimate concern; and we must focus on radical relationally (as Robinson puts it), but the individual is still there; the individual still has a personal sin issue. Robinson does narrow her focus when discussing Christian virtues. She says when we engage in “tangible acts of healing and wholeness in the world with Jesus and to Jesus, the Christ character begins takes shape within us and the salvific work of God in Christ in the Holy Spirit in the world, shalom, is cultivated and expands.” Through faith, hope, and love we obtain the incarnate life (the Christ character—being fully human). While I agree that salvation is becoming fully human, it seems that this type of salvation fails to address our apparent inability to save ourselves (Titus 3:5, Eph. 2:8–9, Rom. 3:20–28, Gal. 2:16).60 If we can be reconciled with God by following Christ’s example, we do have the ability to save ourselves. If this is the case, it is unclear that even the incarnation was necessary for reconciliation (or for that matter sufficient). First, the instance of Christ taking on a human form has very little to do with our human form now. Incarnation didn’t change human nature.61 At the most it gave us a moral model to follow. Within human history we have many wise sages and virtuous people. We did not need Jesus to show us how to be excellent at being human.62 Because we have such little information about Christ and news of Christ spread rather slowly, it might have been more effective for God to arrange multiple people across the globe to be excellent at being human for the good of humanity. God could have given us a moral exemplar through a prophet; this way the charisms of faith, hope, and love could still play the role they are intended. Salvation for Robinson is a transformation into the Christ character—while this is part of the story, it doesn’t account for our need of a savior or our sin issues (Ps. 51). It also seems that it doesn’t comport well with the scriptures. It is unclear to me that incarnation is a better model of reconciliation than penal substitution, satisfaction, or Christus Victor. Lastly, I would like to make some brief comments regarding Robinson’s discussion of faith, hope, and love. Robinson offers a thought provoking



Chapter Seven 191

discussion on the role of the three theological virtues. She characterized faith and hope in the following ways: Faith is accepting and acting in the confidence that God’s way is in our best interest . . . we trust and place our confidence in the claim that following Christ will lead us to a life of flourishing, not only for ourselves but for the whole of creation. . . . Hope serves as the momentum for our Christian journey and the compass we use to orient ourselves toward the fullness of life in God, even as we stand against the forces of hopelessness and despair.

Given this definition of faith, it seems hope is powerless. If faith is trusting that following God will lead to my flourishing, then this is all the momentum I need to act. Since hope is (in part) characterized as momentum for our Christian journey, then it can be subsumed under faith. In the tradition of Socrates,63 R. M. Hare,64 and to a lesser extent Donald Davidson65 I argue that if you truly believe that x is good for you or it will lead to your flourishing, then you will do x. No other motivation is required. If I truly believe that following Christ will make me flourish, then I will follow Christ. Weakness of the will, however, is an obvious counterexample to this statement. For example, eating ice cream late at night is bad for me. I believe this. But I do it anyway. Why? At the end of the day, it turns out that I truly believe eating ice cream will lead to my flourishing. It may be that pleasure is central to my concept of well-being or flourishing; and my belief that eating ice cream at night is not conducive to my flourishing is not as salient as my belief that pleasure is essential to my well-being. We can make this sort of claim for all cases of weakness of the will. This being said, true faith as characterized above is sufficient for hope. Now, Robinson does claim that faith, hope, and love are united. Perhaps, they are all constituents of the same attitude (fitting neatly with her umbilical cord analogy). Or it may be the case that hope is a valuing mechanism. In this way, hoping would be valuing particular ends. Hope would be a recognition of what is valuable as a goal. This fits with Robinson’s discussion of hope’s compass-like function. It also fits well with her discussion of reconciliation. If hope is a valuing mechanism when functioning properly it would assist in leading an individual to eudemonia. But this still seems insufficient for salvation. No person can truly be perfect in all her being. Because we are fallen individuals we cannot have integrated virtue in the sense that all of our motives are good, all of our actions are praiseworthy, and all of our traits are working together to help us flourish in everything we do.66 Despite my noted criticism, I appreciate Robinson’s chapter. She offers an informative discussion of structural sin. She gives persuasive reasons for favoring the symbolism of the incarnation over the symbolism of the cross

192

Chapter Seven

in particular circumstances (though they be few); she rightfully discusses our interconnectedness and places Christ within the here-and-now via his incarnation and earthly ministry. I agree that focusing on the individual and transcendent nature of salvation at the expense of the concrete salvific work that ought to be done here-and-now is at times a problem within Christian communities. And I appreciate that she also sketched a model of the process of making shalom concrete. NOTES 1.  As Hardt and Negri suggest in their construction of the concept of “Empire,” the dominance of the nation-state is in decline and a new global form of sovereignty has emerged that wields the power to oppress and destroy across national boundaries. While I agree that globalization has led to a decline of the nation-state as a global actor, oppression within the nation-state must still be addressed. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 2.  Langdon Gilkey defines evil as “that which thwarts continuously and seriously the potential goodness of creation, destroying alike its intelligibility and meaning and making life as we experience it so threatening, so full of sorrow, suffering and apparent pointlessness.” Maker of Heaven and Earth (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1965), 209–10. Gilkey further notes that evil is “a perversion rather than a necessity of our existence,” (215). 3.  The claim to a deterioration of social capital was first posited by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). More recent theories of the decline of communities in the United States often take exception to Putnam’s thesis and argue, instead, that communities and social capital are emerging in new forms. See, for example, Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009); Marc J. Dunkelman, The Vanishing Community: The Transformation of American Community (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014); and John McKnight and Peter Block, The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012). 4.  Salvation is too often characterized as being “saved” from one’s sins and on a direct path to heaven. The word is more appropriately understood in terms of healing and wholeness, of becoming that which we are created to be. 5.  Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996), 52. 6.  Lee H. Butler, Jr., “Religion, Terror, and America: Pastoral Care in the 21st Century,” Pastoral Psychology 63, nos. 5–6 (Dec 2014): 538. 7.  It is important to note that racial categorization has always had a certain malleability in which immigrants, such as the Irish, could become “white” over time and persons of color could “pass” depending upon skin tone. Even so, it demonstrates the racial stratification embedded in the history of the United States.



Chapter Seven 193

  8.  I am reminded that the Native American societies encountered by the earliest European immigrants embraced “two-spirit” people whose sexuality and gender identity conflicted with European heterosexual categories. See, for instance, Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality and Spirituality, eds. Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).  9. Butler, 541. 10.  I believe that democratic principles, which shape the United States in a theoretical sense, have great merit and potential. At the same time, as a white middle class and well educated woman, I cannot remain oblivious to how many persons have been systematically denied the opportunities to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that I am privileged to enjoy. And as a theologian, I believe political systems of human-making will never produce the good society and bring an end to suffering, injustice, and evil. 11.  Elaine A. Robinson, These Three: Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2004). 12.  See my argument about the need for an ethical component to theological reflection in Race and Theology (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2012), 88–89. 13.  Edward Farley, Deep Symbols: Their Postmodern Effacement and Reclamation (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996). Farley proposes that the intellectual, epochal shift from the modern mindset has diminished the power of the deep symbols that shape cultural cohesion and a recovery or reenchantment of symbols is a pressing task. 14.  Ibid., 3. 15. Ibid. 16.  Ibid., 4. 17.  Ibid., 5. 18.  Ibid., 7. 19.  Ibid., 8. 20. James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), xv–xvi. 21.  Ibid., 74–75. 22.  Ibid., 22. 23.  Ibid., 23. 24.  Tyree Boyd-Pates, “Black Youth Are Going Church-Hopping, and Here’s Why,” Fusion, April 7, 2016, http://fusion.net/story/289150/black-youth-church-hopping. 25. Ibid. 26.  Here I follow my colleague Angela Sim’s definition of lynching as “the malicious taking of an alleged criminal’s life without benefit of due process of law” (5). “To lynch, regardless of the techniques employed, is to use terror or the threat of torture as a control mechanism” (87). Angela D. Sims, Ethical Complications of Lynching: Ida B. Wells’s Interrogation of American Terror (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). 27.  It is possible to argue that reconciliation does not require such intervention. Native American Christian theologians claim that radical relationship has always existed and it is our responsibility to claim and embody this reality. See Steven

194

Chapter Seven

Charleston and Elaine A. Robinson, eds., Coming Full Circle: Constructing Native Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015). 28. Gustavo Gutiérrez, Essential Writings, ed. James B. Nickoloff (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 139. 29. Robinson, These Three, 22. 30.  Sallie McFague, “Conversion: Life on the Edge of the Raft,” Interpretation 32, no. 3 (July 1978): 256. 31.  Josef Pieper, Faith Hope Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 93. 32.  Ibid., 88. 33.  See, for example, Nicholas Carr, The Shallows, What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010). 34. Robinson, These Three, 102. 35.  While it might appear that a tax collector, a person of wealth, is not subject to the effects of systemic scarcity; in fact, he also faces the hopelessness of a life on the margins, serving the privileged at the expense of the majority, lacking the fullness of life found in radical relationality. None of us can be whole, whether privileged or disenfranchised, until God’s restoration of radical relationality is realized. 36. Robinson, These Three, 116. 37.  The phrase of hope, “making a way out of no way,” has a long history of meaning among African Americans. 38.  Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 108–39. 39.  Volf, 52. 40.  I am borrowing from Thomas Crisp’s Jesus and Affluence, 6 (unpublished). 41.  Robinson uses the word “terror” in more than one way. One way has it that “terror” denotes paralyzing fear. The other has it that “terror” denotes the causes of the paralyzing fear (e.g., discrimination, oppression, injustice, etc.). While this certainly appears to be an equivocal use of the term “terror,” the equivocation does not impact the central claims in the chapter. She might have in mind some sort of family resemblance connecting the various usages of “terror.” 42.  Insofar as we merely focus on personal salvation and ignore the pressing matters of the here and now. This, I take it, is a form of Christian nihilism because it, or some versions of it, devalue the world and latch onto the distinction between the sacred and profane. 43.  From a simple Modus Tollens: (1) If the cross promotes social evils (social terror), then like other symbols which promote evil it should be removed. (2) The cross should not be removed. Therefore, the cross does not promote social evils. 44.  That is, promoting social evil is not a sufficient condition for removal. 45.  The disjunction: The cross doesn’t promote social evil or that promoting evil is not a good enough reason to abandon the symbol. 46.  This is to make the promotion of (social) evil a necessary condition for removal as a symbol. 47.  Modus Tollens: (1) If the cross should be removed, it promotes social evil (or disproportionately promotes social evils over social goods); (2) It does not promote social evils (or at least disproportionately so); Therefore, it should not be removed.



Chapter Seven 195

48.  See the chapter “Symbols of Faith,” in Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957). 49.  Ibid., 43. 50.  This is clearly a subjective “likely.” I have no empirical evidence for this; I am taking this “likely” in the modal sense, that is, there are sufficient initial grounds for taking the claim seriously. Mine is a claim about the rationality of taking the claim seriously. 51. It intuitively seems that the replacement of a deficient symbol or a dead symbol, is the proper thing to do. But why do we think that this would work? Why should we prefer replacement over revival? Intuition is a terrible guide to empirical questions. And this is an empirical question. Which will work better: replacement or revival? To settle this, we must not make armchair theories alone, we need to consult quantitative evidence. 52. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 43. 53.  But while I suppose there may have been another way, God could have reconciled humanity with the divine, the cross (seems) to be the way he did it. 54.  Just as long as one holds the biblical record to be authoritative about atonement. 55.  In both ways of understanding power: (1) that data is not probable given her hypothesis, and (2) it does not explain all the data in a simple way. 56.  Or I suppose even a ransom theory. 57.  I am understanding this requirement as informed by Heb. 2, 9, and 10. 58.  A particular of the species, homo sapiens. 59. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, 75, 1. 60.  This is not to deny that sacraments are necessary for justification. 61.  If it did we would be unrelated to our ancestors. We would literally have a different kind nature. 62.  I am borrowing this phrase from Robert Adam’s A Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 63. Plato, Protagoras, 358b-c. 64.  The Language of Morals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952). 65.  “How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?,” in Essays on Actions and Events (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 66.  There are good philosophical and empirical reasons for thinking this is the case, (cf. Adam, A Theory of Virtue, Chs. 5–11). Also see any of the literature on Situationism in psychology (e.g., John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

WORKS CITED Adam, Robert. A Theory of Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Block, Peter. Community: The Structure of Belonging. San Francisco: BerrettKoehler Publishers, 2009. Boyd-Pates, Tyree. “Black Youth Are Going Church-Hopping, and Here’s Why.” Fusion, April 7, 2016. http://fusion.net/story/289150/black-youth-church-hopping.

196

Chapter Seven

Butler, Lee H., Jr. “Religion, Terror, and America: Pastoral Care in the 21st Century.” Pastoral Psychology 63, nos. 5–6 (Dec 2014): 537–50. Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows, What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. Charleston, Steven, and Elaine A. Robinson, eds. Coming Full Circle: Constructing Native Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015. Cone, James H. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011. Davidson, Donald. “How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?” In Essays on Actions and Events, 21–42. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Doris, John. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Dunkelman, Marc J. The Vanishing Community: The Transformation of American Community. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014. Farley, Edward. Deep Symbols: Their Postmodern Effacement and Reclamation. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996. Gilkey, Langdon. Maker of Heaven and Earth. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1965. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. Essential Writings. Edited by James B. Nickoloff. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Hare, R. M. The Language of Morals. New York: Oxford University Press, 1952. Jacob, Sue-Ellen, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality and Spirituality. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. McFague, Sally. “Conversion: Life on the Edge of the Raft.” Interpretation 32, no. 3 (July 1978): 255–68. McKnight, John, and Peter Block. The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012. New Revised Standard Version Bible. The Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, 1989. Pieper, Josef. Faith, Hope and Charity. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1997. Plato. Protagoras, translated by C. C. W. Taylor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Robinson, Elaine A. Race and Theology. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2012. ———. These Three: Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love. Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2004. Sims, Angela D. Ethical Complications of Lynching: Ida B. Wells’s Interrogation of American Terror. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Tillich, Paul. Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. Volf, Miroslav. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996.

Chapter Eight

Transcendence and Solidarity: Conditions of Faith, Hope, and Love Today Anselm K. Min

I propose to deal with my topic in three steps. First, I will briefly characterize challenges posed by the contemporary world to Christian faith, hope, and love. Second, I will attempt a reconstruction of faith, hope, and love as three fundamental modalities of human transcendence toward God and of solidarity toward one another as historical conditions of that transcendence under the graceful reign of the triune God paradigmatically modelled in Jesus Christ. Third, I will argue that contemporary challenges are invitations to renew and reinforce our faith, hope, and love, not pressures toward fatalism, despair, and retreat; that faith, hope, and love are not only theological virtues directed to God but also ecclesial virtues that need to be nourished and modelled in the church and by the church. Contemporary challenges are invitations to renew the ecclesiality of the church as communities of faith, hope, and love by reinvigorating its own faith as a community, reinforcing itself as a communal sign of transcendent hope in the midst of the despairs and temptations of history, and exemplifying itself as a community that practices its love of God by practicing love of all God’s creatures beyond arbitrary boundaries, especially by practicing political love against the temptations and degradations of imperialism and capitalism in all their forms. CHALLENGES TO FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE TODAY In his Enchiridion, one of the earliest summaries of Christian theology, it is worth noting that Augustine organized the entire Christian doctrine under the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love as the three proper modes of worshipping God (colendi Deum). These virtues are mutually dependent, he said, but love is the most important because without love we only believe 197

198

Chapter Eight

and hope in vain (inaniter), while anyone who loves right (recte) does believe and hope right (31.117). It is clear that faith in God, hope in God, and love of God constitute the heart and center of the Christian faith. These three virtues have been called “theological” since St. Thomas because they are directed primarily to God and secondarily to creatures in their orientation or ordering to God (in ordine ad Deum) as the ultimate, saving end of human existence, poured or infused into our hearts by God alone, and made known to us only through divine revelation in Scripture. Through them we are enabled to participate in the divine nature that infinitely surpasses the human (ST, I-II, 62, 1).1 All Christian doctrines can fall under one of these virtues. Christian existence is existence in faith, hope, and love. Christian churches are meant to be, if anything, communities of faith, hope, and love. The creeds and liturgy of the church express, celebrate, inspire, and nourish faith, hope, and love. Christian education is meant to promote growth in faith, hope, and love as Christian political praxis is meant to bear witness to this faith, hope, and love in the public space of the world. Today, however, this very center and heart of Christian life has come under the most severe strains and challenges, and no task seems more compelling than sorting through these challenges, clarifying their theological significance, and struggling to find opportunities for renewing faith, hope, and love by listening to God speaking to us through those challenges, those signs of the times, in the contemporary world. There are, I think, three basic sources that challenge and erode the faith in God, hope in God, and love of God, anti-Christian secular humanism, religious pluralism with its relativizing impact, and the death of the subject brought about by the nihilistic aestheticization of life under capitalism, all of these now spreading rapidly by the economic globalization of the world. First, the globalization and popularization of anti-Christian secular humanism. This threat is perhaps what is best known to theologians. Humanism, most often in its anti-theistic, anti-Christian, and scientistic tendencies, from Hume to Sartre to contemporary poststructuralists, have been the dominant intellectual trends of Western culture for three centuries. What is new today is that humanism in its immanentist form is no longer limited to the minority of intellectuals as it had been for centuries but has become widely popular, almost all over the globe, through the globalization of information technology. As Charles Taylor put it in his A Secular Age, it was impossible not to be a believer in the year 1500, but it has become quite possible to be an unbeliever in the year 2000. To be a believer, of any kind really, has become one option among others. This is especially so because in this post-Durkheimian age all the plausibility structures, that is, those institutional structures that used to provide the sociological support for belief, have collapsed. People can be



Chapter Eight 199

“spiritual,” if they want to, without being “religious” or belonging to an organized religion.2 Part of the anti-Christian temper of this humanism has been expressed and continues to be expressed in the ceaseless deconstruction of Christianity, its intellectual content from the concept of God to the historical Jesus, its history of dogmatism and intolerance, and increasingly its tradition of oppressive patriarchy. This deconstruction and unmasking of Christianity has become almost standard fare in major newspapers, television programs, and of course on the Internet. Christian intellectuals have become a minority, a silent and discredited minority, and, shall I say, even a “silenced” minority in the academic world. Second, the globalization and popularization of religious pluralism. Ever since the eighteenth century when Asian religions became better known to Western intellectuals, especially through the work of Jesuit missionaries, Western intellectuals, theologians, and philosophers had to confront the issue of religious diversity and the comparative theological and philosophical significance of that issue. From Hegel and Schleiermacher to Troeltsch’s The Absoluteness of Christianity in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, and to the theology of religions in Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner, we have seen a gradual development of what is called inclusivism with Christianity still at the center. Since the early 1970s, however, we have seen among Christian theologians themselves an attempt to reduce Christianity itself to one of the culturally variant manifestations of the Really Real (John Hick) or to one religion among others in all their irreducible uniqueness (John Cobb). While pluralism from the Christian perspective has become popular among the educated public, other religions, Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, in all their historical diversity, have become much better known through the mass media, and religious pluralism as a belief in the relativity of all religions has become part of the intellectual consciousness of most of the peoples of the world, not only in the West but also increasingly in the rest of the world. The fact of a plurality of religions is ipso facto a challenge to the absoluteness of any religion, to what Tillich called the “ultimate” concern about the ultimate as the definition of faith. The intellectual necessity of making sense of the stark reality of other religions is in itself a challenge to the integrity of any religion that always includes some experience of absoluteness and ultimacy. Plurality leads to pluralism, which in turn leads to relativization, at least as a tendency, which no religion can escape. I am here just describing pluralism as a cultural phenomenon, not taking a theological position on it.3 Third, the death of the subject brought about by the sheer cultural nihilism now spreading globally under the reign of capitalism. Television, but especially the Internet, have become “the global public square,” to borrow the name of a popular Sunday CNN program, where every interest, every group,

200

Chapter Eight

and every ideology seeks to dominate public opinion in an impossibly divided and fragmented world in all its tensions and multiplicities. By the very nature of the social media, the pressure is to simplify and reduce everything to the level of the popular, and by the very competitive nature of the struggle the pressure is to impress, prejudice, exaggerate, distort, and falsify. There is no room for reflection, objectivity, truth, and reality, but only for oversimplification, prejudice, and the appearance of truth and reality, making it almost impossible to distinguish truth and falsity, fact and propaganda, argument and advertising, analysis and ideology. Truth is subjected to ideological suspicion, while outright propaganda acquires the appearance of truth. Nihilism has become truth. It goes without saying that the unlimited competition for profit unleashed by capitalism also underlies this ideological nihilism and intensifies it to the point where there is no longer any subject who can care about the distinction between truth and falsity, reality and appearance, substance and spectacle, beauty and glitter, good and evil, virtue and vice. Truly we are living in “the post-truth era” where dishonesty and deception have become normal.4 The pressure to compete in a life-and-death struggle in the global market means the temptation to do anything short of outright murder and outright lies, creating a “cheating culture”5 where an entire society has become “lies incorporated.”6 In order to stimulate consumption one must erode any capacity for reflective resistance, stimulate desire, especially physical desire, in fact liberate every desire in the name of freedom. Human beings are reduced not only to consumers but more importantly to the subject of desire, any desire, every desire. We are considered good consumers in proportion as our desires are always variable, always inconsistent, and always imperative. In manipulating and producing this desire capitalism is now producing not just goods and services but our subjectivity itself. In order to liberate every desire, every psychological trick is employed, but what is common to all of them is an appeal to appearances, images, spectacles, and illusions. The phenomena of commercialization, massification, and trivialization of life under capitalism has been noted by many critics of culture. Already in the nineteenth century Kierkegaard was upset by the corrosive effect of advertising and publicity and the general aestheticizing and corrosive tendencies of modern culture on authentic subjectivity and individual inwardness (e.g., The Present Age). Philip Rieff criticized such tendencies as the “triumph of the therapeutic,”7 Christopher Lasch as “a culture of narcissism”8 now become “narcissism epidemic,”9 Guy Debord as “the society of the spectacle,”10 Chris Hedges as “the empire of illusion,”11 and Byung Chul Han as “the burnout society,”12 a society tired of trying to achieve the impossible in an ever competitive world, a society that is bored with the excesses of information and



Chapter Eight 201

impulses, a society so burned out as to be incapable of real contemplation, real dialogue, real bonding, real negativity, real difference.13 According to one psychoanalytic account of the impact of the Internet on human identity people are said to simply invent themselves as they go along with an identity that is fluid, multiple, emergent, decentralized, and always in process.14 A German author, Sven Hillenkamp, described the focus on feelings in the age of infinite freedom as spelling “the end of love.”15 Common to all these critics is the concern that contemporary capitalism increasingly degrades and dehumanizes human beings by destroying the distinctively human capacity to make judgments and to commit oneself to a reasonable and consistent identity, that is, the very subjectivity of the human subject, and reducing them to an object of desire in its wildest contingency, to an automatic reflex of purely external stimulation without intellect and will, something it can produce and manipulate. Long before postmodernism started talking about the “death” of the subject, capitalism has been slowly and now rather intensely bringing death to the subjectivity of human beings with all its nihilistic cultural and political consequences. I mentioned three challenges to Christian faith, hope, and love today, secularism, relativism, and cultural nihilism. Among the three I consider the third as the greatest challenge because it seems to absorb and invalidate the first two. The challenge of secularism and relativism is essentially an intellectual challenge, and it has a very determinate intellectual content, which therefore can be met on intellectual grounds. Atheism, evolutionary scientism, immanentist humanism, religious relativism, and the challenge of other religions: all of these, insofar as they have determinate contents, can be met by determinate intellectual responses, which can range from arguments for their outright rejection to appreciative accommodation of their critique into an enriched identity of Christianity and call for continuing dialogue to arguments for their intellectual inadequacy. The third challenge, cultural nihilism entailed by the aestheticization of life and death of the subject, invalidates the first two challenges. This third challenge lies in the very death of the subject, the disappearance of the subject who has both the intellect to make judgments and the will to commit oneself to an intellectual position. After all, atheism and relativism mean something only to someone who cares to know and to will. In a society too tired, bored, and burned out to care for truth, objectivity, reality, and fullness of life, who cares about atheism and relativism? Consistent atheism requires intellectual judgments and willing commitment of subjectivity, the will to live without transcendent hope (Camus). Tillich’s gospel of “the God beyond the God of theism” is good news only to someone who possesses enough subjectivity to feel the anxieties of nonbeing in its ontic, moral, and

202

Chapter Eight

spiritual forms, but what if we are too dead to feel anything strongly enough, to be “ultimately” concerned about anything?16 The death of the subject, furthermore, is more an ethos, a sensibility, a clouded horizon, something indeterminate and implicit; than a determinate, explicit intellectual position, judgment, or horizon. As such, this nihilistic sensibility often goes unnoticed and is difficult to respond to, just as fear directed to a determinate object can be responded to but not the “anxiety” about nonbeing, as Heidegger, Tillich, and other existentialists used to point out many decades ago. This is something even Charles Taylor misses when he says that institutional religions may have declined but that religion in the sense of “ultimate concern” has not.17 If we are so reduced to the level of immediate, transitory, and always changeable feelings and desires, will we be intellectually and volitionally alive enough to care about the distinction between the ultimate and the relative and to commit ourselves to the ultimate? In this sense I am concerned that the death of the subject and the nihilism it implies are the greatest challenges to Christian faith, hope, and love, as these are, as theological virtues, directed to God. TRANSCENDENCE AND SOLIDARITY AS CONDITIONS OF FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE Before I go on to suggest possible responses to these challenges, I would like to outline a reconstruction of the theological virtues in a way both faithful to the best of the Christian tradition and responsive to the challenges of our times. I want to present a transcendental theology of the three virtues while also insisting on their irreducibility to those conditions. Ever since Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13:13 that “and now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love,” faith, hope, and love have been mentioned side by side as an essential trinity of what constitutes the center of Christianity. As far as I know, however, these three virtues have been treated as something simply given in scripture and in the venerable theological tradition based on biblical revelation, but without asking what there is about human beings or their nature that makes faith, hope, and love “intrinsic” to human nature in the sense that they are not something merely imposed from without by a believing tradition but also profoundly responsive to what lies in the depth of human nature itself, without, however, being “constitutive” of human nature in the sense that they are reducible to a projection of human nature, to use Karl Rahner’s critical distinction.18 Faith, hope, and love are not something accidental or important only because Paul said so but essential in the sense that they embody profound ontological needs—implanted by the



Chapter Eight 203

Creator—to transcend themselves. I am proposing to apply Rahner’s transcendental method to the theology of faith, hope, and love. Human life is a movement of transcendence, a movement to transcend the emptiness of the isolated subject toward a fuller life. There are three basic modalities of this transcendence, knowledge, action, and relation. Human beings have to know the truth of the world they live in, as objectively as possible, and as deeply as possible. They have to guide their life by what they know of the truth of the world if they are to live without errors, illusions, and fantasies about the world, however difficult this might be. Yet what they can know by their own power, by their own experience, insight, demonstration, and verification is limited. In fact, what they do know is itself internally conditioned by what they have to presuppose as its condition, its context, its horizon, which they cannot access except by further presupposing other conditions, contexts, and horizons. These are not things they “know” with clarity and insight but what they have to “believe” as true if what they do know is going to make sense. There is no sharp distinction between knowledge and belief because each is so intrinsically involved in the other as its condition of possibility. This point should be relatively easy to accept in our age so used to the ideas of the “will to believe,” “web of belief,” the horizon of knowledge, and the “hermeneutic circle.” Believing—and the will to believe—is an essential condition of knowing in all areas of human life. The second modality of transcendence is action. We not only must know, but we must above all act. Human nature consists of potentialities and needs, all of which demand actualization, and it is through the act that we actualize ourselves. To posit an act, however, is to expose ourselves, our subjectivity, our interiority, our individuality, our spirituality, to the objectivity of the actual world where our interiority must become externalized, our individuality socialized, our spirituality materialized. This objective, actual world, however, is not something I have created; it is there as a condition of my action, a condition which I cannot control or reduce to my own subjectivity. That is to say, to act is to expose myself to the contingencies of the objective, social world with all its risks of failure and opposition. To act is to stake myself on a result that lies in the future that I cannot completely plan according to my arbitrary specifications. That is, action is oriented to the future in all its unintended and unforeseen contingencies. What guarantee is there that I will succeed in achieving what I intend to achieve through my present act? To act, therefore, is to hope that the future I want to bring about is possible to attain if I do commit myself to act, whereas in desiring and wishing I expect a certain result while remaining simply indifferent and uncommitted. Hoping means the involvement of the subject but also staking oneself on the positive cooperation of objective conditions to achieve the

204

Chapter Eight

result I intend. The stronger I hope that a certain end is attainable, the more I will commit myself to action. Without hope there is no possibility of action. Hoping is an essential condition in all areas of human life inasmuch as there is no human life without action, as knowing and believing are essential conditions of human life. The third modality of transcendence is relation. Just as I cannot not know, and just as I cannot not act, so I cannot not relate myself to others in manifold ways in manifold contexts. Relation is an expression of our ontological interdependence. We can actualize and fulfill ourselves only in and through relations. We depend on one another for our very birth into the world, for our interpersonal relations, for our material, political, and cultural conditions of our very existence. In an imperfect, evolving world our interdependence is liable to become an occasion for mutual exploitation and conflict: not everyone is equally dependent on one another, and some who are less dependent seek to dominate those who are more dependent. The human, moral demand is to transform this interdependence into solidarity based on mutual recognition of each other’s humanity and to expand this solidarity as widely as possible to include all humanity across all the boundaries of identity. This solidarity would in turn require willing and loving appreciation of one another in all their legitimate uniqueness, that is, loving them as fellow human beings in whom we can find ourselves for all our differences and with our differences. Solidarity aims at communion and is the stronger as it is internally energized by communion. That is, loving is an essential condition of relating, as hoping is an essential condition of acting, and as believing is an essential condition of knowing. So far I have considered these three modalities of transcendence in mutual isolation. Of course, they never exist in isolation. I can know only in and through others and through the accumulated wisdom of the ages and traditions. To know is really to participate in the fund of knowledge and insights present in the traditions of communities. I can act only with the collaboration of others and groups and their social embodiments. To act is really to co-act or act together in society and history. I can only relate to others through knowledge and action. The solidarity with others is really solidarity in knowledge and action. Solidarity in society provides the ultimate subjectivity and agency of an act, as agency provides the unifying energy of communal solidarity, and as knowledge provides wisdom and teleology for the solidarity of action. The same internal relation obtains among the conditions of knowledge, action, and relation, namely belief, hope, and love. Belief is generated and sustained in hope, just as hope for the future is both guided by knowledge and energized by love, and just as love is guided by knowledge and sustained by hope.



Chapter Eight 205

According to the Christian tradition, however, the ultimate end of human life, its ultimate definitive salvation lies in participating in the communion of the triune God. Human beings are created in the image of God to image, resemble, and be united with their exemplar in eternal life, the triune God— Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Their ultimate salvation is eschatological, nothing less than the vision of God in God’s own essence in the language of the classical tradition. Obviously, belief, hope, and love discussed above in their historical sense is not sufficient by themselves to bring us to that salvation. God in himself remains incomprehensible and not knowable by us through our temporal mode of knowing and believing. Nor is God an object among objects that we can achieve through our own action and hope in society and history. Likewise, God is not a person among persons that we can come to love according to the contingencies of our pleasure and will. In order for us to achieve union with God we must know something about God, hope in God, and love God, in a way that transcends God’s effects in the world and our finite, contaminated intellect and will. God must take the initiative to empower and inspire us to believe in him, hope in him, and love him in a way that he deserves to be believed in, hoped in, and loved, beyond our temporal modes of knowing and believing, acting and hoping, relating and loving, beyond what his created effects can tell us about God. That is, we need faith, hope, and love as theological virtues. For this we need divine revelation, and faith is the name for the capacity—itself given by God—to accept God’s self-revelation as our ultimate saving end, as the God of love who wills to save us by inviting us into the communion of the Trinitarian life. Faith does not give us insight into the intrinsic intelligibility of the divine being because there is no connaturality between God and us, but the “light of faith” sees the “credibility” if not the “intelligibility” of the content of divine revelation because we believe the person who does the revealing, Christ, the Word of God incarnate. Faith is the will to believe on the basis of the credibility of the revealer, not the claim of self-sufficient reason to “see” into the intelligible necessity of the triune God and the Incarnation. It is both our power and God’s power poured into our hearts or infused by God. It is our capacity because our own subjectivity is freely involved in the act of believing with the freedom to believe or not to believe, but it is not our self-generated capacity but one given by God because such a faith is not something we can achieve by our own finite power. It is our power given by God to transcend ourselves toward participation in God’s own life as the ultimate meaning of creation. It is the grace that produces in us the will to believe (voluntas credendi) by healing our sinful and weakened intellect and will and elevating them to a participation in God’s own life as

206

Chapter Eight

our ultimate saving end. Faith is a modality of our transcendence toward God in himself empowered by God himself as the ultimate saving truth (ST, II-II, I, 1–5; II, 1–3). Hope in the theological sense is hope in the possibility of ultimate, definitive salvation in the communion with God, and this too is not something we can achieve by ourselves. Hope is something we do, and we remain the subject of hope with the freedom to hope or despair, but we cannot and dare not hope to achieve ultimate, definitive union with God by our own power as finite, mortal beings. We must be enabled to hope by the revelation of God who invites and inspires us to hope despite all the temptations to despair in a very vulnerable world and offers us promises of fulfillment through various signs such as the cross and resurrection of Christ. The grace of hope does not give us an insight into how God governs the world, how God overcomes evil, how God leads nature and history to God’s own end and fulfillment, anymore than faith gives us an insight into the intelligibility of God’s transcendent being, but it does give us the patience, the courage, and the will to do our very best in the world and to stake our life on the possibility of ultimate fulfillment in God and by God despite all the defeats, failures, and evils in the world. Hope heals our sinful and despairing will and moves it to persevere with confidence and trust in the possibility of attaining our ultimate end in spite of all the negativities of nature and history. Hope hopes that divine grace will triumph, even though it knows not how (ST, II-II, XVII and XVIII). If faith is an orientation of our whole existence to God as the ultimate end under the aspect of the ultimate truth which we can only believe in without an intellectual vision, and if hope is an orientation of our whole existence to God as the ultimate end under the aspect of the ultimate good to which we can only aspire without being able to attain it with our own praxis, love is the orientation of our whole existence to God as the ultimate end under the aspect of the actual attainment of this end, that is, the communion with God as a friend, not as an object we need for our own salvation as in faith and hope but as the ultimate end to be loved for his own sake. It is self-evident that we cannot achieve this communion with God by our own effort and will. Even achieving the communion of love with other human beings is not a matter of one’s own will. If it were, no human being would be lonely, and if someone intends to achieve it through his or her own will alone, it would only result in manipulation and violation of the other. Even human love requires the willing solicitation from and response to the love of the other, which participates in the character of the gratuity of grace. In the case of human love, however, there is a perfect commensurability between human beings: they are born as mutually dependent beings with similar needs and dispositions for friendship, and love is largely a matter of



Chapter Eight 207

the contingent coordination of these needs between particular human beings on the same level. There is no commensurability between God as creator and human beings as creatures. There is no mutual dependence between them, no mutual need for each other between them as between human beings. Love of God, therefore, is totally the work or function of God who creates human beings with “a heart that finds no rest until it rests in God” (Augustine) and enables, illumines, attracts, and inspires human beings to transcend themselves to seek the personal communion with God as their ultimate end, far beyond anything they can hope for in their created capacity as human beings. This capacity to love God in the theological sense is the grace of God who first loves and invites us to love God in return. It goes without saying that this love of God in the theological sense is not identical with the vision and love of God in himself in the eschaton but only a participation, a foretaste of that love as is compatible with the conditions of sinful, wounded existence in this world. St. Thomas speaks of this love of God, which is God’s love of us, as the “mother,” “root,” and “form” of all virtues, moral and theological. The reason is that theological love is love of God, the ultimate end of all creation, and participation in that end. Love is the form of all virtues because love of God orients all virtues toward this ultimate end and because no virtues are virtues if they violate this ultimate teleological orientation. As such, love of God is the root and mother of all virtues because love nourishes, heals, and elevates them to participate in the ordering of human beings in their ultimate destination toward God. Love of God heals our sinful and contaminated intellect and will, lifts them to participate in our ultimate destiny, and preserves their significance as virtues that reinforce human nature in its journey to God. In Hegelian terminology, the love of God is the form, mother, and root of all virtues because it “sublates” them by negating, elevating, and preserving them in the human journey to God (ST, II-II, 23, 7 and 8). The three modalities of human transcendence in history mentioned earlier: knowledge, action, and relation, and their respective preconditions—believing, hoping, and loving—are also meant to be integrated into the context of the theological virtues and subordinated to the dialectic of healing and elevating; the sublating dialectic of negation, elevation, and preservation, especially the dialectic of the love of God, the form of all virtues, and as such, the greatest of the virtues, moral and theological. There is no dualism of natural and supernatural in St. Thomas. The natural is meant to be healed, purified, and elevated into the saving dynamic of divine grace, the supernatural. Faith, hope, and love are “theological” because they are enabled by God alone, referred to God as their fulfilling end, and knowable only through God’s revelation. How, then, are they also “virtues”? Aren’t virtues human

208

Chapter Eight

works, the result of human effort? Some Protestants, especially Calvinists and Lutherans, are very uncomfortable with this terminology because it seems to deny the all-important principle of sola gratia and smacks too much of Aristotelian naturalism. Without pretending to settle this age-long controversy, let me simply briefly present why Aquinas insists on calling them not only theological but also virtues. For Aquinas, creation means God’s production of our whole being or esse out of nothing, and God alone can create beings or be the proper, not accidental, cause of being because his very essence is to be without any external limitation. The ontological dependence of the creature on the creator is total and complete. However, God does not create beings as purely passive beings that are subject to purely external determination but creates them with their own natures or essences, which are intrinsic principles of action. God shares with them “the dignity of causality [dignitas causalitas]” or agency so that they can act as the kind of beings they are with their own internal sources of action (ST, I, 23, 8). This does not mean they are only or completely internally determined; only the absolutely first principle, or God, is. Creatures are also externally determined or subject to the external causality of many other things, but this only means that when they are, they are so subject through their natures or their own intrinsic principles of action. They react to external causalities precisely as the kind of beings they are with their internal resources or capacities. God deals with stones as stones, with human beings as human beings. Human beings are subjects of their own intellect and will, and act properly as human beings only when their actions flow from their own knowledge and will (actus humanus). There is no purely externally imposed act on human beings without denaturing and degrading their humanity (ST, I-II, 6, 1). Human capacities such as intellect and will are meant to be developed and perfected through good habits or virtues, which are perfections of powers that dispose them to operate well, each according to its nature and end (ST, I-II, 55, 1). Virtue is a “good quality of mind” or rather a good habit of the mind in the sense that only rational beings can posit voluntary acts while a good habit disposes the rational agent to live righteously, in accordance with reason (ST, I-II, 55, 4). In the case of natural virtues, whether moral or intellectual, which dispose our intellect and will to operate well in guiding our existence within the bounds of human nature, their development is up to us according to our capacities given in our nature. In matters of faith, hope, and love, however, which participate in God’s own life beyond our natural capacities, God alone is the efficient cause of those virtues, called “infused” because they must be “poured” into our hearts by God. The source of these virtues is “totally extrinsic to us [totaliter ab extrinseco]” (ST, I-II, 62, 3). They are not products of our own effort. “God works them in us [in nobis] without us [sine nobis].”



Chapter Eight 209

“Without us,” because we cannot bring them about by our own actions [sine nobis agentibus]. But notice: God still works them “in us,” not merely from without, not only without our acting, but also not without our consenting [non tamen sine nobis consentientibus]. (ST, I-II, 55, 4 ad 6). No one is more emphatic than Aquinas that faith, hope, and love are solely the work of God, but he is also emphatic that God does not work on us purely from the outside like inanimate tools. Even and especially, faith, hope, and love involve our subjectivity in its depth, totality, and ultimacy; after all, we are the ones who believe, hope, and love. Stones and dogs cannot be subjects of faith, hope, and love. Even though it is God alone who empowers and inspires us to believe, hope, and love, we still have the responsibility for responding with all our capacities, to accept faith, hope, and love, to persevere in them, to develop them, and to spread them, although always under the inspiring, transcendent causality of God. We are ourselves fully involved in the operation of faith, hope, and love with the freedom to turn deaf ears to God’s invitations or to give ourselves fully to those invitations. God works faith, hope, and love “in us” precisely by supernaturally perfecting our intellect and will beyond their natural capacity. In this sense they are (supernatural) virtues or perfections of our intellect and will, the human subject of believing, hoping, and loving (ST, I-II, 62, 2). It is important in this regard to note what Aquinas says with regard to Peter Lombard’s claim that love is from the Holy Spirit without the mediation of a virtue although faith and hope are so mediated. For Aquinas this view does not exalt but only degrades the excellence of love. The Holy Spirit does not move the human mind like a material thing or a tool without thought and will, without an intrinsic principle of its own movement. If the Holy Spirit did, the human mind would be a robot, and robots cannot be held responsible for good or evil, for merit or demerit. This would be contrary to the idea of love considered “the root of merit [radix merendi].” By nature, love is a voluntary act, an act of the will as an intrinsic principle of its own action. The will must be moved to love by the Holy Spirit in such a way that the will also remains itself an efficient cause of its act. God creates beings with determinate natures or forms as intrinsic principles of their own action, which are adequate for doing things “connatural” to them. The act of loving God, however, surpasses the capacities of human nature and requires supernatural habitual forms as intrinsic principles that will incline the will to love God with ease and delight ( prompte et delectabiliter) beyond its natural capacity. The supernatural love of God does not depend on any condition of nature or the capacity of natural virtue but “solely on the grace of the Holy Spirit [ex sola gratia Spiritus Sancti],” “solely [solum]” on the will of the Holy Spirit who distributes his gifts as he wishes (ST, II-II, 23, 2; 24, 3). Still, the Holy

210

Chapter Eight

Spirit infuses faith, hope, and love into human beings by perfecting and elevating their intellect and will beyond their natural capacity in such a way that they are also “virtues” as sources of action internal or intrinsic to human beings. The Holy Spirit does not push human beings around like things from the outside, but only by perfecting their subjectivity of intellect and will into virtues by which they can, as agents, as human beings with knowledge and will, not as robots, respond to the inspiring Spirit with a measure of responsibility for believing, hoping, and loving. Transcendence, both historical and eschatological, is an essential mode of human existence, but it is not the only mode. The other essential mode is historically mediated sociality or mutual dependence of all human beings in society and history. Our social life generates the need of knowledge, action, and relation, provides the means for their growth, and the context of their preconditions: believing, hoping, and loving, at the level of historical transcendence. Our knowledge and believing take place in the context of educational institutions with their shared beliefs. Our action and hoping take place in the context of various social groups, each with its own goals and hopes. Our relation and loving take place in the context of interpersonal and friendly circles with their own sense of solidarity. All these modes are nourished in the context and by means of social existence, which is increasingly global today. Faith, hope, and love in the theological, eschatological sense are no exception, except that they need their own form of sociality for their nurture, which we call the church. There is simply no possibility of faith, hope, and love in the theological sense without the church that keeps alive the memory of the faith handed down from the ancient church, nourishes the hope in eternal life through its liturgy, and inspires love through its preaching and education. The church is the sociality proper to the eschatological kind of transcendence called faith, hope, and love. No one believes, hopes, and loves in this sense by oneself or only for oneself, but only in the sociality and solidarity of the church. The Church is no more an accident than are the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. Just as faith, hope, and love are three modalities of our transcendence toward God under grace, so is the church an essential modality of human sociality under grace to protect, nourish, and expand the dialectic of faith, hope, and love. There are many attempts to reconceptualize faith, hope, and love, especially Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner, half a century ago, largely in the existentialist, individualist direction, in tune with the existentialist temper of the time with all its ambiguities and uncertainties.19 I cannot elaborate on this further, but I am inclined to think that we must locate faith, hope, and love firmly in the church and locate the church on the ground of faith, hope, and love much more firmly and systematically than has been the case.



Chapter Eight 211

RESPONDING TO CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES: RENEWING THE CHURCH AS WITNESS TO FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE So, given the reign of the death of the subject capable of believing, hoping, and loving with any consistency and commitment, the reign of nihilism in the society of appearance, image, spectacle, and illusion, a society too exhausted and tired out to want to believe, hope, and love anything, what should be our response as Christians? Our first response, I suggest, should be to renew our theological hope that for all these cultural signs of despair and negativity, God, whose power lies in his mercy, has not abandoned the world. God is still alive in the world, inspiring human beings to transcend the weight of despair, indifference, and fatigue, and drawing them toward himself by healing their sins and weaknesses of unbelief, despair, and hatred and elevating them to participate in his triune life through faith, hope, and love. We do not “see” God in history; signs of transcendence toward a better future are always shrouded in ambiguity; human solidarity always seems overwhelmed by the countersigns of imperialism and structural injustice. As communities of faith, hope, and love in dark times, it is all the more imperative that the churches should renew themselves, their faith in God, their hope in God, and their love of God, their creator, their savior, their lord. Christians cannot not hope that God is still enabling, inspiring, and directing the world to transcend itself both historically and eschatologically. We need a theological “discernment” of the spirits and signs of the times. To believe and hope that God is working in the world does not mean that we as a church have nothing to do, leaving everything to God alone. As already pointed out, we still remain the subjects of faith, hope, and love, even though these are empowered by God, whose transcendent agency does not substitute for or replace our finite subjectivity but strengthens it by healing it and elevating it without destroying its created integrity. We still have work to do, in fact more work to do in proportion to the intensity with which we believe, hope, and love. The more we believe, the more we want to nourish our faith; the more we hope, the more we want to intensify our action; the more we love God, the more we want to love our neighbors in God. And we want to do so as a church. Yes, as a church. Not as isolated individuals. Individuals do believe, hope, and love precisely as they participate in the church, the body of Christ, indwelt by the inspiring Holy Spirit, who is the life-giving soul and heart of the church. This idea of the church as the body of Christ needs some emphasis

212

Chapter Eight

today, when under the pressure of individualism the church seems reduced to either the purely external institution without interiority and content, sheer objectivity without enlivening subjectivity, or to the collection of pure, isolated individuals each of whom prays to God directly without the essential mutual support and sharing among the members as the body of Christ made alive by the all-pervasive presence of the Holy Spirit. Part of the response to contemporary challenges, then, I think, is this renewal of the sense of the church, the church as the body of Christ enlivened by the Holy Spirit beyond all the contingencies of institution and personality. The church is the sociality or solidarity of our existence organized as signs of our common eschatological faith, hope, and love. Individuals indeed must make their own acts of faith, hope, and love, but they do so only as participants in the divinely inspired solidarity and communion of the body of Christ, nourishing their faith, hope, and love from the faith, hope, and love embodied in the common life and tradition of the church. The church is already there prior to individuals, and provides the treasury of creeds, liturgy, saintly examples, spiritual and intellectual traditions for the conduct of their lives. Individuals participate in and contribute to this treasury through their own examples of faith, hope, and love. The church is above all the site of the Holy Spirit who is always inspiring these movements of faith, hope, and love revealed in the life of the Son. It is not just a metaphor to speak of the church as “mother” or “Holy Mother Church.” The church is the nurturing home for Christian faith, hope, and love. Separation from the church and living in isolation as an individual almost always spells collapse of faith, hope, and love. The first response of the church as church, therefore, is to renew this sense of the church or sensus ecclesiae and renew its solidary will to intensify its common faith, hope, and love and to become more effective signs of transcendent faith, hope, and love to the world, the world that is not only without any sense of eschatological transcendence but also too fatigued to will anything including historical transcendence in its many forms. There is no one definite way of renewing this sense of the church and its identity as a solidarity of faith, hope, and love. What is at stake is renewing an ethos, a tradition, a common spirit, which cannot be artificially manufactured but formed only through a long process of traditioning and socializing. What the church should always do, not only as the first thing or last thing but as everything is to pray always, in all humility, repentance, and openness, with genuine faith and sincere hope and willing love, for the coming of the Holy Spirit, Veni Sancte Spiritus! Veni Creator Spiritus. “Come Creator Spirit, visit the minds of your people, fill with grace from on high, the hearts you have created [veni creator spiritus, mentes tuorum visita, imple superna gratia, quae tu creasti pectora].” While invoking the coming of the Holy



Chapter Eight 213

Spirit without whom the church is simply dead and who alone can give life to dead bones, even to the dead bones of contemporary society, here are several things we can learn from the history of the church. The renewal of the church or founding of a new denomination always begins with a renewing return to the primordial origins of faith, hope, and love, to the founding Gospels of Christ, to the founders of different denominations and religious orders and their founding spirit and their respective charisms. Periodic collective retreats to meditate on these origins will be an indispensable condition of all church renewal. Among the many aspects of the church to be renewed, I place special importance on the renewal of the liturgy, the common worship of the church. The liturgy has a special place among the means of renewing the sense of the church because it embodies the church in all its symbolic dimensions: it brings all the individuals together into the common flow of readings and homilies and music reminding the congregation of their own empowering and exemplary origins, the common worship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the many praises embodied in the text of the rite, the concentration on the central event of Christian faith, the death and resurrection of Christ, all these in a way that appeals to the totality of human existence, material and spiritual, individual and social, historical and contemporary, present and future, our seeing, hearing, understanding, and will. The vitality of the liturgy is a measure of the vitality of the faith, hope, and love of the congregation. We say people are too busy nowadays, and in fact the liturgy is the only time for the absolute majority of Christians to read, hear, and see anything that reminds them of their eschatological destiny and puts their entire life in some perspective. All the more reason why the liturgy should be strengthened, as perhaps the only way of renewing the sense of the church. With regard to each of the theological virtues I suggest the following emphasis. With regard to faith, I am not sometimes sure whether even theologians have genuine faith. By this I mean that they are inclined either to reduce faith to human rational intelligibility, which makes them guilty of rationalism, the refusal to accept anything unless reducible to human rationality, or to claim an insight into the nature of God and divine providence as though they see into the eternal mind of God himself, which makes them guilty of Gnosticism. I do not want to mention any names here, but these are rather manifest in so much of theological literature today.20 What they find very difficult to do is to recognize the limits of human reason and to learn to meditate on the content of revelation, the trinity, the incarnation, life of Christ in his praxis, death, and resurrection as reflected on by many of the saintly theologians of the past, to savor them, to relish them, to appreciate them, and to develop spiritual insights on human life in “the light of faith [lumen fidei]”

214

Chapter Eight

without falling into the Gnostic claim to know God’s own interior life. This meditation on the content of faith, sometimes continued in the tradition of lectio divina, is a very traditional, classical way of nourishing the faith as faith, something masterfully elaborated by Hans Urs von Balthasar on the basis of his meditation on the works of the Fathers of the church.21 Nourished on faith in the light of faith, the church can testify to its faith in the triune God by contradicting and critiquing the insane pursuit of appearances, illusions, and idolatries so pervasive of the world today that also leads to the ruthless pursuit of wealth and power with all the human suffering and injustice they bring about, and help bring the world back to its senses. The eschatological perspective of faith helps us put human history in its totality, depth, and ultimacy in proper perspective and see all things sub ratione Dei, or under the logic of God, as St. Thomas would put it. Here I feel compelled to point out that the church has lost its courage to critique the worldliness of the world because it is afraid of the charge of escapism into other-worldliness. Isn’t it time to restore its faith and courage to critique the world in its inhuman, oppressive, and self-destructive worldliness? Who will do this if not the church: Wall Street? The White House? The New York Times? The United Nations? Has the church been so completely co-opted into the service of the world in its worldliness that John and Paul warned us about two thousand years ago? Do we need another Kierkegaard to remind ourselves of the distinction between Christianity and Christendom, Christianity and worldliness? With regard to hope, the most effective way of the church giving an account of the hope it bears as a divine gift is to promote the human hopes for a humanly better world in history where there will be less oppression, less degradation, less injustice for human beings created in the image of the triune God precisely as an anticipation and resemblance, however remote, of the eschatological kingdom in which God will be all in all, omnia in omnibus, the new heaven and the new earth where there will be no more tears and sufferings, where the communion of all creation in God and with God will be realized beyond all human imaginings. Christians cannot be indifferent to human historical hopes in the name of the eschatological; they must do their share in reducing the reign of sin in history, injustice, oppression, and degradation of fellow images of God if they really care about the triune God. The “light of hope” in the eschatological kingdom should make us willing to share in the historical hopes of fellow humanity. In fact, I must emphasize that sharing in the historical hopes of fellow humanity, especially of those on the margins of existence is one most important response to the crisis of faith, hope, and love today. Those who suffer from the systemic scarcity of basic needs, which Elaine Robinson defines in her chapter precisely as the essence of terror today, are the ones most prone to



Chapter Eight 215

despair and indifference about believing, hoping, or loving anything. In this regard the church must learn to accept politics, the attempt to humanize sinful structures and sources of human degradation and suffering, as the most effective way of practicing charity today, and thus to bear witness to its own eschatological hope. Here it is crucial to distinguish between personal and social sin. Personal sin is sin committed by the individual, for which the individual is responsible to the extent of his personal knowledge and freedom; without either knowledge or freedom there is no sin. Social sin is sin committed by the social subject, individuals insofar as they commit injustices by virtue of the social knowledge and the social power they share. Thus, structures and laws that embody our collective knowledge and will to sin: presidents abusing their official power and taking an entire nation to war at the expense of killing millions of innocent human lives, businesses manipulating the laws and institutions of the state for their private profit, entertainment industries who abuse and manipulate the social chain of mutual interdependence to propagate the ideology of sheer nihilism—these are just some examples of social or structural sin. It is obvious that social sin far exceeds personal sin in its sheer impact and power to do evil simply because it abuses the united, collective, institutionalized, and structural power of our sociality. An individual can only kill tens or hundreds of people at most, but a president can kill millions. An individual can steal thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but corrupt officials can steal billions. A parent can bankrupt a family, but major banks can bankrupt the entire world. Those who care about sin cannot be indifferent to social sin. I am inclined to say that concern with personal sin and personal sin alone is sheer hypocrisy. Social sin in its impact is the power of evil that embodies and utilizes the sociality of our existence. Our social existence in its organized sociality can produce such gigantic evils as imperialism, false nationalism, massive injustice and oppression, or it can, if properly organized and used for just causes, such gigantic goods as public education, universal health care, public security, greater sense of solidarity as citizens and human beings. There is a world of difference between what individuals can do as individuals and what they can do in their properly organized sociality.22 Clearly, given the totalizing significance of structures and institutions for good and evil, Christians can no longer confine themselves to personal sins and their forgiveness and must accept politics, the attempt to participate in the elimination of oppressive structures and the production of more humane structures, as the most appropriate and effective way of practicing charity today. This will also be the most convincing way of giving an account of their hope to the contemporary world where there is so much suffering and injustice as results of structural sins. It is understood that the aim of the church

216

Chapter Eight

in its hope is not to help produce a society that is wealthiest, most powerful, and most technologically advanced, but a society that is most human because it is based on truth, human dignity, and human solidarity, with a common hope for an ever more humane community as intimations of the eschatological kingdom, the ultimate destiny of all humanity and indeed of all creation. With regard to love, the church bears witness to God’s love by learning to love fellow human beings and God’s entire creation in God, in the “light of the love of God.” Today human solidarity is challenged to the extreme to extend its boundaries across all the traditional and often restrictive and alienating boundaries of identity and to make itself truly universal or catholic. We are challenged to love as widely, as profoundly, and as practically, as Jesus taught us in the Gospels. This universalizing dialectic of Christian love to transcend all arbitrary boundaries is especially compelling today when, as secular humanists like Jürgen Habermas recognize, secularism and capitalism have no spiritual resources for motivating people to overcome their atomistic individualism and make their sense of solidarity cosmopolitan as befitting the age of globalization.23 It is the “light” of love in the theological sense that gives us the impetus, the perspective, and the discipline in the love of fellow human beings from the erotic love of lovers to the love of friendship to the solidarity of citizens to the global solidarity of all in history and nature. The love of the triune God is self-communicative and self-sharing, and human love shares in this divine dialectic of sharing with others. Yet contemporary capitalist society reduces love to mere feeling, mere pleasure, mere play, mere entertainment, and the exchange of transitory superficialities without depth and endurance. The love of God makes it possible to see in the other and all others someone demanding our response of love, someone who is more than a succession of transitory feelings, someone who is also called to eternal life with God, and someone, therefore, whom we cannot reduce to our own desire and pleasure, to our own ethnic, gender, religious, cultural, and nationalist prejudice. In addition to politicizing love, it may be the special challenge to the church to bear witness to this impetus, perspective, and discipline involved in all love in the light of the love of God. Love is meant to be the greatest completion of human nature that is born in emptiness and neediness, with a crying need for fulfilling human relations, and contemporary society seems to do everything to make this as difficult as possible. No wonder that despite all the deafening talk about relationality the contemporary human being is a lonely, isolated, and self-enclosed creature. The church as a community of love may have a special calling in recalling humanity to the divine truth of all love. What has been said thus far should make it quite clear that there is no separating faith, hope, and love from one another. Each is internally involved



Chapter Eight 217

in the other. Without faith in God and in what God is, no eschatological hope in God is possible, hope being a stake in the power of the being in whom one hopes. We do not hope in God unless we also love God. Without the love of God we do not hope in God, and without hope in God, we do not care to have faith in God. The relation among the virtues is mutual and internal, and no one virtue is possible without the intrinsic support of the other two (ST, II-II, 17 and 18). Despite this mutual internal relationship among the three virtues I would like to highlight the virtue of hope as the most compelling for today. There are arguments to show why each is the greatest of the three in some sense. Without faith in God there is neither hope nor love of God. We have the authority of St. Paul for the claim that love is the greatest of the three. All these arguments and appeals are valid each in its own way. For our own time, however, with its distinctive tendencies to despair, insensibility, and fatigue that debilitates, the great crisis seems to be the crisis of genuine action, especially collaborative action in solidarity, to transform our existence, especially our social existence. There are crying needs for all sorts of collaborative action for the sake of human dignity and human solidarity, which requires a certain trust and confidence in the possibility of obtaining certain results for the better in the historical future, that is, the hope that our collaborative action will make a difference. It is through action that we shape our lives and humanize our existence, and hope is the internal condition of the possibility of action that is always projected toward the future. It is hope that gives zest, pleasure, enthusiasm, and intensity to what we do, and gives us the courage and patience to persevere against the many challenges and obstacles any action is bound to face. If there is no hope, if the future is closed, if our present action will only repeat the old, what point is there in acting and trying to humanize our existence, and if acting is meaningless, why believe in anything and love anything, each of which in fact also requires some acting and deciding in the shaping of our existence? Hopelessness is an attack on the very possibility of action, and action in the world is also the condition of knowing and relating, and of believing and loving as their respective conditions. Hopelessness attacks our concrete existence in its action in the actual world, the world in which believing and loving also make sense. What difference does it make to a person when he experiences his existence in the world as hopeless, whether one believes or not, whether one loves or not? Hope has to do with our sociohistorical existence in its concrete totality involving both believing and loving whereas believing affects this totality only in its ideality, loving only in its relationality. It is through the act that we face our existence in all its intransigence and rudeness, and hopelessness entails the despair of this concrete totality including

218

Chapter Eight

believing and loving. In some sense it is hope that brings believing and loving together into the concrete totality of our existence and provides the positive impetus for both, while believing serves as the ideal foundation of our action and loving serves as the telos of our action.24 As the spring of action in the world that involves our existence in its totality, hope is the inspiring and enabling source of our life as a whole.

What If Christians Are Responsible for Their Own Decline? Paul E. Capetz

Anselm Min’s chapter is a reflection of both his genuine humanity as a person and his deep learning as a scholar of Christian theology. This combination of personal and scholarly virtues issues in something that I find increasingly rare among academic theologians these days, namely, profound wisdom and insight into the ontological dynamics of human existence as well as a sincere compassion for suffering human beings. For me, his chapter is thus a clarion call back to an older style of theology that did not feel pressured to sacrifice either existential relevance or intellectual depth in order to be au courant as measured according to the latest academic fashions and fads. Since, as I assume, Min would not have gone to the trouble of organizing a conference for academic theologians on the topic of faith, hope, and love unless he sincerely believed that theology as a disciplined form of inquiry bears, or should bear, some significant responsibility for nurturing and sustaining the intellectual conditions of the possibility of an authentically Christian mode of existence characterized by these theological virtues, I shall begin with some remarks on the criticisms I take his chapter to imply about the state of too much academic theology today before proceeding to identify a few omissions in Min’s analysis of our current circumstances. Min gives us a trenchant analysis, a painfully honest diagnosis, and a hard-hitting critique of those aspects of contemporary culture that pose the greatest challenges to the possibility of living a life oriented toward faith in God, hope for God, and love of God. I wholeheartedly agree with him when he argues that it is neither the critiques of philosophical atheism nor the relativizing implications of religious pluralism per se, but, rather, nihilism or the death of the subject that poses not merely the most urgent challenge but, indeed, the most severe threat facing us at this time. In a manner reminiscent of Tillich’s “theology of culture,” Min identifies the existential issue 219

220

Chapter Eight

at stake in this current intellectual trend. The very category “truth” itself has been called into question, having been “subjected to ideological suspicion” with the result that “Nihilism has become truth.” Min rightly points out that the first two challenges pale in comparison with the third: “After all,” he writes, “atheism and relativism mean something only to someone who cares to know and to will . . . but what if we are too dead to feel anything strongly enough, to be ‘ultimately’ concerned about anything . . . to care about the distinction between the ultimate and the relative and to commit ourselves to the ultimate.” If you think he is exaggerating, let me tell you about my recent experience of teaching a required course in religious studies for freshmen at a well-known university. In all my years of teaching, I have never had such a difficult time getting students interested in the subject matter of a course. When I spoke about this with a rabbi who is a chaplain at the school, she replied: “Let me guess what’s going on. They’re utterly disengaged, aren’t they? They are bored by serious questions and they don’t care.” With these words she hit the nail on the head. But let me give another example that has been far more characteristic of my career in graduate theological education. Many of the liberal Protestant students I have taught are, on the one hand, rigidly politically correct in an ideological sense, and yet, on the other hand, completely convinced of the postmodernist axiom that so-called “truth” is nothing but an ideological construct that stands in service to the will to power and domination. How many times have I been told that “there is no truth” or “there are no universally valid truth claims” by students preparing for professional ordained ministry in Protestant churches! And yet they cannot see the glaring contradiction between their universalizing political and moral commitments to liberation of the oppressed and their epistemological denial of truth. For if there is no such thing as truth, then it follows that there is no such thing as falsehood, either: the Holocaust never happened, there were no slaves in America, Jesus didn’t die on a Roman cross, there is nothing wrong with oppressing women or gay people, and no form of government is better than any other! These are such patently absurd conclusions, and yet they follow of necessity from the denial that there is any objective standard of truth to which we are all subject and by which we are all measured. Min correctly points to postmodernism as the philosophical fountainhead of this widespread doctrine, even though by doing so he risks alienating the legion of academic theologians on the left who have aided and abetted these postmodernist tendencies in contemporary theology. But Min is not a right-wing reactionary; he has been an ardent defender and student of liberation theology who realizes that the cause of liberation from oppression cannot be grounded on such a nihilistic non-foundation as a postmodernist denial of objective truth. Moreover, he draws attention to the correlation—or



Chapter Eight 221

if that is too weak a term let me then say, the intrinsic connection—between postmodernism and capitalism. To cite Min: “Long before postmodernism started talking about the death of the subject, capitalism has been slowly and now rather intensely bringing death to the subjectivity of human beings with all its cultural and political consequences.” To be sure, neither Min nor I deny that there have been some utterly crucial questions posed and issues raised by philosophers and theologians identified with postmodernism. Whether we are talking about the ambiguity of language and of texts, the suspicion of grand metanarratives, respect for “the other” as genuinely other and not as merely a projection of ourselves, postcolonialism, or related matters, none of us can any longer be sanguine about modernity or modernism—though this is hardly a new insight that was first discovered by postmodernists! However, even as a graduate student in the 1980s when I was beginning to come to terms with postmodernism, I already realized its inherent nihilism and its utter antithesis to the genuine cause of liberation theology, in spite of the fact that so many postmodernists are leftists in their moral and political sympathies. Nevertheless, we academic theologians, whether we are liberation theologians or not, whether we are postmodernists or not, have become pawns of the capitalist economic system. We are promoted or tenured as much as if not more by the quantity of our publications than by their quality and publishers accept only those book proposals for publication that promise to make a lot of money. Furthermore, even books from reputable publishing houses are rarely screened for errors. I recently read a book issued by a prestigious firm written by a well-known theologian with a PhD from a first-rate school. In it he described Manichaeanism as a neo-Platonic religion, which of course is akin to calling something a square circle. When the error was pointed out, he dismissed the criticism as trivial and said no one would care about such a fine point. Apparently truth, in this case historical truth, no longer matters, but at least his book is selling like hotcakes! Unfortunately, this is not an isolated example but is symptomatic of a serious intellectual decline in our ranks as well as of apathy about our vocation as theologians. Min also risks alienating theologians on the right for whom his Rahnerian transcendental analysis of human subjectivity is considered “foundationalist” and thus to be rejected in favor of a “positivism of revelation” (Bonhoeffer’s description of Barth). While I support Min’s call for strengthening the churches as the communities in which faith, hope, and love are sustained and nourished, ironically those theologians who have talked the loudest in recent decades about the need for theology to be ecclesial would look askance at his appeal to common human experience. Here I refer primarily to the postliberals under the influence of Barth and his rejection of a “point of contact”

222

Chapter Eight

between biblical revelation and insights to be gleaned from non-biblical sources. Imagine how a statement like the following would be heard by them: these three virtues have been treated as something simply given in scripture and in the venerable theological tradition based on biblical revelation, but without asking what there is about human beings or their nature that makes faith, hope, and love essential or constitutive of human nature in such a way that they are not something merely imposed from without by a believing tradition but also deeply responsive to the depth of human nature itself. . . . Faith, hope, and love are not something accidental or important only because Paul said so but essential in the sense that they embody profound ontological needs.

But note the irony here: Min’s philosophical, specifically transcendental claims about these virtues as rooted in something essential about the human being and its drive toward transcendence cut against the grain of both the right and the left by exposing their underlying shared consensus on human reason. Whereas the left has no basis on which to ground its concern for the oppressed given its capitulation to postmodernist nihilism, the right has no grounds for its claims other than sheer authoritarianism. Indeed, many conservative theologians take no small comfort from what postmodernists say about reason. I find this convergence of left and right with respect to the question of truth to be frightening and unprecedented; and to the extent that this generalization accurately captures a real trend in our discipline today, I fear that such theologies are hindrances rather than helps to the cause of furthering existential commitment to faith, hope, and love precisely because of their inability to make truth claims about reality that appeal to lived human experience simply as such. Notwithstanding my hearty agreement with much of Min’s diagnosis of the challenges defining our circumstances as well as my warm embrace of his robustly ontological form of theological reflection, I have to register some reservations about certain of his formulations and, furthermore, I wish to draw attention to what appear to be some blind spots in his thinking about the problems facing Christianity in our culture with respect to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. While he is downright prophetic in his critique of major tendencies in present-day American culture and society, he risks giving the false impression that Christians—and the churches—are innocent victims of a hostile anti-Christian world who have done nothing to undermine or obscure the very cause of faith, hope, and love they supposedly exist to serve. Let me begin with Min’s claim that “Christian intellectuals have become a minority, a silent and discredited minority . . . in the academic world.” Perhaps this statement is in some sense true yet without further clarifica-



Chapter Eight 223

tion of which examples he has in mind, I have to express my unease about this formulation given that this kind of rhetoric is often heard on the lips of right-wing Christians who do not hold themselves accountable to the strictly public criteria of reason and common human experience when advocating for their theological or moral views. Christian, mostly evangelical, scientists who complain that so-called “creation science” or “intelligent design” is not taught alongside evolution in public schools and universities typically characterize themselves as unfairly marginalized intellectuals in an academic establishment that is inherently “godless” and anti-Christian. Clearly, however, such pseudo-scientists do not uphold the publically recognized methods of science that alone merit a place within the curriculum of modern, secular educational institutions. Indeed, these conservative Christians have so damaged the reputation of Christian faith in this culture by virtually identifying the cause of Christ with anti-intellectualism and anti-science that invariably the first question I am asked by secular people when they learn what I do for a living is whether I believe in evolution! Obviously, Min is not defending such indefensible positions or the persons who represent them when he claims that Christian intellectuals are being marginalized; nevertheless, the distinction between this sort of reactionary Christian anti-intellectualism and what Min represents is all but completely lost on most people in our society and especially in the academy. Sadly, the cause of Christianity has become widely identified with an anti-modern agenda that identifies modern knowledge with unfaith. It is hard to imagine how this kind of popular perception can be altered. Yet even with respect to the kind of academy theology Min represents, I think it is important to point out that most of it, whether Catholic or Protestant, is usually understood and practiced in an authoritarian manner; that is to say, it sees itself as a form of inquiry bound to its traditional authorities (scripture and tradition or scripture alone), merely explicating their meaning rather than asking whether what these authorities teach is also true. Surely this is what the time-honored view of theology as fides quaerens intellectum is predominantly taken to imply: theology as a form of inquiry presupposes the truth of the faith that is the object of theological study. But I have to question the adequacy of this understanding of the theological task in a society like ours that is secular in principle though religiously pluralistic in fact. “Secular” here should not be confused with “secularistic” (i.e., an antireligious ideology); rather, it simply means religiously non-authoritarian. Any religious argument, Christian or otherwise, that seeks to make its case in a context without an established religion or church has to do so in a manner that appeals to reason and human experience. Only an understanding of theology as an open-ended inquiry that is prepared to enter the public forum

224

Chapter Eight

and willing to subject its claims to critical scrutiny from other perspectives, including non-theistic and non-Christian ones, will be vibrant and worthy of serious consideration and respect in our society. But, unfortunately, most Christian theologians reject such a view of their task since to their mind the truth of Christian faith is not subject to public adjudication. Furthermore, criticism of the church or its traditional authorities is only allowed up to a point. So, for example, when Min laments that anti-Christian critics never cease to highlight Christianity’s “history of dogmatism and intolerance,” we should not forget that Min’s own Roman Catholic Church still reinforces that authoritarianism in theology by silencing and censuring some of its best and most creative theologians who understand themselves not as the church’s enemies but as its conscience. Clearly, Min’s view of the theological enterprise includes not only “dogmatics” (“faith seeking understanding”) but also “apologetics” (contra Barth). Still, it is not transparent from his remarks in his chapter just how far he thinks the apologetic task extends. As a Roman Catholic theologian, Min follows Thomas Aquinas in affirming that our eschatological fulfilment as human beings (salvation) depends upon knowing God in a way that transcends God’s effects in the world (natural theology); hence, faith in divine revelation is necessary. While the freedom to believe or not believe belongs to our human subjectivity, we are also told that faith is “not something we can achieve by our own finite power” since only grace can produce in us “the will to believe.” Here Min touches upon a difficult issue in the Christian tradition, namely, the relation between human freedom and divine election or predestination. But we need to think more carefully about the implications of what is being said here in the light of the other two challenges Min mentioned at the outset of his chapter, namely, atheistic humanism and religious pluralism. If faith is brought about by grace, then what about those who are without faith? Have atheists or Buddhists not been chosen by God to receive the grace that issues in Christian faith? Or is their refusal to accept the credenda of Christian faith (Incarnation, the Trinity, etc.) simply the product of their “sinful and weakened intellect and will”? It is difficult to see how on this view Christian theologians could ever enter into meaningful dialogue and debate with non-Christians so as to persuade them of the truth of Christian faith on which their eschatological salvation depends. Although Min chides certain nameless theologians whom he calls “rationalists” for not possessing the faith requisite to their calling as Christian theologians, I have to ask whether the truth of Christian faith, as Min understands it, can ever be persuasively argued for in a public sphere given his view that “the content of divine revelation” is beyond “self-sufficient reason.” Even if many religious doctrines transcend what is usually meant by “rational,” are they in



Chapter Eight 225

any sense reasonable? To put the issue in another way, we can ask whether theology, in its most academically respectable sense, is exclusively or primarily an exercise in clarifying the meaning of what we Christians already believe to be true, even if we also insist that somehow Christian faith, hope, and love are not only rooted in the ontological structure of human existence but are actually the answer to its deepest existential longings. Can Min make a compelling case why non-theists should believe in God or why Buddhists should become Christians? If not, why should non-Christians believe in the gospel? In my judgment, so long as theologians cannot answer this question in a non-authoritarian, purely public manner as befits intellectual argument in a secular, pluralistic society, it is not surprising if Christian intellectuals, even the best ones, should find themselves increasingly marginalized from academic discourse. Additionally, I have to raise a protest against what appears to be an overly idealized depiction of the Christian community in Min’s chapter: “a community that practices its love of God by practicing love of all God’s creatures beyond arbitrary boundaries.” Min knows as well as I do that this is hardly a realistic depiction of the empirical church as it actually exists; still, what is missing from Min’s chapter is any critique of the church as having undermined faith, hope, and love in the lives of real people. It goes without saying, of course, that “Christian churches are meant to be, if anything, communities of faith, hope, and love”; but what needs to be said is just how rarely they are! I cannot help but mention my own disillusionment with Christians of all stripes in this regard. Although I grew up in a church where we often sang a hymn entitled “They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Love,” my experience of life has sadly forced me to acknowledge that in addition to all that Christian love there is also a great deal of Christian hatred at work in the churches, especially of those who are different, as well as much Christian indifference to the plight of our suffering fellow citizens. In my view, nothing has more discredited the Christian cause today than the discrepancy between this idealized self-understanding of Christians and their actual conduct. Obviously, I do not mean to indict every Christian of this lack of love; there are many truly loving Christians in the world. But, and here’s the point, there are just as many truly loving non-Christians too, so the identification of Christianity with the cause of faith, hope, and love—at least in their generically human sense—only serves to highlight the hypocrisy to which non-Christians bear witness against Christians. Finally, we cannot overlook, as Min apparently does, the impact of rightwing politics on the popular perception of what Christianity is all about for many people in our country. In the recent presidential primary season it was Ted Cruz, not Bernie Sanders, who was widely seen as representing biblical

226

Chapter Eight

values. (Most American Christians, unfortunately, do not share Min’s critical judgments about capitalism but, rather, believe that Christianity and capitalism are allies in the struggle against everything they perceive to be anti-American!). While driving through the Midwest last year I saw a billboard on the side of the road that exclaimed: “Reclaiming America for Christ.” Although these were the only four words on that billboard, I immediately knew what the unspoken agenda behind them was: in addition to being anti-scientific, “Christ” here was a code word for a platform that was anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-Muslim, pro-capitalist, and probably racist as well. Last summer after the Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage, I heard a number of gay people exclaim that, “Christians are our enemies when it comes to securing our human and civil rights.” Those of us who are theologians of a progressive bent have to ask ourselves to what extent our own failings have created such a vacuum in the wider culture that the word “Christ” can now signify an agenda like this to believer and nonbeliever alike. It is high time for academic theologians to do some serious soul searching and to take stock of the impact of their work beyond the narrow confines of the ivory tower. If academic theologians can no longer make any truth claims about what is ultimately real and thus what is ultimately important, claims that appeal to reason and common human experience in a non-authoritarian manner, or if we restrict our task to defending but not criticizing the churches and their inherited theological and moral traditions, then it is no wonder that our work has little influence on the wider culture. It is possible, even likely, that Min has addressed my concerns in other writings of his. But since I am not familiar with his entire published corpus, I have had to restrict my critical remarks solely to what he has said in this chapter. I have no doubt that he has important things to say in response to what I have lifted up, given his vast learning and his genuine humanity. So in closing, let me simply express my appreciation for this opportunity to engage a truly fine person and theologian on issues that face all of us today as we seek to be faithful to our calling. NOTES 1.  My references to the Summa theologiae (ST for short) are by part, question, and article. 2.  Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), 1–22, 505–35. 3.  Anselm K. Min, Solidarity of Others in a Divided Word: A Postmodern Theology after Postmodernism (New York: T&T Clark International, 2004), 156–97.



Chapter Eight 227

 4. Ralph Keyes, The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004).  5. David Callahan, The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).  6. Ari Rabin-Havt, Lies Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics (New York: Anchor Books, 2016).  7. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).  8. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).   9.  Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). 10. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994; French original 1967). 11.  Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (New York: Nation Books, 2009). 12. Byung Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 13. Ibid. 14.  Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 10. 15. Sven Hillenkamp, Das Ende der Liebe: Gefuehle im Zeitalter unendlicher Freiheit (Munich, Germany: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009). 16. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952; Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957). 17. Taylor, A Secular Age, 427, 437. 18.  Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1978), 185. 19.  For example, Tillich, The Courage to Be. 20.  Anselm K. Min, “The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Christian Identity in a World of Différance,” in The Task of Theology: Leading Theologians on the Most Compelling Questions for Today, ed. Anselm K. Min (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2014), 29–55. 21.  Hans Urs von Balthasar, Seeing the Form, vol. 1 of The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, trans. Erasmo Levivà-Merikakis (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), 131–218. 22.  Anselm K. Min, Dialectic of Salvation: Issues in Theology of Liberation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 104–16. 23. Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion (Malden, MA: Polity, 2005), 101–13. 24. Anselm K. Min, “Toward a Dialectical, Trinitarian Ontology of Relation: Overcoming Abstract Formalism in Theology and Philosophy,” in Rationalität im Gespräch, ed. Markus Muehling (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016), 127–38.

228

Chapter Eight

WORKS CITED Aquinas, Thomas. Summa theologiae. 4 vols. Matriti, Italy: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1955–1958. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Seeing the Form. Translated by Erasmo Levivà-Merikakis. Vol. 1 of The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982. Callahan, David. The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Habermas, Jürgen. Between Naturalism and Religion. Malden, MA: Polity, 2005. Han, Byung Chul. The Burnout Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation Books, 2009. Hillenkamp, Sven. Das Ende der Liebe: Gefuehle im Zeitalter unendlicher Freiheit. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009. Keyes, Ralph. The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004. Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. Min, Anselm K. “The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Christian Identity in a World of Différance.” In The Task of Theology: Leading Theologians on the Most Compelling Questions for Today, edited by Anselm K. Min, 29–55. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2014. ———. Dialectic of Salvation: Issues in Theology of Liberation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. ———. Solidarity of Others in a Divided Word: A Postmodern Theology after Postmodernism. New York: T&T Clark International, 2004. ———. “Toward a Dialectical, Trinitarian Ontology of Relation: Overcoming Abstract Formalism in Theology and Philosophy.” In Rationalität im Gespräch, edited by Markus Muehling, 127–38. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016. Rabin-Havt, Ari. Lies Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics. New York: Anchor Books, 2016. Rahner, Karl. Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. Translated by William Dych. New York: Crossroad, 1978. Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007. Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952. ———. Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Twenge, Jean M., and W. Keith Campbell. The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009.

Index

Abelard, Peter, 82 Adam, Robert, 195n62 Adorno, Theodor, ix, 8, 9 Akerman, Shane, 18–23 Albert the Great, 106n10 Ambrose, 82 Anderson, Victor, 152 Ansbro, John J., 146 Aquinas, Thomas, xiii, xv, xxii, 1, 11–12, 18, 45, 67, 76n4, 81–83, 85, 91, 101, 106n10, 107n14, 139, 151, 156nn18–20, 198, 206–9, 214, 224 Aristotle, x, 5, 11, 83–85, 99, 101, 139, 149–51 atheism, vii, xiv, xviii, 9, 14, 60, 66, 69, 201, 219–20 atonement, xxi, 171–72, 185–89, 195n54 Augustine, vii, xiii, 1, 12, 82, 93, 107n14, 139, 197, 207 Baker-Fletcher, Karen, 153 Bakhita, Josephine, 7 Baldwin, James, 154 Barth, Karl, 221 being-in-the-world, 49–50 bell hooks, 116, 158n73 Benedict XVI, Pope, viii–x, xv, 1–23, 81, 90 Benjamin, Walter, 152 Bietz, Charles, 88 Bonaventure, 2–3, 12

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 221 Brown, Teresa Fry, 116 Buber, Martin, 122, 130 Buchanan, Allen, 88 Buckley, Michael, 14 Bultmann, Rudolf, 93 Butler, Lee, 165–66 Campbell, Charles, 122 Camus, Albert, 201 Capetz, Paul E., 219–26 capitalism, xxii, 6, 163, 165, 177, 180, 197–201, 216, 221, 226 Cave, Nick, 54 Chang, Kei Eun, 158n70 charity. See love Church, the. See theological virtues, as ecclesial in essence civil rights movement, xix–xx, 141–47, 148, 151–52 classism, xx, xxii, xxiv, 167 Clayton, Philip, 76 Cobb, John, 199 colorblindness, xvii–xviii, 117–18, 120, 122, 125–26, 127, 132; See also racism common good, xix, 97, 102, 104, 139– 40, 148–51 communalism, xvii, 97 Cone, James, 75, 170 Copeland, M. Shawn, xix–xx, 120, 123, 139–47; Gerdes on, 148–54 229

230

Index

creation: as God’s creative love, x–xiii, 16, 29, 39, 41, 43–45, 49, 56n11, 176; out of nothing or death, xi, 36–38, 43, 45, 56n11, 208 creator-creature distinction, xii, 39, 41–42, 45, 48, 50, 207–8 cross, the, symbol of, xx–xxi, 146, 167– 73, 180, 182–83, 185–92, 194n43, 194n45, 194n47, 195n53 crucifixion, xii, xviii, 38, 43, 63, 169– 74, 183, 187–89. 206, 220; See also cross Cushman, Robert, 12 cynicism, xiv–xv, 62 Dalferth, Ingolf U., x–xiv, 29–46; Kuzmic on, 47–54 dangerous memory, xviii–xix, 120, 123–26 Davidson, Donald, 191 Davis, Stephen T., xiv–xv, 59–68; Russell on, 69–76 death, ix, x–xiii, xv, xx, xxii, 17, 29–54, 54n2, 56n11, 64, 67, 90, 129, 164, 167–68, 170–71, 177, 180–81, 184, 186, 200; fear of, x, xx, 31–32, 35, 48–49; of Jesus Christ, 5–6, 8–10, 115, 120, 128, 135n36, 170–72, 187–89, 213; social, 75–76; of the subject, xxii, 198–99, 201–2, 211, 219, 221. See also crucifixion Debord, Guy, 200 de Lubac, Henri, 7 Derrida, Jacques, 92 Descartes, René, 73 difference principle, 87–89 Dobbs, John Wesley, 155n6 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, ix, 6 Dupuis, Jacques, 16 Emerson, Michael, 121 Engels, Friedrich, 8 Epicurus, 33–34, 38, 41 Erasmus, Desiderius, 85 eschatology, 2–3, 6, 21

Eucharist, ix, 5; ecological, 128–29; as an embodiment of the three theological virtues, xvii–xviii, 115– 20, 123–24, 127, 132 faith: as a combination of fides and fiducia, xiv, 60, 69–70; as an epistemological virtue, xiv, 60, 80–81, 176, 178; justification by, x, 64, 96; as light, viii–ix, 9–11, 15, 205, 213–14; and reason, x, 10–11, 13–15, 19 Farley, Edward, xxi, 122, 130, 168–69, 193n13 Farmer, Paul, 93–94 Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler, xv–xvii, 79–98; Prabhu on, 99–105 Francis, Pope, ix, 4, 6, 9, 109n59 Francis of Assisi, 3 Franklin, Benjamin, 99, 101 Freeman, Samuel, 88 Freire, Paolo, 105, 143 Fulkerson, Mary McClintock, xvii–xix, 115–26; Kao on, 127–33 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 93, 101 Gandhi, Mahatma, 146 genocide, xv, xvii, 66, 96, 166 Gerdes, Kirsten, 148–54 gift, xi–xii, 8, 13, 39, 41, 46, 49, 80, 82, 92, 124, 146, 155n5, 172, 174, 182–83, 209, 214; See also grace Gilkey, Langdon, 192n2 globalization, vii, xxii, 192n1, 198–99, 216 Gnosticism, 213–14 God: as both reason (logos) and love, 4–5, 15, 19; and interventionalism, 69, 74–76, 171–72, 193n27; as the object, source, and end of the three theological virtues, vii, xv, 18–19, 81, 155n5, 197–98, 205–7. See also creation; creator-creature distinction grace, xiii, xxi, xxiii, 3, 11–12, 15, 82, 100, 115, 119, 128, 171, 174–75,



Index 231

205–7, 210, 212, 224; nature and, 11, 81, 207, 209; sin and, 44 Guth, Karen V., 153 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 172–73 Habermas, Jürgen, 84, 103, 216 Hamer, Fannie Lou, xix, 140–41, 144– 45, 147, 148, 151–54 Han, Byung Chul, 200–201 Hardt, Michael, 192n1 Hare, R. M., 191 Hart, William, 133n6 Hartman, Sadiyya, 152 Hedges, Chris, 200 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 103–4, 199, 207 Heidegger, Martin, 14, 91, 93, 109n56, 202, heterosexism, xx, 125–26, 128, 167 Hick, John, 61, 199 Hillenkamp, Sven, 201 Holocaust, the, xv, 66–67, 75, 96, 220 hope: and the argument for the existence of God, xiv–xv, 59, 65–68, 69, 72–74; for communal/ social salvation, 6–7, 9, 16, 21; eschatological, ix, xxiii, 23, 65, 81, 141, 148, 211, 214–17; in human progress, viii–ix, xix, 2, 4, 6, 8; and (in)justice, ix, xv, 6, 16, 60, 66–67, 71–72; as the most compelling virtue for today, xxiii–xxiv, 217–18; as a psychological attitude, xvi, 61, 70, 73 Horkheimer, Max, ix, 9 Houston, Shannon M., 152 Hugh of Saint Victor, 82 humanism, xxii, 198–99, 201, 224 imperialism, 197, 211, 215 incarnation, the, xvii, 15, 60, 63, 68, 102–4, 115, 140, 147, 205, 213, 224; symbol of, xx–xxi, 167–74, 176, 180, 182–84, 185–92 individualism, xvii, xxi, 154, 163, 176, 186, 212, 216

Jeung, Russell, 132 Jim Crow, 75, 121 Joachim of Fiore, 3 John Paul II, Pope, x, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 92 Julian the Apostate, 5 justice: and charity/love, xvi, xix, 79–80, 82, 94–95, 98, 100–101; comprehensive vision of, xvi–xvii, 79–80, 95–98, 100; as a constitutive element of the three theological virtues, xv, 79–80; distributive, xvi, 80, 87–89; remunerative or punitive/ retributive, xvii, 95, 100; as social and political, xvii, 22–23, 80, 83, 86–88, 92, 102–4. See also hope Kant, Immanuel, x, 8, 14, 30–32, 47, 70–72, 84, 91, 103–4; Kao, Grace Y., 127–33 Kierkegaard, Søren, 200, 214 Kim, Rebecca, 132 Kim, Sharon, 132 King, Martin Luther Jr., xviii–xx, 121, 140–43, 145–47, 148, 151–54, 155n6 Kingdom of God, the, xiv, 4, 8, 65, 102 Kuzmic, Rhys, 47–54 Lasch, Christopher, 200 Levinas, Emmanuel, 91–92, 109n56, 122, 130 liberalism, 2, 6, 97 liturgy, xvii, xxiii, 117–20, 123, 127, 133n10, 198, 210, 212–13; See also Eucharist Lloyd, Vincent, 148, 154 Locke, John, 73 Lombard, Peter, 82, 209 Lonergan, Bernard, 143, 146 love: as an action, xvi, 62, 70, 83; as both eros and agape, ix, 4–5, 16, 181; as the greatest of all three ecological virtues, xvi, 59, 65, 70, 81–83, 197–98, 207; and justice, 5–6, 16–17; and knowledge/truth, ix–x, 10, 12–13, 15, 19, 93

232

Index

Luther, Martin, 29, 54n2 Lynch, William, 141 Machiavelli, Nicolo, 85–86 MacIntyre, Alasdair, xv, 84, 103 Mahler, Gustav, 42 Manuel II Paleologus, 14 Marion, Jean-Luc, 93 Marsh, Charles, 144–45 Martin, Thomas R., 149 Marx, Karl, 5, 8 Marxism, 2, 5, 92 McFague, Sallie, 176 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 49 Metz, Johann Baptist, xvi, xviii, 2, 90, 92, 95, 98, 100, 120 Milbank, John, 20 Miles, Sara, xviii, 123–24, 126, 127 Min, Anselm K., vii–xxv, 94, 197–218; Capetz on, 219–26 “Mirror of Princes” as literary genre, 84-85, 98 mode, in contrast with virtue, xiii, 39, 44–46, 48–53, 57n20 Morrill, Bruce, 120 Murray, Pauli. See Pauli Murray Project nationalism, xxiii, 215 naturalism, xiv, 59–60, 65, 69, 73, 208; See also supernaturalism Negri, Antonio, 192n1 Neuhaus, Richard John, 6 Nichols, Aidan, 3 Nietzsche, Friedrich, x, 4, 32, 49 nihilism, 44, 211, 215, 219–22; Christian, 186, 194n42;cultural, xxii– xxiii, 199–202 Novak, Michael, 6 Nussbaum, Martha C., 84 Nygren, Anders, 4 Ober, Josiah, 157n63 O’Leary, Josef, 56n11 O’Neill, Onora, 88, 96

Oord, Thomas Jay, 76 orientation, hermeneutical, xi–xiii, 29, 39–41, 46, 48–52, 56nn13–14 Outka, Gene, xvii, 95 Pascal, Blaise, 93 Paul, xiv, 2, 7, 9, 38, 48, 50, 56n11, 59, 64–65, 81, 151, 202, 214, 217, 222 Pauli Murray Project, xviii, 124–26, 127, 134nn28–29 personalism, theistic, 72–73 personhood, Kantian, x, 30–32, 47 phenomenology, 50–51 Pieper, Josef, 1, 81, 178 Plato, 12, 139, 150 pluralism, xvi, 22, 84–85, 88, 130; religious, 198–99, 219, 224 Pogge, Thomas, 88, 96 Polycarp, 2 postmodernism, 201, 220–22 Prabhu, Joseph, 99–105 preferential option for the poor, xvi, 92–95, 98, 122 Putnam, Robert, 192n3 racism, xv, xvii–xx, xxii–xxiv, 93, 118, 121–22, 124–25, 128, 130, 133n9, 136n38, 136n46, 146, 148, 167 Radbertus, Paschasius, 1 Rahner, Karl, xvi, 2, 13, 20, 90–92, 95, 98, 109n56, 199, 202–3, 210, 221 Ranciére, Jacques, 84 rationalism, vii, 177, 213 Ratzinger, Joseph. See Benedict XVI, Pope Rausch, Thomas P., viii–x, 1–17; Akerman on, 18–23 Rawls, John, xvi, 86–89, 97–98, 103 Reiss, Timothy J., 149–51, 157n58 relativism, vii, 22, 199, 201, 220 resurrection, xi–xii, xviii, 3, 6, 39, 45, 48–51, 53, 55–56n11, 60, 68, 115, 120, 128, 146, 172, 186, 189, 206, 213



Index 233

Reynolds, Barbara, 152 Rieff, Philip, 200 Robinson, Elaine A., xx–xxii, 163–84, 214; Pistone on, 185–92 Romanus, Aegidius, 85 Ross, Rosetta, 140, 145 Rouselot, Pierre, 93 Rowland, Tracey, 1–2, 13 Russell, Jonathan, 69–76 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 53, 198 Schall, James, 8 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 199 Schmitt, Carl, 108n48 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 30 secularism, viii, 198–99, 201, 216, 223, 225; See also theological virtues, secularist mutation of Sedgwick, Timothy, 117 Sen, Amartya, 89 sexism, xix–xx, xxii–xxiv, 124–26, 128, 167 Sexton, Jared, 152 shalom, as the telos of the three theological virtues in the context of terror, xx, 164–65, 168, 171, 174, 176, 181–82, 184, 185, 190, 192 Shklar, Judith, 96 Sim, Angela, 193n26 sin, structural or social, xvi–xvii, 92, 94–95, 97, 191, 215 skepticism, 14 social capital, 163–64, 192n3 Socrates, 32, 139, 155n2, 191 sola gratia, 208–9 sola scriptura, 14 soul, immortality of the, x–xi, xiii, 36–38, 44, 71 Spillers, Hortense, 152 supernaturalism, xiv–xv, 59–60, 67, 69, 71; See also naturalism Taylor, Charles, 1, 30, 53, 57n21, 198, 202

terror, systemic: age of, xx–xxii, 163–84, 185–86, 194n41, 214; distinction between terrorism and, xx, 164–66 theism, xiv, xv, 9, 60, 65, 67, 69, 72–73; Christian, xiv, xv, 60, 67–68, 69 theodicy, 75, 166–67, 183 theology: liberation, xvi, 2–3, 20–23, 92–94, 100, 102–3, 105, 120, 153, 183, 220–21; political, xvi, 2–3, 18, 20–23, 90, 100, 108n48, 149, 153; transcendental, xvi, 202 theological virtues: and justice, xv, 21–23; as ecclesial in essence, ix–x, xxi–xxiii, 5, 10, 16, 167–68, 182–84, 197, 210–18; as Godgifted transcendental conditions of human transcendence and solidarity, xxii–xxiii, 202–10; as heart of Christianity, vii, 1, 115, 198, 202; as proof of God’s existence, xiii, xv, 45, 67; as source of the incarnate God-life in its radical relationality, xxi, 167, 174–82; as theo-political virtues, xix–xx, 140–47, 148–54 contemporary challenges to, vii– viii, xxii–xxiv, 197–202, 219–20; distinction between the cardinal/ natural/moral/intellectual virtues and, 11–12, 79–83, 85, 98, 101, 208–9; internal relationships among, xiv, 59, 63–64, 69, 81, 115, 197, 204, 216–17; Lutheran critique of theological virtues as “virtues,” xiii, 39, 44-46, 48-53, 57n20; secularist mutation of, 1–4, 6, 11–12, 18–20, 23; Tillich, Paul, 164, 168, 186–87, 199, 201–2, 210, 219 Trinity, the, 60, 68, 213, 224 Troeltsch, Ernst, 199 virtue ethics, xv–xvi, 80, 84–85, 98, 104 Volf, Miroslav, 164–65, 184

234

voluntarism, doxastic, 71–73 von Balthasar, Hans Urs, 93, 214 Vögelin, Eric, 3 Webb, Stephen, 128–29, 135n36 Weigel, George, 6 Wilderson, Frank B., 152

Index

William of Saint-Thierry, 10, 81 Williams, Delores, 180 Wolterstoff, Nicholas, xvii, 95 Yancey, George, 121 Young, Iris, 96–97 Žižek, Slavoj, 55–56n11

About the Contributors

Shane Akerman is an adjunct professor of religion at La Sierra University in southern California. He is the author of an essay, “Political Theology or Theological Politics? Bonnie Honig and the Non-Democratic Core of Democracy,” published in Claremont Journal of Religion 2, no. 1 (January 2013). A PhD candidate at Claremont Graduate University in the philosophy of religion and theology program, he is writing his dissertation “On the Intersection of Trinitarian and Political Theologies.” Paul E. Capetz is professor of historical theology at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. His research interests include historical and systematic theology and theological ethics. He is the author of God: A Brief History, and Christian Faith as Religion: A Study in the Theologies of Calvin and Schleiermacher. He has also contributed to many journals including The Journal of Religion and The Harvard Theological Review. He is currently working on a book about Martin Luther and Rudolf Bultmann as well as preparing a volume of translated essays on theology and ethics by Ernst Troeltsch. M. Shawn Copeland is professor of theology at Boston College. Her research interests include theological and philosophical anthropology, African and African-derived religious and cultural experience, and African-American intellectual history. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of, among others, The Subversive Power of Love: The Vision of Henirette Delille and Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, and the editor of Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience. She is past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. 235

236

About the Contributors

Ingolf U. Dalferth is the Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Claremont Graduate University. He has also taught for many years at the University of Zurich. He has been doing research in philosophical and theological hermeneutics in the twentieth century, ecumenical theology, and systematic theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among his numerous articles and books are Transzendenz und säkulare Welt, Crucified and Resurrected: Restructuring the Grammar of Christology, and Creatures of Possibility: The Theological Basis of Human Freedom. He is past president of the European Society for Philosophy of Religion and current editor of Theologischer Literaturzeitung. Stephen T. Davis is the Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. His areas of expertise include analytic theology, Christian thought, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. One of the best known analytic theologians, he is the author of numerous articles and books, including God, Reason, and Theistic Proofs; Logic and the Nature of God; Risen Indeed: Making Sense of the Resurrection; Christian Philosophical Theology; and After We Die: Theology, Philosophy, and the Question of Life after Death. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza is the Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Theological Studies at Harvard University. His research interests include the significance of contemporary hermeneutical theories for fundamental theology and neo-pragmatic criticisms of foundationalism. Among his countless articles and books is Foundational Theology: Jesus and the Church and Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives (co-edited with John Galvin). He is currently completing a new book Human Rights in the Crossfire: Political Theology Faces the Cultural Challenges to Rights. Mary McClintock Fulkerson is professor of theology at Duke Divinity School. Her primary teaching interests include practical theology, feminist theologies, contemporary Protestant theology, and ecclesiology. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church and Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and Feminist Theology. She also co-edited with Sheila Briggs The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology. Kirsten Gerdes is assistant professor of philosophy and humanities at Riverside City College in southern California and a PhD candidate in Women’s Studies in Religion at Claremont Graduate University. She is currently finishing her dissertation entitled “Foucaulting Calvinism: Tracing the Evolution of



About the Contributors 237

Personhood in Seventeenth-Century Women’s Writing.” She has published numerous essays on revelation, new materialism, conversion, hope, and selfhood, and contributed five entries to All Things Dickinson: An Encyclopedia of Emily Dickinson’s World. Grace Y. Kao is associate professor of ethics at Claremont School of Theology. Her research interests include human and nonhuman animal rights, religion in the public sphere in the United States, ecofeminism, and Asian American Christianity. She is the author of Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World and recently co-edited Asian American Christian Ethics: Voices, Methods, Issues. She is co-director of the Center for Sexuality, Gender, and Religion at Claremont School of Theology. Rhys Kuzmic is assistant professor of theology at Ezra University in Los Angeles. A recent doctoral graduate from Claremont Graduate University, he wrote his dissertation on “Called and Always Calling: Toward a Constructive Theology of Call/Response.” He has contributed essays on Pentecostal ontology, Irenaeus, speaking in tongues, and Karl Barth to anthologies and the International Journal of Systematic Theology. Anselm K. Min is professor of religion at Claremont Graduate University. His research interests include Aquinas, Hegel, contemporary systematic theology, and theology of globalization. In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of, among others, Dialectic of Salvation: Issues in Theology of Liberation; The Solidarity of Others in a Divided World: A Postmodern Theology after Postmodernism; and Paths to the Triune God: An Encounter between Aquinas and Recent Theologies. He is now working on a theology of globalization and the ontology of Thomas Aquinas. Paul Pistone is a philosophy instructor at Biola University in southern California. A PhD student at Claremont Graduate University, his research interests include philosophy of mind, moral psychology, ethical theory, and philosophical theology. He hopes to write on the mind-body problem for his dissertation. He was editor of a special issue of Philo (12:2) on theism and naturalism with a contribution of his own. He has several essays under review at different journals. Joseph Prabhu is professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. His research and teaching interests include religion and globalization, human rights, and economics. In addition to numerous articles, he is the editor of Panikkar: Selected Writings and The Intercultural Challenge of

238

About the Contributors

Raimon Panikkar, and currently working on Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspective and Hegel, India, and the Dark Face of Modernity. Thomas P. Rausch, S.J., is the T. Marie Chilton Professor of Catholic Theology at Loyola Marymount University. His areas of specialization include Christology, ecclesiology, and ecumenism. In addition to numerous journal articles, he is the author of several books, including The Roots of the Catholic Tradition; Eschatology, Liturgy, and Christology: Toward Recovering an Eschatological Imagination; Reconciling Faith and Reason; and Faith, Hope, and Charity: Benedict XVI on the Theological Virtues. A well-known ecumenist, he has been involved in the Roman Catholic dialogue with Southern Baptists, Evangelicals, and Anglicans. Elaine A. Robinson is professor of Methodist studies and Christian theology at Saint Paul School of Theology. Her research interests include ministry and evangelism, Methodist studies, and contemporary issues facing the church. In addition to many journal articles and book chapters, she is the author of Introduction to Theology for Ministry; Exploring Theology; Race and Theology; Godbearing: Evangelism Reconceived; and These Three: The Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love. Jonathan Russell is an adjunct professor of philosophy and religion at Chaffey College in southern California and a contributing fellow at the University of Southern California Center for Religion and Civic Culture. A PhD student at Claremont Graduate University, he is preparing to write a dissertation that explores how contemporary embodied and enactive conception of selfhood might reorient philosophy of religion and the academic study of religion in general. His interests include philosophical and theological anthropologies in the context of contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind, embodiment, and the current ecological climate crisis. He has published essays on Kant, Hegel, and Bataille.