13 watchmen and witnesses

8/3/2019 13 Watchmen and Witnesses

1/22

1

13. Watchmen and WitnessesWe look for his coming again with great gloryHope, Patience and the Witness of the Church to World, Market and State

1. The Watchmen PeopleHope, Waiting and Looking OutThe Church lives in the world. The world receives all its life and prosperity from God, andreceives it through the generations that have preceded it. The Church reminds the world thatit is not the source of its own existence but that the present world is formed by itsrelationship with past and with future generations.It is the city on a hill, its sentries posted on its walls. Christians issue their challenge in everypublic assembly. They ask whether the local powers and authorities are claiming too muchfor themselves. The Church looks out to what is coming and it looks forward to what God willdo.

Son of man I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel, so hear the word I speakand give them warning from me (Ezekiel 33.7).

WatchingChristians bear witness before against kings and governors and make supplications,prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone in positions of authority (1Timothy 2.1). The church must watch and keep awake.

It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with hiswork, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake, for you do not knowwhen the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, orelse he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake(Mark 13.34).

They wait for the dawn. The church must be ready to give the alarm when it sees danger. Itcannot be afraid to speak out. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated (1 Peter3. 14). It must say why it finds certain developments threatening.

Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hopethat is in you (1 Peter 3.15)

The Spirit equips the people of God so that they can carry out this task. It gives them whatthey need to protect themselves.

Take up the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, andhaving done everything, to stand firm. Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth aroundyour waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put onwhatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take theshield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one.Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word ofGod

(Ephesians 6.13-17)

Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert andalways persevere in supplication for all the saints (Ephesians 6.10-18)

2. We Live by FaithLife under the CrossThe Christian lives by faith. The promise of God is the one sure thing on which the Christianstands. We look forward to God's redemption of his promises, we pray, asking God for whatwe do not yet have. Here we have no continuing city, but we look forward to the city that willcome.

Christians live against the stream: we are going one way while the world is going the other.We are going against them and they are going against us. The world pushes, and is amazed


2/22

2

when we do not push back. We are peace-keepers, put unarmed into the middle of everyconflict, doves among wolves. We soak up all the grief and distress experienced by theworld. It is our privilege to experience the rage of the world.

By faith means life lived away from home, as an army away on operations must livewithout seeing its homes and families or affirmation, reinforcement, reward. The army maybe unable to see its leader or the future vindication of its present hardship in victory. We livein small detachments of this army; we are unable to see the army as a whole or our general.As long as we are away from camp and must endure this hardship, and the ignorance of theoverall strategic situation that goes with it.We may wonder whether we will ever reach theplace to which we are heading, but we persevere nonetheless.

Christian Suffering and EnduranceWe are the victorious and invincible people. Precisely because we are invincible we maynow suffer and bear the resistance of the world in order to bring the world to Christ. We bearwhat is still lacking in Christs sufferings. We suffer the resentment, incomprehension andfury of the world. Since the Church stands where Christ stands, it receives the very same

hostility. Its power to endure this hostility, and not to crack or wither under it, is thedemonstration of his victory for the world. We are to soak up the grief of the world, and soparticipate now in Christs act. Forthe Christian, to live this life of witness to the world is thelive with Christ.

Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, living is Christand dying is gain(Philippians 1.20-21).

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becominglike him in his death(Philippians 3.10).

Christians display the sufferings and the unrecognisable and unwelcome sight of the Lord.

We always carry round in our body the death of Jesus (2 Corinthians 4.10-12).

It is a joyful labour for it is purposeful. We are not working or suffering in vain, but alreadyexperience its outcome and reward, which is the salvation of the world. We alreadyanticipate the joy we will have then together with the very people who are still presentlyopposing and persecuting us. We rejoice in our sufferings (Romans 5.3), for we are notsuffering for our own salvation, for this has come to us as a sheer gift. Our salvation camethrough the efforts of others who passed the gospel on to us, and who put up with us andsuffered our antagonism. God has paid out their lives in order to win us. We may now workand suffer in order to bring salvation to others. Our suffering or resistance is the means bywhich the remains of this world are scoured off us. We learn how to suffer, how to beoverlooked, and how to grieve with others. We mourn with those who mourn (Romans

12.15).

We are not experiencing anything that has not be felt before by many generations ofChristians. No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone (1 Corinthians10.13).

Those who want to make a good impression outwardly are trying to compel you to be circumcised. Theonly reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ (Galatians 6.12).

Christ is battle-hardened. He can take the pressure and the knocks. He was not taken in bythe temptations or weakened by them, and now he is inured to them and does not even feeltheir threat. Since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourself with the same attitude, because

he who has suffered in his body is done with sin (4.1).The Christian can even bear upunder the pain of unjust suffering (1 Peter 2.19-20). He can do so when he understands that


3/22

3

this is what Christ does for us. This man bears the burden of the sin committed by the sinfulman, but which the sinful man himself cannot possibly bear, precisely because he is sinfuland therefore too weak. The righteous man can carry the sinful man, until his sin leaves himand he can carry himself.

3. Bearing Witness Before Kings and GovernorsChristians submit to their rulers. The authorities have been set over us for our good.

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and

those authorities that exist have been instituted by God Do you wish to have no fear of the authority?

Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval; for it is God's servant for your good (Romans

13.1-4) .

Christians are ready for the discipline that will serve to pacify their passions. Evenunrighteous rulers will serve this purpose.

Submit yourselves for the Lords sake to every authority instituted among men (1 Peter 2.13).

We should give our leaders the honour and praise they demand, for they are also servantsof God. We cannot protest his discipline is too severe, for we are under the much moresevere discipline of God.

I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for leaders

and all in positions of authority(1 Timothy 2.1).

Christians bear witness before against kings and governors. Before every bearer of authoritythey confess that Christ is the source of all authority and finally the only Lord. Christians bearwitness before against kings and governors. They warn any lord who claims too much forhimself or who is unwilling to take up his full responsibility. The trial of strength betweenChrist and all other lords takes place in every public assembly where Christs envoysconfront every leader in the hearing of his own people. The Christian witnesses are to readout the accusation of God against each leader who lays hands on them, and give him onechance to confess the God of Israel.

On account of me you will stand before governors and kings as witnesses to themjust say whatever

is given you at the time, for it is not you speaking but the Holy Spirit. (Mark 13.9-11)

The Christians are the message and embassy of God to the authorities in each place. Whenthese authorities fail to hear them, the Christians can go over their heads and direct theircomplaints straight to God: if they have to do this the authorities are convicted of failing in

their office, and it is taken away from them. The Christians will be handed over to those inpower.

Whenever you are arrested and brought to trial do not worry beforehand about what to say.Just say whatever is given you at the time, for it is not you speaking, but the Holy Spirit(Acts13.9).

Overcoming EvilThe world may be explicitly hostile. When we are being engaged in combat we stand, sideby side, contending as one man, so that we hold together as one unit.We are to endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus (2 Timothy 2.2). Weneed to be properly equipped to withstand the missiles that are coming our way. We are to

put on the full armour of God so you can take your stand.


4/22

4

Our struggle is against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world andagainst the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 6.11).

We have to take the battering, soak up the punishment that the opposition puts up (1 Peter).We have to withstandall the fiery arrows (James). We have to stand without beingfrightened in any way by those who oppose you. This is a sign that they will be destroyed

(Philippians 1.28). We may stand without flinching. This is the sign (miracle) to them, thatyou are without fear, and thus that they have no means of holding you.

We may overcome evil simply by taking what is thrown at us and remaining unmoved by it.We can soak up all that those in power throw at us and return their cursing with ourblessing.

The World will hate You

Christ was unrecognised and regarded as repugnant. Christs people evoke the same

disgust.

Blessed are they who suffer any kind of s persecutions because of my name (Matthew)

Blessed are you when men hate you and when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name

as evil because of the Son of Man (Luke 6.22).

The world will hate you, because of my name A time is coming when anyone who kills you thinks he

is offering a service to God (John 16.2).

Christians display in their persons the sufferings of Christ, unrecognisable and unwelcomeand so the world recoils from us. We always carry round in our body the death of Jesus (2Corinthians 4.10). Every member of the Church has the responsibility to speak up. Not to doso is to be complicit in whatever injustice is done. If a person sins because he does not

speak up when he hears a public charge to testify about whatever he has seen or learnedabout, he will be held responsible (Leviticus 5.1).Leaders who do not lead and watchmenwho do not pass on the warning, carry the resultant sin or death of others.

Speak to your countrymen and say to them: When I bring the sword against a land, and thepeople of the land choose one of their men and make him a watchmen and he sees thesword coming against the land and blows the trumpet to warn the people then if anyonehears the trumpet but does not take warning and the sword comes a takes his life, his bloodwill be upon his own head (Ezekiel 33.1).

4. Christians WaitEschatology and Christian Hope

The Church looks forward in hope. The Church that says that human being is not yet whathe will be, holds out the possibility of our redemption. Whilst secular eschatologies announcethat man has already arrived, and already is everything that he ever will be, Christianaccounts say it is not so. We cannot consider the human being simply as another animal,without ambition or hope. Man may yet take us all by surprise. The church is the guarantorthat man is not yet entirely known and controlled, and thus that each generation maycontinue to make new discoveries about man.

The modern tradition asserts that contemporary man is the pinnacle of all earlier history andthat man is therefore all that he ever will be. This tradition asserts that the world hasabsorbed and overcome the various distinct traditions of nations and religions. It insists thatit, the secular tradition, is the whole truth, already. It claims that man is already Christ, or

with a little more time will turn into Christ. Then we will be king, and we will all be kings andnone of us will be servants. Already you are kings, and this without us (1 Corinthians 2). It is


5/22

5

the hubris and conceit of this claim that the Church challenges and it does so by pointing outthat the secular tradition, or traditions, represent one form of life amongst others. Thestubborn existence of the Church demonstrates the untruth of the claim of the presentgeneration to universality.

Christians must insist that the distinction between religion and secular, between church andworld, are fundamental. Until Christ comes, we may not abolish the distinction between thechurch and the world, or say that there is no a gap between what we have and what wedesire. As soon as we say that man may no longer hope, or define man withoutconsideration of his purposes and aspirations, we take away his freedom. Christian faithteaches that Christian society is not the kingdom of God or the end-times. The mostChristian society can be is civil society, under the rule of law, in which the Christiancommunity and its tradition is partner and participant. The secular sphere not only has aChristian origin, but it is always sourced by the gospel that distinguishes between now andnot yet. Only Christianity makes a secular sphere, and without Christianity secularismbecomes a fundamentalism, and thus no longer secular. When we abolish the distinctionbetween church and world we have removed our means to control or direct ourselves and

thereby turned man into a fundamentally pre-social or asocial being, who can only becontrolled externally, by a class of controllers. Then we have created a two-class society, ofcontrolled and controllers. If we abolish the duality of present and future, we create a moresevere dualism of controlled and controllers: if we disallow a duality of present and future,we get a dualism of class.

The catholicity of the Church is the control on the pretensions of any particular state. Itmeans that the Church is more than the States religious department. The Church must saythat there are many states and forms of governance, many modes of arranging the publicsquare and performing the tasks that are required. There is no one Christian form, and thusno theocracy. The Church holds out the promise of the future catholicity and insists that itis future, it is not the present possession of this society or its state and leaders. The gospel

prevents the excessive claims of one generation over all others.

The Saints WaitChrist is not simply behind us in the past, but also ahead of us and future to us. But this doesnot mean that he is not simply located further on the direction in which we are all heading. Itis not the case that, given the passing of time, that we inevitably catch up with him; we donot know that we are pointing in the right direction, and if we are not pointing in his direction,we will certainly never catch up with him. There is no inevitability about this future. Historicalprocesses do not bring us closer to our him nor take us further away from him. Neverthelessfrom out of the unknown, he will come. The whole purpose of Christian existence in theworld to say that the world is not yet what it will be, and that it does not know itself as itthinks it does. The world does not control its own definition or future.

The saints wait patiently. They look forward to what they do not yet have. They are not takenin by our present comfort. They point out that things may not yet be what they seem, andthat what is truly real is what has reality in the end. Much of what we presently see and taketo be real, may turn out not to have had the reality we thought it had. They call God and askhim to be with us. We ask him to unite us with those with those that historical distanceseparates us from. We proclaim that God is not yet as he will be here. We have to wait forhim and lament his absence. This is the Christian calling in history. They wait cheerfully, withno despair or resort to cynicism.

The Whole Gospel Protects the People

The whole truth, given by the gospel, safeguards the whole people, not only those whobelieve that they have already arrived, but also so who have not yet arrived, at the summit ofhuman existence.


6/22

6

Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an accounting forthe hope that isin you(1 Peter 3.15)

We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God,and we take every thought captive to obey Christ(2 Corinthians 10.4-5)

In every generation the Church is asked to offer a simpler gospel. In its attempt to speakmore clearly to the world the church searches around for simplifications of the gospel thatrepresent ways in to dialogue. We can all offer new ways of being Christian, but we mustargue for them and persuade other Christians of their rightness by showing that they are notnew inventions, our but faithful interpretations. The church that is proposing a newinterpretation has to argue that it is the proper evangelical interpretation of Christian teachingfor the particular circumstances in the particular part of the world to which this church iscalled to be a witness. It must be the very basic presumption of all Christians that, becausewe belong to Christ, we belong to one another and owe an account of our action to everypart of the Church. We must always explain what we are doing and seek to persuade othersof its rightness.

We see these reductions and segmentations of knowledge in the compartmentalisation ofknowledge in the modern university. What is to ensure that these dilutions really stillrepresent the whole body of knowledge? Successive simplifications and reductions of it haveturned the gospel into the various ideologies of modernity. They want to make it impossiblefor us to think of ourselves in relationship to God, and therefore to think of ourselves aswhole being. Without the full gospel, we are exposed to many forms of reductive alienintellectual domination.

Modern reductions of the gospel play down the element of judgment. When it does so, wetake too seriously the public consensus that we are all victims and none of us is responsible.The Church must interrupt the monologue of the secular liturgy and deflate its pretensions.

Gospel Improvers and Unreliable WitnessesPeople whose gullibility makes them vulnerable need protection. They have to be given thename that they can use for their protection. We cannot take away from them the one thingthat will secure and aid them. To offer them only a reduced gospel, and reduced account ofthemselves, is to under-represent God or misrepresent God. But much more it is to leave theweak exposed. This is to break the second commandment by taking the name of the Lord invain. This insufficient gospel, not give them the necessary warnings, the necessity safety talkappropriate , that would prepare them for the danger they face. To give them a realistic ideaof the danger they face. The gospel must come to them with hope and with warning andjudgment. The church must identify those simplifications which do not introduce but reducethe gospel. They betray Christ, but more importantly they betray the people Christ came for.

The sin against the whole people of God is sin against the last and least, the sin against theHoly Spirit.

These teachers want to gain control over us so they can access power from us. We have tobe adamant and refuse to give ourselves away to them. Left to themselves heretics maybecome dictators. They say what is permitted and the gullible believe them. Many will comein my name and say, 'I am he!' and they will lead many astray (Mark 13.6). Israel's sentriesare blind, they are all without knowledge; they are all silent dogs that cannot bark; dreaming,lying down, loving to slumber (Isaiah 56.10). The man who does not enter the sheep pen bythe gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber (John 10). Whatevercorresponds to the cross helps us identify the truth of Christ. The true shepherd calls hissheep by name and leads them out. When he brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of

them, and his sheep follow because they know his voice(John 10).


7/22

7

Heresies and New AgendasWe have said that the Church responds to rival accounts of the world. These are made up ofoptions which occur in new combinations over the centuries. But in new combinations theviews that the Church rejected are still here. The Church identified these as paths that wemay not take, but they make up the worldviews of the world to which the Church speaks.They are substitute gospels that claim something that is superficially similar to the gospel,which but do much less. The Church defends the real gospel because it alone is able todefend the weak from the predatory. But such options are also continually brought back intothe church by those who fail to recognise them as old heresies. Each of the rival viewsidentified and rejected formally by the Church is represented by the various therapies andcorresponding branch of social science and law. It is the task of the Church to point out thatthey are not new at all, that we have not broken through into a new era. The Church mustnot capitulate to other teachings or to teachers who are reluctant to pass the whole gospelon.

You put up with it when someone makes slaves of you, or preys upon you, or takesadvantage of you, or puts on airs, or gives you a slap in the face(2 Corinthians 11.20).

They are hostile to all men in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that theymay be saved (1 Thessalonians 2.15).

Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. Youyourselves have not entered and you have hindered those who were entering (Luke 11.52).

They have left the straight road and have gone astray. It would have been better for themnever to have known the way of righteousness than, after knowing it, to turn back (2 Peter2.15-21)

Each church has to convince all other churches that the presentation of doctrine it proposesis good and faithful. They have to reason and convince one another in the councils of the

Church, showing that their teaching is in continuity with the teaching of the whole Churchthrough history.

PART TWO

Confronting Tyrants and Other Messiahs

Christianity is not Identical with European CivilisationWe now take up the historical account from the end of the nineteenth century. Thecontradiction of European culture was made obvious when in 1914 two self-confessedlyChristian nations went to war, and all other nations of Europe along with their colonies lined

up on either side. The suddenness of this violence was shocking, contradicting all the claimsof European civilisation about its relationship to goodness, truth and reason. Such violencewas assumed to have been put behind us by the centuries spent teaching one anothercivility, the long pacification of mankind. The war was a shattering return to a medievalsavagery that it had been assumed had been left behind after the seventeenth century, thelast time that religion was evoked in war in Europe. Rage and unreason had burst out again.

We have considered the claim of the Republic of Man in its ancient and modern forms. Itsmodern form claims that all talk of God is divisive and that man must finally put himselfbeyond religion. The Republic has to build society anew, removing all previous foundationsand build again from scratch, without reference to any of those traditions that it denouncesas religious. But without God, the State is always likely to exceed its mandate and build an

abstract man, a Society that towered above all men. The building of this colossus wouldconsume the populations of nations. The nineteenth century had started with Robespierre to


8/22

8

Napoleon, the movement from terror to totalitarian state power. The totalitarian republics ofthe twentieth century, of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and the Chinese cultural revolution weresimilarly driven by the idea that society had to be reinvented and must be established againon clear ground. But, however self-confessedly atheistic, but with their cult of personality andcult of the New Man, such dictatorships has simply created their own new religion, very likethat of the Caesar cult of Imperial Rome.

In the economic and cultural meltdown that followed the First World War, came the samestate of emergency and need to grant extraordinary powers to the emergent leader whoundergoes a personal struggle (Mein Kampf) to identify the enemy, and then to lead hispeople so that his struggle becomes their Struggle. Europeans chose rulers who mademessianic claims for themselves and their nation, who identify a class- or national-enemy,(so that the problem is always outside us) and promise to deliver the nation from this enemyby undergoing a costly process of national renewal through revolution. This renewal involvesus in wading through blood, initially the blood of our enemies, but increasingly our ownblood, in a process of purgation from which the nation will arise like a phoenix, or die,destroying the nation in the course of saving it.

5. Christian Faithfulness in the Twentieth CenturyKarl Barth suggested that European theology was under the judgment of God. The Churchhad failed to remain distinct from the nation. It had not passed on to the nation the gospelwhich can truly save us from self-destruction. The confession of God took on an additionalurgency in the 1930s, as it became clear that only this confession could halt the ideologicaland demonic claims of the run-away state. The Church had to identify a new idolatry andlearn again how to oppose it.

Bonhoeffer and DiscipleshipDietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 -1945) was one of the Christians re-discovering the Churchs needto distinguish itself from the state. Though Bonhoeffer taught theology in the university of

Berlin, he left in order to set up a new seminary that would teach the Christian faith in , notas a cultural artefact, not so that the Christian religion could be moulded to serve the state,but as a discipleship through which we could become truly human.

Bonhoeffer found that the university was unable to allow Christian theology to speak clearlyand make its distinctive contribution. The Church had been the original sponsor of theuniversity in Europe, for it was the source of the high definition of human being and callingthat had formed the Christian basis of the humanities. But the university could only concedethe sort of religion that would serve the state. Under these circumstances, in order tofunction as prophetic witness, Christian theologians had to withdraw from university andother public cultural arenas and return to the Church. In three worksThe Cost ofDiscipleship, Ethics, and Communio SanctorumBonhoeffer argued that Christians are calledapart from the world, and must display this separate identity before the world and for itssake. Kant wanted an account of man without God, anthropology without theology.Bonhoeffer reply that, by making anthropology everything, Kant has succeeded in turning itinto a dreadful theology of demonised man. Along with Karl Barth, Bonhoeffer said thattheology was the proper way to anthropology, but only when theology is heard on its ownterms as God's knowledge of himself given to us, to shape our knowledge of ourselves ashis creatures.

In The Cost of DiscipleshipBonhoeffer asserts that we are not individuals because we aremembers of a particular culture that values individuality, but because we are members of theChurch. We have disastrously got civilisation confused with Christianity. Europeans are not

by definition Christians. We have forgotten that the Church is not the world. The best gift tothe world is that the Church be clearly different so the distinctiveness of its gospel can be


9/22

9

seen. To recapture Luthers teaching that it is simply the act of God, the grace andgenerosity of God, we have to learn again all those forms of discipleship that we associatedwith catholic and even medieval Church. The monasticism of saint Benedict is the defensiveform that the Church has to return to whenever it is threatened. We have to relearn how towithdraw from the world while remaining in it. We are monks in the world, and only as suchare we truly worldly, able to point the world to a much higher definition of itself.

The price we are having to pay today in the shape of the collapse of the organised Church is only theinevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost. We gave awaythe word and sacraments wholesale, we baptised, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked andwithout condition. Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful andunbelieving. what had happened to all those warnings of Luthers against preaching the gospel insuch a manner as to make men rest secure in their ungodly living? Was there ever a more terrible ordisastrous instance of the Christianising of the world than this?(Cost of Discipleship 12)

In response to Kant, Bonhoeffer said that men cannot make themselves individuals. Truly tobecome individuals, we must be drawn out of our pathological obsession with ourselves andthis can only happen if we are seized by someone who is not ourselves God.

Through the call of Jesus men become individuals. They are compelled to decide, and that decisioncan only be made by themselves. It is no choice of their own that makes them individuals: it is Christwho makes them individual by calling them. Every man is called separately, and must follow alone.(Cost of Discipleship 48). But we are made individual only in the Church. No one can become a newman except by entering the Church, and becoming a member of the Body of Christ. It is impossible tobecome a new man as solitary individual.(Cost of Discipleship 180).

The only rescue for Christians, and for Protestant Christians in particular, is to discoveragain that they are members of the Church.

The Body of Christ is identical with the new humanity which he has taken upon him. It is in fact theChurch. Since Pentecost in the life of Christ has been perpetuated on earth in the form of his Body, theChurch. Here is his body, crucified and risen, here is the humanity he took upon him. To be baptisedtherefore means to be a member of the Church, a member of the Body of Christ. To be in Christtherefore means to be in the Church. (Cost of Discipleship 179)

The way forward is to learn the old discipline and discipleship. Bonhoeffer rescues Lutherfrom all the cultural accretions that have sanctified him and made Europe deaf to hiswarning.

This is exactly the conclusion that Luther reached with regard to the Christians secular calling duringthose critical years when he was turning his back on the cloister. It was not so much the lofty standardsof monasticism that he repudiated, as their interpretation in terms of individual achievement. It was notthe otherworldliness as such that he attacked, but the perversion of otherworldliness into a subtle kindof spiritual worldliness. To Luthers mind that was a most insidious perversion of the gospel. Theotherworldliness of the Christian life ought, Luther concluded, to be manifested in the very midst of theworld, in the Christian community and in i ts daily life. Hence the Christians task is to live out that life interms of his secular calling. That is the way to die to the worldand engage more vigorously in theassault on the world and everything it stands for. 200

Barth concurs:First, all theological work can be undertaken and accomplished only amid great distress, which assailsit on all sides. But though this distress may befall theology from within and without, it is ultimatelycaused by the object of theology itself. Without judgment and death there is no grace and no life foranybody or anything, and, least of all, for theology. (Evangelical Theology p. 159).

Barth and Bonhoeffer argue that by making anthropology everything, Kant has succeeded inmaking a theology of man without God, which has the effect of isolating man from hisneighbour and fellow man. Theology insists that Christ is the mediator of man to man.

Christ wants to be the centre, through him alone all things shall come to pass. He stands between usand God, and for that reason he stands between us and all other men and things. He is the Mediator,not only between God and man, but between man and man, between man and reality.(Cost of

Discipleship p. 49)


10/22

10

Confronting the Run-Away StateBarth and Bonhoeffer were part of a minority of the Church in Germany that identified thatthe country was being overtaken by a huge idolatry. The claim that Hitleris Leader was soclose to the claim that Hitler is Lord that Christians must publicly reply that Jesus Christ isthe sole leader of the German people. This was the purpose of the declaration made in 1934in Barmen. But it was a minority of the Church that made this public confession. The majorityChurch did not see that political claims had become religious and messianic to the point atwhich a new and terrible politics cult had formed. They did not identify the political claims ofnational socialism as idolatry. Why did not the greater part of the Church in Germany notfollow Barth and Bonhoeffer in making this declaration? Luther taught that we can take alldiscipline, whether just or unjust, and so whether the political sphere is run by a godly orungodly leader really is a matter of indifference to us. It does not matter who is in power if weour faith becomes simply otherworldly. Luthers heirs had reasserted the division betweenthe inside man and the outer man of the political - and thus the division between (inner)religion and (outer) politics and so betrayed the Christian Luther, and followed the pagandualism of Kant.

Karl Barth on the Gospel against Political IdolatryKarl Barth (1886-1968) wrote pastoral and politically in response to the crises of themoment, above all he wrote systematically. In his Church Dogmaticshe re-connected everyissue to Christian doctrine as a whole, so that all our assumptions about the human mind orreligious language or theological method is referred back to the gospel. We speak truthfullyback the nature of man, of reason, psychology and society as these issues appear in light ofthe evangelical history of Jesus Christ. Barth is arguing that Christianity is the trueenlightenment, and that all eighteenth and nineteenth century attempts to graspenlightenment were simply refusals to accept enlightenment from its only possible source.

For Barth, a Christian cannot help but be a lonely bird on the housetop (psalm 102.8), butnonetheless content. The song the Christian must sing is not an old, familiar or popular one

but a strange song that will not necessarily result in great choirs joining in the refrain. To bea Christian, to anticipate here and now the future, universal praise of God, is to be a memberof a limited and prophetic minority. Barth starts from the proclamation of the churchChurch Dogmatics. The body that can speak with authority is the Church. According toBarth, The subject of dogmatics is the Christian Church (Dogmatics in Outline1).

Barths response to the crisis represented by the First World War was to return to theScriptures. In his Romans commentary Barth challenged the Church to return to listen to thebible without any of the biblical studies exegetical or dogmatic apparatus that had grown uparound the study of the bible and Christian doctrine but which had left the unable to tell itselfapart from European civilisation or from the ideological claims of European nations.

When we know and have mastered the gospel, and that we no longer have to exertourselves and to pray to receive the gospel from God, we have become merely religiousand unrighteous. We imagine that we are no longer beggars. But we cannot suborn God tomake him an ally in our own projects. God is not identifiable even with the finest products ofhuman culture, art, music, the growth of knowledge, science and sensibility and prosperityand peace on earth or even peace in Europe. In opposition to the life-philosophy, vitalism,social Darwinism, the cultural pessimism of Weber and Spengler, emotionalism, power-politics, the various spirits of unity or of social or national reconciliation, Barth says that theEuropean cultural success gospel is not the truth of God. We must let God be the only Lord.

Barth insists that is God is the person he is, so God comes to us in a narrative that heunfolds. There is no all-at-once Gods eye view for us. Time is the graciousness of God for

us. We cannot abolish it. we cannot strip the narrative away from Scripture to find some pureethic without this ceasing to be the Christian religion but some other without simply finding or


11/22

11

constructing some other religion of our own.

Christology and Israel The Riposte to Kant on the JewsBarth is replying to Kant. Kant identified the Jews as the problem. In some way the people ofIsrael, the Jews, are indeed the question that God has put to the people of Europe. Theyare witness of God to us. They have the promise of God and this people is communityformed by the revelation of God to man. Barth makes the existence of this particular peoplecentral to his theology. In Dogmatics in Outline(p.63) Barth says that the Jew Jesus isSaviour and Servant of God Barth stresses after European history has tried to diminish thedifference of the people of Israel and then the Church. It has the equalization andhomogenization. Hitler was the climax of this process that could not tolerate foreignness,and seeks to drive it out. Hitler is defeated, Jesus the Jew has withstood his attempt toabolish or absorb him, and is victorious.

the attack on Judah is means the attack on the rock and work and revelation of God, beside which rockand revelation there is no other.(p. 67)A nation which and that was the other side of National Socialism choose itself and makes itself the

basis and measure of everything such a nation must sooner or later collide with the truly chosenpeople of God.p. 68

A Jew, an Israelite, a Hebrew, Jesus who is the Christ that is a bit of earthly history, which takes placeon the way from Israel to the Greeks, that is, to the whole world. we cannot split Jesus Christ and seekto retain only one of the two components. Jesus Christ would not be what he is, were he not the Christ,the Commissioner who comes out of Israel, who is the Jew Jesus. But again this Jew Jesus would notbe theperson he is, were he not Gods Commissioner, were he not Christ who causes Israels life andmeaning to gleam as a light to the gentile world and in the whole of humanity. p. 63

If as Christians we thought the Church and Synagogue no longer affected one another, everythingwould be lost. And where this separation between the community and the Jewish nation has been madecomplete, it is the Christian community which has suffered. The whole reality of the revelation of God isthen secretly denied and as an inevitable result philosophy and ideology take the upper hand, and a

Christianity of a Greek or German or some others freely chosen kind is invented. P. 66

We must strictly consider that Jesus Christ, in whom we believe, was of necessity a Jewthefulfilment of the covenant concluded by God with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. P. 67

The problem of Israel is, since the problem of Christ is inseparable from it, the problem of existence assuch. The man who is ashamed of Israel is ashamed of Jesus Christ and therefore of his ownexistence The attack on Judah means the attack on the rock of the work and revelation of God,beside which work and revelation there is no other. P. 67

A nation which and that is the other side of National Socialism chooses itself and makes itself thebasis and measure of everything such a nation must sooner or later collide with the truly chosenpeople of God p. 68

Not for their own glory was the people of Israel picked out, not the sense of a national claim, but for the

other peoples and in that sense as the servant of all peoples. This people is Gods Commissioner. It hasto proclaim his word; that is its prophetic mission. By its existence it has to be a witness that God notonly speaks, but pledges himself in person and surrenders himself even unto death; that is its priestlymission. And finally in its political helplessness, it has as witness among the other nations to indicate thelordship of God over men; it is its kingly mission. Humanity needs this prophetic, priestly and kinglyservice. (p. 68)

God has given man one particular people, and of this people, one particular man, is soleaccess to himself. There is no way to the universal except through the particular man andmen whom God has given.

6. Twentieth Century DisintegrationInconsolable PeopleThe Man built by Modernity, is taken apart by post-modernity. We have seen that man


12/22

12

searches for someone to tell him who he is. We are all looking for the one who canrecognise us call us by name. In the twentieth century thinkers alternately exalted anddespaired at being this homeless man, who seeks recognition but receives none.

The intellectual has the greatest experience of being an individual, cut off from society. Theintellectual distinguishes himself from the crowd, stands against the hierarchy, the march of

technology and scientific progress, in the belief that scientific progress witnesses to auniverse without meaning. He despises all tradition, all the comfort and superficiality ofinauthentic middle-class existence. He attempts to live life more in the raw by stepping awayfrom the institutions and familiar received ideas. The individual is against versus themachine, the state, which is itself is a machine that reproduces workers as fodder forindustry, and against technology and war.

The individual, the one who cuts himself off from all others, is a problem to himself.Expressionism and existentialism were new names for this attitude of disdain. Man flees allties and responsibility to raise himself above his peers and then bewailing his newloneliness. Much nineteenth and twentieth century literature reflects the age-old pagan

belief, that man must exert himself to make himself free, before eventually being caught upand brought down by the envious forces of society and nature. The republic is the city ofman who is not only without God, but without his fellow man.

Nietzsche to FoucaultAll civilisation and government is control just over a much great absence of control. Thiscontrol may be worthy and dignified, or it may be useless hypocrisy and self-deceit. FriedrichNietzsche (1844-1900) decided that the Western tradition was just a veneer of moralrespectability concealing all the competitiveness and violence about which the ancients weremore honest. Nietzsche developed the new paganism of Goethe, Schopenhauer andWagner. We saw the desire for spontaneity and freedom from artifice represented byRousseau and Hume.

Nietzsche is repeating the argument that Plato places in the mouths of the sophists, thatwhat is ultimate is power. Callicles tells us that our natural superiority demands that we enjoyour natural advantage and gratify our desires without restraint. We must not let people talkus into self-control. We should throw off all self-control. Glaucon points out that we all wantto get away with whatever we can, but don't want others to get away with anything that putsus at a disadvantage. The general public tends to believe that good people are weak. Theyadmire the strong and calls good whatever you can get away with. Callicles (in Gorgias482c-484c) says that it is better to commit a crime that to let anyone commit a crime againstyou. To suffer an injustice is truly shaming. But the majority will always be weak and knowthat they are unable to resist if every strong man were free to pursue their own advantage.So they settle for equal shares for all. The law is just the conspiracy of the weak against the

strong. A truly strong person will see through this sham of law and society, and get on withtaking he wants (Gorgias 488b-492c).

The twentieth century developments that followed from Nietzsche determined that allaccounts of man and the world are disguised violence, so they must be all be refused. Wemust exchange a universal scepticism, or hermeneutic of suspicion. Nothing can be what itclaims to be. The demand of goodness and truth are simply means to drive us to dowhatever serves the strong and oppresses the rest of us. What we called historicism in thenineteenth century is termed relativism and postmodernism with reference to the twentiethcentury. The modern or postmodern is afraid that the world is not a good place, that ourknowledge of it can never be reliable. The struggle to free ourselves now requires that weexamine the way we regard our own and other peoples bodies.

Foucault moves the struggle for emancipation on to the body. The restraints of tradition are


13/22

13

written into our very bodies so the body must be stormed as the last hideout of God.Freedom means treating our bodies as disposable instruments. Sex must be divorced fromcommunity and the meanings that the community places on it. We have returned to theoption represented by the ancient gnostics and Manicheans.

Moderns cannot decide whether we are essentially bodies, and must obey the dictates of ourbiology, or whether our bodies are simply vehicles which we can use or abuse, as thoughnothing our body does really touched us. The modern self is a solitary and solipsistic being.It regards itself as the only real thing, and is determined not to be interrupted andinconvenienced by anything or anyone not itself. The Christian tradition calls this attitudegnosticism. This is the belief that I am solely my mind, and that I am trapped in my body,and in this world. It asserts that my mind can know the world, and other people, entirelywithout their aid and begin to extract itself from the limits they represent. Gnosticism is apanicked attempt to escape my past, my present situatedness, and all the plurality andambiguity of life. It views embodiedness as entanglement and misfortune. It is a permanenttemptation to believe that we are to remove ourselves from what it regards as the entangling,disgusting materiality and complications of this world and set ourselves above them.

The Post-moderns assert that there are no answers or master story. The claim that there isno master story is of course itself a master story. But they have removed from the debate themeans by which we can discuss their assertion. By insisting that the debate is completelyopen and anyone can believe everything and not be corrected they forestall real debate.

Trapped in the Technological CageWith the rise of democracy and technology we have become a terrible danger to ourselves.Our technologists and technicians keep the truth, about our violence, concealed from us andthey keep our violence under control. We need more technology in order to prevent anyultimately loss of control; each new generation of technology empowers a new generation ofcontrollers .

European civilisation seemed to have succeeded in controlling man by declaring that totalsubstance and immobility (Parmenides) before movement and total flux (Heraclitus).Heidegger was the best known twentieth century representative of the long German wish toflee from substance and death to life and movement. The Germans want to run away fromtheir fascination with immobile substance, with darkness and morbidity and, becomingGreeks, rediscover the religion of bright Mediterranean sunlight, spontaneity and joy.

The body (individual) generates others and the world, but it has no means of securing andallowing this otherness. It is never secure in its relationships to others, whether persons orthings. It oscillates between giving recognition and withdrawing it again. Even in givingrecognition it oscillates between acknowledging what is already there, and in projecting andconstructing what is not otherwise there. Only God who is truly other, and does not seek our

recognition for himself, can give us the recognition that give us the security to concederecognition to one another.

The Arrival of Global ManWe said that social science is a form of control that does not want to say who is to controlwhom and for what purpose. Sociology is the science of politics from which debate has beenremoved in the assumption that this is the way to control what is said to be mans inherentviolence. The sociologist understands the object of his knowledge to be that of a neutralobject, as though society had no more to say for itself than the object of geology. Thesociologist examines society and its members without the assistance of society, withoutentering conversation within which that society could disagree with the sociologist and try tochange his mind. For the sociologist the object of his investigation is methodologically takento be inert and silent, so he can take no correction from it.


14/22

14

Through the twentieth century the humanities were replaced by the social sciences. Theacademic can only yearn for the society that is being dissolved away by the apparentlyunstoppable process of alienation brought by the forces of technology.Global man turns out to be a man without particular tastes, without memory, withoutpersonality. The media supplies him with a torrent of images of the selves he could adopt.He can select his imagination and self-image from the information and entertainmentindustries and as often as he is bored he can re-invented himself from the resources theygive him: he is the man with of no lasting characteristics. The media is able to provide himwith everything. His desires will always find their fulfilment, so he does not have to pine orlament or wait. He enjoys everything ersatz. There is nothing he can do that puts him at risk .Since he enjoys everything he experiences all life already. He cannot take a risk that andcannot throw his life away He has no criteria not mediated by the media, by which to judgewhat is before him. The media is a universal mediator.

Bread and CircusesThe news and entertainment service of the media is the liturgy of the pagan tradition.Entertainment, instant, constant and inconsequential, is the mode of pagan religion, full of

gaiety and carelessness, envy and fear. Its Media present us with stock figures, narratives,crises and outcomes. It provides a stream of events that reproduce all the moments of theWestern tradition, played out in differing modes epic, comic, romantic, deathly. Itcontinually re-runs these moments as the whole truth. All together the whole media showrepresents our capitulation to the fiction that we can do without each other, are already free,mature and independent, and have no need to learn anything. Our particularities arerepackaged as tribalism, that together with uniforms and mass manoeuvres make for thefascism by which the most pagan of the interwar leaders tried to keep control on theirpeople. But the cult of personality is inevitable, for people emulate, and identify individuals tomodels themselves on and direct their affections too. Those who have not formed much self-discipline direct their affections (and hates) excessively towards those figures.

Theodor Adorno lamented our losses. We have given ourselves away to forces beyond ourcomprehension. Every relationship is reified by some commodity, but even product of myown labour becomes alien to me. We struggle to find the motivation, a malaise givenintellectual respectability by the term nihilism(nothing-ism - hopelessness). Without self-control we cannot prevent ourselves from bleeding our substance away. We can do nothingthat cannot be instantly calculated, and so positioned in a hierarchical nexus. Everything isjust a form of shopping. All gratification and calculation of value is instant, so there is nowaiting. Without waiting there we could never throw our lives away, as the monks did, bypursuing a hunch. Without risk there is no life that is worth the living. We are attempting toinure and immure ourselves against surprise, to make ourselves impassive.

Flight from Reason

The last of the champions of autonomy are rooting out all the stability, timelessness andsense that there are truths that are given and timelessly so, the transcendentals. It hates thethought that there are traces of this metaphysics left in our grammar from which civilisationcan rebuild itself. They want to be confirmed in their fear that is flux, that there is no stability.We have a reversion to flux. It is just as though pagan thought is on a long slow oscillationfrom growing stability, emergence and stability, and then as Empedocles says, this changesand there is an equally long unravelling and reversion to flux and chaos. Modernity is aderacination, of pulling everything up by the roots. Modernity has become the greatunreason.

Expertise and excellence have become an insuperably problematic. Practical judgment haswithered and been converted into science, and the triumph of science is the end of

judgment, and the end of judgment is the end of responsibility. Man no longer wishes to takehimself seriously as a responsible being. Our intellectuals are unable to offer any leadership


15/22

15

for they fear that any leadership would be elitist or the resentment of an elite that has lost itsauthority.

The coherence of our moral practices has gone. Modernity intends to dispense with allrestraint, discipline and the involvement of other people. We have to be free of the restraintof others and of the past with the result that we do not know how to serve, bear, suffer, bepatient and so how to be grown up. We live as adolescence who do not wish to grow up andleave the comfort our self-indulgence creates. The compartmentalised character of our livesmakes the moral and coherent and articulate life difficult. The fragmentation of the universitycurriculum reproduces the compartmentalization of knowledge and decision of man. On thisbasis a university education cannot transform our character and educate our ambitions. Butwithout authority that comes from relationship to traditions of reason I like it or I don't likebecomes the only response we can make. The voluntarism, fideism and antinomianism thatwe have seen (in Callicles) is related to the flight from the body and from the corpus oftradition. Every issue is ultimately an issue of power, so there are no issues of good, truth,order or reason.

The Enlightenment has turned one sort of reason on the other. Pure reason is the criterionand practical reason is continually found inadequate and discriminated against. This meansthat individuals no longer need to acquire the skill of judgment. The individual loses thesense of his own authority to judge and bear responsibility in the phrase of C.S. Lewis, theabolition of man

The Modern Gnostics over-value the present. Since we do not regard our children ascontinuers of our own identity in any strong sense, we have let go of the basic imperative ofinter-generational continuity. We dont hold any cultural goods over in the interests of thenext generation. This means that we have to both accomplish and enjoy the fruits ofeverything in our own short life-times. We must experience everything first hand, and adoptthe lifestyle of every culture, while remaining the intellectual tourist above them all. The

memory-free, tradition-erased individual browses across all forms of life and remain free ofthem all. In this way we belong to the tribe of the homeless minds and become incapable ofthe long-term relationships which sustain society.

The Evacuation of EducationWe said that most people have to work to support themselves and their households. They donot have the economic surplus that would give them the leisure to get an education and todebate in public and learn how to achieve some independence of thought from their peers.We said that most people cannot undergo the apprenticeship through which they couldachieve the attributes of the completed man. The intellectual life is a form of athleticism; it iscostly and rare.

Education is a form of piety, of reverence for our forebears. But Modernity is in flight from theancestors. We profess not to believe in them, but since we are frightened of them we clearlydo. We act as though the past were, a dark power, actively attempting to hold us back. Weregard our own intellectual parents as the enemy. As a result the humanities are in crisis andmodern education is just a faint memory of real education. Contemporary educators onlycommunicate that nothing thought or written by any generation before us is worth ourattention. Convinced heirs of Hegel, they submit to no course of self-control. They haveeducation, but everything has become information, without the formation that might broughtabout self-control. Nothing demands self-control, restraint, waiting, saving, anticipation. Theabolition of anticipation and renunciation of waiting is the disappearance of the future.Without any conception of the true form of man, its aim, education is empty. Our shameducation gets wider, vaster and shallower, and more expensive for those swept into it. As

we treat our own predecessors and intellectual ancestors so shall we be treated by our ownintellectual offspring, our students and children.


16/22

16

The End of WaitingWe saw that in the first half of the twentieth century the frustration and fury of the mob wasexpressed through the dictatorship of the demagogue with the worst imagination. Thesecond half of the twentieth century witnessed a seizure of power by a new clerisy ofmanagers who wrapped themselves in the soft ideology of the saviour state. The middle-aged took power against their own offspring. Determined to hang on to life and youth, ageneration in the West conspired to prevent its own replacement and so fortified the presentagainst the future. We vote ourselves new appropriations that will keep us in prosperity andhealth, but which are to be paid for by future savers and tax-payers. Democracy has come tomean the present (boomer) generation awards itself prosperity by loading finance obligationsonto the millennial generation (those now in their twenties), committing our children tosupport us in a standard of living that they will never be able to enjoy. We have beensacrificing our own children to Moloch.

The Homogenisers and the Eradication of DifferenceThese climatic moderns are certain that the head is superior to the body and independent of

the body (the material world, Body). No one wants to be a member of the class that isdefined by bodily labour. We have all indulged one anothers belief that everyone of us can,and should, leave the class of those involved in labour, and joint class of those defined bytheir brains, the clerical and office work, who work in administration and management.Everyone is a manager now, so we are all heads, but no one is body. We still have the twoor three-level pyramid, but the pyramid is inverted, top-heavy, the upside-down iceberg inwhich seventh eights are visible and only one eighth is below the water-line, where the workis done. We do not have to labour any more, nor save, nor exercise an epistemologicalmodesty about the present. In these end times, no one is obliged to work and wait, for allcan at last enter the kingdom of the universal middle classes and present gratification.Insisting that all goods are of equal value, we have refuse to deny ourselves any. All of uscan join the new middle classes as soon as we get ourselves into any institution in any of the

funding streams dedicated to dismantling some specific cultural distinctive. Each case ismade either in terms of ethics, or of efficiency, increasing economic participation throughwidening access and increasing opportunity. The effect of removing these distinctions andthe barriers that they are perceived to represent is that we have convinced ourselves that noone has to wait, or work, for what they want. Western societies are pursuing aneconomically non-productive agenda of attempting to erase all differentials of status andtense. We have all made it. There is no more waiting for us, for in this climatic moderneschaton we have all arrived.

Yet we have not succeeded in abolishing the constraints under which all previousgenerations lived and have not done away with the need for labour. There can be noeconomy that is all services and no industry, or all managers and no workers. Indeed there

cannot be any kind of economy when humans already have all they want, because then theyhave no need to transact with one another in other to come into possession of what they donot yet have. By suppressing the need to defer and wait we are losing that forwardorientation towards what is not yet in our possession. It is only this that gives us ourmotivation. This attempt to be rid of the distinction between the present and the future is asecularisation of the eschaton. But it is not either an injustice nor an economic inefficiencythat the future is just out of reach, that we can look forward to but not take captive. Humanlife is about wanting what you dont have, and therefore of looking forward, with or withoutpatience. Humans just are the creature that is orientated to the future, the animal with cultureand aspirations. The more we try to absorb the future into the present, the less motivationwe have to create a future for those who come after us.

Christianity as Public ReasonChristianity is the guarantor of the open secular sphere. It is not only historically the product


17/22

17

of Christian witness and teaching, but its present existence is now the result of presentChristian witness, and cut off from that witness, long term there is no such secular sphere.Liberal civil society is a great achievement. It is the outcome of the presence of Christianwitnesses. But when it does not allow itself to receive the contribution of Christianity, liberalsociety becomes illiberal. Alone in the humanities, Christian theology makes the case fordifference and otherness, order and also inevitably hierarchy, and for the case thatcommunion, or society, must be an entity of love. Christianity stands for public reason.

7. Christian Faithfulness in the Twenty-First CenturyIn earlier generation the leaders of civil society went to the Church because they realisedthat they benefited from the practices of self-judgment, self-restraint and self-governmentthat the Church practises. The love and mutual service of Christians flows out of the Churchand into public service. Their self-government and public service creates civil society.Because this nation and its rulers have listened to this God-worshipping community, andreceived, at least at second-hand, the judgment and forgiveness of God, our national historyhas been a movement, slow and erratic, from tribalism and violence to unity and peace. Ourancestors will reproach us, and say that if we do live as they did, acting as they did

(sacrificing themselves for the next generation future) and so honour them, we will notsurvive as a society, and their memory will not survive either.

Bread and CircusesThe state and market want us to be content, so that we do not cause one another anyunhappiness. becomes matron, singing its nervous lullaby and hushing us up for fear that wemight cause one another offence, that would result in someone disassociating themselvesfrom the consensus, and so public debate and discord breaking out again. The state wantseach to us to identify ourselves with the consensus in which each of us is pleased toconsider the views and behaviour of the other as just as valid as his own, and not to judgethe other inferior or dangerous so to identify ourselves with the arrived kingdom and rule ofall by all - and never to wonder whether it is in fact so. It hopes that it can make each of usjust afraid enough of censure not to explain in public the judgment that others are wrong in asense that makes them dangerous to the continuity of our peace.

By abolishing public memory and cultural self-respect we have attempted to trap ourcontemporaries and successors in an exclusive obligation to us and the forms that representan abandonment of the modern project.

John Paul I and Benedict XVIThe writings of John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, made particularly accessible in theencyclicals, set out the response of Christians to the self-doubt of late twentieth centurypalpable in Western culture. There had been an increasingly pessimistic view of human

sexuality and a growing assumption that men and women are antagonists. In response tothese, the Church reiterated that sex and gender are good, for they are features of ourmutuality, itself a part of the good of human createdness. The Church identified the issue ofsex as part of a large gnosticism and emphasised that marriage, founded in humancomplementarity, is the institutional form of our recognition that human societies flourishwhen one generation is prepared to love and serve the next.

Man and WomanEvangelium Vitae(The Gospel of Life ) The Christian Gospel strengthens all thosecharacteristics of a society that cherish life. It sets itself against that pessimism and self-hatred and those practices that intend to de-link sex from the arrival of children.Evangelium Vitaeshowed that the concerns of the earlier (1967) encyclical about the link

between sex and reproduction were justified. When we attempt to break that connection, bycontraception and abortion, we also dissolve the rationality of marriage and the assurance


18/22

18

that one generation gives, through the covenant of marriage and service of parenthood, thatit does places a fundamental value on its own children, and so recognise an obligation togenerations other than its own.Along with Christian discipleship, marriage is one form of public service that is morefundamental than any other. Two consenting persons enter an exclusive public covenant tolove and serve one another and those who are born through their coming together in thisway and in this way they freely, and without coercive mediation of the state,bring about thefuture of their society. When a society no longer encourages marriage, and encouragesmarriage partners to stay together for the sake of the children, that society will start to suffera demographic crisis. It was is part of a renewal of teaching on the vocations of singlenessand of marriage, sometimes referred to as the Theology of the Body.

Faith and ReasonVeritatis Splendor(The Splendour of the Truth) reaffirms that the truth is objective. Thetruth has its own dignity and authority. This has to be admitted if there is to be any science orreason at all. It is an indication of how far the disintegration of reason has come at this pointin Western history that the retreat from public reason and loss of confidence in ourselves as

reasoning and rational persons, that we have to affirm what all earlier generations neverdoubted. The truth is not whatever we make it, it is that that everyone has their own opinionand no ones opinion is any better than anyone elses. The truth is out there and it is for usto discover what the truth is.

If we deny the authority of the tradition we have come from, and say that all cultures andmoral options are of equal value we put ourselves beyond challenge and so dictating tothose who come after us. We then propound our description of the world without givingreasons for it, by offering arguments that refer to sources and traditions of reason we share.By denying any of the independent canons by which we could be challenged we haveprevented our successors from finding the tools by they could dethrone us. We have re-written history in order to crown ourselves as its sole heir.

Fides et Ratio(Faith and Reason)Faith and reason which of them is fundamental? Which comes first faith or reason?Which is fundamental theology or philosophy? Augustine and Aquinas tell us that theologyis the true philosophy and the basis on which there may be science. Theology is faith andreasoning, faith that generates reasoning and understanding. Faith enables knowledge.

In the twentieth century much Christian theology had to defend the complexity of reason,pointing out that, whether we are talking about science or the humanities, that reasonemerges from communities of discourse, and is thus embedded in conversation that havelong histories. The unity of knowledge that once came from a unified concept of man is lostso that, divided by many separate sciences, universities have no over-arching vision and are

now opposed to any unified of man or of human dignity. Education merely offers data.Theology had to point this out to those positivist advocates who believed that reason had tobe defended against particular contexts and communities and against faith. It had to explainthat tacit knowledge allows some things to become explicit and so become knowledge inresponse to particular questions, and that intuition, imagination and analogy allows us toexamine the categories and concepts we employ in the hope of framing our questions better.

Christians insist on the primacy of faith AND reason, not one rather than the other. In answerto the question which of these is primary, Christian faith declares that neither is prior to theother, for they are co-fundamental. Faith that offers no reasons is fideism and irrationality.Reason that does not acknowledge that it is embedded in specific narratives and history is

less than fully rational. Though our knowledge aspires to the universal, it is characterised byparticularities which may not be erased or substituted for. Reason, is always a matter ofreasoning; it is a faculty that must be received as a gift, exercised, practiced and passed on.


19/22

19

Our ability to do this depends on our readiness to concede that we may have something tolearn from others, even the most unlikely of sources. Reason is not the possession of themind locked within the autarchic individual.

The Gospel always obliges us to compare our accounts of the world, and thus to dophilosophy. A philosophical system with a larger conception of man, his sociality and place inthe universe, such as that provided by Thomas Aquinas dialogue with Aristotle, makes abetter conversation partner than a philosophy with a reduced conception of man and theworld. The Church has become the last defender of reason.

The Christian presentation of the gospel is always to be tested and adjusted in the course ofits encounter with the world, represented by many alternative worldviews.The Gospel cannot be presented shorn of the history of its presentation or from the manycultural accents that have transmitted Christian worship to us. We cannot shear the worshipand liturgy of Christians of the particularities of language and embodiment that that liturgyhas accrued. A one-dimensional liturgy, in which we insist that we speak only in the flataccents of our own generation, and that all must be immediately comprehensible to our own

contemporaries and seekers, is not faithful. The liturgy makes the presence of many, indeedall, generations present to us.

De-Hellenization and the Dictatorship of RelativismFaith and rationality are intrinsically connected. The Christian faith prompts us to givereasons and to search for a greater coherence and more comprehensive rationality. TheGod of Israel and Jesus Christ is a God of reason, who makes promises and keeps them,and gives reasons for his judgments, and demands that we do so. The concept of covenantreflects this characteristic promise-keeping rationality. God is constant, a faithful keeper ofhis covenant with man, bound by his own promises. If God were at every instant ready tochange his mind, he would be utterly unpredictable and so unknowable. It is not theChristian faith that proposes that God is a fickle tyrant, who remakes his mind anew at every

moment, and might therefore make a complete departure that would plunge us into new acourse, at odds with his previous course, thereby robbing us of all certainty.

The Christian faith gives reasons for itself, and so is a reasonable faith. Moreover itspractices of giving reasons has given rationality a very high status in Western life, which inturn are accountability to one another, the public and political life that arises, and theadvance of science. But a contrary tendency to exalt will over covenant and reason, alwayspresent, has a powerful re-appearance in the modern period.

But in the twenty-first century we have abandoned much of the confidence in the powers ofhuman reason and the possibility of public reasoning taken from granted by ourpredecessors. It has become the modern habit to enforce a debased lowest-common-

denominator equivalence on one another. We discourage one another from suggesting thatany course or any culture is more valuable than any other. When everything is regarded asequally good, no particular thing is good. When we regard some course as better thanother, we discover that a staged public consensus tyrannically wants to stop us fromexplaining publicly why we think this. Benedict calls this the dictatorship of relativism.

In Europes Crisis of Culture (2005) Benedict points out that there is always a temptation todrop engagement with the long Christian-pagan dialogue that makes up made the Westernintellectual tradition. He identifies three steps towards this de-Hellenization and irrationalitythat that have been taken by the modern West. The first of these was the Reformationrejection of metaphysics and Protestant determination to save the gospel from philosophy.Christians should be taught by Scripture alone. Yet how can Christians who are taughtScripture alone learn from Christians of previous generation on how to read Scripture andagree on what it said? The Church offers us Christian doctrine to aid our to hear Scripture


20/22

20

truly. Philosophy is simply the ongoing dialogue between the Gospel and the worldviews ofthe various cultures that hear the gospel. It is an intellectual inquiry that is driven by Christianfaith, that is committed to continuingAugustine and Aquinas engagement with Plato andAristotle, as the most sophisticated representatives of non-Christian thought.

A second stage, in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was the divorce of faith from theChristian community and from its worship and other practices. After this separation, broughtabout by Kant and the moderns, faith simply became morality. But on this basis Christianityis no longer about salvation and membership in the communion of God, and thus about theact of God that brings man into this communion. Instead it is simply about the acts by whichman secures his own boundaries, defining his own territory against God and against hisneighbour.

The third, twentieth century, stage of this de-hellenisation is the assumption that the lensesof any culture are as good as any other, and that the lenses of Greek and Latin culture areno better than any other, or indeed represent a European imposition on other cultures. But itwas Greek culture that first received the gospel, being transformed by the Church fathers as

it did so. Perhaps the Greek emphasis on what is universal has made Hellenic culture asuitable means of grappling with the issue of how the gospel transforms over individualcultures and ethnicities. The creeds, prayers and worship of Church reflect the newsynthesis of Hebrew and Greek culture to make Christian culture. No generation ofChristians can be its own teachers, in defiance of all previous generations of Christians.

As a means to spread faith, violence is self-defeating since faith that is coerced cannot befaith. Violence is irrational, and indeed irrationality is a form of violence.

Benedict points to the primacy of love, good and beauty, and to faith and reason.Benedict made these points again in his Regensberg Speech. Violence is irrational, andthose who resort to it have already lost the argument. Every representation of any tradition

or religion should encourage all others to present reasons for their views, and not attempt tocoerce, deride or intimidate.

Those secularising liberals who want to drive all talk of God out of the public square areinevitably driving out all discussion of what is good and true, and in particular what is goodabout humankind. They denigrate those cultural institutions like marriage that make for thetransmission of life, and the culture of life, from one generation to another. Liberals do notcommit themselves to the covenants that create family life and so they suffer a demographiccomeuppance. Though the liberals are in power in the present, inward migration into Europeof communities with a much less liberal conception of equality of the sexes will inherit powerand the modern, liberal moment will be over.

Alasdair MacIntyreIn After Virtue(1981) the British moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre suggests that we haveforgotten what earlier generations knew. Though we have the elements of morality, theirunity has been lost. We have the fragments but no idea how they fit together, and thereforelittle sense of what makes for a good and meaningful life. The result is that each of usexpresses the emotions we experience in each moment but are unable to say why theyshould interest the rest of us, or are good. We cannot reason our way to a commonconclusions and so act as a unified society.

Alasdair MacIntyre suggests that we need to travel the whole route of the Christian andWestern tradition again. We need to discover the local forms of community within which thecivility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the dark ages which arealready upon us. We may need to resort to the same monastic discipline and form our ownBenedictine communities that will again preserve the memory, the mind and reason of


21/22

21

European civilisation. MacIntyre believes that this time however the barbarians are notwaiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.

Nevertheless, the road to human life is as open to us as it was to Augustine, Benedict and allthe Christians who have preceded us. For the sake of our own successors, we should getup, re-join that company and resume this journey.

SUMMARY

1. The cultural leaders of Europe attempt to replace the Church with the nation. Modernswant to give the state the functions of the Church, and to get rid of the distinction betweenthe Church and the world.

2. A healthy society emerges from a healthy culture, formed by dialogue with the particular

of Christian, and ancient pagan, traditions from which it originated.

3. A healthy political society is sustained by the practices and virtues of debate that sustaincivility and the rule of law.

4. Love relates to particular persons, and thus is directed first to those closest to us. Asociety must honour and reward the covenants such as marriage by which society isrenewed. We love first family, then community then nation, then those beyond: inversion ofthis order is pathological. A society must acknowledge the rightness of love and the desire ofhuman beings for one another in particular covenantal relationships, unmediated by thestate.

5. Politics cannot be conducted solely in the discourse of power, will or personalpreferences, but must be shaped by truth and an objective conception of what is good. Truthis discovered by judgment, and judgment is enabled by mature political traditions.

6. Humans do not come to maturity in fear of the capabilities of their own bodies or of thecrowd. Persons may offer one another their service, and those who have undertaken theappropriate apprenticeship in been educated to do so can do this through instruction(education) and leadership (politics).

7. The mature person is self-ruled and well-ruleda unity of head and body. He is a well-ruledman and his contribution and out-working (his product, offspring and body) is manygenerations of people who are also will-ruled because ruled (exclusively) by the law of can

also and

8. Western and modern societies that do not acknowledge a debt to their forebears, suffer aloss of self-respect and fail to honour their obligations to future generations.

9. Modernity is a conviction that man cannot control himself and so he has to be controlled.We have therefore reintroduced a two-class society, of the majority, that has to becontrolled, and the elite, that has to control them. An unsustainably high proportion of thepopulation has managed to climb into that elite class.

10. We have not shaken off our masters: they have merely dispensed with the intellectual

tradition by which we could challenge their direction.


22/22

11. Lost confidence manifests itself through those agendas which intend to diminish cultural,political and even biological differences. They are an attempt to set up the kingdom of Godby force, without waiting for all to enter it, freely and without coercion. These agendasreduce the opportunity for mutuality, and remove our reasons for desiring and servingparticular other persons.

12. The future of Western societies depend on an openness that modernity does notcomprehend and cannot support from its own intellectual resources. Whilst denying that itdoes so, modernity lives from the social capital accumulated by Christianity.The healthy nation requires the long-term presence of Christians to create the conditionswithin which it can be sustained.

13 watchmen and witnesses

Documents