Conference rejection blues: a haiku

Rejected by a conference.

Career down in flames.

Must make money from haikus.

Indicative of the big society?

An article about Philip Blond here.

A limmerick

The theorist Gillian Rose

expatiated in incomprehensible prose.

Too clever by far

For most people to care,

She’s now giving me PhD woes.

Religion and politics homily

Exodus 33.12-23; Ps 99; 1 Th. 1.1-10; Mt 22.15-22

 

In the chapters of Exodus we have been reading these last few weeks is a consistent element of demythologizing, of debunking certain pictures of God, of which last week’s text is a particularly good example. God pictured as the angry, whimsical superpower ready to hurl thunderbolts around, talked into calming down by the intellectually and morally superior Moses. The point of course is that God is not like this, though we sometimes imagine or even wish it to be the case. In this morning’s text Moses asks to be shown God’s ways and to see God’s glory. He is shown God’s goodness and then, in Exodus 34, to which this whole section of passages is leading, God reveals her ways as ‘slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness’, forgiving sin without neglecting justice. Justice, especially for the orphans, widows and aliens, was very important in ancient Judaism, but it was seen somewhat differently than in the classical Greek conception. For someone like Aristotle, justice is a question of correct distribution. Israel did not neglect these issues, as the Jubilee tradition of periodically returning land to indebted families shows, but there was a greater focus on the act of judging, based on Israel’s faith in God’s acts in history of judging the nations. Psalm 99 hints at this: ‘you have executed justice’. Thus whether a ruler has delivered just judgments becomes a criterion for their legitimation. All rulers are accountable before God, something of whose judgments are made known in the Torah, the law.

 

Something of this comes through in Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees and Herodians about the emperor’s tax. Bearing in mind that Jesus was trying to avoid a public trap rather than engaged in a philosophical discussion about politics and religion, he nevertheless enunciated what has come to be a core Christian view: that no political arrangement can be fully identified with God’s Kingdom but is answerable to and judged by God. By decisively separating the sacred and the political, Christianity contributed to the secularising process that has taken various forms in history, from Christendom’s idea of a secular Christian government and society, to the late twentieth century idea of a completely secularised polity, to the more recent suggestion of a postsecular world.

 

Perhaps postsecularism can do for our pluralistic age what Christendom did for more uniformly, though never monolithically, Christian European countries. Christendom is the recognition that the political is not and cannot be a full participation in the Kingdom of God, and so is secular, but it can nevertheless be in some measure responsive and obedient to Christ’s rule. Postsecularism seeks to allow religion to contribute to debate about the common good of a society without allowing any one religion to override others through policy or governance, and whilst requiring religion to accept the gains of the secular reason it helped to birth, in particular in science and egalitarianism. A postsecular government would be secular but not aggressively so. Of course, in large and diverse groups such as nation-states, some laws will always offend the consciences of some members; but since there is now no universal or even majority agreement on any one total metaphysical and/or religious scheme it is wise to refrain from imposing any religious vision too directly on politics. Yet, at the same time, secular politics is not simply formal, it is not simply a clearing of space in which different religious and non-religious views can meet and debate; it must make decisions about the substantive good, and that is why the views of its religious members should not be excluded. Should forced marriages be allowed? Should people seeking unemployment benefit be forced to work on Saturdays or Sundays? Can the law incorporate elements of other jurisdictions? Should homosexual marriage be legalised? And so on.

 

The realisation that whole-scale worldviews, whilst not redundant, cannot be self-evident, and a postsecular politics corresponding to this should, in my view, be welcomed and even worked towards by Christians because they provide the opportunity to resist two weaknesses that I think are structural to Christianity, in the sense that they are deeply built into the nature of Christianity and the church. The first is the temptation to triumphalism, the feeling that the church is in the right and others tend to be in the wrong, morally and intellectually. So the church has usually claimed to possess the truth about God and morality and maybe about philosophy too. The church is in the light whereas others are in darkness; we are found, they are lost; and so on. The second is the temptation to look after the church’s institutional interests before and to the exclusion of the common good or solidarity with others. Both weaknesses can be seen coming together in spectacular fashion during the Second World War, when some church leaders refused to help Jews unless they converted to Christianity; though, admittedly this has as much to do with the structural weakness of supersessionism as it has to do with these other two. So postsecularism might help focus minds on solidarity with other groups, working with them on projects for common goods. A recognition of other worldviews and a humility about our own could curb triumphalism and help us carry out our own demythologizing on ourselves.

 

Christian theology associated the idea of the two realms of church and politics with the idea of two ages, the present age and the coming age: both overlap. That is probably why the lectionary brings in 1 Thessalonians, stressing turning away from idols and waiting for the return of Christ. The horizon of a returning judge is intended to colour all our actions in the meantime, prompting us to give to God what is God’s. Of course, the return of Christ can be taken to mean different things. For example, some members of the American Christian Right have suggested not worrying about climate change because God will sort it all out in the end. (It is for reasons such as these that we should probably re-name them the Christian Wrong). But the contemporary importance of this kind of ultimate horizon for action should be to focus attention on what we do in the present to assist in the work of justice, in imitation of God’s ways and as an attempt to reveal something of God’s presence.

When people ask me to explain Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence

I tell them it’s like Groundhog Day, just less funny but with more mustaches.