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Since I’ve been on a bit of a Robert Jenson “kick” lately, and it seems germane to this morning’s topic, here’s an excerpt from his 1984 essay “Toward a Christian Theory of the Public” (I’m not sure how much of this Jenson still stands by, but it’s good food for thought anyway):

In the economy God rules us in the same way as he rules galaxies and amoebae: without our choice. We must eat, take shelter, and the like; and we are an economy insofar as we cannot manage these singly. God so arranges his creation that we cannot but deal with one another. Just so, communal moral choices become inevitable, and with them politics—and with politics prophecy.

I have room and ability for only a few somewhat scattered maxims about right economy—whereby it should be remembered that presenting and arguing such maxims is an act within the political public, not the economic public. The first is: if necessitating politics is God’s goal with the economy, maximum production in itself is not. Of course, since I must eat, I cannot but want to eat well. But not even the possibility of substituting “we” for “I” in the previous sentence can make the promotion of production the automatic right choice for every situation. In a right economy, the GNP would not be a norm.

The second maxim is like unto the first: an economy that produces such inequalities of wealth as to dispense some from and incapacitate others for communal moral deliberation is just so evil, counter to the economy’s godly function. “Safety nets” are nothing to the point; it is not poor citizens’ mere survival that is the polity’s responsibility, but their freedom for the polity. And every self-aware polity has appreciated the necessity of “sumptuary” laws. (Jenson, “Toward a Christian Theory of the Public,” in Essays in Theology of Culture, pp. 144-5)

For Jenson (in this essay at least), the essence of politics is communal moral deliberation. That is, when we gather to deliberate about what kind of community we should be. Economics is subordinate to politics in that its goal should be to equip us for this communal deliberation. Economic necessity is God’s way of forcing us to recognize our interdependence and our consequent need to come together and reason as a community. “Prophecy” refers to hearing the external moral word that calls us to something new. Thus, for Jenson, there can be no absolute “separation of church and state” because moral deliberation requires being open to hearing this word that stands “above” the community.

Jenson here sounds quite “Lasch-ian.” For Christopher Lasch, liberal politics and capitalist economics tended to corrode the civic virtue necessary for people to reason together about the public good. Such virtue requires a measure of independence in thought, which itself rests on economic independence. Liberalism, for Jenson and Lasch, seeks to eliminate this need for deliberation by creating a political “machinery” – a system or process – that will allow for the balancing of “interests” without requiring deliberation about the common good. (For a good discussion of Lasch’s views, see this interview.)

I have two reservations about Jenson’s views here. The first is that he seems a bit too sanguine about political control of the economy. For all the familiar reasons, subjecting economic life to the dictates of a political class can easily lead to corruption, inefficiency and outright oppression. However, in fairness to Jenson, he elsewhere says that a political corollary should be an increase in direct democracy, so that the people who are affected would be the ones making the decisions (and this, presumably, would require a significant measure of political decentralization to be feasible).

My second concern is that Jenson (and Lasch) is too dismissive of the value of liberal freedom – i.e. the preservation of sphere of private action where one is not subject to the community but is free to do as one chooses. Anti-liberal thinkers like to point out that liberal freedom leaves us free to choose, but doesn’t tell what we should choose. But this seems to miss the point. Just because something doesn’t give us everything we need doesn’t mean it’s of no value whatsoever. Something may be a necessary condition of living a good life, even if it’s not sufficient.

Kim at Crossroads has a very thoughtful post about poverty and how Christians should think about government’s role in responding to it.

I left this comment (minor modifications added):

I think it’s difficult to get a political philosophy from the Bible because of the circumstances in which it was written. In the NT in particular, Jesus and the disciples are in a distinctly minority position – both as members of an oppressed people and as part of a despised new religious movement. They’re not exactly in a position to be drafting policy papers for Caesar!

But there is ample precedent in the tradition for seeing the distribution of goods as a matter of justice and not simply charity as we understand the term. The church fathers, the scholastics, and the reformers all seemed to take the view that anything beyond what was necessary to meet our needs was owed to our poor neighbors [i.e. witholding from the needy neighbor was often regarded as theft]. And there is a longstanding tradition of regarding the institution of private property as a kind of concession to sin and, therefore, subject to qualification by those responsible for ensuring justice in the community. So, I think it’s pretty hard to argue for laissez-faire as the “Christian” position.

Two qualifiers, though. First, I think empirically we’ve seen that a relatively free market does a better job at producing wealth than other economic systems. But that still leaves a lot of room for government intervention when it comes to providing basic necessities to those unable to provide for themselves, health care, education, infrastructure, etc. etc.

Secondly, I think our credibility as Christians in arguing for particular policy proposals does depend in part on how we live out those principles in our own lives. We risk looking like hypocrites if we ask the government to enforce principles that we’re unable to live by ourselves! On the other hand, if Christians actually engaged in radical acts of wealth sharing, what kind of impact might that have on our unbelieving neighbors?

This is from Lutheran theologian Robert W. Jenson‘s essay “With No Qualifications: The Christological Maximalism of the Christian East,” found in the collection Ancient & Postmodern Christianity: Paleo-Orthodoxy in the 21st Century – Essays in Honor of Thomas C. Oden, edited by Kenneth Tanner and Christopher A. Hall:

The Father has defined his deity itself by the appeal of that man, “Father, forgive them”: to be God is to be the one who says “Yes” in that exchange. That is why there is hope of salvation. The Father has defined his deity itself by that man’s hospitality to publicans and sinners: to be God is to justify the ungodly. That is why we have hope of salvation. It is because the Father has defined deity by that man’s permission to piggyback our prayers on his, sharing his address to “Father,” that we can pray with certainty of hearing. Shifting, for a moment, to metaphysics, it is because that Father has defined being by Jesus’ promise to be with us, that a loaf and cup here and now can be his body and blood. And so forth through as much of the Gospels’ story as needed for any homiletic or confessional occasion.

What if Jesus were in fact a sort of male Shirley MacLaine? And he were risen to be the Son? Then that is the kind of God there would be. Almighty Boopsie in heaven. What if Jesus were in fact a liberal politician? And he were risen to be the Son? Then standard Protestantism would be true. What if Jesus were in fact an unconditionally accepting therapist? One can only set one’s nightmares in order.

Mary is the Mother of God. Unus ex Trinitate mortuus est pro nobis. One of the Trinity is a Palestinian Jew who came eating and drinking and forgave sin and prophesied implausible glory. Jesus saves. These and more sentences like them are the great metaphysical truth of the gospel, without which it is all religious palaver and wish fulfillment and metaphorical projection. Jesus really is Lord because he is one of the Trinity, and that is our salvation.

Speaking of Bishop Willimon, I liked this talk on “mixing religion and politics.”

William Placher reviews Anglican theologian Oliver O’Donovan’s latest book, The Ways of Judgment, in the Christian Century. O’Donovan is (in)famous for his defense of the idea of “Christendom.” The notion that Christendom was a disaster may be the one thing that unites liberal and “postliberal” theologians these days, but O’Donovan has argued that 1. it’s natural and right for Christians to seek to “make disciples of all nations” and 2. if they’re successful at doing that (and they should want to be!) it’s only natural that people’s faith will then shape and influence the ordering of the political sphere.

However, as Placher points out, O’Donovan’s notion of Christendom is a lot different from that of, say, Pat Robertson. For starters, it would be committed to a robust notion of social justice, and it would refrain from the oppression of non-Christian minorities because it’s Christian, not out of a liberal commitment to “neutrality” or secularism. O’Donovan thinks that the liberal notion of forever seeking the truth and never finding it robs us of one of our essential freedoms as human beings.

Old-fashioned liberals from Milton to Mill, O’Donovan pointed out, valued intellectual diversity because it helps us find the truth. The combat among different ideas helps lead us to the right answer. He worried, however, that nowadays people celebrate diversity for its own sake, as if actually finding truth or even finding agreement would be some kind of tragedy. But suppose we did agree on how society ought to be organized, and suppose that agreement rested on Christian principles. Should Christians find that so terrible?

[…]

O’Donovan has little patience with liberals like John Rawls who define justice as no more than the compromises that enable us to live in peace by giving us the freedom to pursue our various visions of the good without interfering too much with one another: “There could undoubtedly be worse tyrannies than that of the regnant liberal secularism, so sensitively averse to overt physical suffering. That much must always be said in its favor. But what cannot be said for it is that it fosters freedom. For in attempting to dictate what is true on the basis of what is convenient, it shuts down the human calling to the knowledge of the truth.” When Rawls and others encourage us to tolerate each other’s differing goods, they simply give up on the quest for the good. O’Donovan thinks human beings are driven to look for a true good and to try to convince everyone else when we find it, and we are deprived of an important freedom if we are told we can’t do that.

Placher, however, is skittish about the idea that Christendom could avoid the temptations to corruption and abuse of power that have marked much of its history. He’s not convinced that, in practice, it wouldn’t involve compromising Christian principles in order to be “effective.”

O’Donovan is hard to classify with the usual political categories. Like Pope John Paul II, he is committed to social justice in ways more liberal than almost any current American politician, but he also notes as an example of unjust laws “those that permit unborn children to be unnecessarily killed by their mothers with the assistance of gynecologists.” Though he never mentions the name, O’Donovan puts me in mind of F. D. Maurice, that 19th-century British advocate of both church tradition and the poor who was H. Richard Niebuhr’s favored example for his concept of “Christ the transformer of culture.”

I am relieved to encounter an eloquent account of “Christian values” that doesn’t call for hating gays and assassinating the president of Venezuela. But does O’Donovan face the sad history of “Christendom” rigorously enough? So often when Christians have dominated the political realm, we have persecuted Jews, denigrated women and started crusades. Those who have the greatest political success just now while waving a Christian banner would seem unlikely to do much better if they had more power. I do see O’Donovan’s point: as we share the gospel with the world, it’s absurd to worry that we will persuade too many people. But shouldn’t we worry about what would happen if we succeeded?

Partly this is a question of whose version of “Christian values” would prevail in the public sphere. A liberal like Christopher Insole would say that precisely because we can only partly discern the divine order of things, we need a liberal polity that refrains from making certain values – “Christian” or otherwise – publicly authoritative. Still, I don’t see how O’Donovan’s question can be avoided – don’t we want people to believe the Gospel? And if so, won’t that affect how they think about politics, how they vote, etc.?

Via Kevin Carson comes news of the Vermont Independence Convention:

The objectives of the convention are twofold. First, to raise the level of awareness of Vermonters of the feasibility of independence as a viable alternative to a nation which has lost its moral authority and is unsustainable. Second, to provide an example and a process for other states and nations which may be seriously considering separatism, secession, independence, and similar devolutionary strategies.

The keynote speaker is James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and other books. Kunstler thinks that as a result of, among other things, the rising cost of oil we’re going to be forced to live much more locally in the near future. For a brief overview of his views see here.

Independence, localist, and secessionist ideas cut interestingly across political and ideological lines. Vermont secessionist and economist Thomas Naylor co-wrote a book several years back with Methodist pastor/theologian (and now bishop) Will Willimon called Downsizing the U.S.A., which argued for radical devolution and decentralization of political and economic power. Naylor has also collaborated with left-anarchist Kirkpatrick Sale on this idea. You also see such sentiments entertained from time to time by various libertarians and conservative agrarians.

The October issue of First Things is now online in its entirety.

Some pieces I particularly enjoyed:

• Stephen Barr on evolution and design
• Joseph Bottum on P.G. Wodehouse
• David B. Hart on the theology of Robert Jenson

This is from Gustaf Aulen’s excellent book Reformation and Catholicity:

The act of salvation is entirely an act of Christ. This act creates faith. Faith is the sign of man’s new relationship to Christ, which comes into being when man is incorporated into a living fellowship with him. Luther has a classic statement: “in faith itself Christ is present” (in ipsa fide Christus adest). If “faith” therefore involves a relationship between Christ and man, it means that faith may also be considered from man’s point of view. Faith means then man’s acceptance of the gift given by Christ. This point of view eliminates completely the question as to how salvation can be partly the work of God and partly the work of man; or how it can be partly dependent on what God does, and partly on qualifying achievements on the part of man. The man whom Christ saves is an unqualified sinner. Faith cannot be understood as a qualifying, human achievement. On man’s part faith is primarily receptive. But this does not mean at all that man is passive in relation to what takes place. He participates actively to the highest degree. From this point of view faith is man’s Yes to the gift given to him on the basis of pure, undeserved grace. His acceptance of the gift means that he has been won and overcome by Christ and has been brought to obedience in faith under him. If faith were not primarily conceived of from this point of view, but were regarded as a matter of holding more or less tenaciously to certain doctrines as true–to speak in modern terminology–“Christianity” would be transformed into an ideology, one among many ideologies competing with each other. To be sure, Christian faith includes both the acceptance of something as true and a confession. But acceptance and confession depend primarily on the fact that faith is “God’s work,” God’s redemptive act through Christ. If this context is ignored, the truth will be lost, and faith will be devoid of meaning. (pp. 62-3)

Aulen goes on to discuss how, for Luther and the Reformation, Christ is actively present in faith. He comes to us in the Word and the Sacraments, actively justifying, forgiving, giving us new life, and sanctifying us.

Salvation takes place thanks to the fact that Christ as Kyrios continues in his church the work of reconciliation he fulfilled on the cross. The characteristic feature of the Reformation is not only its strong emphasis on the fact that the atonement has taken place once for all but also, and especially, that it combines what once happened with that which continually takes place in the church of Christ, where Christ realizes the victory which had been won through sacrifice. He accomplishes this continuing work through the means of grace, the Word and the sacraments. (p. 63)

Because Christ is present with us in the church, the Word, and the sacraments, justification isn’t merely “forensic” as some critics of the Reformation have charged, because to be united with Christ in faith is to “posses” all that he has – his life and his righteousness. This is the essence of Luther’s “happy exchange.”

From this point of view justification by faith alone, through Christ alone, involves possessing. “He who believes has.” He “has” Chirst with all that he is, owns, and can do. Because this is so, Reformation preaching and hymns are filled with the joy and confidence of faith. The life of faith is a life “in Christ,” “in the Spirit.” God’s gift, salvation and adoption as sons, is a gift given to man now in the present. We can speak here with a modern expression of “realized eschatology.”

But the eschatological perspective also prevents us from thinking that we have already attained the perfect righteousness that is our hope in faith. The meaning of simul iustus et peccator – being at the same time saint and sinner – is that our trust is always in Christ’s righteousness, not our own. Before God, considered in ourselves, we always remain sinners. We have no righteousness of our own that we can use to make claims upon God. And the righteousness we do have – the righteousness of Christ – is only party realized in this life.

What this formula wants to say about the Christian relationship with God is that this relationship always depends on and has its foundation in the forgiveness of sins. This is something, therefore, that does not have reference only to the beginning of the Christian life, to initium, but is true of Christian life as a whole under the conditions of human life here on earth. Man never comes to a point where he has so qualified himself that by his own attitude and his own work he could present his “own” rigteousness before God. Before God, coram deo, he is always a sinner who has nothing else to trust in than God’s mercy which meets him in the forgiveness of sins. He is not partly a sinner and partly righteous. He is altogether a sinner, who lives by and finds his righteousness in the grace of God which is new every morning. (pp. 84-5)

This doesn’t mean, however, that there’s no progress or growth in sanctification. Though our righteousness always remains partial and incomplete in this life, the Spirit does really effect change in our life.

The Holy Spirit accomplishes sanctification by “obliterating, destroying, and killing sin.” Here on earth there is “a Christian and holy people in whom Christ lives, works, and reigns per redemptionem, through grace and forgiveness of sin–and the Holy Spirit per vivificationem et sanctificationem, through daily washing away of sin and daily renewal–so that we do not remain in sin, but can and ought to live a new life in all kinds of good works, as God’s Ten Commandments demand.” By these means man grows in sanctification and becomes more and more a new being in Christ. This growth in sanctification, in faith and obedience, continues throughout life. It takes place through the use of God’s Word and the Lord’s Supper, which are the means the Spirit employs in sanctification. (pp. 88-9)

And yet, in another sense, we’re always beginning anew. This is because “the Christian life never reaches a point where it can build on anything else than God’s forgiving grace that is new every morning” (p. 89). We always live between the “already” and the “not yet,” and this reminds us not to have unrealistic expectations of perfection and to always rely only on God’s mercy.

Wow! Anne Rice has returned to the Catholic Church and has published a novel about Jesus’ “lost years” in Egypt.

Rice knows “Out of Egypt” and its projected sequels—three, she thinks—could alienate her following; as she writes in the afterword, “I was ready to do violence to my career.” But she sees a continuity with her old books, whose compulsive, conscience-stricken evildoers reflect her long spiritual unease. “I mean, I was in despair.” In that afterword she calls Christ “the ultimate supernatural hero … the ultimate immortal of them all.”

I only ever made it through Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat but enjoyed them both. I’m kind of intrigued by the new novel.

The UK Observer profiles the “new puritans” – twenty-something youngsters who build their lives around making “ethical choices” such as eschewing consumption, being ultra-health conscious, avoiding alcohol and tobacco and haranguing their friends and fellow citizens about their “lifestyle choices.”

I can agree with the aims of some of these people to live in less shallow and more environmentally-friendly and healthier ways than some of their peers. But darn it if the ones they profile don’t come off as insufferable and humorless prigs.

Also, it’s hard not to see this as a peculiarly modern and secular version of “works-righteousness” – you justify your existence by making all the correct “ethical” choices, resulting in a pinched and joyless approach to life. Hopefully they’ll grow out of it and moderate their positions before they manage to use the force of law to impose their neo-cromwellian order on the rest of us.