In the first of these two posts, I very briefly sketched Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities project, focusing on her epistemology of person.  Here I will expand why Karol Wojtyla’s Person and Act can well support Nussbaum’s capabilities project.  As is Nussbaum, Wojtyla was an Aristotelian scholar; not just for this his project complements and supports hers, but in what follows some Aristotelian aspects of his thought will perhaps be evident.

Wojtyla begins by considering the “experience of the person”.  His is a phenomenological approach; an experience is not merely phenomenal, with the intellect then shaping the idea of “person”.  Rather, the experience itself is at once sensation and comprehension; in experience there is a sort of direct cognitive contact (832).

Significantly, Wojtyla grounds the experience of the person in one’s experience of oneself.  Our experience of ourselves is our basic experience of the person: “The experience of the person, the person that I am, obtains as long as that direct cognitive contact of which I am at once both subject and object” (832).

Our larger “experience of the person” is not limited to ourselves and includes all others with whom we are in contact.  Where we experience ourselves as both subject and object, we experience others as “objects of experience, that is, in direct cognitive contact” (832).  It might be tempting to consider these as separate experiences, one as of the person as object, the other as of the “I”.  Wojtyla argues that, while in some respects there is an incommensurability between these two experiences, but “one cannot deny their fundamental qualitative identity” (834).  The experience of oneself is not outside the scope of the experience of the person (835).  The experience of oneself is an once as interiority and as exteriority; we experience others only as exteriority, though each other has his or her own interiority, and in certain close relationships we can become quite aware of the interiority of others (836-837).

Based on this shared experience of ourselves and others, “every human experience is thus also a sort of comprehension of that which I am experiencing” (840).  Through this shared cognitive experience of ourselves and others, the intentional act is what reveals the person: “the act is a particular moment of the vision—or the experience—of the person” (840, emphasis in the original).  It is through the act that the person reveals him- or herself to us, whether the person revealed be ours or others; in Aristotelian terms, it is a property of the person to reveal herself through her intentional acts (840).

Wojtyla pointedly states that his project is not a study in ethics; typically, a study of ethics as regarding intentional human acts presupposes the person as an agent (841).  He proposes to reverse that; his is a “study of the act that reveals the person, a study of the person through the act” (841, emphasis in the original).  Such a study will permit us, in the most fitting manner, to “analyze the essence of the person and to understand it in the most complete way possible” (841).

What remains is to tie what has been said so far to Nussbaum’s project.  I suggest three ways in which this can be done.

We saw in the first post that Nussbaum’s project was to determine, through an internalist, empirical analysis, the essentials of what it means to be human.  Wojtyla’s project gives us just that: phenomenologically grounded, it is a study that reveals the essentials of the person from within human experience, through persons revealing themselves through their acts, “based on the entire continuity of empirical data” (832).

Nussbaum argued for “thick”, or direct, epistemic access; Wojtyla’s realist phenomenology claims just that sort of direct cognitive access to the essentials of the person.

Finally, one of Nussbaum’s goals was to bridge the alterity of the other, establishing a set of essentials that is held in common with all other humans, regardless how culturally different they may be; Wojtyla again provides a bridge to the other, in that our direct, objective, and cognitive experience of others is grounded by, and inextricably interwoven with, our direct cognitive experience of ourselves as both subject and object.  We reveal ourselves to ourselves and others through our acts, just as others reveal themselves to us and themselves through their acts.  This is not a collapse of the subject/object distinction; rather, it interweaves subject and object in our relationships both to ourselves and to others.

In summary, in my view Wojtyla’s study of the person, revealed through his acts, can provide a robust epistemological support to discover the human essentials on which Nussbaum’s capabilities project is grounded.

Martha Nussbaum, “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism”, Political Theory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1992), pp. 202-246.

Karol Wojtyla, “Persona e atto” ["Person and Act"], from the anthology Metafisica della persona, G. Reale e T. Styczen, eds., Bompiani, Milano 2003.  Any English translations are my own.  The available English translation of this work is The Acting Person, which I do not reference.

Martha Nussbaum’s “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism” seeks to delineate certain essential human characteristics.  Nussbaum’s goal is to define the most basic essential human characteristics that cut across culture and time in order to lay out a minimal set of capabilities that should be provided by a liberal government.

She proposes a list of ten capabilities; listed in summary form, these are: living a complete life; adequate health, shelter, and nutrition; avoiding pain and enjoying pleasure; able to think, imagine, and reason; to love, feel, and belong; form an idea of the good and critically plan one’s life; interact in family and society; live with and concern for nature; laugh, play and recreate; live one’s own life in one’s own surroundings (222).

These capabilities are designed toward the end of promoting the flourishing of each person (215), though each one has the option of functioning, or not, in the provided capabilities (221).  She argues that the essentials she defines are such that a human life without all of them is less than fully human (222).  Crucially, these essentials are not transitive: the lack of one cannot be compensated by the increase in another (231).

My focus here is less on the capabilities per se and more on her epistemology of person.  Nussbaum’s is an internalist, historically grounded view of humanity; she specifically disclaims an externalist metaphysics (215).  She calls her account a “thick vague theory of the good” (214).  By “thick” she intends her work to stand in contrast with John Rawls’ “thin theory of the good” (214).*  I understand her term “thick” as signifying that in observing humanity, we have direct epistemic access to real phenomena on which a liberal polity can be normatively grounded.  She understands that the essentials determined by internalist observation will be imprecise, or “vague”; that is as it should be, as the capabilities would apply across a broad range of cultures such that people could determine their own best ends (215).

Nussbaum makes two basic observations that ground her internalist view: “first, that we do recognize others as human across many divisions of time and place … [s]econd, we do have a broadly shared general consensus about the features whose absence means the end of a human form of life” (215).  Her goal is ultimately to establish an essentialist understanding of humanity on which it is possible to bridge the alterity of the other: in certain key ways the other is like us, regardless how culturally dissimilar she may be.  Her argument is that there is a robust, empirically verifiable commonality to all of humanity that can ground a normative capabilities polity.

Clearly her empirical, internalist view must obtain if it is to successfully ground a normative liberal capabilities polity.  In support of her argument, I find important parallels to Nussbaum’s epistemology of person in Karol Wojtyla’s Persona e atto.  To be sure, the aims of the two works are different.  Wojtyla’s goal is to understand the person as revealed in his conscious acts; in this sense, the whole of Wojtyla’s project could support Nussbaum’s capabilities argument.  In my view, Wojtyla’s phenomenological realist approach can add significant epistemic support to Nussbaum’s larger capabilities project, for a particular reason that I will expand in a later post.

* Jody Azzouni gives useful definitions of thick and think epistemic access.  Thick access is “any form of epistemic access which is robust, can be refined, enables us to track the object (in either sense), and which (certain) properties of the object itself play a role in how we come to know (possibly other) properties of the object is a  thick form of epistemic access.’ By this definition, all observations of something are thick” (477).  Thin access is more a matter of theory; “if a theory has these virtues, we have good (epistemic) reasons for adopting it, and all the posits that come with it. I shall call this sort of epistemic access to a posit, that it is a quantifier commitment (see footnote 5)  of a theory which has Quine’s five virtues, thin epistemic access” (479).

Jody Azzouni, “Thick Epistemic Access: Distinguishing the Mathematical from the Empirical”, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 94, No. 9 (Sep., 1997), pp. 472-484.

Martha Nussbaum, “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism”, Political Theory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1992), pp. 202-246.

Karol Wojtyla, “Persona e atto” ["Person and Act"], from the anthology Metafisica della persona, G. Reale e T. Styczen, eds., Bompiani, Milano 2003.  Any English translations are my own.  The available English translation of this work is The Acting Person, which I do not reference.

Enzo Bianchi: “E tuttavia, se l’altro non accetta il perdono, se l’altro non assume il perdono, il perdonante, nel perdonare, afferma la gratuità.  Afferma che lui vuole ricominciare da capo la relazione con l’altro, che gli ha fatto del male.   Vuole in qualche misura dire che non vuole la reciprocità.  Questo secondo me è ciò che è davvero umano, profondamente umano, nel perdonare.”

“In any case, if the other does not accept or receive forgiveness, the one who forgives, in forgiving, affirms gratuitousness.  He affirms that he wants to re-initiate the relationship with the other—the one who wronged him—from the beginning.  He wants in some way to say that he does not want reciprocity.  This to me is what is truly and profoundly human in forgiving.”

Listening again to the podcast (see the foot of this post) of an exchange between Enzo Bianchi (the prior of the Bose Monastery) and Gustavo Zagrebelsky (an ex-member and ex-president of the Italian Constitutional Court), I was suddenly struck by these few statements by Bianchi in the middle of a much larger dialogue.  The theme of gratuitousness (la gratuità) is one to which I am particularly attuned since my translation of Luigino Bruni’s The Wound and The Blessing: Economics, Relationships, and Happiness (La ferita dell’altro: economia e relazioni umane; forthcoming in English from New City Press).  Gratuitousness is the central term in that book; Bruni asserts the value of gratuitousness as the expression in the market of a more general agapic love.

Bruni argues generally for reciprocity in markets, as opposed to either of the polar opposites of self-interest and altruism (other-interest).  We meet in the market in order to exchange because we need a good the other has, whether a product or a service, and others need something we can offer.  In this sense reciprocity is a recommendable paradigm of economic activity, as we exchange in ways that, at least to some extent, takes into account the attitudes and behaviors of the other.  However, reciprocity is not a complete paradigm: gratuitousness is needed to alter one’s response when one has been wronged.  Being willing to be hurt, absorb the wound, and transform it into a blessing, is the essence of a gratuitous response.

In contrast, Bianchi seems to focus on gratuitousness as only contrasted against reciprocity.  In a situation in which someone has hurt me, offering forgiveness—not from a position of moral superiority, but as a peer—is in direct contrast with a reciprocal response.  In a case of offense, a reciprocal response would be more what we might call revenge, or retaliation—an eye for an eye, that sort of thing.

At first it might seem that Bruni’s and Bianchi’s views of reciprocity are somewhat at odds with each other.  Bianchi’s view is that gratuitousness is in opposition to reciprocity; for Bruni, they seem more complementary, with gratuitousness filling in the spaces in what are otherwise reciprocal market transactions.

On reflection, however, there is no difference in their positions.  Bianchi contrasts gratuitousness and reciprocity in a situation in which offense and wound have already happened, and it is precisely in such a situation of wound and offense that Bruni argues for a response of gratuitousness rather than reciprocity.  In non-injurious relationships, reciprocity is a good and normal sociality; when the relationship becomes injurious, both Bruni and Bianchi argue for a response of gratuitousness rather than reciprocity.

Uomini e profeti, Speciale Torino Spiritualità – “Perché il perdono?” con Enzo Bianchi e Gustavo Zagrebelsky, il 25.09.2010
http://www.radio3.rai.it/dl/radio3/programmi/puntata/ContentItem-be3fc669-44f8-478f-b411-fead492a4328.html

Illegal immigration is doubtless a highly complex issue, with myriad points of view to consider, as are drug use and other non-violent crimes; however, a positive one should not be corporate profit, recast in patriotic and political terms with which it becomes difficult to differ in principle without seeming to affirm the opposite.  While there is no definitive answer, it seems interesting to consider the question whether or not the Arizona law would have ever been written had it not happened as it did.

“Prison Economics Help Drive Arizona Immigration Law”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130833741

A life sentence prisoner recently commented that this evokes the last words of Revelation 18:13:

11 “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes any more– 12 cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones and pearls; fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet cloth; every sort of citron wood, and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron and marble; 13 cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, myrrh and frankincense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat; cattle and sheep; horses and carriages; and bodies and souls of men” (the original NIV; the NASB reads “…and slaves and human lives”).

When I heard that I was astonished; it seems chillingly accurate.

Foundationalism is an ancient theory of knowledge, going back at least as far as Aristotle, that we can know the world 1) immediately (i.e. directly, in an unmediated manner) and 2) incorrigibly (i.e. with no need of correction).  The problem is, foundationalism does not hold up well under criticism.  Nicholas Wolterstorff has explored the collapse of foundationalism in his brief work Reason within the Bounds of Religion (see also this helpful review).  Some in discussing an alternative to a total post-modern collapse have discussed various versions of a moderate foundationalism in which we can at least partially know the world veridically.  The question remains: what of our experiences are true, and how might we know them as true?  Where do we start?

I have a friend profoundly mired in a post-foundationalist crisis.  His worldview, once anchored in a naïvely foundationalist, modernist Christianity (and he is intelligent and well-educated), has crumbled under the 20 year weight of his experiences in what he thought was an authentic Christian community, which he now understands to be a deeply deceitful cult.  Now nothing at all is certain, and he told me recently that he was well on his way to becoming a Logical Positivist (in which the meaning of a statement is the possibility of its verification; with no possibility of verification a statement is simply unintelligible).  I think I have dissuaded him of that futile path, but he remains without an epistemic anchor.

Having lived through something of the same process as my friend, I have begun recounting to him what for me has been the best fallback to date, which is Karol Wojtyla’s Person and Act.**  This was Wojtyla’s most significant pre-papal work, in which he explores the concept of “person” through a phenomenological lens.  Summarizing extremely, we come to know ourselves through our interaction with others; we are not detached knowers of the world in the typical modern sense, but our knowledge of ourselves is intimately bound up in relation to others and to the world.  Precisely because our self-knowledge is intertwined with our experiences of the world, when we encounter something outside ourselves that seems true, to then deny its veridicality, though perhaps provisionally and subject to further understanding, is in some way to deny ourselves.  We most fully become ourselves in transcending ourselves toward the truth we encounter outside ourselves.

The starting point thus becomes not a near-solipcistic Cartesian cogito, but our knowledge of ourselves through experience of the world, and, most significantly, the other.  This seems the best explanation of how I have come to recognize the truth to which I can hold.  It may be partial, mediated, and subject to correction and fuller knowledge, but certain things ring so true that for me to deny them is to deny myself.  As I experience the world, I find things that present themselves as true, in that I can re-cognize an underlying reality; to deny the truth of the world as it presents itself is at some level to deny my existence in it.  As I experience the love of and for another, to deny that love is to deny my existence as one who can love and be loved.  I have had certain mystical experiences, some of which involve the most immediate knowledge I have ever had of both good and evil, that are as real to me as any sense-based experience; to deny those would perhaps be the most profound denial of myself, as these touch me at my core, well beyond my normal interaction with the world.  In Wolterstorff’s terms, I think of these as my “authentic commitments”, or a set of control beliefs, from which basis I seek to further understand the world.

Such an epistemology loses the comfortable certainly of foundationalism.  So be it; contra Protagoras, I am not the measure of all things.  As I see things at the moment, any certainty that I have does not derive from my ability to reduce the world to the scope of my theories, whether scientific or theological, but from these truths which I re-cognize outside myself, toward which I reach beyond myself.

——

** The text I am reading is the Italian translation of “Persona e Atto” (“The Acting Person” in its English translation) from the original Polish by Giuseppe Girgenti and Patrycja Mikulska, contained in the Italian language compendium of all Wojtyla’s philosophical works Metafisica della Persona, Giovanni Reale and Tadeusz Styczen, eds. (Bompiani, 2003).

In 1942 Isaac Asimov, in a science fiction story called “Runaround”, introduced three laws that the robots in his stories must obey.  The first law is simply this: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”  A simplified form is simply: “A robot may not harm a human being.”.

Are these not fictional laws for fictional robots?  Certainly.  Yet, as robotics and the various bio-engineering sciences advance their technologies and create devices with increasing ability to act autonomously and “intelligently”, the ethical debates around such artificially intelligent devices, the ethics of their decision processes and the moral responsibility of their actions are increasingly important.  Asimov’s laws of robotics sometimes come up in such discussions, and the first law seems obviously desirable.  Some robotic systems have powerful mechanisms that can kill or maim a human; such a robotic device must be able to sense a human presence and cease action or avoid action in that area.  Heuristic systems that can “learn” and self-modify their own decision making processes are particularly important in such discussions.  Clearly one of the limiting parameters on a heuristic robot is that it must not learn to harm a human; positive controls must be in place such that it cannot learn such.

A few days ago The New York Times published a story on the long history of cover-ups and prevarications of the cardiac dangers of the diabetes drug Avandia by its maker, GlaxoSmithKline.  There seem to be real questions under discussion about how to interpret drug test data, and sometimes a medical cure may involve an inadvertent harm that, given present technology, is unavoidable (e.g. the side effects of cancer therapy).  Such discussions aside, from the internal memoranda GlaxoSmithKline knew of the problems for years and did their best to conceal their findings.  They acted similarly with their drug Paxil, with its increase in teen suicidal thought and behavior.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/health/policy/13avandia.html

Might it be too much to require the management of drug companies to adhere to the first law of robotics?  How is it that such a constraint applies categorically to robots and not to humans who, with far greater impact and responsibility, daily make decisions about the products they produce that can indeed harm, or even kill, humans?  After all, if we find such a law desirable and necessary for robots, surely it should a fortiori apply to humans, and above all to those in the healing professions.

In ogni rapporto umano, ogni dinamica interpersonale, facciamo decisioni e formiamo atteggiamenti o che ci portano verso la relazionalità e la solidarietà, o che ci portano verso “O Dio, ti ringrazio che non sono come quello/a lì”.

In every human relationship, in every encounter with another person, we make decisions and develop attitudes that either lead us toward relationship or toward “O God, I thank you that I am not like that person”.

Over the past few months I have noticed that there are billboards in the area with a picture of an individual and the slogan “I am second”; there is no other explanation or contact information.  It did not take much to understand that there was some contemporary church marketing thing going on.  Further information may be found at the links below.

http://iamsecond.com/

http://iamsecond.wordpress.com/

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-billboard_20met.ART0.State.Edition1.4a2064f.html

At first glance this might appear to be an authentic expression of what the Christian church should be like.  It can be difficult to disagree with those behind such a campaign without impugning them as persons or their motives.  That is not my intent.  I do not know those behind this, but in a spirit of charity I trust that they are sincere.

That said, I profoundly disagree with the campaign’s message, partly in what it does say, but more centrally in what it does not say.

What it does say is noted in the very formulation of the statement, “I am second”.  The sole subject of the sentence is “I”, already irrecoverably self-centered.

What it does not say is that I have an essential relationship to my neighbor as well as to God.  The predication of the statement that one is immediately subordinate to an unspecified other, subsequently discovered to be God, only covers the first of the two greatest commandments, to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind and strength.  The second greatest commandment, to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is absent.  Why?

Considering the second greatest command, the formulation should be something like “I am third”.  Would that sell?  Probably not.  Yet, when did the Gospel become something to be sold using clever marketing methods?

There will probably be some good come out of this, and one might question why I don’t simply accept that and be glad for it?  In response, this campaign may be clever marketing, but it is distorted theology; distorted theology leads to distorted praxis.  It bypasses the essential relationship to the Other that is the core of the church as the eschatological community, living kingdom values now while awaiting its fulfillment.  Because of its “I” focus and its eclipsing of the second greatest commandment, in my view the long term result of the “I am second” campaign draws us yet further away from the understanding and actualization of the eschatological church.  That is its greatest loss.

Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem

http://www.heritage.org/Press/Events/ev050609a.cfm

From the above web site: “The church is bombarded with two competing messages about money and capitalism. The first message is that wealth is bad and causes much of the world’s suffering; the second is that wealth is good and God wants you to prosper and be rich.”

A friend sent me this; I have not had time to listen to the presentation itself so cannot comment on that.  However, snipping this bit of text from the event’s web page for brief comment, there are two foci in the above: wealth and self. This seems a misfocus; the 2nd greatest command is about the relation of self and other, not about self to wealth. With the self-other relationship as primary, I wonder if much of the rest won’t balance itself.

Last week my wife received a letter from a girl she had visited in the county jail.  The girl asked her thoughts on a few questions for a Bible study in their tank, one of which was this:

“If you were in front of God right now, and he asked you, ‘Why should I let you in my Kingdom of Heaven?’, what would your answer be?”

My wife mentioned this to me last Saturday, and after a few moments’ reflection I responded: “Because I want what you want.”

The usual answer is something like this: “Because of the blood of Jesus.”  And that is undeniably true.  It is only on that basis that we have any claim at all before God the Father.  And yet something seemed missing in that response.  Yes, I might respond thusly on the basis of Jesus’ blood, but does it follow that I want to?  I am not so sure.

Sure, we all think we want to “go to heaven”, but I do not think it is as simple as that.  Considering the Beatitudes as reflecting the ethic of the coming kingdom, if we want to live that way now we will be right at home then; if we do not want to live that way now, why do we think we will want to live that way then?  Jesus indicated that many would choose not to live that way, and they will be shut out.

We have a choice to begin living now by the ethics of the coming kingdom: one, love God totally, and two, love others as myself.  That entails living in forgiveness, humility and other such personal virtues, long a part of the broad Christian tradition.

Loving one’s neighbor as oneself also entails living with others in mind.  When we see others oppressed or in dire need, how do we respond?  Do we respond?  Is this not what it means to hunger and thirst after justice (which is interpersonal, rather than the personalistic “righteousness”?)

John concluded succinctly: “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything” (I John 3:17-20.)

Our ongoing responses here and now determine how much we choose to live, or deny, the love of God, the central ethic of the kingdom.  Such love is motivated by the Spirit; if we refuse to respond in compassion, we refuse the Spirit who would change us to respond as God responded to us and wants to respond to the other.  If we choose to respond to the promptings of the Spirit and act toward meeting the needs of another, we can take assurance that we are living as he would, that we “belong to the truth.”  And the evidence of our changed lives is our assurance of becoming more like him.

The “eternal security of the believer” is not just a theological proposition; it emerges from a changed life, and without that as evidence that we are actualizing God’s love toward others, John concludes that we do not and cannot have that security.

James said something similar: “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead” (James 2:14-17.)

The faith that James discusses here requires more than the active acceptance of and alignment to a credal formulation of the nature of Jesus as God’s Son, born of the virgin Mary, killed for our sins, resurrected on the third day, ascended to the Father, who will come again to judge the living and the dead.  It includes the understanding that we are to respond to others with the kindness shown to us by God; we are to actualize now what God wants done in the world, one act of love at a time, until he returns to completely fulfill it.

There are limits.  Jesus rebuffed those on whom he had had compassion the day before (John 6:26-27.)  Unconditional love does not mean that we do whatever others demand; it means responding to others as best we understand without conditions that they respond in any particular way.

One could doubtless rebut this as “works salvation;” I leave that squabble to others.  What I want to do is hear what the Scriptures are saying and respond accordingly.  Saved by grace alone?  Absolutely—and changed by the same grace to actualize that grace toward others.

If we choose now to live the love of God, when asked why God should let us in we can truthfully respond that we want what he wants: to see the kingdom fulfilled in all the earth, and we desire to play an active part.  He will be delighted to invite us in.

A couple of months ago in a discussion with a few friends I came to understand something I had never seen before.  I am still absorbing the implications of this for the life of the church.

Four hundred years of prophetic silence was broken by John the Baptist with a succinct statement of radical equality.  Tom Friedman sees the world flattening now; John saw that two millennia ago.  John spoke of a leveling, a flattening: every hill cut down, every valley filled in.  It doesn’t seem too far a stretch to consider that the valleys would be filled with what was cut off the hills.  When asked what that means, Luke 3:10-14 records that John gave two specifics: one, be satisfied with what you have, though you have the power to coerce from others, and two, if you have two, give one, whether it be clothing or food.

As I have considered this, the usual style of John’s declaration as poetic verse seems a travesty of translation.  John did not live in the desert composing refined verse; his message was a blunt ram against well defended gates protecting entrenched powers, and it must be heard that way.  It must be understood metaphorically, as John was not addressing the alteration of topographical features.  Yet, because it must be understood metaphorically, we perhaps too readily lose the forceful power of John’s words regarding our contemporary personal and ecclesiastical lives.

Jesus expanded this in the sermon on the mount in Matthew 5:38-42.  In a context of coertion, where one was compelled, Jesus said to give two.  We might term this radical generosity.  Though it is a different situation than John was addressing, there is still the noteable 1:2 ratio of giving and response.

Paul, in II Corinthians 8:1-15, concludes that the principle that was to govern inter-church relationships is equality.  Large, wealthy churches who gather much would not have too much, and small churches that gather little will not have too little.  When is the last time you heard that preached from a pulpit?

Radical equality, indeed.

Did John, Jesus and Paul not intend that their words be taken at face value, that the church is to live in a radical equality, a radical generosity?  One might think that it would take an artful exegesis to avoid the force of these texts in the life of the church; on the contrary, most of the church lives in ignorance of these texts and their import.  I certainly have no priviledge in this; I have missed it all of my life until recently.

And none of this is to be enforced by any rule, tithe, regulation, or redistribution structure the goal of which is to level the economic status of individual Christians.  Paul is very clear in II Corinthians 8 that participation is voluntary, not coerced.  Any notion that the church should end up with anything like a typical leftist social structure of wealth redistribution is to patently misunderstand all three (cf. Paul’s analogy of gathering different amounts of manna, as mentioned above.)  Neither is it a typical conservative structure with the goal of individual wealth accumulation in which the public good is accomplished as a by-product.  Yes, individuals must accumulate wealth in order to have sufficient to give, but the purpose is not the benefit of the individual; rather, it is the good of the entire community.

This may be something which has never been seen before on a wide scale, and where practiced locally may not long survive in integrity.  It is an organization that works best in weakness, dependent on the individual discernment and voluntary compliance of all of its members.  Yet, there clearly must be a superstructure that can oversee and balance intra-church relationships.  That was Paul’s role in the various churches he oversaw.

Many questions arise in considering how to implement this.  The most profound is that the focus of the church must change.  Individuals within a single church must think of each other as equals.  Individuals and leaders within a church must consider other churches, large or small, regardless of geographic boundaries, as peer.  Trustworthy and broken inter-church leadership must be in place to balance the needs and correct abuses.  I hesitatingly conclude that what is needed is true apostolic leadership; my hesitation is that many today want to claim such, and I mistrust the selfish motivations of at least some, if not many.

Without doubt this sounds like the stuff of a hopelessly idealistic fantasy that is destined for swift, decisive failure.  I know that.  What I cannot escape is that this is the state of the church which John, Jesus and Paul desired to realize.

The leadership of the church is the pivot on which this can or cannot be implemented.  The primary focus almost certainly must be the care of one’s own church and its gain, in numbers of members and/or income; that is not wrong per se.  Where most fall short is that they do not consider others as equals, rather, competing within a given market for members, whether that market is geographical or, increasingly, on the Internet.

Our eschatology also has a direct influence on our charity.  If we think we are all “going to heaven,” that is, that we will be transformed to a totally different spiritual existence, in a totally different place or state of being, in which God will set all things right there and then, there is little impetus to drive for justice and equity now.  If however we understand that God is about renewing this earth, that this earth is the locus of redemption, of salvation, that the kingdom of God is about reclaiming domination over this earth, and that the church is to begin to live and act now toward the eventual culmination of that kingdom here, our understanding about how we should act radically shifts.

In my view the Incarnation and our promised resurrection forcefully bear testimony to the latter eschatology.  Jesus took a human nature, which he did not have previously, in order that we might participate in his life, his nature, which we could not previously.  When Jesus became human, humanity became part of the Godhead, which nature he will never lose.  He became human to redeem, to reclaim, to renew, to save, this earth.  When Jesus was resurrected, he was resurrected on this earth, though his nature was changed.  Our destiny in resurrection is to be as he is, on this earth.

Finally, the scope of our thinking and our action must be global; we know too much to restrict regionally.  As I have written elsewhere in this blog, the implication of the parable of the good Samaritan is that there is no one on this earth that we cannot call a neighbor, to whom consequently we owe a debt of love.

This is but a summary sketch of my thoughts to date.  Much more can and should be said on these and numerous other points.  To be continued as I develop this further, in the meantime constructive comments are welcome.

I just found this NPR review on the University of Illinois, Springfield, through which I am studying philosophy online. I am in my fourth year of study. UIS has a very good program; the standards are high, and the profs know their material. I would highly recommend it for someone looking for online study in analytic philosophy.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16638700

China threatens ‘nuclear option’ of dollar sales

China threatens to trigger US dollar crash

Dollar falls as report suggests Beijing threatening asset sales

The second link has a note to the effect that 44% of the US debt is foreign owned; China is estimated to own about $900B, near enough to a trillion dollars.

From the third link:

“Asked about the Telegraph article in an interview with Fox News, Bush responded that China would be “foolhardy” to attempt to weaken the US currency in retaliation for US pressure over Beijing’s alleged currency manipulation. “If that’s the position of the government, it would be foolhardy for them to do this,” Bush said.

Foolhardy. Political bluster and rhetoric aside, that must be a very comfortable sandhole in which he is inverted if he really does not understand, or denies, that they have us on a leash and a choke collar. At least he didn’t deny that they could were they to so desire.

Will they exercise it? I don’t know that I would look for that right now, but that is not really the point. What it points out is that in borrowing from others we give them control over us. When the Chinese think they can get away with major moves against us, I think we can look for them to act at times. Yes, they partly need us to buy their goods, but when the rest of the global markets have begun to buy them as well, they don’t need us so much any more. They have real interest [sic] in flexing their economic power, and they are willing to play a long game.

Whether or not people will ever connect the dots that in our sumptuous lifestyle we have sold ourselves into slavery to others, and be willing to make some very hard decisions with personal impact, remains unknown. This is easy to blame on presidents and Congress; while they do control the fiscal policy, we ultimately hold them accountable, or not, for how they manage that. I take my share of blame, as I’ve not done so for most of my life. Yes, international finance is a very complex area, but one basic remains unchanged: the debt holder controls the debtor. Mostly I must say that I’ve chosen the easy route of not seriously questioning those that have been and are borrowing scads of money over the past decades. Enough.

For reasons I don’t quite understand this whole concept of integrated community is very much present to me now. I cannot escape or dismiss it in my own thinking about the role of the church. A question I must step back and answer for myself: why community? This is far from an adequate apologetic, but this is the gist of my thought at the moment.

I instantly responded to Scot McKnight’s (The Whole Gospel) definition of the church as an alternative society where justice and equity prevail. If the church is to live that out, we cannot but be involved in the practice of such in an intimate ongoing manner in our own lives.

I have been in one non-denominational church where that was actually well practiced, but the larger theology didn’t quite see to the formation of an eschatological, intertwined community as is being discussed today. All other churches with which I have ever been associated have had their share of problems with insider power trading. That begins at the top and filters down. Transparency at the top does not preclude that there may be hidden, unaccountable power brokers in the organization, but certainly if it does not begin at the top it cannot survive in the larger organization. When transparency does begin at the top, unless the power brokers are confronted the community cannot thrive, certainly not reach its highest potential.

Ultimately the purpose of community is mission. That includes preparation of those in the community for increasing intimacy with God; it also includes bringing others in as a setting in which the (trans)formation of the whole person can happen for the purpose of a life committed to the coming Kingdom.

There is a recurring word in the new monasticism book that I note: ‘mess’. Trying to set up a community polity cannot but be messy. It is relatively much easier to focus on doctrine than on the transformation of the intimate details of our thoughts and motives; that is why the traditional church cannot well approach community without profound transformation of those involved.

L, the single mother with four kids at home for whom we recently spontaneously gathered a sum to pay her electric bill, responded in an unusual way a few weeks ago. After her public assistance had come through, she said that churches have helped her so much over the years that she wanted to give back. She and Chris went through a store on a shopping spree, and L bought enough to fill up the trunk of the Civic. Because L has received food aid before, she knew exactly what to buy that would be most useful. When the food arrived at the local food pantry, they were in tears, as their shelves were very low. We were able to carry this news back to L so she would know just what her response had meant. That probably cost her something in terms of food for her family that we do not know, but it was important to her to be generous, even what beyond what she could probably afford.

A couple of weeks ago L called Chris and asked for a ride to a job interview; for reasons longer than bear telling here she had no money for a bus pass. Chris picked up and took her to the interview, and she got the job, starting the next day.

Last week F ended up with a severe and very painful infection in both ears. She went to the emergency room, but that did not clear it up. We found out late one evening that F was still in severe pain, so Chris took her to the emergency room again, waited that out, and then took her to get the prescriptions filled. That made a difference, and her ears are now recovering.

Sometimes it does not take much to help, a ride here or a few dollars there to get bus passes to get to work, yet without that those on the edge have trouble putting together even the little it takes to make meet the few ends they have. Mostly it takes being available. Yes, it is easy to be overrun if one is not careful, but we have found that with attentive discernment of the real needs that can be managed.

A generous community must respond in the crisis of the other, not in its own convenience.

F and M, the couple for whom All Saints recently threw a shower, did have their child, a little boy. He had a minor cleft palate, which was known ahead of time by means of ultrasound. On that basis F decided to give the child up for adoption, as she had no means to care for a special needs child. From the beginning she wanted to have an open adoption. The adoptive parents agreed — until on F’s final day in the hospital, July 16th, the final papers were signed, after which the adoptive father refused to give F their address. F, feeling completely betrayed, became very angry, and someone at the hospital overreacted and called CPS.

CPS came out about 11:00 PM the next day, July 17th. F and M were cooperative, if stunned, and things went reasonably well until F’s roommate became hostile and refused a drug test. Because of that the CPS worker decided to remove K, the 2 year old, from the environment that same night. If F and M could find a place to go with K they could remain together, otherwise K would be placed in foster care immediately. F called us at 11:45 PM, frantic that K was going to be taken away. Because of prior history there were no family or friends that would have been acceptable to CPS.

We made a quick decision to take them into our home, not knowing how that would go or just how long it would last. Chris was scheduled to leave for a reunion with her parents early the next day, July 18th, and that had to be cancelled at the last minute.

During their stay M’s car broke down several times and had to be placed in the shop. Once we had to tow it a few miles, done in cooperation with L and T, friends with a large truck. Chris took F many different places over the course of the weeks, even staying home from the office a couple of days early on to help stabilize F. I had to deal with a totally clogged sink one night when I came in about 9:15, disassembling the drain to unblock it. There were always considerations of refrigerator space, K trying to take food out of the kitchen, even a broken diaper on the carpet. Yet, with grace toward them we continued to extend them our welcome and we all survived quite well.

They were released with the case fully closed by CPS last Wednesday, August 2nd. They had found and set up an apartment pending the case resolution, so we were able to move them to their own place that same evening. We told them that we had given them that time with us because we believed in them, and that we felt that K being taken away was the worst thing that could happen to her. K has already had far too much upheaval in her young life. Both F and M were in tears, unable to fully express their gratitude.

F and M staying with us was not a situation without controversy for some. They are not married, but they have been together about a year and consider themselves a couple. These two have essentially no church background at all, so they do not have the same moral structures that we hold for ourselves. Had we rejected M because they are not married, neither of them would have understood that. In particular, F is Caucasian and M is Hispanic, and our rejection of him for whatever moral reasons almost certainly could not have been understood without some degree of racial overtone.

It is in these sorts of crisis times that we find ourselves most stretched and challenged to respond generously, without counting the cost to our time, our property or our space. We are glad we kept them with us. We will never know what might have been otherwise had we not taken them in, but we do know that they were touched in many ways which could not have happened had we not done so.

Spesso la costanza della verità si è mutuata, e si mutua, in una costanza culturale. Insomma riduce la verità in una prassi, una forma. D’accordo, la verità può e deve infatti esprimersi in cultura, ma ridurre la verità in cultura mostra una confusione fondamentale tra le due. Nessuna cultura può esprimere che una parte della verità. Ci si deve stare molto attenti alla tendenza di confondersi tra la propria espressione, la propria concezione della verità e la verità stessa, altrimenti si tende a credere che nel mantenere la culture si propaga la verità. Nel mantenere la cultura però senza rilevare di continuo dalla verità sottostante nuove espressioni culturali per la più ampia cultura attuale ci si dista sempre di più dalla verità. Questa tensione si manifesta spesso nelle chiese.

Oggi è stato difficile. È fallito il ventilatore CPU di lgw, che nello spegnere il sistema ha distrutto la strutture del disco. Ho dovuto trasferire il servizio su alfredo, perdendo la giornata intera. Almeno sembra stabile ora.

Non ho dormito bene stanotte. Mi sono svegliato verso le 0300 e non mi sono addormentato di nuovo fino le 0600. Di solito non ho un senso definito del perchè di tali periodi insonni. Era pure il caso ieri sera, ma in fondo la frase che mi girava per la mente era ‘sto perdendo qualcosa’. Questo weekend appena passato dai vecchi amici dell’AI m’ha veramente piaciuto. Sentivo una certa tensione che non faccio più parte della Chiesa di Cristo, ma a parte quello è stato un vero piacere rinnovare le amicizie e chiacchierare con gli italiani presenti. So che tramite il dialogare con WA, il leggere diverse opere, ed l’ascoltare i vari podcasts che ho trovato ho potuto mantenere la lingua italiana ad un livello abbastanza alto. Mi è stato molto interessante rinnovare quelle esperienze, e insomma… non le voglio perdere.

Most people confuse their culture for truth.

My wife recently purchased two new pillows. While looking at the selection, she noticed that the plastic covers on the pillows had all been slit so the “Do Not Remove” federal tag was protruding. When she queryed a store employee about that, he explained that customers would switch the pillows in the plastic covers, replacing a cheaper pillow with a more expensive one. The store had found it necessary to slit the covers to expose the tags; at checkout the tag was scanned to verify that the pillow itside matched the scan code on the plastic case.

My mother remembers that her sister found some money in the field one day during the Depression. Times were very tight on the family farm, and they well could have used it. My grandfather refused to spend it; they might find the rightful owner so the money could be returned. There has been a marked degradation in the ethics of the country over the 60 or so years since that time.

Where do we think it will end up in the next 60? And why do we not feel an urgency at the disintegration of our society? I suppose that the sense of ongoing normalcy for most of us, as our immediate circumstances are not particularly affected, belies what we cannot see.