To describe these deaths as “collateral damage” is to say that they were not intended, but that they were the unwanted results of a deliberate attempt to stop and reverse the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovar Albanians by damaging the Serb forces responsible. In so far as these death are effects outside Nato’s intention, but simultaneous with its intended effects, they were, literally, co-lateral.
The Church exists for the sake of the world. Its raison d’etre is to love the world and seek its highest good. Therefore, it must enter into the life of the world in all its complexity and ambiguity. Where its Lord has gone, the Church is called to follow.
The entrenchment of rights language in contemporary discourse is beyond dispute. No less significantly there are indications that the concept of rights is itself passing beyond dispute. The concept of subjective rights, or rights ascribable to individuals and groups, has entered contemporary political and legal currency primarily through the liberal contractarian tradition. Consequently, the meanings of the term ‘rights’ cannot be properly ascertained in detachment from this theoretical context. For these meanings are embedded in a constellation of political-legal, philosophical and theological concepts with a complex history. Thus, to appraise the contemporary vocabulary of ‘rights’ is to appraise the dynamic theoretical complex that has given rise to it. If such an appraisal seeks its standard of judgement in the Bible, then it is bound to proceed theologically.
My impression is that theologians often engage in a naive and facile appropriation of the language of rights.
Most citizens of this country and of other advanced western and westernizing nations approve of human rights, some more guardedly than others; and most perceive rights to belong to the moral, political and legal fabric of modern liberal democracy. By rights, I mean rights attributable to subjects, to persons, whether individual or collective ‘persons’. To suggest that rights, freedom, and democracy go together (as does the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which has been the template for subsequent generations of declarations) is a modern truism, which, like most truisms, is largely true. Less clearly perceived, I think, is the extent to which human rights and democracy are bound up with liberal economics and free-market capitalism.
The Protestant reformers of the 16th century proclaimed that God’s word in scripture must serve as the final judge of all human tradition and experience. Left to our own devices we are capable of infinite self-deception, confusion and evil. We therefore must turn to scripture and submit ourselves to it, the Reformers insisted, in order to find our disorders rightly diagnosed and healed. Only through the biblical writers’ testimony do we encounter the message of God’s grace; only the revelation of Jesus Christ, disclosed uniquely and irreplaceably through the testimony of the evangelists and apostles, tells us the truth about the merciful God and our relationship to that God. Without this word which comes to us from outside ourselves, we are lost.
Chapter 16 of the Moral Vision of the New Testament. One of the best shorter discussions of the biblical material.
Shaffer’s play may render another service. It alerts us to the danger of misunderstanding the doctrine of the Trinity. Such a misunderstanding is easy, for the language of the church fathers who formulated this doctrine was different from ours, and it defies simple interpretation. This is not the place for a disquisition on the Trinity. One might only suggest that Equus prompts us to look again at the mystery of Christian faith through the analogy of parental, filial and professional conflicts.
God the Father is not the symbol of paternal tyranny, as feminist theologians have sometimes claimed, or as post-Schleiermacher Protestant idealism — paradoxically followed by Freud and Jung — has maintained. These erroneous views of God abusively separate the New Testament from the Old Testament and misinterpret both. God the Father maternally provides and nurses, judges and forgives.
God the Son is not an androgynous youth, fuzzily playing at the extension of consciousness, or a Marxist rebel, compounding injustice in the name of justice.
God the Spirit does not overwhelm with emotional intoxication — although visionary trance and speaking in tongues may have their place in situations of exceptional extremity. The Spirit is the Comforter — that is to say, the Fortifier of communal bonds and the Authenticator of knowledge.
One thing I have learned from the Radical Reformers is that theological thought can never be separated from its embodiment in concrete communities of worship and service. Thus, when asked how my thought has been shaped by engagement with Radical Reformation theology, I must reply-in the spirit of what I have learned from the Anabaptist tradition-that I cannot answer the question without explaining how my life has been shaped by encounter with radical reformation communities.
Paul was a planter of churches (1 Cor 3:6-9), an organizer of far-flung little communities around the Mediterranean that united clusters of disparate people in the startling confession that God had raised a crucified man, Jesus, from the dead and thus initiated a new age in which the whole world was to be transformed. The letters of Paul that survive in the NT are his pastoral communications with these mission outposts. Though separated from them, he continued to offer them exhortation and counsel about how to conduct their common life “worthily of the gospel of Christ” (Phil 1:27).
These general observations about the Pauline mission merely restate common knowledge, but their implications for Pauline ethics have not been sufficiently appreciated. I would like to draw particular attention to their significance for interpreting the moral vision of the Pauline letters. It will be my contention that Pauline ethics is fundamentally ecclesial in character and that we begin to grasp his moral vision only when we understand that he sees the church as inheriting the corporate vocation of God’s covenant people, Israel. Apart from this foundational assumption, Paul’s ethic can only appear to be what many critics have thought it to be: a haphazard conglomeration of moral notions drawn eclectically from the commonplaces of his time.
