12 the society of men

8/3/2019 12 The Society of Men

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12. The City of ManMan as Social and Political Being

Two men, Two societies

Christ is the true Body. He is not simply the head at the top but also the body, to be found inthe very lowest position. Christ is the head of the procession of all creatures to God. But bythe Holy Spirit he is also at the bottom of the cosmos. He brings up the rear of procession,carries the stranglers and ensures that no one is left behind.

We may liken the history of the human race to a cross-country trek in which teams compete.Team Christ wins by holding together, to ensure the survival of all members. ing: the teamthat of which all members wait for all others, wins. The question is not simply who, that is,which culture, can get a competitor over the finishing first, but which team can get its wholeteam, and so the very last competitor, over the finishing line? So its captain is found in theleast conspicuous or dignified place, bringing up the rear, gathering and helping along everystraggler.

But when Christ is understood without the Spirit, and without rest of Christian doctrine, weget a very different account of the man and God. On this logic, the Father way to the Son,who gives way to the Spirit, who gives way to the Church, which gives way to man theindividual, and to society and secularity. Each is superseded and replaced by the next.

The movement from the Father to the Son would then continue as an unrolling in which manwas fthat rpo is equated with the beginning, the Son with the present, and the Spirit with theend. The order of salvation would then place God as origin. The movement Father Son Spirit would then be an unrolling of God in a process that starts as the history of God andends as the history of man without God. But such a narrative does not stop with the HolySpirit.

At the beginning there was belief in the one God, who gave issue to the Son, who gaveissue to the Spirit and to the Church, so the Church and Christendom gave way to humanityand to the individual, the disappearance of hierarchy, and arrival of secular society anddiversity. In such a narrative we are always moving out of the age of the Son and into theage of the Spirit in some three or seven-ages schema, and a narrative of history which issmoother in prosperous times, and couched in more chiliastic terms of a future convulsion,when times are harder. This is the narrative of modernity, as the overcoming of all partialkingdoms and the final arrival of the universal man and the rule of the people.

The Passover of the Body

The Lord woos us, with the gift, of his only begotten Son (John 3.16). He has set the Bodyof Christ on view everywhere before the world. Will the world be won over? The world candecide to be pleased by this gift and receive it. It can receive it as the passage intocommunion with God, and so as its salvation. Or the world can decide to find this giftunpleasing, and decide not to receive the Son. It can decide that the Church is not anacceptable gift, and that it will not be propitiated by this body offered.

The Lord gives this body to world as its way into its salvation. For the worlds sake Christkeeps his body present in the world. The Church is broken open and sacrificed for the world.Since he preserves and renews it, the Church can take the battering meted out to it.

God is wooing the world, and the body of Christ is the gift or bride-price by which the world is

wooed. The Lord seeks us, and having found us, calms us, treats our injuries and removesthe cause of our pain and distress. God is winning over the world by this patient offering and


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sacrifice of his Son. Since the Lord sets out to please us with this body, we can say that hehopes to propitiate us with it. God propitiates man.

We have seen that when man does not identify the true God, he directs his love in all sortsof other directions and, constructing a world of substitutes and compensations, gives himselfaway. He has to be re-oriented, his worship re-directed and he has to be purified. Christpurifies man by directing all our offering to the Father, and gives us the love that purifies usof false loves. God expiates man, and so mans misdirection is expiated. The Lord expiatesour sins, so that each of us may become as acceptable to each other as to God.

Christ purifies us. The Church is made ready by Christ to be his body for the world. Sincethis purification happens in public, the Church is continually humbled before the world. Weexperience it as a passion. Christ performs this service and this liturgy before the world inorder to show, through his body, that this is the way that the world may take in order to entercommunion with God.

We are the sacrifice of Christ. He offers us to the world. He is the fire that shines unceasing

light through us and from us. The Lord is the fire that constantly burns off our sin so that weendure forever. Since this fire burns off whatever does not belong to him, it always appearsas though we are being consumed by it and thus to the world it looks as though the Churchis being punished.

1. Divine Liturgy and Secular LiturgyIf we do not sing along with the first liturgy, that of Christ, it is because we are borne alongby the second, the liturgy of the world that aims to get along without Christ. But we must alsosay that this second, secular, liturgy is entirely dependent on the divine liturgy. The worldthat wants to puts as much distance as itself and Christ as it can, is able to do only becauseChrist sustains its freedom to do so. Christ is the guarantor of the secular sphere, and of thefreedom of man to do without him for as long as he can.

The secular liturgy is dependent on the divine liturgy. The worship of the Church , sustainsthe secular liturgy of this world. The Church makes this distinction between church andsecular. This distinction does not divide the Church from the world, but indicates that Christhas made himself the servant of the world, and that we may participate in his service to it. Allthe activity of the Church is just a particular expression of the liturgy of Christ. This action ishis, and ours only in the Holy Spirit, who glorifies him, and in him, glorifies us.

Christian worship is a drama performed in public for the world first to watch and increasinglyto participate in.

The secular liturgy and the art and labour of man are entirely dependent on the gift to man ofparticipation in this divine liturgy. Our songs are derived from the songs of Christ to man andour many loves are expressions of his one love for us. This true worship opens up the rightway to live and it cleanses us from all lesser ways. All popular song with its language of love,and even all secular music with its rage against form, are derived from the songs of theChurch which resound Christs love for us. The world that wants to puts as much distance asitself and Christ as it can, and receive the love, or the memory of the love, without the giverof that love, can do so because Christ sustains its freedom to do so. Christ is the guarantorof the secularity of the world, and so of the freedom of man to do without Christ for as longas he can.

The Church intercedes for the world. It goes through a passion and it accompanies the world

as it puts itself through a passion.


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Christ speaks up for us before all others. He has interceded for us with those who wereenraged at us. God speaks on our behalf to persuade all others to be patient with us. Christintercedes with us on behalf of those with whom we are at enmity or of whom we areoblivious. His prayer is directed to us, to persuade us to be merciful with each other. Christrepresent us to those whom we have made our victims. He asks them to give us more time,and another chance to turn around. Christ unceasingly asks us to release those whom, inour fear and rage we have taken into our grip. We may release them and so we ourselvesmay be released; we are blocked and immobilised by the grasp we have on others. Hepersuades our creditors and all those whom we have hurt to be forgiving of us. He asks us tospeak and pray for all men and to pass on the forgiveness that we ourselves have received..

2. Passover and the Continuing Passion of the BodyChrist leads us throughIn the passion Christ walks through the assembly of humankind. We are the storm we goesthrough: we lash out, our blows rain down, and Christ is pummelled and battered.

The cross is behind Christ, but it lies ahead for us. Our cross is not a repetition of his. Christsuffered alone, entirely without us, and indeed against us, since it was our aggression thathe suffered. But in our passion we are not alone, but with him. Since he cannot be separatedfrom the Spirit, and by the Spirit we cannot be separated from him, our passion will not endin our destruction. Because we are joined to him our passion will not unravel us entirely. Itwill release us from what does not belong to us, so that we may finally be joined solely tohim, and through him we will be truly joined to all men. We will be raised.

The passion is the way we may experience the resurrection now. We must live life as thispassion that must be endured until the whole number comes in and the body is complete.Our course through life is a passage through the storm caused by the ungoverned forces,social, political and natural forces that rage around us. The waves tower over us and close in

on us so that we do not see how we will get through. They press in and try to break our self-possession. As soon as we are pushed out of our composure and give in to that rage webecome part of it. As psalm 124 puts it:

If the Lord himself had not been on our side they had swallowed us up quick, the waters

had drowned us and the stream gone even over our soul.

We must resist and absorb the violence of the storm and not pass its buffeting on. We mustremain holy, still and innocent.

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

I want to know Christand the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by

becoming like him in his death(Philippians 3.10).

We 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. We are not left only with the bitterness of our labour and suffering,because we already know (and have constantly to remind one another) that our work ispurposeful, its purpose is already fulfilled, so we are not working in vain, so our work isconnected to its outcome and brings its reward with it. We already anticipate the joy we willhave then together with the very people who are still presently opposing and persecuting us.

We rejoice inour sufferings (Romans 5.3). They are not for nothing. We are not sufferingfor our own salvation, for this has come to us as a sheer gift. Our salvation came through the

efforts of others who passed the gospel on to us, and who put up with us and suffered ourantagonism. God has paid out their lives in order to win us.


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But we may now work and suffer in order to bring salvation to others. Our suffering orresistance is the means by which the remains of this world are scoured off us. We learn howto suffer, how to be overlooked, and how to grieve with others. We mourn with those whomourn (Romans 12.15).

Aversion to ChristChrist was unrecognised and regarded as repugnant. Christs people evoke the samedisgust.

We always carry round in our body the death of Jesus Death is at work in us(2 Corinthians 4.10-

12).

Christians display in their persons the sufferings of Christ, unrecognisable and unwelcome,reeking of everything unpleasant. To the world Christians have their smell, the smell ofdeath, and they cannot stand us. To the dying we are as unrecognisable as Christ, theycannot tell what we are, and recoil from us. Our entire lives Christian life are this baptismalpassage through this sea and through this narrow defile. We have to pass through this

storm. It is no inanimate trouble that we have to go through, but the deliberate resistance ofthe world, and the fury that other people now direct at us. We have make our way throughthem. They try to prevent us passing, so we have to run the gauntlet of them. The worldattempts to stop us coming through this dark passage with whatever thumps and kicks itcan.

Christ takes us through our own passion. We ourselves have been part of that storm, for wewere enemies of God, who tried to oppose this body. The procession of God has had toproceed against our resistance. But as the end of the procession goes past, and ourresistance to him is finally exhausted, we are caught up by Christ and join the procession ofhis people. Now we have become members of the procession that goes through the world.We now attract the same rage that we once showed, but now we remain untouched and

unmoved by it.

The Priesthood of the Whole Church

The Gospel has come to us through the hands of many generations of Christians. They were

not universally loved and thanked for this. Some of them were opposed and persecuted for

their faithfulness to us and to other generations in the future. These saints suffered for the

Gospel for our sake.

All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted

them.All these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since

God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect (Hebrews

11.13-40).

The whole Church is a intercessory and priestly body. The Church prays and speaks up forthe world. The world does not always celebrate with us; we pray for them and they rely on usto do this for them. The world delegates its own responsibility to the Church. The Churchappears loaded with sin, its appearance apparently entirely compromised, but it is the sin ofthe world that the Church carries, and is itself caught up in. Bearing accusation and ridiculeis part of our priestly calling.

The Church offers its account of human identity and the confidence which result from thathigh view renews civil society as a whole. The distinction between the Church and the worldis fundamental, yet it is a permanent source of aggravation. The Church says that man is

called by God and utterly restless until he heeds that call. He tries to distract himself fromthis restlessness by pursuing other goals, and yet no other goal provides the satisfaction and


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release that man seeks, and this turns him to a rage that turns against the Church. As longas man is still restless it is because he is on way to his redemption, and regardless ofwhether he is at any moment moving backwards or forwards, yet he is unable to silence thecall that motivates him.

Christians suffer for the sake of the Church. We continue the sufferings of Christ until theyare vindicated and completed by the reconciliation of all. As the Apostle Paul says:

I fill up in my flesh was it still lacking in Christs afflictions for the sake of his body (Colos sians 1.24).

When we refer to Christ bleeding we are referring to the Christians, and to the people ofIsrael, whose lives have been lived in service of which we are the beneficiaries. Theybecame martyrs for our sake. Christ reckons them his, and so refers to them as his ownbody and blood. He considers their labour to be his own so when they are persecuted thathe is bleeding. To despise or persecute the saints, is to crucify the Son of Man all overagain (Hebrews 6.6).

The Church is the Passage for the World

The Church is the way that has opened to us. With Christ, directed and enabled by him, wemay now open ourselves and let the world enter him through us. The Church is the gatethrough which the world can enter Christ. The Lord commands the Church to become thisopening.

The Church and the Churchs passion is the path along which the world must go. The worldis saved by the service and passion of the Church, the body of Christ. The Church suffersbecause it takes whatever the world metes out in its frenzy. This generation of the people ofGod are the conduit through which this generation of the world may enter the communion ofGod. Thus it is the Church which is present, with Christ, in the eucharist.

Civil society springs up around the Church. When this secularity does not know its own

source, in the patience of the Christian Church, it becomes an impatience, which we maycall secularism, an ideological attempt to separate society from its source in the communionof God with man, given in the Church. But the Church is the one thing that preventsideology, and which therefore keeps the world secular, open for the good judgment of man,given by the grace of God.

The Church does not serve society by making out that there is no difference betweenChurch and society. The Church is the source of the life of society, and the confidence withwhich the Church offers its account of human identity renews civil society as a whole. Thisdistinction does not divide us from the world, but indicates Christ has made himself theservant of the whole world, and in him we may participate in his service for the world. This isthe point of the distinction between liturgy and secularity, between ordained and lay, and

between Sunday and the days of the week.

This worship and liturgy generates all our public and secular activity in the everyday world.All our activity is just a particular expression of the liturgy of Christ. Our activism is only ours,because it is first his. All our outreach is the work of the Holy Spirit who hides and glorifiesChrist, and in him, hides and reveals us and hides and reveals our work. He alone knowswho we are and therefore what the purpose of all our activity is.

The Church does not understand the secular week to be not Sunday. It understands that allthe days of the week are just ways in which the fullness of Sunday spells itself out to us.Sunday is too much to take all at once, so this day of resurrection spells itself out to us

slowly, as Monday and Tuesday, the days in which we encounter

and in which we learn toencounter the world through saints. Only let us be faithful to the saints whom have beenentrusted to us.


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The fullness of time, eternity, is not yet. We may have no timeless direct rule from God. Thisfaith insists that the rule of God is mediated to us through other persons, and thus there is arealm of interpretation, judgement and individual conscience to which we are all called.Without this space for the freedom of conscience given by Christian faith civil societyshrinks.

The Passion of Christs BodyIn the passion Christ walks through the assembly of humankind. We are the storm we goesthrough. We lash out and our blows rain down on him and he is pummelled and battered.

The cross is behind Christ, but it lies ahead for us. Our cross is not a repetition of his. Christsuffered alone, entirely without us, and indeed against us, since it was our aggression thathe suffered. But in our passion we are not alone, but with him. Since he cannot be separatedfrom the Spirit, and by the Spirit we cannot be separated from him, our passion will not endin our destruction. Because we are joined to him our passion will not unravel us entirely. Itwill release us from what does not belong to us, so that we may finally be joined solely to

him, and through him we will be truly joined to all men. The passion is the way we mayexperience the resurrection now. We experience it as passion until the whole number comesin and the body is complete. So we sing:

Our course through life is a passage through the storm caused by the ungoverned forces,social, political and natural forces that rage around us. The waves tower over us and close inon us so that we do not see how we will get through. They press in and try to break our self-possession. As soon as we are pushed out of our composure and give in to that rage webecome part of it. As psalm 124 puts it: If the Lord himself had not been on our side theyhad swallowed us up quick, the waters had drowned us and the stream gone even over oursoul. We must resist and absorb the violence of the storm and not pass its buffeting on. Wemust remain holy, still and innocent.

Our entire lives Christian life are this baptismal passage through this sea and through thisnarrow defile. All creation is disordered and frustrated. We inflicted this disorder on Christand, now we are in Christ, others inflict on us. This storm of disorder must also pass throughus, for we have to drink it down, and as we do it will be pacified and come into its properorder.

It is no inanimate trouble that we have to go through, but the deliberate resistance of theworld, and the fury that other people now direct at us. We have make our way through them.They try to prevent us passing, so we have to run the gauntlet of them. The world attemptsto stop us coming through this dark passage with whatever thumps and kicks it can.

Christ takes us through our own passion. We ourselves have been part of that storm, for wewere enemies of God, who tried to oppose this body. The procession of God has had toproceed against our resistance. But as the end of the procession goes past, and ourresistance to him is finally exhausted, we are caught up by Christ and join the procession ofhis people. Now we have become members of the procession that goes through the world.We now attract the same rage that we once showed, but now we remain untouched andunmoved by it.

The whole Church is a intercessory and priestly body. The Church prays and speaks up forthe world. The world does not always celebrate with us; we pray for them and they rely on usto do this for them. The world delegates its own responsibility to the Church. The Church

appears loaded with sin, its appearance apparently entirely compromised, but it is the sin of


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the world that the Church carries, and is itself caught up in. Bearing accusation and ridiculeis part of our priestly calling.

Christians suffer for the sake of the Church. We continue the sufferings of Christ until theyare vindicated and completed by the reconciliation of all. As the Apostle Paul says, I fill up inmy flesh was it still lacking in Christs afflictions for the sake of his body (Colossians 1.24),so we are also poured out like a drink offering (2 Tim 4.6) and rejoice in this.

When we refer to Christ bleeding we are referring to the Christians, and to the people ofIsrael, whose lives have been lived in service of which we are the beneficiaries. Theybecame martyrs for our sake. Christ reckons them his, and so refers to them as his ownbody and blood. He considers their labour to be his own so when they are persecuted thathe is bleeding. To despise or persecute the saints, is to crucify the Son of Man all overagain (Hebrews 6.6).

There is a penumbra around the Church, which we call civil society or secularity. Manybirds find shade under the branches of this tree. When this secularity does not know its own

source, in the patience of the Christian Church, it becomes an impatience, which we maycall secularism, an ideological attempt to separate society from its source in the communionof God with man, given in the Church. But the Church is the one thing that preventsideology, and which therefore keeps the world secular, open for the good judgment of man,given by the grace of God.

The Church does not serve society by making out that there is no difference betweenChurch and society. The Church is the source of the life of society, and the confidence withwhich the Church offers its account of human identity renews civil society as a whole. Thisdistinction does not divide us from the world, but indicates Christ has made himself theservant of the whole world, and in him we may participate in his service for the world. This isthe point of the distinction between liturgy and secularity, between ordained and lay, and

between Sunday and the days of the week.

The Lord commands the Church to break and distribute itself and make itself the openingthat the world go through, so the Church suffers the world. The Church is the gate throughwhich the world presently outside the body of Christ can enter and along which it must go.The Church is Passover for the world: they will walk over our bodies to their salvation. Theyare saved by our works, our service and passion. They will deal out whatever rage they wantto us, and in Christ we will be able to take it without giving it back, and so without beingmoved by it. The Church the people of God present to us in this generation is the conduitand passage through which the world enters the communion of God.

In the Holy Spirit Christ makes us present to one another, but he does not do this

unilaterally, for this would be a unilateral imposition. He offers us one another, and he waitsuntil we are able to receive one another as good gifts, bringing us to our proper relativeplaces. Christ not only gives but waits. He does not give us one another all at once, butserially, through time. He serves us and waits on us and waits for us, and this waiting is whattime is. The resurrection that raises us to Christ, will also raise us and bring us face to facewith all men. He now sends us all these people ahead of him to us, so our resurrection,imperceptibly underway since our baptism, consists in meeting these saints who alreadymake up his glorious body.


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PART TWO

Hegel to the Twentieth centuryGrowth of the State as Arrival of the Kingdom of God

The Romantics wanted to return to the virtues they associated with medieval Christendom,such as cohesive and orderly society, less deracinated and distant from our physicalenvironment, and in which, they want to believe, we did not make petty and viciouscalculations of our own interest. Hegel included every period in a grand synthesis.

Time as the New Guise of the Old MetaphysicsThe ancient world understood that everything we have and everything that we are comesdown to us from above. The ancestors pass down to us the life that they themselvesreceived from those before them. Early in history represents a position higher up on theladder of being. Modernity offers two accounts of our origins. One is that we are made bynature, which and which means that all that precedes us finds its rational in us. Our historymakes us what we are, so the arrow of time pushes from behind us and drives forward into

the future. The second is that we make ourselves; we are the agents, not patients, not thecreation of history.

Two metaphysics are at work here. One is the pyramid-like hierarchy of Greek idealism, inwhich all reality is at the top and some reality descends but every level is a reduction of thelevel above it. All reality flows down from above: we can represent this by a pyramid invertedto stand on its point or by a downward arrow. From the seventeenth century the hierarchy ofbeing represented by this pyramid and arrow was regarded as an out-dated andoppressively totalitarian theory of everything. it was condemned as metaphysical.

Kant and the Enlighteners thought they had got rid of this pyramid of reality. But in fact theysucceeded only in turning the pyramid on one side. When the pyramid lies on its side, its tip

points horizontally, from left to right. This tip and arrow still represents the flow of reality,outward from its origin, from the left to the right. The flow is horizontal, and is nowrepresented by the left-to-right arrow of time. Through time things evolve to become moresophisticated; there is a movement towards diversity, from the one to many. This is seen asa process of increasing freedom, so we are freer now than any earlier generation. It is seenas an inevitable process. This arrow of time represents an eschatology, although it is verydifferent from Christian eschatology, for this movement is by necessity, a general and anecessary truth, so it is a matter of nature, driven from the rear, rather than a matter of thecall of God, the act of the will of God in freedom.

The old top-down metaphysics had now turned into the left-to-right movement of the arrow oftime, that separates us from one another in different periods of history. The ascent of man is

still our narrative. Kant and Hegel represent two definitions of the ascent of man, and thustwo definitions of human enlightenment. Kant puts the emphasis on the individual and Hegelthe emphasis on mankind as a whole and thus on society.

Metaphysics, represents by the ladder, chain of being or pyramid, is couched in terms oftime and history, and so it appears to be a new issue. The top-down metaphysic, laid on itsside, has become our left-to-right metaphysic, our concepts of history, progress andevolution. The concept of history became central in the nineteenth century and twentiethcenturies and was experienced as a permanent sense of crisis, in declarations of theurgency of present issues and the new to look for new solutions.

Whereas the ancients understood that underneath all that happens there is something thatnever changes and so timelessness is their ultimate category. The thinker who bestrepresents this idea is Parmenides. In the modern metaphysics, its opposite, change


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became the ultimate category. The emphasis had shifted from sameness and stability, todifference and flux. Modernity represented a shift away from Parmenides, who emphasisedstability and the unity of all things, to flux and perpetual change. Not fact the case thatunderneath there is unending change was put by another ancient thinker, Heraclitus.

The emphasis on the radical changeableness and incompatibility of all things, is representedby Heraclitus. So we can say that the transition from the ancient and medieval worldviewswhich emphasised timelessness, to the modern worldview in which the emphasis was onchange, was simply a transfer of allegiance from one ancient philosopher to another: theWest had simply deposed Parmenides and put a different ancestor, Heraclitus, in power.Identity or being ceased to be the chief god of the new pagans the European intellectuals,and now Flux had ascended to the top of the hierarchy. Change is God, and time is the. Weare bound and defined by change. He is as relentless, remorseless and pitiless he cannothear the prayers.

Time and HistoryThe arrival of the twin concepts of time and history were a result of the impact of Christian

eschatology on Western thought. Nonetheless, as these two concepts took hold of the publicimagination through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they were used to challenge theChurch. The claim was that the Church is left behind by history and consequently madeirrelevant. The proponents of history, the all-dissolving and all-conquering process of time,we may call historicists believe that everything is eroded away by the remorseless current oftime.

But theology challenges the modern understanding of history. But what reality this forwardmarch of history has? Is all history the same, or is competing versions that never move inany common direction, so that there is no forward? What is the criterion for its forwardnessor unity? Perhaps time eddies and swirls in any and all directions at once? What can wemeasure time against in order that we can affirm that time does indeed move in one

direction, forward, and thus that arrow of time is straight? The Church insists that withoutthe direction retrospectively vindicated by Christs coming to us, we have no direction, sonone of our hurry and movement can be said to be purposeful and indeed we cannot knowwhether any of it is ultimately real. They believed that we cannot share the worldview of theearly Christians, for history has made it unreachable to us.

Without Christian eschatology and hope there can be no direction to history and us noconcept of time. Christian doctrine alone is able to give sense to the idea of time. As a resultof there is similarly no sense of differentiation, so modernity believes that hierarchy has goneand that it should disappear. But it is not that the steep hierarchy has gone. It is rather thatthe majority of us Westerners are at the top, and from this position our perspective is soforeshortened that we gain the impression that everything is visible to us. But the view

available to us is deceptive. We think the hierarchy is gone, but the fact is that we haveascended the hierarchy, and become members of the elite and we suffer the foreshorteningof view that makes the world look flatter than it is.

Modern thinkers believe that there is nothing more basic than time. Everything iscomprehended by time and divisible by it. Time is the effective pneumatology of modernity.The Church of course insists that there is indeed something still more basic than time. TheSpirit is more basic than time, and time is simply his economy for us. The modern concept oftime is a poor imitation of the Spirit of the Lord. What time, the fundamental spirit ofmodernity divides and holds apart, the Holy Spirit holds together in unity.

Modernity the Spirit, but no ChristWe need an account of how others, other people and outside forces, impact on us. If we callour account of these forces and spirits, a pneumatology. The tradition has used the term


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spirit to referto any indefinable host and to the effect of a very large number of peopleacting on us and setting the context for our own action.

Christian talk about time relates to the belief that we are in the world of Gods hospitality,being prepared by him for increasing relationship with him and with each other. But withoutthe distinctively Christian narrative about the progressive hospitality of God, time is notdetermined by relationship. This concept of absolute unchanging time is derived from theHellenic concept of fate or necessity: thus the secular modern conception of time is in part apagan pneumatology. Kant is denial about time and change, so has no explicit eschatology.He already has what he has, so does not need to hope for it. His is a timeless system. Kanthas a strong and static doctrine of Nature, which he then allows himself to be agnostic aboutit, with his reservation about being in itself. Kant is opposed to the idea of time and change,and thus has adopted the role of Parmenides. Hegel insists on the importance of change,history and flux, so has adopted the role of Heraclitus. Kants scepticism that created hisdualism of appearance and the thing in itself, means that he has journeyed so far away fromthe old Platonic paideia that, as Nietzsche pointed out, he has he has crept all the way roundto arrive back in the same place. He has left us with the old top-down cosmology in new

attenuated, sceptical and agnostic form. He has man the scientist sitting in judgment on allwith all the serenity of a deity.

How did this happen? It was asserted that the Christian doctrine of providence put God inour time, which it was deemed was not appropriate to his holy transcendence. It was betterthat we was excluded by our time, and did not find it necessary to impinge on us or makehimself felt by us. It was increasingly assumed that it was unworthy to suppose that Godwould occupy any of our time, for he would be trapped by it or eroded by it. The Word of Godwas historicized, and so thought to be being made irrelevant by changing circumstances.Then God's own being was made subject to the changes of time, as though ourcircumstances must impinge on God, so God seems always to be sliding into irrelevanceever deeper in the past. To this Christian doctrine must reply that God makes history and

makes time for us, and in this time, he comes to us, and he receives us in our time. Theeternal and transcendent God is quite free to sustain relationships with the creatures of time.

Romantics wanted to recover the whole world of the emotion and empathy, referred to in thisperiod as sentiment, and the associated ideas of the cultivation of sensibility. Romanticswanted to recover the experience of the whole body, which had been undervalued by therationalists and in particular by Kant.

Associated with this was a quest for the truths of history, and in the course of the quest forthe truths of the Christian religion, there was the quest for the foundations of Christianity andfor the historical Jesus.

History distances the Church from its HeadIn the last chapter we saw that scholarship of the historical Jesus identified an oppositionbetween Jesus and Judaism and so with the people of Israel. It was determined that Jesuscould not be integrated into the background of Jewish piety of his time. Through thegenerations, representations of Jesus have shifted with the current, whether socialist ornationalist, sometimes making him a leftist revolutionary, it always makes him an opponentof Judaism. He represents the individual suffering oppression, but always the oppression ofJews. Jesus as critic of religious practices rather than of Judaism's morality or beliefs. TheJews are oppressed by their own religion, of which Jesus is a severe critic. In the nineteenthcentury Jesus was portrayed in opposition to the allegedly materialistic, superficial and evenoppressive Judaism of his day, opposing the Jewish laws of ritual purity. The old polemicalopposition of law and grace has become the contrast of purity versus compassion.


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The modern belief in time, with its continued and heightened sensation of change, isgnosticism. Without a proper account of the provision and patience of God for us, webecome as more restive people, who fear that things are changing out of recognition, andthat time is getting quicker. We are separating the past action of God (of rule, politics) fromthe present and ongoing action of God. We are separating (what we see as) the past role ofGod that is what we insist is past (though it is only past us).

Without a proper account of God looking after us, we have the idea that change isaccelerating, and things are changing out of recognition. This heightened sensation ofchange creates an assumption that nothing established will work, everything we know is nowold. It obliges the Church continually to apologise for being out of date. This is gnosticism towhich charismatic evangelicalism is particularity vulnerable. It separates the past action ofGod from the present and ongoing action of God. It does not trust God to perform hismaintenance office for us. It is determined that new to re-invent the Church in the new mediato avoid the direct meeting in one place at one time of all age-groups of the Church. TheChurch needs to give up on mission and withdraw from the world. The Church needs to betold again who it is and so be purified by the one voice that gives it its proper name. The

Church is always in danger of ceasing to be Church to the world, and becoming just anotherinstitution that needs the worlds perpetual reassurance. It needs a cease supply of newconsumers of its product to reassure it that it is not useless. It does because this onlybecause it is not content to live off its Lord, to listen to him and remain faithfully dependenton him only.

So all this long period of four centuries, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, isnothing but a wandering about and failure to get started in the right direction. But we do nothave to be the old and indecisive Adam, now that the ever-living and decisive Adam, the Sonwho does hear and obey the Fathers word and goes into to vineyard to take up the Fatherswork, understanding it as his own.

If history buries Christ it also buries the Christian community. Historical criticism worksagainst the claim of the ecclesial community to be the unity of the past and presentcommunities. It refuses the doctrine of Spirit, that connecting past and present communitiesas one community. Such biblical exegesis represents the continuation of the rationalists,elitists and evangelicals that insist on interiority and deny the discourse of no publicleadership and responsibility. The motive of historical scholarship of force of History asdivision of the Church, the indivisible community. History is the teaching that we areseparated from them back there in the past. The Church insists that we are not ultimatelyseparated from them, but they may turn out to be our future too. If the Holy Spirit is strongerthan time, time is not ultimately capable of dividing us from one another.

Christ, the Holy Spirit and Hermeneutics

But Christ and the Spirit are never apart, and together with the Father, their communion iscomplete. The Spirit is therefore always there to support the Son. Christ is in history, but theSpirit is not; if we accept the confession that the Spirit is always with Christ we have toconclude that Christ is, and is not, identifiable by history.

The hermeneutics which are not informed and disciplined by the church cannot tell usanything that will enable us to be the Church, or make our doctrine Christian. If Christ iswithout the Holy Spirit he is merely an individual, which means that for us he is a figure in thepast. Any historical discipline will assume that Christ is sealed in history, trapped like a loneminer deep down there in the past. Perhaps they no longer hope to bring him out whole, buteach of these sciences intends to recover some part of his body. But according to thegospel, this is the other way around, for Christ is on the surface, in the air and light, whilewe, held by the confines of time, are underground. But we are not beyond his reach. Therock that holds us is not rock to God: united with the Spirit, Christ is entirely able to move


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through the great and impenetrable distances that hold us apart, and where he goes the rockturns to the air and light.

Jesus is not identifiable in the way modern historical critical scholarship supposes. NewTestament studies imagines we will find him in the first century by distinguishing him from allother first century persons. If we construct a christology without the Spirit, Christ is anindividual, without his people, without his church, its teaching and discipline. If Christ isconfined to the past so will all his people be. They will need a resurrection, but so will he,and so the past will claim them both. If Christian doctrine is simply data about the dead, it isan already open set of data which can be taught in the university entirely without the Church.

But doctrine that is Christian teaches that Christ is always with the Holy Spirit. He belongs tothe Holy Spirit, and may only be known within that community that the Spirit sanctifies for thepurpose. Then Christ cannot be isolated because he cannot be separated from the wholepeople of God. If this is to be Christian doctrine, we may not detach our knowledge of Christfrom the present life of this community, its worship, sacraments, gifts and offices and peopleof the Church. First though we must see what happens when these are disregarded.

Church Dismissed Religion as Social ReformWe can see the nineteenth century as battle between the inner man and the outer man. Kantrepresent the inner man, for whom the world coincides with his mind. Hegel represents theclaim of man as social and political being, who grows through the events of his life lived withothers. Kant only allows discussion of the existence or non-existence of God, because iscertain of the concept of mind, because he has effectively promoted the Mind to the place ofGod. Kant represents pure mind, a monastically austere intellect, with a dash of the highhopes of utopian idealistic revolution and one-world state. Hegel represents the mind andbody united. He connects intellect with the emotions, the customs and practices, the law andinstitutions. Hegel keeps together the internals and externals together and wants a diversity-tolerant social democracy. Hegel represents the proliferation of human and social sciences,

with paideia, so they are not only sciences, but a political project and mission statement.

Kant and the champions of autonomy want to prevent the Church from speaking and attemptto defend what it says in public. They want to prevent us from repeating in the public spherewhat the Church sings and confesses in its worship. The church and its worship cannot bethe authority for theology that speaks in public. The church must give up some of its claimssimply in order to approach the public square at all. They remove the teaching of the churchform the church and translate it into other terms for the public square. What the churchteaches about the church, and thus about this actualised plurality and community, thechampions of autonomy translate into a description of the individual.

Secularised GospelKants Agenda

The champions of autonomy insist that the individual is the truth of the church. The Kantiandetermination of theology is that Christianity is ethics. All the history of church is the historyof the emergence of this ethics of the individual, which could only be of scholarly orantiquarian interest. Theology is theology of the individual, alternately in terms of theindividuals head, intellect and reason, or his body, guts and feelings.

It has to take seriously what non-theological sources says about the individual and histriumph over the world or his misery in being dislocated from the world and divorced from hisfeelings. The single mind and individual experience is the criterion of this modern theology. Itunderstands that whatever it says must appeal to the individual, and re-describes the gospelin terms of the individual mind. It does not countenance that our will is halted by a contrarywill, or that we are not yet in our right mind. But a non-modern theology must question thepriority of the concept of the mind and free individual will. It must ask what freedom of the will


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there is, and whether the experience of individual self-consciousness is delusory, preciselythat delusion from which we must be rescued, if we are to be rescued at all.

The nineteenth century German tradition of historical studies and modern biblical exegesis,follow Kant in distinguishing a Jesus of critical historical science and the Christ of the faith ofthe Church. They contrast the biblical narrative about one member of a primitive people, andthe real truth about the development of the autonomous individual that lies beneath thenarrative about Jesus. The bible is a picture book for the immature that it dispenses moraltruths dressed up in narrative form, for those who can only take them this way. Of coursesome of us grow to maturity simply by realising that we could construct the propositions ofthis religion for ourselves without all the picturesque narrative. This narrative religion is justthere to be grown out of. The historical science that follows intends to strip away theparticularities to get to the timeless truths underneath, if any remain.

Contemporary biblical exegesis shares Kants determination that true religion is not publicand contestable, but internal and self-imposed. Kant teaches that dogmatics is one domain,exegesis another, ethics another. There is no requirement that they be dialogue with one

another for our ethics is not strengthened by historical research: it must be entirely unformedby other influences if it is to be truly ours and truly moral. The present separation intoautonomous domains of Old Testament, New Testament, Christian doctrine, ethics andecclesiology demonstrates that Kant is still in control. Separate academic domains do notallow theological discussion of the faithful ongoing action of God with his witness people.

Marcionism and MoralismChristianity is an experiential not a cognitive matter, its doctrines are not so much claimsabout how the world is but religious and experiential claims about what it is to be human. Heopened the way to examine Jesus as the first individual, Jesus without his people and who isthus no longer Christ. Nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship identifies Jesus as amoral or social or political reformer. He was contrasted with the people of Israel, so that they

represented the old regime which Jesus wanted to drag into a more Enlightenment andethical religion.

The scholarship of biblical criticism distinguish dead history from present ethics. Nineteenth,as twentieth, century biblical exegesis distinguishes a Jesus of History and the Christ ofFaith. It separates the God of the individual from the Old Testament God of the community,and the God of peace from the God who judges and condemns this world as inadequate. Itdivides what the Church must hold together. The claim of history that it makes represents anabsolute, non-self-reflexive scepticism and relativism. It represent the same divorce of timeand the timeless. The opponents of the One Testament promote a non-ecclesialhermeneutic that separates Scripture from Church. It must find considerable portions of theScriptures, and the doctrine which records what the Church has found in those Scriptures, to

be less than moral, and so dispense with it. Their mission was to get rid of the people ofIsrael, and of the Old Testament, and of unacceptable portions of the early Church and NewTestament, identifying Hellenic from Jewish Christianity, dividing Paul from the otherapostles, and the apostles and writers of Scripture from the subsequent generations of theChurch. F. C. Baur (1792-1860) led the scholarship into the secular context of Christianorigins, identifying a Jewish and a Hellenic Christianity. Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930) triedto rehabilitate Marcion as representative of true Christianity, which was being influenced byforeign forces (History of Dogma, The Essence of Christianity). Others wanted to recaptureChrist for pietistic interiority or for social reform. Ernst Troeltsch (The Social Teaching of theChristian Churches) suggested that theology must talk the language of responsibility andcommonality, which is the language of values and thus the language of the state. SorenKierkegaard (1813-1855) conspicuously held out against the movement to turn the Christianfaith into ethics. Religion is about personal obedience to Christ, not about meeting somedefinition of morality and faith is defiance of worldly rationality.


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Scholars found either that the roots of Christianity were fundamentally Hebrew orfundamentally Greek, and had to purged of contaminating Hellenism or Hebraicism. Themission of this historical scholarship was repeatedly to demonstrate to civilised Europe thatits lord was buried deep in the past, and that that only they were in any position to mediatehim either to the Church or to bypass the church and mediate him to civilized people.

Wanting to be Greek, not JewishThe scholarly effort of the nineteenth century university was to reconcile the Hebrews andGreeks. The best way to do so what to find the Greek superior. Jews are a particular peoplewith customs that are not generalisable beyond a certain point. The Greeks are universal.

Jews were the living demonstration of the fact that the continent of Europe was not entirelycoincident with Christianity, so though perhaps the Christian faith could seamless evolve intothe rational faith and pure morality, this other community would remain a baffling presenceand question-mark over Europes identity. The presence of this community became morevisible due to czarist persecution and princely statelets gave way to national states and

citizenries. Judaism was understood as failure to be religion of love, lacking the appreciationof beauty and harmony which was essentially Greek. The Jews held themselves aloof fromother peoples for Judaism represented the alienation of man from everything else, and evenfrom himself.

Kant believed Judaism was about rules but had no rational or ethical core. Kant's reading ofSpinoza's interpretation of Judaism as a set of regulations designed for a particular people ata given point in history stripped Judaism of any pretence of universality. Dogged obedienceto irrational precepts made Judaism run counter to the development of civil society. Jewslong restricted to occupations such as usury that made them more conspicuous thanpopular. Some called for restrictions placed on them to be lifted, in the expectation that theywould be assimilated and Judaism would disappear as a public phenomenon. Jews in

Germany and France were very largely assimilated until a different tide started coming in atthe end of the nineteenth century. We shall see how this formed a number of intellectualcurrents at the end of the century.

The modern project intends to eradicate particularities. This means that it wants to make thepeople of Israel indistinguishable from any other citizens of European states. Thisrepresented a threat to Judaism and meant a sense of inferiority for the Jewish diaspora.Marx and Freud wanted to show that though the Jew may be crude and primitive he doesnot suffer the hypocrisy of civilisation. The determination that the Greeks and Hebrews weredeeply incompatible was stronger at the beginning of the twentieth century than at thebeginning of the nineteenth. The two mindsets were incompatible: the Hebrews were formedby an alienation from life, while Greeks were formed by a spontaneous and enlightened love

of life.

Hegel and the Ascent of ManOur representative figure for the nineteenth century is GWF Hegel (1770-1831). Herepresents the hope for a comprehensive science in which, despite Kants despair at thisproject, man and nature, the irreconcilable halves of the cosmos, are reconciled. Hegelbelieved that the split between nature and evolution on one hand, and man, society, cultureand history on the other hand, was the motor of world history, indeed of the cosmos. Butalthough Hegel makes huge efforts to integrate all Christian insights into his account, hedoes allow the Christian gospel to determine the logic of the account, and so there is anotherretreat from the concept of the person, the great Christian conceptual break-though. Thepersonhood of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is not conceded, and so God does not become aperson or an agent, and the result is that man never becomes a person or agent either. Manis wrapped up into some process ostenibsle much greater and more important than himself


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and so man is lost and the individuality of human persons is lost too. Hegels account is arecombination of many of trends heresies that the ancient Church turned away from.Nevertheless Hegel has formed the modern worldview which we have inherited and sincewe are stuck with these heresies, the Church has to continue to argue that the completion ofthe person is fundamental, not forces, and that the individual person is formed primarily byhis relationship God and with all other persons, and not by relationship with nation, market orstate.

Hegel is important for our purposes because his new expression of the unity and diversity ofknowledge was given effect in the university, the institution that produces and controlsknowledge. The form taken by the university in Germany, given its rationale by Hegelexpressed effected the split between science and the humanities, between that is pureknowledge and the mediated and tacit knowledge that allows to make decisions. The rapidexpansion of scholarship and of the university, led by Germany, and followed by Britain,France and the United States.

Hegel was a social, educational and political reformer who looked forward to the arrival in

Germany of a commercial, internationalist commonwealth, on the British pattern. Along withmany other intellectual leaders, Hegel wondered which German principality could play hostto and set up the set of institutions that would commence the process of nurturing first onenation and then more. By 1811 Prussia had become their best bet and Berlin became theplace of the experiment in liberal social reform on the British model. The Prussian politicalauthorities themselves were not prepared for this, and always under opposition fromconservatives, Hegel spent much effort concealing the liberalism that European regimesregarded as threatening.

In a set of lecture series covering, history, religion, logic and aesthetics, Hegel laid outincreasingly full accounts of the system he had laid out in his early synthesis of knowledge,The Phenomenology of Spirit. We could subtitle this work The many appearances of our

underlying Unity. His ambition is massive, for he intends to summarise and properly relateall accounts of knowledge in a single account of the ascent of man within the world. Hegelsascent is not to the pure reason of Plato. He does not want to jettison Christianity and returnto pagan Greece. He intends to combine the best of all the culture of Christendom andnorthern Europe with the Greeks and so to bring the pagans and Christians together in afinal reconciliation.

The ascent of Spirit was Hegels account of the development of man from simpler to morecomplex forms of life and civilisation. We have to give two accounts of this ascensionbecause man frees himself from his internal passions and from his external masters. In theexternal account we see man first frees himself from belief in the gods. Man is first under themastery of every natural phenomenon, for in primitive animism everything is believed to

have mind or spirit. Then man is under the mastery of many gods, each responsible forsome aspect of existence and its disasters, and this is polytheism. Then in the religion ofEgypt and Greece man is under the domination of a hierarchy, a priestly-and-royal elite andits pantheon, with many layers of intermediaries. In monotheism man is directly under God.Catholicism makes the clerical hierarchy the intermediary between man and his God. TheProtestantism puts man directly before God, without intermediaries. Finally, the religion ofpure reason takes away all intermediaries, leaving man face to face with himself without themediation of God

Man starts as many impulses. He learns how to withstand the impact on him outside impacts this we can term Stoicism. Man starts out under the mastery of every natural and bodilyimpulse. Each organ of the body responsible for producing or receiving one influence orpassion. He begins to master his own impulses and develops intelligence. Slowly man bringshis organs and members, appetites and temper, under control. Finally he masters all


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external forces and internal passions and becomes become pure mind. The ascent of man isthe triumph of reason. The rule of the mind over the body accounts for the unity of man asmind and body.

Hegel offers the most complex account of the of the ascent of Man. Hegel believes that manis growing up, progressing from simpler to more complex religious, psychological andpolitical forms. This progress of man through history is the self-discovery of the Spirit. God isalso getting something out of this. God is also growing up and becoming more fuller who heis. In the Phenomenology of the Spirit he sees all the ages of man, and the mentality thatrepresents, as the masks that the Spirit tries out. Through this voyage the human mind andworld of reason and experience come into being. In Lectures on ReligionHegel set out acomprehensive analysis of the history, sociology, anthropology and psychology of religion.Hegel believed that Kant was wrong to imagine that this ascent could take place by theunaided effort of the individual mind. Our mind is formed by the set of institutions we inhabit,families, groups, guilds and other institutions that form our mind. He looked forward toseeing a set of civil institutions that can support us in the course of our development:

Man grows up by many stops, starts and reversals, through a series of mishaps, from whichhe gains experience. Life is series of strange juxtapositions and mismatches. We neverforesee what turn things are going to take next, so we are never done and there is alwaysmore to be said. So it is not clear whether this really is mans ascent or that of the Spirit: hasman been absorbed into a larger whole? This progress of man through history is the self-discovery of the Spirit. God is also getting something out of this forward march of man. ButGod is also growing up and becoming more fully who he is.

The Spirit the Unifying ConceptTruth is one, and so we seek a single unifying theory. Every scientist and philosopher iseither looking for such a theory, or saying that such a theory is not to be found. Hegel lookedfor a theory that would re-unite the divorced worlds of nature and human action and of public

life and politics therefore. Because these two have been separated, man is alienated fromhis fellows and from his world, and this makes him miserable. Hegel is saying that we havean ongoing obligation to set out the unitary account. If we forget it, and with Kant remain insolely analytic mode, we enter a spiral of increasing separation from one another and fromthe world. Hegel wants a dualist account, and he wants a unitary account. He wants both,and he is quite right to insist on both.

Hegel chose Spirit for his fundamental concept. The concept of spirit combined being andbecoming, stability and change. The enlightenment has split knowledge into two knowledgeof what was, and faith as our relationship what was not yet present. Spirit combined past, thepresent and the future.

Hegel as ModalistHegel believed that the Father turns into the Son and then returns to himself, now as Spirit.Earlier we called this modalism. It represents a collapse of persons and of all difference anddistinction that the personhood of these persons guarantees. The freedom of God for manhad been turned into unfreedom for God and consequently also for man.

But the Spirit is not the union of the Father and the Son. The Father is not succeeded by theSon, or rolled up into the Son, and the Father and the Son are not rolled up in the Spirit. TheSpirit is distinct from the Father and Son, in order that he may also make the two of themdistinct from each other. The Father is the initiator and the finisher. It is the Father, not theSpirit, who accepts and receives what the Spirit has done, and only when he accepts it is itdefinitive. The Spirit makes everything ready, but it is the Father who decides whether or notit is finally ready. Nothing is what it is until it has been confirmed by the Father, who is its


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proper arbiter and audience. The Father receives the act of the Son. The Holy Spirit enablesus to receive and give thanks for the act of the Son, and to receive it as the act of the Father.

Hegel believed that Christian theology had trivialised the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and sohad failed to show that Christianity is already intrinsically the enlightening of man. Thereason why modern thought has stalled, was that it did not understand the Trinity, so couldonly ever repeat opposite aspects of the full coming into being of man. He has insisted thatChristian thought should not forget its roots in the political thought of earlier generations, andthus not to forget that it must have something to say to political thought and indeed to allother sciences, because it claims to be the whole truth (and the truth relates to the whole).Christian theologians had disregarded (and still do) the whole tradition of pagan andChristian theological political thought in the mistaken belief that it is not purely theological,and does not therefore concern Christians, concerned as they are purely with heavenly, andnot at all with earthly, affairs.

Hegel believed that the lack of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit was the reason why modernthought has stalled, and can only ever repeat partial aspects of the full coming into being of

man. The West conceptualised action in terms of subject and object, and where there areonly these two terms, they can act only one at a time and against each other. Two termscause a alternation between two poles. Either man is object, or God is object, either one ofthem is subject and must struggle to subdue the other, so we have a battle of two titans.

But Christology is only a moment within this pneumatology. Jesus Christ is not the centreand control on Hegels eschatological synthesis. Christ is the image of the final state of man,but this man is also an account of the cosmos, so Christ and man and cosmos are wrappedup in an account of a total process, so at the end we do not have a person, but this singleGod-and-world process. Everything emerges out of Spirit and remains in movement in it. Butif we make God everything, is there any real particular identity either for God, or for anythingthat is not God? By making theology everything, Hegel has merged all objects and sciences

into a great whole in which everything has ceased to be solely itself. The distinct identity ofGod, and of creation, and of man, are equally lost. Hegel has not only succeeded infollowing Spinoza, in making hyphenating God-and-the-cosmos into one undifferentiatedentity, that oscillates between constancy and flux, between Parmenidean and Heracleitanpoles. Hegels grand synthesis of knowledge is too costly. But our question must be, is Spiritany more than the movement in which all things are kept?

Hegel, and all the evolutionist anthropologies and premature alliances of theology andscience that have followed him, fail to let the Spirit be determined by the Father and the Son.Hegel fails to be a Christian theologian because he does not let the Spirit serve and manifestand glorify the Son, and the Son the Father. The Church teaches that God does not needcreation. Creation does not make God who he is. Because God is freely, and not

dependently, who he is, he can allow us to come to be who we are to be. Only a Christiantheology understands that it is the Son, not we creatures, who by his obedience makes theFather who he is. Hegel cannot let the world be world, or God be God. We might say that hefinally makes the unitary account more important than the dualist account, so monismprevails. In doing so he makes it impossible to show that God is different from the world,ruining the freedom of both. He allows the world to be absorbed into God so it is wound upand lost.

Hegel rightly insists that ideas are not sealed off in an upper realm, but react with events inthe world, unpredictably and yet not chaotically, and together events and ideas make up asingle continuum. There is a continual mismatch between our aims and outcomes, but thismismatch keeps everything in movement. Each new person represents new possibilities;other people not only present us with competition but are also life enhancing and create anenlarged mentality and community based on freedom and reciprocity. The institutions of


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family, civil society, and state, are not impositions on or limitations of freedom but theconditions of the realisation of freedom.

But although Hegel understood the Spirit to comprehend both ideas and intellect and events,bodies in material interaction, he did not manage to allow the Spirit to be a truly third term.Like Kant and the thinkers of modernity before him, he had two fundamental conceptsinstead of three and as a result the individual and society were the two concepts thethinkers of the nineteenth century had to work with. They therefore struggled to come up withany concept of place, or of world, as really there, different from ourselves. They did notunderstand that a place in time is created by a tradition. The concept of place is whatensures particularity and so prevents the vicious oscillation between the one and many thatputs them in opposition.

Hegel says that theology is public and political, not simply internal personal religion.Christian theology had once included political philosophy. Like Aristotle, Hegel understandsthat man is a social being and a political animal who lives from the recognition of others. Tobe a person is to be recognised as such by other persons. Each person is dependent for his

formation on his contemporaries, and on the layered experience of previous generations, ininherited social practices and institutions. The development of man is supported by manyintermediary institutions school, university, church, guilds, clubs, charities, trade and all theother associations by which responsible citizens are formed. Man is always at the very leasta dual being, either servant or master, but in real life a complex layered combination. Hegelis determined not to let Kant and his predecessors get away with making the Christianreligion either a cerebral-rational discourse or making it a discourse about our own spiritual,emotional and psychological states. It makes me responsible, it puts me in front of you andmakes us converse.

Without Christ, no concept of the Son cannot show how man may grow up to become acompetent, social thankful animal. Without this basic christological and theological narrative,

the development of man is just a story, each rival elite trying to implement their own versionof it. Hegels account of the Trinity was not Christian or robust enough to reverse Kantssimplifications.

Without Christ as its criterion, and the church as its form, there can be no coherent accountof formation, or of history as the outward form of that formation. There can be no educationin general, that offers no specific form of human being: all education without definition ismerely partisan, recreating the barriers that it ostensibly overcomes. Sociology, psychology,anthropology and economics, all now divorced from the apprenticeship, are seen merelytechniques that share no central narrative about the formation of man, so that it is difficult toreason what does and what does not contribute to the good of man.

A sub-Christian (non-trinitarian) doctrine of God only allows us to affirm the present state ofaffairs under whatever description our intellectual contemporaries give it. When theologywas regarded merely as one discipline among many, it no longer accounted for the unity ofknowledge, or gave these many sciences their coherence and mandate. As the logic of theearlier arrangement of sciences unravelled theology descended from the highest down to thelowest status, until it was regarded as the least respectable member of the academy.

Hegel attempted to turn Christian teaching into a series of general truths that were to befound as much in the world as in the church. Thus the university became a source ofknowledge of the world that rivalled the church. As we will see in the next chapter, thechurch is the anticipation of the universality of man and as such it is source of trueknowledge both of man. Only Christian doctrine offer knowledge of man that does not makethe whole of humanity captive to the generation presently in possession of power.


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We have been comparing two societies, two jurisdictions and the two men that come fromthem. The two societies we have been comparing are the Church, and the world, made upof all other communities. Which one will ultimately prove to be the true society and thesource of all society? The Church is the source of all other society, and all other societiesfunction well as long as they are refreshed from the Church and are able to recognise thatthe Church is distinct. The Church cannot be absorbed, for it is the body of Christ for us, andChrist is always held distinct from us by the Holy Spirit, and the society that understands thatflourishes.

Then we have asked about the relationship of man and society. With Luther we saw man onhis own before God. With Kant we saw simply on man on his own. With Hegel we will seeman amongst men, and so see society and individual in perilous balance, that by the end ofthe nineteenth century was clearly a balance lost.

We saw that our archetypal modern, Kant, wants to rule himself and thinks that this meannot accepting the rule of any other. This means that he rules his passions, he rules his body,and thus he is his head. But who rules this head? For Kant there is no head for this head, no

authority above him from which he head sources his ideas and gets his concept of the good.No panel of experts and no tradition of thought is acceptable. No one can offer him any help.The man of modernity had to move away from the particular, local and national customs, towhat was universal. He no longer went to war for his ruler against the people of anothernation. The man of peace had arrived at last.

Kant has made being and stillness more fundamental than movement, change and life.Hegel tries to find the balance between being (constancy) and life (change) but the result isthat he turned the Christian doctrine of our formation by Christ into a general truth aboutchange, in which everything is developing and evolving. The element of adventure andmystery has been pushed out by the demand to know everything explicitly, controllably andas science.

Kant regards the head and body as opposites and antagonists. Hegel understands that thebody is derived from the head, the body is the work of the head, and so that the world ofmans doing as derived from thinking. But he has subordinated faith and practicalknowledge to explicit knowledge, and so he has collapsed tacit and explicit, faith andknowledge, mystery and control. He has pulled the future down into the present and made asecular eschatology.

We take the insights (of practical and tacit practices as knowledge) from the Church andgeneralize it. Everything becomes education, and the goal of that education is that we allbecome everything, but without specific definition this education can have no content.Specific definition can only be given by a specific tradition, such as the Church, which for its

definition of man points to Christ.

So far Protestantism represents the highest point of the development, the ascent, of man.The local law had been a reflection of the universal law and helped us to obey that higherlaw. But now man had to make a further breakthrough. He had to leave behind his culturewith its local particularities. He did not want to be a citizen merely or this or that state, but tobecome cosmopolitan and universal man, the citizen of the world.

Hegel decided that not all mankind could become this self-powered moral and intellectualaristocracy that Kant had in mind. There had to be a balance between this elite and thepeople as a whole. Society would always be composed of those who could govern ofthemselves and be able to offer their government to others, and those who would simplyneed to be governed. There would always be experts. The only point is that society wouldexplicit recognise them as such so the power they exerted would be an authorized and


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publicly accountable power. There had to be a mixture of self-control and control by thosebest able to support us. In order that we become as far as possible individually mature wehave to be members of a well-ordered people under a mixed constitution.

The ordered people and the mixed constitutionWe have said that in order to become self-governing we also have to be governed by others,and that we have to be an ordered people, and that is a people ordered towards oneanother. We do not become a people by replacing our rulers with the people, or byreplacing all other forms of government by democracy. In order that the people really comeinto their own, and become a well-ordered people, all forms of government must be present.Good government must be composed of democracy and aristocracy and monarchy.

In order that we have an ordered people, we need not just democracy but those other formsof government but that these other forms of government are present. There must be a ruleby the best (aristocracy) that is, excellence. There must be unity, which is what the ideathat the whole people are under one single law and rule (monarchy) and even that thiscan be made plainer through a figurehead, a single person who represents the singleness

and unity of this people. And this governing class must be authorized by the people, and sothe people must give their assent. A democracy therefore requires the active participation ofthe people in giving, or when necessary, withholding their assent. The people must beparticipants in their own government. Each of us must attempt to be first governor ofourselves, to control our own desires, and achieve a measure of personal autocracy, inwhich our head rules our body. It must be seen that the rulers, the best and the monarch,are themselves servants of the people and themselves members of the people. And theseexperts are truly the best, by merit, and thus the aristocracy must be a meritocracy, and thebest will be few. We cannot be governed by everybody but must be governed by somespecific, dedicated and formally accredited group. The teachers of the church are that groupfor the church. The one enables the few who enable the many; while the many affirm the fewand the one. There is a flow of authority, service and its acknowledgement both downwards

and upwards, for only so do we have a single functioning national community.

If everyone rules, no one specific takes responsibility, and there is no actual government. Ifevery member of society is equally able to decide, which is what democracy represents,whatever decision we have taken can be as easily reversed. If we make a new decision withevery opinion poll or news bulletin, we have no real leadership. To avoid this we mustunderstand that rule must take these three forms of simultaneously: rule by all, by some, andby one. We want someone specific whom we can identify to take responsibility (for whomAristotles term would be monarch); we want to be lead by those publicly recognised to begood at the task of government, those who have recognizably achieved excellence, and so aruling elite. And we want everyone to participate to some degree in the government and feelresponsible for it, so we need the democratic component. We want government to be

received by the whole nation and owned by it: we have to own up to the fact that thisgovernment is our government, and we have to and to give our leaders credit, and tell themthat they are public-spirited.

The people are truly the people when they are ordered and well-ruled. The people need theirto orient themselves to the panel of expertise that the church refers to as the apostles. Thepeople come to themselves and win their own voice when they join in chorus with thosesanctified to lead them, the apostles of the church.

The Dissolution of the PersonKant turned head and the body, and the individual and the crowd, into antagonists. Hegel didnot succeed in reversing this move. Hegel understood that the head is the source from whichthe body comes, that the present world springs out of the earlier generations and that earliergenerations are therefore the head from which the body of the present generation comes.


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Thus they understood that world and all our present activity derives from what those earliergenerations understood as the soul or spirit. All human interaction and the world that it givesrise to, come from what Hegel now refers to as thought. What has been thought, by allprevious generations, still lives and thinks and our present society is the form in which itdoes so.

Hegel gives the most comprehensive account of the ascent of man. But the decades afterHegel saw the faltering and beginning of the break-up of man. He is no longer an integer,who lives publicly among his peers and who is responsible and able to give an account ofhimself to them. He is a bundle of urges; his primary relationship is with the state. Man ischallenged by the inner world of his body and its passions, and by the outer world of crowds.Man is challenged by vast economic movements and by revolutions in technology. Thegoverning and middle classes abdicate responsibility to govern and lead the people towardsself-government. The discourse of self-control is replaced by the discourse of rights. Allpolitics became class politics, in which their irreconcilable economic interests pitch all rulersagainst all workers, creating the perpetual stand-off of opposed interests that Weberdescribed. The body has no head; the people have no leaders brave enough to give them

the leadership they require. The body, the passions and the people, have only to shout forwhat they want, so rulers merely attempt to provide what the loudest sections of the crowddemand. The nation must ask their leaders to bring to the task of government all the wisdomthat they have received through whatever apprenticeship they have undergone. It mustacknowledge that the good judgment learned through this apprenticeship is to be exercisedfor the nation as a whole. it must therefore give its leaders the authority they need to leadand to govern. Perhaps it is true that a nation gets the leaders it deserves.

But at the end of Hegels century, the prospect of finding the proper harmony betweengovernment and self-government, by balancing responsibility and control, the inner andouter aspects of man, look as far away as ever. The people, their class representatives, theirworker movements, their industries do not demand responsibility and seem to demand no

self-control or good judgment from the individual. He had to be controlled and governmenthad to keep the lid on his violence. The individual receives his identity from his relationshipwith the state. The question of how man the individual could possibly be reconciled withsociety was as poignant as ever in the twentieth century.

What of the people? In this chapter we have turned from the mind (psyche) to the materialworld (cosmos) and material bodies. We have also turned from the individual to society(polis). In the nineteenth century we turn to the issue of the people, and the social question,the condition of the working classes, the franchise, the social question and the economicissues The voices of working people can be heard at last and the power of their numberswas felt. Through the revolution of communications through the rise of railways, shippingand international travel that creates a single world, a global economy. In this global economy

a request made on one side of the world can be answered and met by the production of amaterial good from the other side of the world. The world is implicitly, and thereforeeconomically, though not yet explicitly and politically, a single economy and so one world.

Hegels successors gave up on Kants search for the perfectly self-ordered man, alarmedthat this rational man was no more than a calculating machine. They were alarmed by theviolence of political revolutions and demonstration of the power of the workers through thenineteenth century. They gave up looking for the soul of man that would create the true polisand turned their attention to the body and to the search to the fulfilment of the material needsof the people. Kants high ambition that the mind would come to govern the body andsubdue its desires is replaced by the much more modest goal of satisfying the (bodily)demands of the workers. The hope that man can become a united person suffers a reverse,as man is again divided into soul and body, in the hope that the material demands of thebody and the of the workers can at least be met. Material and economic requirements come


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first, in the hope that this will bring political peace, but the requirements of persons, thatinvolve freedom are deferred indefinitely.

Hegel has turned the Christian doctrine of our formation by Christ into a general truth aboutchange, in which everything is developing and evolving. The element of adventure andmystery has been pushed out by the demand to know everything explicitly, controllably andas science.

Traditions and religions are training regimes that serve as preparation for life together. Thehumanities investigated these tradition and so formed the course of education by which wecan acquire the whole range of the virtues, arts and skills that make us mature persons. Thehumanities are those traditions of thought that make up the apprenticeship in judgment, bywhich we can become decision-makers. The humanities teach us not only that we can andmust make decisions, but also that we may and must accept many of the decisions made forus, by our leaders, by earlier generations and by our natural and social environment. Bysuch an apprenticeship we learn to argue for our decisions in a public square, and learn thatthey are all open to challenge and so part of a properly political process. We may learn that

is good to accept many of the restraints on our action that other people represent. It is goodto conceded that not everything can be within our control, for it is because we are unable tocontrol circumstances that we have a future.

Kant subordinated practical judgment (humanities) to pure knowledge (science). Knowledgemediated through particular community and practices is pushed out in favour of knowledgethat is not mediated but general and universal. His successors turned practicalknowledge and faith into explicit knowledge and science, collapsed the tacit into the explicit,and collapsed faith into present knowledge. The result is that man now believes that he isentirely in control of what he knows, that he will not encounter anything that he has not willedor foreseen, or that he cannot be taken by surprise. The future is pulled down into thepresent and made a secular eschatology.

The apprenticeship in judgment, by which we learn to make decisions and to accept thedecisions made by others, was increasing replaced by the apprenticeship in science.Scientists do not learn that decision have to be made, or that they should be tested in thepublic square with reference to traditions of thought. The scientific apprenticeship does notteach the scientist to accept any limits to knowledge. Knowledge that is scientific isknowledge of objects that cannot hide, the cooperation of which is not required, and who donot have to be reasoned with. In the university those areas which were the territory of thehumanities have become the territory of the social sciences. Because man has madehimself a scientist and thus a subject beyond challenge, he has also become a object fromwhom nothing is expected and on which vast social experiments may be carried out. Thoughsuch experiments may be said to be for his own good, the criteria of this good are also

beyond challenge. Man is the object of the sciences and social sciences. Man hassucceeded in making himself a thing.

The events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represent the triumph of the people. Inthis modern society every human will have the same value as every other. But eachindividual has suffered a breakup, and is no longer an integral person, but a merecombination of impulses. The struggle of the mind and the body, the mind and the passionsremains.


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1. The apprenticeship has come to an end. Education is no longer a transformative process,voluntarily taken on by a few, in which we acquire of self-knowledge and the skills of self-control and self-government and grow into mature agents.

2. The Christian understanding of the relationship of doctrine and discipleship is replaced byan understanding of knowledge as mere information. In the modern conceptio

12 the society of men

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