Christ, Society and the State

In the first main part of this book (God and Society) I broadly take issue with what I regard as the curious and over-inflated ‘fondness for the particular’ (for difference, diversity, specificity, the concrete, the local) in western culture at the present time and its corresponding ‘hostility towards the universal’ (oneness, sameness, form), and I argue for a re-evaluation and rehabilitation of the ‘universal’. In chapter two, for example, I argue that the ‘finger’ of unity (of the ‘universal’) points to ‘particularity’ (and to ‘specificity’ or the ‘concrete’) as ‘its other’, its necessary correlative, complement, and completion, and I show how Richard Niebuhr and Michael Walzer succeed in seamlessly incorporating into their work the truths emphasised both by the (‘particularist’, ‘historicist’, ‘postmodern’) Ressourcement/culture school and the (‘universalist’, ‘supra-historical’, ‘modern’) Rahnerian/instrumentalist school. In chapter three I show how a proper understanding of the ‘universal/particular’ relation in ethics and politics helps us to better deal with and elucidate the key issue in Christian social ethics, namely, the extent and type (or nature) of the church’s responsibility for the proper ordering of society. I hold that we can gain very valuable assistance in dealing with this question by taking into account the full socio-political significance of the crucial ethical distinction between the ‘right/just’ and the ‘good’. I hold that in the ethical consciousness the ‘right/just’ (‘right’ used in the sense of ‘just’) primarily consists in our recognition of the value of persons, whereas the ‘good’ consists mainly in our endeavours to realise values. Thus, when acting justly or when considering the requirements of justice, our primary concern is to act in conformity with our recognition or acknowledgement of the absolute value of persons as spiritual beings and the church has every right to speak its mind, whereas when it is a (mainly political) matter of realising value, in the form of the ‘common good’, the church, I suggest, needs to be considerably more circumspect, for we are dealing here with a delicate political version of von Balthasar’s ‘perichoresis of the transcendentals’ (not just truth, beauty and goodness, but also the values of liberty, independence and equality) and whilst church members would assuredly agree on value-based political objectives when pitched at a sufficiently high level of generality (helping the poor, liberating the oppressed, etc), they are liable to diverge in liberal, conservative and socialist directions as soon as practical policy measures are proposed to achieve such.