Beneficence

Ecclesiology

I'm picking up this thread from the comments running at The Radical Business of Original Sin . Thanks to Tony Woodlief for joining in there. I'm fairly certain that Tony's Sand in the Gears was the first blog I ever looked at, and I still admire the style he uses there. I would like for this space to become more transparently personal... something I'll aspire to!

Anyway, I was asked in a comment to explicate the statement that "the church is the body of Christ." Gerry Gleason is correct in identifying the Pauline origins of this understanding. The classic exposition of this is in Ephesians, where Paul discusses the unity of the church (ch 4) and again in ch 5 where the identification of Christ and the church is posed as a mystery of faith (5:32).

I was discussing this issue today with my pastor, and he confirmed that Christ speaks seldom of His church but very often of His Kingdom. I pulled the concordance out tonight and found only two instances where the term for "church" is used in the Gospels. They are the passage to which Gerry refers us, Matthew 16:18 (...you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church...) as well as Matthew 18:15-20.

However, dismissing the authority of Paul will not get Gerry where he seems to be headed, to the dismissal of most (any?) earthly ecclesiastical authority. If we look contextually at these two passages, it is clear that Christ is acknowledging authority for the church in each instance.

At Matt 18, this authority extends to the disciplining of a sinning brother by the church. The church is here loosely defined as "where two or three have gathered together in My name."

In Matt 16, the authority mentioned is that of the keys of the kingdom (the famous foundation of the Roman Papacy). As a Protestant who denies that the Roman Church stands athwart the gate to salvation, which is truly nothing but the Cross and Christ crucified, I see a different ecclesiology in this passage. This passage as a whole, Matt 16:13-20, is known as Peter's confession of Christ. Christ asks the disciples, "Who do you say that I am?" And Peter answers: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." Christ replies that this revelation came to Peter not from the flesh but from the Father. So the "rock" on which Christ will build the church may be seen as Peter's witness, which came from the authority of the Father.

This may raise for some the question about verifiability of such a witness, which points us again to the standard of Matt 18, "by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed." There is little room for solipsism in the Christian life. We are to rely for interpretive help not only on the Word but also on the church--marked not only by our fellowship with our brothers in Christ but by the teaching of the Word by apostles of the church and the administration of the sacraments.

Clearly, what Christ called the disciples to--and empowered them for--was to be his witnesses (not his keepers). Christ's final injunctions all point to the authoritative and missional nature of His call:

"you are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending forth the promise of My father upon you..." (Luke 24:48-49)
"Tend my lambs" "Shepherd my sheep" "Tend my sheep" (John21:15-17)
"follow me!"
"you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses..." (Acts 1:8)

The death of Christ on the cross was accompanied by a tearing of the veil of the Temple in two. The significance being that God had left the building, thus supplanting the old covenant with the new covenant, fulfilled in Christ's birth, death, and resurrection and the pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost upon the church. So, the church is in this age the body of Christ infused by the Spirit, equipped with the Logos, and the testimony to the kingdom to come.

J I Packer puts it this way: "The task of the church is to make the invisible kingdom visible through faithful Christian living and witness-bearing. The gospel of Christ is still the gospel of the kingdom."

Hope that helps. Ecclesiology is not typical blog fare, I suspect!

What is truly remarkable in the context of conversations about decentralization and the displacement of hierarchy by wirearchy, is that the ecclesiology of the modern church continues to undergo reformation

Just arriving in my mail today were two books pointing in these directions:

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shape of Things to Come: innovation and mission for the 21st-century church

and Darrell Guder, ed. Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America

I'm looking forward to exploring these texts, and I'll close what has grown to be a very long post with a teaser from Guder:

"This trinitarian point of entry into our theology of the church necessarily shifts all the accents in our ecclesiology. As it leads us to see the church as the instrument of God's mission, it also forces us to recognize the ways in which the Western church has tended to shape and fit the gospel into its cultural context and made the church's institutional extension and survival its priority. As we have used the tools of biblical scholarship carefully, we have begun to learn that the biblical message is more radical, more inclusive, more transforming than we have allowed it to be. In particular, we have begin to see that the church of Jesus Christ is not the purpose or goal of the gospel, but rather its instrument and witness." (5)

And now for something different--the Gift Economy

Thanks to Sue Braiden for posting at the Omidyar Network this interesting article by Jem Matzan on The Gift Economy and Free Software.

I found two passages quite provocative and relevant to my musings on beneficence:

Recently CNN called Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft Corp., a "leading philanthropist" for his donations of money, computers and other resources to help third-world nations and poor urban areas of the United States. . . . If he truly wanted to help people, Bill Gates could more easily do it by licensing Microsoft's products in a way that allows his customers to help their community instead of threatening them with legal action if they share.

Indeed, which is the greater beneficence: MS Office as open source or the millions or so Gates will donate to medical causes in Africa in a given year?

The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) provides access to enterprise-grade hardware and infrastructure resources to Open Source developers who wish to add support or write software for such devices. OSDL relies on money from its members, which are primarily computer hardware manufacturers and service providers who benefit in some way from Free and Open Source Software. Tim Witham, an Open Source advocate and Chief Technology Officer of OSDL, sees Open Source Software as a quid pro quo, a classic business relationship where you get and give in return. By sharing source code like scientists share their theories and discoveries (as mentioned above), greater solutions can be reached. "A gift," he says, "comes with no attachments. Software licenses add attachments; they allow you to keep your intellectual property." So even though you're sharing your ideas and methods, you're still retaining the rights to your work. "I think every major player in Open Source has business in mind," Witham says. "No one is giving anything away." Instead, developers create software which is useful; if it is useful to them, then, like Theo de Raadt, that is the return and if it is shared then others may capitalize on it in the same way. If it was created to be useful to others, then that developer or business generally works on the project with the expectation of some kind of compensation in return. In both cases the return of the Open Source development method is also that other programmers can make your program better for free. So while they get to use it, you get to have it updated, expanded and improved -- again, quid pro quo.

The Open Source "economy" is indeed fascinating, but how might this "gift" economy actually work in a world not united by a common expertise, such as the community of hackers or the community of astrophysicists, etc? In other words, if I'm not part of the community, how do I participate in the quid pro quo referred to by Witham? If I cannot update, expand or improve the product, but merely use it as a tool in doing my other work--thinking and writing not about code but about community itself--I am not in a good position to understand either the quality of the product (will it do what I need?) or the relative value of the product (is $299 too much for the latest MSOffice upgrade?).

It seems that where these inequities of information or skill exist is exactly where the exchange economy of the "market" is essential. In the absence of monopoly or cartel pricing, I can shop for a product to meet my need at the price I can afford. And I can use the medium of money to, in essence, exchange my skills for the skill of the programmers and company that bring me the product I purchase.

Are gift economies, in Matzan's definition, then, best suited as internal operational guides for fairly focused communities of practice? Or are they somehow able to help us better knit our communities at large?

Managing the Commons

David Pollard asks whether there isn't a middle way between neocon and liberal strategies for managing common spaces. Good question!

Interesting that there are increasing spaces like this where real communication among progressives and libertarians might take place, but seemingly few links between. Lessig and perhaps James Surowiecki are among the most likely cross-pollinators I've come across.

Some might like to have a look at Marginal Revolution, where James Surowiecki is currently guest blogging.

The End of Education

Thanks to Jon Husband for the link to Robert Paterson. Paterson points us to Aaron Campbell on the best outcome of an education.

I think both Paterson and Campbell might enjoy a good dose of Ivan Illich's De-Schooling Society (see my book list at right). Don't want to post too much on this tonight, but here are a couple of teasers from Illich:

The institutionalized values school instills are quantified ones. School initiates young people into a world where everything can be measured, including their imaginations, and, indeed, man himself. But personal growth is not a measurable entity. It is growth in disciplined dissidence, which cannot be measured against any rod, or any curriculum, nor compared to someone else's achievement. . . . The learning I prize is immeasurable re-creation."

The planning of new educational institutions ought not to begin . . . with the question, "What should someone learn?" but with the question, "What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?"

Hmmmm Moments

It’s been a couple of weeks now since I’ve managed to create a little space to blog. I hated to leave the previous conversations hanging, but there we have it. I also write for pay, and duty called.

Grant McCracken has created a charming trilogy on How to Blog Like an Anthropologist. I have GOT to get a photo of my refrigerator posted here (a good chance to figure out how to sync the digital camera and the blog). But I was most taken with his paean to what I call the Hmmm moment--

In short, the blog entry begins with that little ping of surprise that comes from the stray remark that will not herd, the datum that defies expectation, the observation that does not fit. Most of the time, most of us let this slide. There is no ping of surprise, because we are dumb as posts. Or there is a ping but we don’t do what Sahlins did: stop and ask “what just happened. How did the world just resist my expectations?”

These little pings of surprise, the small moments of “hmmmm,” are what I’m in search of here. Hmmmms can often lead to “whats?!” But if one is fortunate they can also lead to “Ahas!” And in a moment of grace, the hmmm can lead to Silent Awe.

Authority and Conscience

Again I'm dragging my conversation with Gerry up here in a main post. Gerry responds to my previous post thus:

Just to be clear, I don't reject earthly authority per se, but I don't see how it is legitimized. You are free to recognize any authority you choose, but thankfully the first amendment says that the government cannot recognize or constitute such an authority and it remains a matter of choice for each of us.

Yes, exactly. I thrive by not trying to impose my religious belief, nor my scientific views, etc. through any governmental means. But this absence of established religion does not imply that I can recognize no religious authority in my life. In fact, it is the absence of established religion that ALLOWS me to submit myself to religious authority. Exactly the freedom Gerry acknowledges.

I think Michael Polanyi comes close to capturing my view of this submission of will to authority in his chapter "Authority and Conscience" in his slim volume, Science, Faith, and Society.

the creative order of the scientific community is not the resultant of a clash between sheer organized force on the one hand and individuals pursuing their mere personal ends on the other. Scientists must feel under obligation to uphold the ideals of science and be guided by this obligation, both in exercising authority and in submitting to that of their fellows, otherwise science must die. It would thus appear that when the premisses of science are held in common by the scientific community each must subscribe to them by an act of devotion. These premisses form not merely a guide to intuition, but also a guide to conscience; they are not merely indicative, bu also normative.

Polanyi later observes that "processes of creative renewal always imply an appeal from a tradition as it is to a tradition as it ought to be." And again

Scientific opinion, legal theory, Protestant theology are all formed by the consensus of independent individuals, rooted in a common tradition.

It's interesting that Chris Corrigan is blogging something quite similar from his reading of Lewis Hyde over at Parking Lot today!

I was asked in a comment to my post on Public Benefit how on earth I draw a line from Hayek to Christ and back again. I have to confess that it goes right through Polanyi... and that otherwise I have no clue how to live out this strange Christian libertarianism to which I freely subscribe. It is not yet a coherent, consistent worldview. But I strive for integrity and think Polanyi offers more solid grounds for the effort than a Hayek or any other Austrian economist.

I stand with Polanyi on these grounds of human action:

In the wide fields of public argument each participant has to interpret day by day the existing custom in light of his own conscience.

Christ, of course, didn't live in a democratic age, where public argument could speak effectively to temporal powers. But as we see in Paul's speech at the Areopagus, the forms of such public argument were emerging. And I believe that the principles with which Christ left us are necessary and sufficient--and indeed causal--to our own age. Nevertheless, we mustn't tie them too closely with political action, for it was not the market but the state to which Christ referred when he proclaimed that his kingdom was not of this world.

Another Fall

After writing my post on original sin this morning it strikes me that I have also fallen from those nice manners of Southern ladies that my mama tried to teach me: That the subjects of religion, politics, and money don't make for polite dinner conversation! Seems that those are the most intriguing topics of all, and we're hitting them all here! What a great place is this blog-world, where new civilities and manners can be worked out. Thanks to all my interlocutors!

The Radical Business of Original Sin

I'm picking up the thread from the comments to the previous post, where Gerry has made some provocative observations. He writes:

There is no "original sin" in any Bible I know of, just a story about a fall from grace. If man's original state is not in grace, then just where did we fall from?

Yes, the Fall was certainly from a state of original grace, and the term "original sin" was Augustine's neologism. But Paul himself says that "In Adam all die" (1 Cor 15:22) The point being that we are all marked by sin and that we are unable to work our way back to the Garden.

I like J. I. Packer's note on this business:

It may be fairly claimed that the Fall narrative gives the only convincing explanation of the perversity of human nature that the world has ever seen. Pascal said that the doctrine of original sin seems an offense to reason, but once accepted it makes total sense of the entire human condition.

We can arrive back in the state of grace only through Grace itself, and interestingly we return not to a garden but to a city. So divine history does entail the working out of how we learn to live well with one another, and in the Christian tradition, Christ is the great magister vitae.

However, the dismissal of all earthly authority, as Gerry seems to endorse, is not possible in the Christian tradition, since the church is itself the Body of Christ. The richness of the Christian faith leaves us here not only with the Spirit of Life to work in and through us, but also through the mystery of the union of Christ and the Church enjoins us to attend to the needs of the body as well. And to unite ourselves in community under One Head. Christians do not agree on the earthly form this One Head takes (pope, presbytery, metropolitan, etc), but we are enjoined to submit ourselves to church authority as well as to the authority of the Holy Spirit. I just bought Bonhoeffer's Life in Community. Will be intersting to see what light it sheds on these matters.

But back to the bottom line: I think the Christian tradition offers us a rich, living, and sufficient religious paradigm. And yet there is work for us to do. I deeply appreciate the following observation of Dallas Willard, in The Divine Conspiracy:

What right and left have in common is that neither group lays down a coherent framework of knowledge and practical direction adequate to personal transformation toward the abundance and obedience emphasized in the New Testament, with a corresponding redemption of ordinary life. What is taught as the essential message about Jesus has no natural connection to entering a life of discipleship to him.

Willard then goes on to expose the shorcomings of both the right's "atonement as the whole story" gospel and the left's "religion as social ethics" gospel and to diagnose the situation thus:

And so we have the result noted: the resources of God's kingdom remain detached from human life. There is no gospel for human life and Christian discipleship, just one for death or one for social action. The souls of human beings are left to shrivel and die on the plains of life because they are not introduced into the environment for which they were made, the living kingdom of eternal life.

The remainder of the book presents a quite fresh and radical re-reading of the Sermon on the Mount. I highly recommend it.

Public Benefit

Bill Schambra points me to a story he finds of interest "because we have a major apologist for the plutocratic exploiters of the masses editorializing in favor of a decision that protects small community against . . . well, plutocratic exploitation of the masses. Another category scrambler for your friends at GiftHub."

The more troubling category scrambler is that creative shift from "public use" to "public benefit" argument that created the trouble in the first place.

This is a great example of why we need to take care when presuming "benefit" and to be on guard when beneficence is justified on the grounds of "public" interest.

Poletown's Revenge
Wall Street Journal
August 3, 2004; Page A10

It must come as cold comfort to the citizens of Poletown, who back in 1981 had their homes taken away from them by the city of Detroit and bulldozed for a car factory. But the Michigan Supreme Court has finally stated the obvious: What's good for General Motors wasn't so good for the people -- and it sure didn't justify violating their "sacrosanct" Constitutional property rights.

Though Friday's decision comes nearly a quarter-century after an earlier Michigan Supreme Court cleared the way for Detroit to condemn the homes, churches, schools and hospitals of Poletown on behalf of a Cadillac plant, it's hard to overstate the significance of this reversal. By expanding the justifications for eminent domain seizures to include "economic development," the earlier decision not only ushered in the destruction of a neighborhood. It set a woeful precedent that continues to embolden unseemly coalitions of private developers and tax-hungry municipalities using government powers to take other people's land.

Friday's decision was unanimous. The lead opinion put it this way: "Poletown's 'economic benefit' rationale would validate practically any exercise of the power of eminent domain on behalf of a private entity. After all, if one's ownership of private property is forever subject to the government's determination that another private party would put one's land to better use, then the ownership of real property is perpetually threatened by the expansion plans of any large discount retailer, 'megastore,' or the like."

Exactly. Remember, we're not talking about a public highway or bridge. To the contrary, today we have governments taking land from Peter because they'd rather Paul have it. In the Michigan case, Wayne County was fighting to condemn the property of a handful of owners after they refused to sell land the county wanted to use for a business and technology park.

In one sense you can hardly blame the planners. Once the Poletown case shifted the test from "public use" to "public benefit," it put any limits on eminent domain on a slippery slope. State and local governments all across America have been happily sliding down it ever since -- and citing Poletown as their justification. The Institute for Justice reckons that between 1998 and 2002 some 10,000 private properties were either taken by or threatened with eminent domain on behalf of other private parties.

for entire article see WSJ