Month: May 2006

The Oxford Dominicans have been enjoying more publishing success as they have cleared out the desk of the great Herbert McCabe O.P. (that’s Order of Preachers, Thomas Aquinas’s Dominican teaching order). Herbert McCabe taught without bothering too much about publication, but a crucial work that he did send to the publishers is ‘Law, Love and Language’.

Here Herbert McCabe shows us that ethics is about all human action and interaction, and that we are intrinsically in conversation, all our action is response to others, and this economy of response determines our environment too. There is no split here between nature and culture (between ‘is’ and ‘ought’). There is no particular need to attribute anything here to Aquinas or Wittgenstein, for McCabe is simply saying that we are not disembodied beings isolated from another in an inert or neutral or hostile world. McCabe’s argument is simply good Christian theology, so he shows that we are not only embodied, but social and linguistic beings too. McCabe’s version of ethics as all human action is therefore very much bigger than the usual accounts of morality investigated through a small number of difficult moral problems. Herbert McCabe replaces our modern dualist account of language and life (for every thing, a word timelessly exists, so language is simply the correspondence of word to thing) with a more supple dynamic (‘aristotelian’) account which allows that what we do really alters who we are, what there is and how we relate to it. What we think of things and how we name them is not just the (post-)modern power game of the individual. We inherit and inhabit our social world along with how we think of it, as we live and interact in interlocking sets of language-speakers and communities. This deflates the (post-) modern Cartesian view which makes naming an act of power by the individual who is above all relationship and responsibility. The effect of his book is to show how in hock we are to the disembodying pull of Cartesian thought, for which turns we are essentially a demonic eye that hovers above the world. In other words, McCabe has recovered important aspects of theological anthropology and the doctrine of creation.

I’ll post some snippets from Law, Love and Language. You’ll thank me.

By understanding theological discourse as a church practice determined by the salvific-economic mission of the Holy Spirit in doctrina and the core practices, we overcome the false alternatives between freedom and being bound, between theology being self-determined or being externally determined. Only in the Holy Spirit and in genuine poeisis of communion does theology as a church practice participate in God’s liberum arbitrium [freedom]. Only by remaining bound to God’s economy of salvation does it step into the ‘freedom of the children of God’, becoming thus a discipline commensurate with its object. For only within its distinct pathos does it become capable of truth.

The ecclesial koinonia is to be understood as a soteriological work of the Holy Spirit grounded as such in the communion of the triune God, a communion which through its own presence engages its salvific activity in the koinonia and indeed binds itself to the koinonia by beginning to draw the latter into the divine life. The ‘other’ side of the church as the work of the Holy Spirit is also that the triune God has bound his communion to the ecclesiastical koinonia … In its pathos the church is the actualizing agent of the salvific-economic mission of Christ and of the Holy Spirit. In this sense the church needs to be understood precisely as the public of the Holy Spirit.

Reinhard Hütter Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice

You could try Hütter’s more accessible Bound to be Free: Evangelical Catholic Engagements in Ecclesiology, Ethicsm and Ecumenism. It is not only state of the art, but it is full of joy.

But what if the Church which hears (the Ecce Homo) begins to forget the absence?…worse than the world’s ignorance of Jesus’s absence…is the Church’s failure to proclaim the absence clearly, to witness in its every act of worship that it really is ‘looking for his coming again with power and great glory’. Not the ascension itself but the ascension and parousia together, constitute the Ecce Homo! which in the eucharist is heard and repeated. Martyrdom, as the Apocalypse teaches, is the truest manifestation of Jesus’s heavenly session. A doctrine of his departure that is not a doctrine of his impending return is a doctrine capable of converting absence into presence without martyrdom.

Douglas Farrow Ascension and Ecclesia.

Farrow’s book is in my top ten. I haven’t yet found anything like it, and it informed a great deal of The Eschatological Economy. Andrew Burgess The Ascension in Karl Barth or Gerrit Scott Dawson Jesus Ascended: The Meaning of Christ’s Continuing Incarnation are more introductory, and Burgess has a chapter on Farrow.