See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, then you will live and increase and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.
Yesterday (13 Feb 2011) was the sixth Sunday of Epiphany. Every Church of England, and every Roman Catholic, Christian will have heard this passage from Deuteronomy 30. It refers exclusively, to Israel, telling you that you are the people who entered this land and must possess it. But by extension it refers to you in the United States and every other place you live. This passage tells me who I am, for we Christians understand this promise for ourselves, discovering our inclusion on this entirely exclusive basis. So Christians in Britain have understood this to be our permission to form a sovereign nation under law and so to live well together. And on the basis of this faith, held by many generations over many centuries a culture has grown, and on the back of it, a law, a polity and a nation. This gospel has created a political culture that gives us the freedom of conscience, rule of law and conception of property that makes for a dynamic economy and prosperity.
I call heaven and earth to witness that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live?
Choose life ? that sounds easy. Who would choose anything else? The British and Europeans and all the societies that have devolved from them have, more or less, chosen life and prosperity. They have been able to do so because the covenant with Abraham and Israel came to us gentiles in the gospel and as a result of the long presence of Christians among them, British and Europeans have understood this promise for themselves. Our predecessors have made this choice for us, and as a result we have enjoyed this life and prosperity. We have to ask how we may continue to take that path so that we and our descendants may live and prosper. Whatever we do, we may ask one another whether we are making it more or less possible for our descendants to have that same life and prosperity.
Modernity as paganism
Our brief for these discussions has been Covenant, Hope and the Human Future. Hope and a human future depend on covenant, specifically the covenant of God with Abraham and so with Israel. We are interested in this covenant and this religion because we believe it enables us and our descendents to live well.
I think our Jewish-Christian conversations might be more successful if we start in the right place. Religion is not that place. If we start with religion, you have yours, I have mine. You want to talk about football, but I want to talk about cookery. Our tastes are different, and don’t give us any easy conversational openings. What we really want to know is how to live well together. Together, that is the hard bit. What we want is a shared political culture.
The first thing to say is that the human being is an animal; we aspire to be the animal with civilisation, but we have to aspire to this, that is, we have to want to be more than simply creatures of our biology. First, we are pagans. Then we aspire to become more than our tribe can make us and so we desire to be the political animal, the animal who can be civil enough to sustain, not just a tribe but a society and a nation. Westerners are those whose paganism has been held more or less in check by Christian discipleship. It is held back, but hasn?t gone away; when that restraint is taken away, that old Gentile nature emerges again. Jews have never lived in a Christian world: Jews in Europe live in a pagan world with Christian veneer. When Christian discipleship wears thin, it is the pagan you see. Until you make this distinction between pagans and Christians, and see modernity as at least in part pagan, the Jewish conception of Christians is likely to be mistaken and our discussion is skewed from the outset. Of course our political cultures are shaped by religion because they are formed by our hope.
We have attempted to conduct this conversation as though there were just Jews and Christians. But the context in which we both must live is formed by two entirely different religions that represent the contemporary pagan option. Modernity is one of these. Modernity is the way we are all pagans now. It is our default religion. Of course it takes a little effort to conceive of modernity as a religion because it offers us no convenient package of dogma to consider. But this means that it is for Jews and Christians to work out, by deduction from their own dogma, what the effective doctrine of modernity is. Let us have a go.
In the peculiarly modern form, paganism regards man as a single, isolated being without intrinsic relation to his fellow man. Everything is a threat to him; we regard anyone outside the tribe as a threat. In the same way paganism assumes that ultimately there can be only one thing in existence, and so no God can ultimately tolerate anything beside himself. Modernity identified God in this way and got rid of him. God has disappeared because ?Man? has absorbed everything. But by absorbing everything, ?Man? becomes that very same monad god. If you don’t worship the God of Abraham, you get this monad. If you despatch the monad God, you get the monadic modern Individual, and since the world is then full of monad individuals, the monad State must emerge to restrain them.
Since it is not informed by the covenant of God, Modernity finds it difficult to concede the fundamental significance of any person or people. Like any other pagan, they believe that they are on their alone, and the world is a violent place and, as a result of their fears, the world is indeed violent. The pagans who imagine God in this way cram themselves into the small dimensions of the idol they construct, jettisoning responsibility and freedom in order to do so. Modernity is only able to conceptualise Christianity in terms similar to itself, as though it were a deism, and thus as a form of submission to fate, in which God is a unit of infinite will, or the infinite will is god; voluntarism and occasionalism determine the metaphysics. But Christianity holds out before us a destiny characterised by freedom, enabled by the covenant of God with Israel.
But Western societies now assume that their freedom needs no continuing relationship to their history or to that covenant. A cultural self-abjuration, the result of a great ingratitude and self-reviling, is directing public policy against the faith that generated our inherited culture. Ideological Moderns want to cut themselves off from those relationships and achieve the universal through the reduction of particularities. The West is dominated by this ostensibly non-religious but thoroughly ideological monism which drives this great levelling and particularity-eradicating project. Christians and, I have always assumed, Jews are here to ask whether this phenomenon of will-and-power is turning into our de facto deity, and so to warn us that the claims that modernity makes on us are cultic.
The modern misconception of God and consequent reduction of man becomes an offence when they attempt to push others, Jews and Christians included, into that same shape. When moderns insist that this present form is the only form that there may ever be, they set themselves against whatever they cannot control and so against any future that is not the mere continuation of the present. Idolatry is to give yourself to what, being a merely partial truth, has a present but no future.
The responsibility of Israel to the world
For Christians, Jews are the people who represent the question of the faithfulness of God to his promises and therefore put the question of the future. So I do not understand my colleagues when they suggest that the identity of Israel is no concern of Gentiles, or that Christian interest in it is some kind of intellectual take-over bid. Christians ask these questions about the relationship of covenant and future, and God’s faithfulness and so of Israel?s vindication before the Gentiles. Don’t take them as some kind of power-play. If Christians warn you that Western societies are no longer Christian, if ever they were, why not believe them? When you see the gentiles deserting the restraint of Christianity and reverting to paganism again, why not say that this is what they are doing? Is it not Israel?s vocation to warn all cultures that they will be destroyed if they let their idolatry rage out of control? So why not tell the heathen that they are sending their worship in the wrong direction and that their idolatry prevents them from discovering what it is to be human? When did you decide that the concept of the ?heathen? was anachronistic? Was it when you dropped the doctrine of election? Any Jewish discussion of the covenant that makes no reference to the contemporary actuality of idolatry seems untruthful and without compassion. The modern particularity-eradication project does not mean that modern European political culture treats Israel just like any other nation: it identifies Israel quite differently from any other nation, as you know.
Israel lives in the world, and we Gentiles are that world in which Israel lives. Minimally, the state of Israel lives in the world of international politics. Every nation can notice that Israel lives well, and ask how it does so. It does not live as her neighbours do, in political cruelty and economic misery. It represents political and economic opportunity, as every nation not bent on self-destruction must see. So when the foreign policy of my government appears to hold Israel responsible for all the griefs of Arab world, you have to call this what it is ? British political culture in decay. Modern monism, which is that same old paganism re-appearing, has cast off its inherited Christian moral and intellectual capital, and as a direct result it losing the ability to engage in political encounter with those it cannot control and so it fails to recognise the one civil society in Middle East.
We can talk to one another because we are part of the community of nations, and for much of the time we don’t need to refer to religion at all. We can say that it is the vocation of every people to rule themselves just as far as they can. We can try to persuade our neighbours to rule themselves well, and so to be civil. We suggest that our particular way of ruling ourselves works, and sustains civil society best in this place and time. So it is the vocation of the nation of Israel to form its own state, and build up and defend its civil life, and the contemporary state of Israel can and does show that it sustains civil society here and now. It is a vibrant society, which builds the democratic institutions that enable individuals to exercise responsibility and to generate prosperity for themselves, and not only for citizens of Israel but for others too. But it is surrounded by those that seem unable to build their own civil societies. It therefore has to ask its neighbours whether it is their religious and political ideology that makes it impossible for considerations of common good to emerge and for those societies to become civil.
Islam is the explicit theist form of the monism that dominates the Middle East. It is another articulation of the Gentile form of life, of man-without-God, shrunk to a unit of will, and unable to affirm creation and his fellow creature as good. It shares its metaphysics of voluntarism and occasionalism with modernity. Like modernity it is an ideological form of the God who admits no covenant and recognise no equal conversation partner. Confronted by the world he did not make and cannot love, the monist ?god?, turns his frustration against one particular people, and you have the honour of being that people. Islam is explicitly directed against Israel, and indeed regards itself as having superseded Israel. You should recognise this, but how to reply to it?
Theological analysis of Islam as political culture enables us to keep the conversation civil. Since they do not acknowledge the covenant of God with Israel or the doctrine derived from it man is made in the image of God, Modernity and Islam have the utmost difficulty in allowing the dignity of the Other. Both are reluctant to concede the room in which civility and individual freedom and responsibility can emerge. They do not take up the challenge of new encounters with people from outside the tribe, in a secular sphere that cannot controlled, and so only a very stunted civil society and economy appears. You can ask questions about Islam?s ability to create nations and civil societies, ask whether it can allow a middle-class to emerge and can ever permit its adherents definitively to put civil strife behind them. Ask your Muslim neighbours to convert to Judaism. You find this thought too ludicrous? Then content yourselves with asking your Muslim neighbours why they are so politically backward. What curse are they under?
Christianity free-rides on Israel and grateful. Islam free-rides on Israel and is enraged . The difference between this thanksgiving and that rage is the difference between civilisation and reversion to tribalism. Westerners have to know that their inherited, Christian, culture enables an entirely different degree of civility than has ever emerged under Islam. But the Western self-hatred articulated by ideological Modernity finds a counterpart in the resentment of the West articulated by Islam. In London these two forms of resentment and mutual incomprehension seem to have reached a deal. Islam can have the future if modernity can hold onto the present just a little longer.
Pagan man is in misery. It is not kind to regard him any other way. You do that by telling the Gentiles that the monist God is a killer. Sophisticated modern atheism is no refuge from him. The only way to disengage ourselves from the monist phenomenon is to exorcise the monist God by worshipping the God who has made a covenant. Only the God of the covenant enables man to be the civil animal, only his worship sustains our more or less civil global polity.
We owe our civilisation to Israel. If we do not value that civilisation about all others, and insist that it is preferable to all others, we are an enemy to ourselves and to everyone around us. For civilisation is fragile and precious. You only have to whittle away at central cultural pillars like marriage for a few decades and your society will suffer a loss of confidence that will translate quickly into economic and political collapse. It is the responsibility of the one God-worshipping assembly, Jews and Christians alike, to identify as the various ways in which the man of modernity subjects himself to the undeclared gods of modernity, and by which we return to the collectivism, totalitarianism and tribalism which are always just beneath the skin. The issue of Israel is never just about Israel but always about Westerners too. No Israel, no West.
So in my outrageous, imperialistic Christian way I commend to you the doctrine of the election of Israel. This people is holy: the presence of God is there, with them, and so they are the presence of God. This is what Christology secures. Through them, we discover that the truth about man is that God is with him. God regards man as his companion and friend; God is guarantor of man?s otherness from God, and of otherness of every human being from every other as of the possibility of their communion and society.
Israel points to what all mankind will be, and as this holy community, in some hidden way is already what all mankind will be. Talk about the covenant and the future requires a concept of the purpose and orientation of life ? a teleology. If you don’t like the concepts of witness or mission you are going to have to come up with something very similar. You could deploy what Christians would call an ecclesiology, that is, that Israel is the holy community, drawn apart from the world, in order to point to the world to something that it doesn’t yet have.
In her worship Israel names the right God. Worship of the God of the covenant is the one fundamental political and civil act. Gentiles can only withhold their worship from the God of Israel by giving themselves to another divinity. If they do that, they do not flourish or become what they could become. That holy assembly of Israel, and the Church, those Gentiles added to her, is the presence here of the future, and this future-orientation is what has created Western civilisation. I don’t see how you get Western civilisation without this promise that man may be more than he presently is.
My sermonic form with bible and lectionary must have been a disappointment to you academic sophisticates. I mean only that worship of the God of Israel, in which each generation receives this covenant for itself, is the one fundamentally civil and political act. It is intrinsic to the public task of Israel, as of the Church, to name the idols, so to restrain the power of lawlessness which otherwise threat our societies and every society, and hold God to the promise of our deliverance from them. This is not only the best thing you can do for your society and for your descendants, but it is the best thing you can do for mine.
It looks to me as though Britain and Europe are on the way to one big Ash Wednesday and one long Lent. If there is life and prosperity ahead, there is a fair amount of death and adversity to endure first. If European societies emerge from that long passion, it will be because they have been preserved by the leaven of faithful Jewish and Christian communities. God has made a covenant with a promise. I suppose that this is the one thing that makes Gentiles interested in Jews. We want to see if Israel?s God can keep his word. Everything hangs on this promise. Will humanity survive? Will God be faithful? For that we will have to wait and see.
