11 Man as Single

8/3/2019 11 Man as Single

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11. The Singularity of the Person

The True Son and the False

The true Son does not reject, or disengage from, any other person. The Son is in always ingood company, and opens that company to us. The false Son flees relationship, is turned inon himself, but without company is unable to become truly human. The person is defined byhis relationship with others; the individual is determined to rise above all his relationships.

1. The True Son

The Son confesses the Father

Jesus Christ is the true Man, who is in relationship with the Father and with all otherpersons. All others are in relationship with one another through his relationship with them.

Jesus Christ only hears the voice of the Father, and no other. Jesus Christ made the goodconfession (1 Timothy 6.12-13). He confessed the Father and was content to receive his

whole identity from him. He is the Son of the Father, and as this Son, he makes the Fatherwho he is.

Christ made the good confession before Pontius Pilate: Jesus made no rely and Pilate wasamazed (Mark 15.5). Jesus has the power to withhold his word. He has the power to speakor not to speak. Pilate does not have the power of Jesus name, and so has no power overJesus. He does not know who he is, and so does not know where his authority is sourcedfrom, and what power it has. Pilate does not know who he is up against. Pilate representsCaesar and Rome. Christ resists and overcomes the whole company of the soldiers ofRome, and does not without being provoked into using anything that Rome could understandas force.

The Son did not give this recognition to any other, and deferred to no other authority. Hewithheld what every other man had conceded. The Son called on no other name, and paidnorespect to any other entity, no matter how exalted. He did not recognize Nature, orNecessity, or Fate, or to any other foundation. The Son was able to see through all worldlyoffers of support as attempts to control him and separate him from the Father. He fends offevery offered form of earthly respectability, support and covering. He forewent publicrecognition. When threatened by them, the Son did not rely on the support provided by anyother relationship.

Christ Son was tempted but withstood. He refused all the status we extended him. He tookfrom us nothing that would put him in our debt or our power. Everything we had he countedas partial and insufficient and so as temporary and mortal, and thus as death. He took only

from the Father, and accounted only what the Father gave him, regardless of whether thisappeared to be life and glory or suffering and death.

And yet the Son accepted the proper discipline (Hebrews 5.8, 12.9-10). He was obedient tothe prophets and patriarchs, learning from them how to suffer and resist the resistance of theGentiles and the aggressors, and so acted according to the Scriptures.The Son went downthrough all tiers of relationship into the place with an absence of relationship. He made theplunge, down through all layers of being into non-being and death, knowing that God wouldnot let go of him. Therefore God raised him from the dead.


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In Christ all created and material things can properly be regarded as the means to bring allothers in relationship with Christ. The Christians follow Christ away from material wealth,down the ladder to what in worldly terms as poverty. In the economics of the kingdom,spiritual promotion involves material demotion. We opt out of the economy of Caesar, whichis denominated in terms of power and money, and thus requires the subordination ofpersons into impersonal substance, and into the economy of God, in which living personsare riches.

Christ is building the household of the church. Every member of the body of Christparticipates in this work. Each one should be careful how he builds (1 Corinthians 3) Whereour work is good, it is truly his work and truly ours. Where it is not yet good, it is not his work,it will not survive and will prove not to have the truth of us either.

His work will be shown for what it is, the fire will test the quality of each man's work. If it isburned up he will suffering loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping throughthe flames(1 Corinthians 3).

Our Redemption

Adoptive ParenthoodWe are called to be godparents, whotake on other people and make them members of ourhousehold. They are to be our children and we are to be their parents and sponsors. We arehere to lend to them and invest in them, and as often as it necessary, to bail them out. Howmany times should we be prepared to bail them out? Seven times seventy (Matthew).

The rich young ruler is told to give all his money to the poor. His question is What must I doto inherit eternal life?, and the reply that he receives is:

Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasurein heaven; then come, follow me(Luke 18.18-22).

Perhaps he is to do this over a lifetime or perhaps Is he being told to do this all at once, and

reduce himself to penury right away.

The Christian community participates in Christs work of redeeming the poorout of theexploitative relationships in which they are held. It has to buy them because their presentmasters will not otherwise let them go. We have to find the financial and political means toinduce masters to release those servants whom they hold in abusive relationships of debtbondage. The Christian therefore has to cash in everything he have in the worldly economy.We have to buy ourselves out of one economy (apprenticeship) and into another.

We are transferring our stock and holdings from these worldly currencies to the permanentcurrency of the Lord. In the course of this transition period we may get rid everything wehave held in the old currency of earthly glory. Our citizenship in the coming kingdom

depends on our giving up reliance on citizenship in this present city and in the reputation thatour peers in this present generation can give us. Our investment in the future kingdom maylook reckless spending to our peers.

Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wearout, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted(Luke 12.33).

God has chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to inherit the kingdom hepromised (James 2.5)

We are transferring our stock and holdings from our short-lived worldly currencies to thepermanent currency of God. According to the parable of the dishonest manager is that weshould cash out of one, partial economy, that of material things, and into another, the full,which is that of persons.


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His master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. Itell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it isgone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes(Luke 16.8-9).

We should cash in your savings and use every worldly resource to expend on them so theyknow themselves spoiled and treasured, to make yourself their host and them yourdependants and so make them your children in the faith and you will be their father in thefaith and they will be your savings and your investment and your deposit and when you areexhausted they will take you into their house and look after you in your old age because theyrealise that you are their father in the faith. Make friends just as Christ has made himselfyour friend.

The people of this world know how to use wealth to make friends and alliances. We shoulddo what they do. We should use material wealth to gain friends for ourselves, so that when itis gone they will have become our wealth. Then we will be able to present them to the Lordas our harvest and so, with them behind us, we will be welcomed into eternal dwellings(Luke 16.9). We must give and not be given back.

Do not invite your friends. If you do they may invite your back, and then you willberepaid(Luke 14.12).

We must not hoard the wrong sort of wealth. We must not harvest the health out of thepeople, but rather must harvest and gather the people themselves. We embrace the costsof bearing others with glee, and get on with the work of paying back everything we owe. Inthis way we are being poured out like a drink offering.

Sacrifice and Spiritual WorshipPresenting people holy to the LordThe work of Christians is spiritual, and it is worshipand sacrifice. The Body of Christ lifts upthe world to God. They may do this for they are themselves God's offering to the world. Godis a cheerful giver, and cheerful givers share in Gods joy. They are the aroma of life, afragrant offering, acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God (2 Corinthians 9.12). The gift isacceptable according to what one has (2 Corinthians 9.12). Every gift is credited to youraccount (Philippians 4.17). I am already being poured out like a drink offering (2 Timothy4.6).

Christ feeds his people on his own work. We too must work with our own hands (1Corinthians 4.12, Ephesians 4.28, 1 Thessalonians 4.11) so that we always have somethingto give, for we cannot give them what other men have worked for. The command to stopbringing meaningless offerings (Isaiah 1.13) means that we can give what has cost usnothing, gifts which are therefore not really from us.

3. Restitution and RestorationRecovering the Wholeness of the BodyMan in Christ is a whole being. His integrity is restored to him, the internal civil way thatwaged between his members (Romans 7) is ended and his divisions are healed. Hiswholeness comes to him and it comes through the spiritual service of all other members ofthe Body of the Church.

The body is holy. Within it all parts receive their work and dignity. Those parts of the bodythat seem to have no great significance must be treated with special honour (1 Corinthians12.22). But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honour tothose who have so far received none. Christ needs to be all in all before the most humblecan find their place in this totality. Any lesser totality would leave out some of the mosthumble, and this would make it a false totality. Only when the whole body is present willeven the most modest parts find their role and receive their honour.


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this sin in terms of debt or guilt depends on whether we want to emphasise its short- or long-term character.

Sin is against the creature of God and therefore against God. God considers prolongedoffences against his creatures to be aimed at him. Sin is not just a something weunaccountably find within us. It is not a private matter between God and ourselves. We

withhold from others what God has given us to with the express purpose of handing on tothem. It is because God takes their side that he intervenes and declares that this action ofours is against him. God takes their side against us.

There are the haves and the have-nots, the insiders and the outsiders. Salvation consists inthe have-nots being given what they do not have, and in the outsiders being brought in. butthe haves also have to be saved. They may be saved by being re-connected to the have-nots.

Sin is not a matter of nature or cosmology as the pagans believe. Sin is our failure to passon what we have been given. We do not consider other people our people. Our sin islistlessness and lack of love. Our sin is against one another. It is against God because we

withhold from them what God intends for them. We come between them and God, betweenthe little ones and their protector. We have usurped God.

Cathartic DivestmentReimbursing What We Have TakenOn the Day of the Lord we have to be sure that we have nothing in our possession that doesnot belong to us. Whatever we have that does not belong to us will bear witness against uswhen the Lord arrives. We should check ourselves regularly to make sure that nothing hasattached itself to us, and that we are clean. If we extracted our wealth from the poor, it wasus who made them poor. Their poverty then denied them the means of making their offering,and receiving their renewal with all God's people. If we allow them to be pushed out of thebody and into the wilderness, their impurity is not the result of their act but of our failure to

provide aid. When a man sees his donkey has fallen into well, does he not go to its aid?(Mark)

We have to get rid of whatever does not belong to us. At the year end we have to spendwhatever remains in each account, or we will lose it. The single payment (interest andcapital) that God demands is that you turn up, that you come and visit in person two or threetimes a year. God does not demand anything that would mean that we have to go to work toearn alien currency in order to pay alien creditors in the currency and on the terms that theyset. He is not looking for any payment that can be denominated by any currency, but he islooking for some token that is truly your own, and that communicates something of yourself.

Zachhaeus offers restitution. Look, Lord here and now I give half of my possessions to the

poor and if I have cheated anyone out of anything I will pay back four times the amount(Luke 19). He is referring to the command to pay back double what has been taken (Exodus22.3-9 and Deuteronomy 21.17).

We must ask ourselves whether we are in possession of anything that belongs to Caesar,and which possession and employment of made us functionary of Caesar? Have you gotanything that belongs to some foreign force or relates to its ideology (see Numbers andwarning against Nababholding on the idols of other nations). Eating food presented toidols (1 Corinthians 9).

Through the event of baptism and the process of sanctification, which is itself a process ofdivestment and reinvestment, of redemption and re-integration, the gospel turns us from

individuals to persons.


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PART TWO

The Son of No Father is the False Son

The Modern and Pagan Account of Man and his History

We identified the chief components of the pagan life as self-advancement, team-building andescapism. We said that the pagans understand that man is alone against the world, againstall other men. Plato saw the universe as totality, and provided a total theory of the universe.There is nothing outside what there already. Change is an aberration: all change will behalted, reversed, and timelessness restored. The Greeks believe either that everything istimeless, or that everything as moving. These two positions are not very distant from oneanother. In either case none of this change is purposeful. It is all pointless. Man has to makehis own destiny, and make it against other men and against nature, though he is eventuallydefeated and re-absorbed. Above the gods is Fate, or Necessity. Fate is absolutelyunchanging, impersonal: it cannot be changed or argued with. It is not concerned with us.The modern account of time is largely owed to this (Greek, pagan) account of Fate: time is

Fate. In the modern account time is absolutely unchanging. It cannot be changed ornegotiated or argued with.

Every culture, and the philosophical tradition that encapsulates that culture, is a course ofeducation, and therefore a project of human formation. It is not merely a description of astatic state of affairs, but is itself an orientation and a project. Like any endeavour, itdemands our effort. But in the Christian account, God can be negotiated with and arguedwith. We can address him, protest to him and ask him for what we want. Our world, time andspace are acts of his hospitality. We can take up this course of formation or we can reject itas we wish. Our freedom grows as we progress on that course of formation. But we canattempt to be free without Christian course of formation, but this is then a freedom in theabsence of others, and maintained against them. To the degree that man gave up his

apprenticeship with Christ he showed himself to be the unready son and to the extent thiswas affirmed and enforced by intellectual political leaderships, they revealed themselves tobe the false son.

4. Kant as Modern

From the seventeenth century Western thought began to separate the spiritual from thematerial and physical. A new emphasis on the transcendence of God unmediated by theChristian gospel pushed God away to the top of the cosmos and into Arian and deistirrelevance. God was no longer concerned with creation and was held never to interrupt theworking of what was understood to be the self-regulating system of nature.

Isaac Newton (1643-1727) is representative that nature is a closed system of cause-and-effect. God is to remain outside this world-system and thought to be above concern for us oris reduced to a vague conception of providence. On this basis, if God showed any concernfor this creation he would be confounding its autonomy and perfection.

The Enlighteners present us with the claim that there has been a general move from religionand superstition to secularity and reason. History represents a slow growth of man fromprimitive to mature. Man has progressed through stages of mediated knowledge, expressedin narrative and particular practices, towards a more general and universal knowledge.

The Autonomy of NatureMan who is not prepared to heed the call of God to be his creature, and so not determinedby God for freedom, is determined by default by Nature. What in theory is attributed tonature is in practice a matter of the exercise of power and the practice of that hold thatexercise of power within limits.


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We could call this the naturalisation of ethics and politics. The individual and his propertywas not longer understood as project in which others are involved, but as static, and need ofdefence from others. We have to negotiate minimum rules and standards for commerce, andsuch minima were referred to as natural law. Such natural law provided a notional global

framework. But natural law assumes that biology settles our questions for us, as thoughbiology determine morality.

Seventeenth century political philosophers treated self-preservation as the fundamental rightand on its basis erected the structures of natural jurisprudence along with a minimalistnatural law, the bare obligation not to harm anyone unnecessarily. But nature cannot givelaws, and since only law can give rights, nature cannot give rights. Nature cannot set uslimits that bind us, but only represent to us challenges.

The Reduction of ManChristianity was able to remain in conversation with Platos conception is that it all worksbecause it is drawn forward (upward) by goodness, truth and love in a common

understanding of paideia. Secularisation gives up on the concept of paideia. Plato andAristotle had provided the complex conceptuality for this account. Platos understandingconcept that everything is moved by love gave way to a darker and more pagan conceptionin which things are constantly in conflict with one another and life is a state of war. Man wasno longer understood as a creature nested in nature or as work in progress. Aristotlesanthropology of man's rational and social being was replaced with an epicurean conceptionof man as a passion-driven self-destructive being. So in the seventeenth century intellectualsturned from the issue of how to build society and form persons to the more modest issue ofhow to prevent social conflict.

But from the seventeenth century we can see a number of conceptual separations: the firstis the separation of the business of government from the greater project of human formation.

Governors ceased to be accountable for the formation and education of their people. Thesecond separation is between government and self-government. If we are no longerunderstood as essential responsible for ourselves. Our rulers have to step in to provide forus the self-control we cannot manage for ourselves. If government compensates for the self-control we don't have, our self-control does indeed wither and is compensated for bygovernment. The third is the separation of government from the discipline of the good, andthe separation of the discourse of desire from the discourse of virtue and excellence.

A further separation was that between into two spheres of religion and politics. Politicsdeals with the outer world in which we meet and exchange, while religion covers the innerworld of the heart and the deep, essential, unchanging identity of the individual. Religionmeant whatever either did not impinge on the public square, or whatever it was deemed

should not impinge on it. Politics had to keep religion out: politics had to defend itself againstreligion.

Government Without Self-GovernmentIf human nature is violent, it has to be controlled. Government the control, which for the sakeof society, has to be imposed on passions of man. But if we assumed that man is alwaysviolent and that his nature does not change, government cannot set out to help man grow tomaturity.

The enlighteners want self-control without external control. But because they have discardedthe means whereby we can learn self-control and teach one another self-control. But in theseventeenth century the schoolmaster see his pupils as unruly, as incapable of making any

progress. He began to despair of making any progress with the project of the education ofhis people. He becomes less a teacher and increasingly a warder. The disappointed


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schoolmaster, adopts an alternative syllabus. The apprenticeship is increasingly restrictedto an elite who are to control the majority, not to form them but only in order to prevent themfrom becoming violent. The apprenticeship gradually ceases to be a Christianapprenticeship, though Christianity continues to represent its content, and increasinglyadopts reductions that make the apprenticeship effectively pagan.

The End of the ApprenticeshipThe understanding of that all knowledge involves an apprenticeship, referred to in theChristian tradition as discipleship, was replaced by an understanding of knowledge as data,immediately available. There is nothing we have to learn from the past and there is noapprenticeship to be served. Now we no longer see law as a course of education, but merelyas restraint, and as unfortunate necessity .

The course of enlightenment then consists of getting rid of mediate (learned) knowledge andsubstituting immediate knowledge, delivered by a universal method which is independent ofits content. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is a chief early representative of the new primacy ofimmediacy and method. The individual must practice a universal scepticism based onassurance about his own existence as thinking and observing mind. The mind and intellect

was separated from the body and sense impressions.

From the seventeenth century the Christian understanding of Christian knowledge asdiscipleship and life started to be replaced by a concept of knowledge as information. Thereis nothing we have to learn from the past and there is no apprenticeship to be served. Weare our own master. It is an affront to suggest that we have to learn from, or be instructedand formed by, anyone other than ourselves. Knowledge is matter of breaking out of allprevious knowledge and experience and discarding it. It is a matter of seeing the objectdirectly, without the help of anyone else. This misunderstands how we know anything. Sincescientists learn from previous generations, and rely entirely on learned practices, principlesand doctrines, it is falsification even of science. The belief grew that unmediated knowledgewas superior. The scientist awarded himself a Gods eye view of anything : he decided thathe knew everything as well as its Creator.

Descartes promoted this disembodied view of knowledge into theory. He regarded us asessentially and purely minds. Our minds can see without the aid of any physical interactionwithout speech, discussion or debate with other people. He rejected the experience ofprevious generations, which the Church terms doctrine.

Some believed that the process of Reformation waited to be completed. Religious, moraland ecclesiastical had made some headway. But the reform all public institutions, politicalpower and life had to be continued. Power and influence had to be removed from the Churchand given to national governments. In restoring the gospel to the people, removing obstaclesof language, comprehension and access, the Reformation also questioned the purpose of

Christian creeds, doctrine, and the public practices of the Christian life. This process ofchallenge of Christian doctrine and leadership continued, and became a larger process ofsecularisation, of attempting to be worldly, without God.

In Britain in the civil war and commonwealth years (1640-1660) the people began to re-discover their voice and to participate in political and theological debate. But with theRestoration of the monarchy in 1660 this freedom of speech came to an end. A political elitedecided that allowing ordinary people to talk about the reform of public Christian life wasdivisive and created civil conflict. Much of the subsequent movement of secularisation, latercalled Enlightenment, started in England with this mixture of anti-clericalism and elite distrustof popular debate of public Christian life.


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Building Society without the Company of GodModern Political Philosophy as Pagan ReplyThe Western tradition is concerned with building a society. The Enlightenment thinkerswanted a return to the Greek or Roman republic. Modern thought is the return of ancientthinkers in the Platonic, Stoic and Epicurean traditions. Platonism resulted in the return of

dualism and the drifting apart of the top from the bottom the universe. Gradually the issuesthat arose from this dualism were greeted as new challenges, and together they encouragethe impression that whole these were new, Christianity was old, even though these pagantraditions were obviously simply the return of some very old ideas, that had never beenentirely absent.

We have two traditions, the Christian and the pagan. But both were stifled from realencounter confrontation by a determination that synthesis is desirable or possible, that truthrequired a mediation between them. Some believed that the Greeks and Romans gave thetruthful account directly accessible to the educated mind, while Christianity represented amerely narrative and illustrated account for the common people.

SecularisationWe have established that we are not dealing with one tradition, the Christian tradition orreligious tradition, that has given way over time to clearer modern secular tradition. Therehas been no general historical move from immaturity to maturity. Those who taught thatthere has been such a move, away from religion and superstition to secularity and reason,we may call enlightenment thinkers, or moderns. We may say that they are telling a story,and a false one at that. That they are telling a story, is a point that must be explicitly made,because they claim that stories are inferior to unmediated (non-narrative) truth.

The seventeenth century saw the beginning of a separation of Christian life in to religion andpolitics. Politics covers broadly the life of the outer world in which we meet and makecontracts. Religion covers the inner world of the heart, the deep, essential, unchangingidentity of the individual. religion meant what was of no public interest and had no publiceffect, and which was not allowed to impinge on politics. Christian teaching was pushed outfrom the public debate into the private sphere. Elites set out to stop people talking aboutpublic life (politics) and doing so in the language they learned from scripture, using the bibleto hold their leaders to account. They distinguished between two sorts of reform outer andinner, political (external and institutional) reform, and internal, personal reform personalpietism of religion of the heart.

Christianity is not for the elite, and the elite are justifiably suspicious of it. The gospel givesthe poor the language by which they can call God, appeal to him to help them and give themwhat their leaders have not given them (resources, justice). To take away the gospel, andthe right to teach it and publicly pass it on, is to deny the poor the name by which they canask for salvation.

Secularisation represents laying down the task of education and paideia and disallowing allthe vocabulary by which it can be debated. Aristotle had provided the complex conceptualityfor this account. From the seventeenth century this gave way to a simpler conceptuality thatmade difficult any discussion of man as creature nested in nature or as work in progress.

From the seventeenth century the Aristotelian anthropology of man's rational and socialbeing was replaced with an epicurean conception of man as a passion-driven self-destructive being. The belief that the will was A voluntarist theology excluded theologicalconceptions of justice from the civil domain. If justice is not the expressed will and commandof God, some other foundation for justice must be found. Philosophers identified justice withnatural law, with the commands of the civil sovereign, and with the contracts and covenantsmade by man, and kept by fear of the consequences of mans own preservation if he brokethem.


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There was a divorce of nature and culture, body and action, the changing concept of religion,cultivation of interiority and story of the disenchantment of the world. Secularisation gives upon political debate and the project of building a society that is content to be led by God.Political debate cannot function within definitions of what is worth doing and bein. g, and sowithout notions of paideia and of the criteria. If these are all ruled as inadmissible, becausethey relate to tradition that are religious, there is no possibility of reasoned debate. If whatwas said in the public sphere was not related to purposes and to our own social and politicalnature, an Aristotelian mode, all that was left was the Stoic cosmology of passions andnatures. The discourse of withdrawal, Stoic and Epicurean indifference (apatheia) to publicaffairs and failure to control our passions, became the mode of discourse of the publicsquare. The language designed for retreat from public responsibility became the wholevocabulary in which politics and public responsibility was debated. Economics is a moraldiscourse disguised as a discussion of nature. In the modern centuries economics becamethe conceptuality in which politics took place.

The Paradoxical Republic of IndividualsThe Return of the Roman Cicero, Stoicism and Natural Law

Now we must consider the Republic of Man without God. The state is the construct of man.Man must build it for himself without God. Man has to put himself beyond God in order to puthimself beyond partisanship and violence. The state cannot come from the generosity ofGod. The republic is the attempt to build society anew. The law is not given, or at least notby God. It to be constructed, by ourselves, without reference to anything outside ourselves.Civilization is corrupting, and that we should abandon the effete and unmanly life in thesmoke of industrialization for the vigorous life of the man who works the land and builds hisown house There is therefore no one to hold the ring between state and individual.

The return of the ancient Roman mind-set of Stoicism, best represented by Cicero and well-suited to the patriotism of Britain and France, the European powers then extending theirpower around the world. Stoicism represents the noble qualities required by patriotism.

Tacitus represents the cultivation of the private disgusted resignation, the cynical, anddisenchanted commentator on political events, who reduces every issue to the question ofwho stands to benefit (cui bono)? The sceptics intended to search for wisdom by riddingthemselves of all their inherited views, all interests and all passion.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Bernard Mandeville are convinced thatmanis bynature, passion-driven and violent. Hobbes replaced the Aristotelian anthropology of man'srational and social being with an epicurean conception of man as a passion-driven self-destructive being. In his Leviathan Hobbes argued for unqualified obedience to a sovereignpower. This represents the return of Thrasymachus view (343c.) that pursuing our ownadvantage is never just because justice consists in promoting the good of other people, infact of promoting the good of the ruler, which is to say the self-interest of that ruler embodied

in his laws. If justice (good action) consists in doing what the ruler lays down in his laws, wewill have to say that it is about promoting someone elses good, not your own.

The republican tradition bases itself in nature. Nature gives us our theology, philosophy andethics. We have a truncated version of Platos belief that so that ultimately human societywill flourish to the extent that it harmonises with the beauty of the movement of the cosmos.

Man who is not prepared to heed the call of God to be his creature, and so not determinedby God for freedom, is determined by default by Nature. What in theory is attributed tonature is in practice a matter of the exercise of power and the practice of negotiations andcontractarianism. We could call this the naturalisation of ethics and politics. Seventeenthcentury political philosophers treated self-preservation as the fundamental right and on itsbasis erected the structures of natural jurisprudence along with a minimalist natural law,the bare obligation not to harm anyone unnecessarily. But nature cannot give laws, andsince only law can give rights, nature cannot give rights. Nature cannot set us limits that bind


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us, but only represent to us challenges. The individual and his property was not longerunderstood as project in which others are involved, but as static, and need of defence fromothers. We have to negotiate minimum rules and standards for commerce, referred to asnatural law. But such natural law is premised on the mistaken belief that nature and ourown biology, answers our questions for us: it is the contradictorily assertion that our freedomis determined.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) saw the cosmos as a harmonious single global-organism andbelieved that every nation and state should be understood in the same way within it. in hisTheological-political TreatiseGod is just another word for the totality of the world of nature.We are back with the biological cosmology of Platos Timaeus. We live inside a single world -organism, a biological-political unity (a single being, a One-and-All (hen kai pan) which healso called God-or-Nature (deus sive natura). We are indistinguishable from the world, andit is indistinguishable from us. Spinoza wants us to see no significance in the great tradition,and in particular in the tradition that we take to be so important, the Scriptures, of thispeople, Old Testament. God has been absorbed into creation. The means by which we canprotest about our masters is lost

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) tells his ruler that he has to be an absolute master and toemploy any means to do so. He must have unquestioning obedience. But Machiavelli avoidsall considerations of what it is that the ruler wants. So how can he know when he has gotwhat he wants? The ruler has no one who can tell him what is genuinely good or worthhaving. Unless he can take advice, and perhaps even discipline from his counselors andfrom the law, a ruler will follow the multitude and his desires will be no more mature thantheirs. If he has other source of criteria, he will chase the same desires and never achieveany greater satisfaction than the multitude does.

But Xenophon (431-355 BC), in Hiero, the master tells his servant how miserable, abasingand servant-like it is to be an absolute master. When you have no one in authority in you,but are entirely your own master, the result is misery, and you have no one to blame forit. Not to be under authority, does not give us the freedom we imagine.

The Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) charted the escape from public into the private andinterior life. His Characteristics of Men and Manners tamed the aristocracy by teaching themthe vocabulary of the inner man. The model for the self-controlled gentleman, was theancient republic of Sparta.

John Locke (1632-1704) argued that Christianity has to be shown to correspond to canonsof reason that are accessible to all (The Reasonableness of Christianity), without attributingany distinct status to the church. He put the natural theology of the distant God before therevealed theology of the gospel, and so demoted all that was distinctive about the Christianand trinitarian doctrine of God. He stepped away from the Nicaean homoousion and the

deist religion that resulted Locke set out was a revived Arianism that thereafter had arenewed public existence with the Socinians, and Unitarians.

Dualism and Gnosticism

Ren Descartes (1596-1650) believes that all previous generations of knowledge (Aristotle)has obscured the beautiful simplicity of truth. In Meditationsand his Discourse on Method,Descartes argues that we have to see behind the veil of all this useless knowledge.Geometry is the new model for all knowledge: knowledge is clear vision of the individualobject directly before you. The philosopher has to remove himself from the distracting fray,cut out all but the most essential concepts and stop his ears. Descartes wants to extractknowledge from the distracting clutter of old concepts. Words spread as much confusion as

clarity so, he believes, we have to go behind words to the wordless.


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Descartes represents the triumph of unmediated (pure) knowledge (and reason) is thetriumph of the paradigm of vision. All knowledge is a form of seeing. Descartes sets out toturn all knowledge that is mediated to us by other authorities into immediate knowledge,which we perceive directly for ourselves. He wants to get rid of the role of other people in ourknowing. How can we have any reliable knowledge while other people are involved? Thismakes knowledge a function of rumour. We have to surmount the obscuring complexity byrising to a higher pure knowledge of pure and direct vision. If we learn the internal self-control we can filter out the distracting noise of crowds and traditions, and attain a directcontemplation of the object for ourselves. The scientist has to achieve a mysticalexperience, which come through abandoning the turbulent and contradictory confusingsense impressions of this world. Descartes method is immediacy, and this method is alwaysindependent of the content. The individual must practice a universal scepticism based onassurance about his own existence as thinking and observing mind. Descartes took over thePlatonist and Plotinus agenda of separating mind from body and intellect from senseimpressions, once again understanding spiritual as ethereal, and putting spirit in oppositionand antagonism to materiality. The task is to release the soul or mind from captivity in thebody. Only the intelligible is really real, and so what is tangible is only apparently real.

The Unaccountable SpectatorThe place we live in is a location in absolute and empty space, and geometry is able to giveits exhaustive description. The world is the inert object available to the immediate view of theobserver. There is no requirement that the observer undergo any apprenticeship or beaccompanied in order to be taught to see. Descartes first promotes God up out of the way,back into a heaven that is sealed behind him, and then the scientist, the eyeball, is made theunchallenged demiurge. He is the real god of this age who can prowl and pry, see andknow everything, and remain unconcerned and above it all.

Descartes has taken the Christian talk of judgment and the forensic account of ourreconciliation and transferred it to man and the world. Man is now the judge, spectator and

critic of all that is before him. The individual is judge and critic of society. And man is judge ofthe world of nature. Descartes raised the autonomous individual, secure in his knowledge ofhimself, and able to look down on the world, both social and natural with his wholepanoptical technology, in detachment, viewing, registering, controlling. Descartes has madethis individual unaccountable, beyond the language of protest.

The scientist, a detached spectator like a single eyeball, became the new demiurge. Ourpersonal identity is imagined as a little man (homunculus) in our head who watches all theinputs arriving to our senses as a spectator in the theatre. The external world does not touchus. We have put ourselves beyond challenge, so within us all is calm and serenity. Bymaking us pure spirit, impassively receiving the impacts of the external sensual world,Descartes has situated us above the animals. We have ceased to be a social political animal

of Aristotles account.

From the seventeenth century it was understood that the soul and the body are opposites.Subsequent development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reduced the upper circleso it appeared to be in repeated danger of total eclipse. Thus the modern epistemologysearches for empirical (that is tangible) verification but it disallows that the intangible canever make things tangible (because it sets them as opposites). We have two spheres, theupper representing heaven and the intellectual realm of unchanging truth, and the lowerrepresenting earth and the realm of material, all that is sensory, empirical and changing. Inthis period we return in many variations to the insurmountable problem of how to get fromthe lower to the upper sphere, to have real unchanging knowledge, of God, or of anythingelse.


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Enlightenment without Definition, Education Without SyllabusThe Western Protestant tradition has not talked about the world, location, place and space,and our role and identity within it. it has avoided metaphysics. It has let all that all bedetermined by a concept of inert nature. The concept of nature is owed in part to theChristian teaching that creation is really given by God so is reliably there for us. It is not a

miasma but allows and invites investigation. But the doctrine of creation has then be reducedto the two concepts of nature and man, which require a third concept to mediate betweenthem.

Another aspect of the Enlightenment is the assumption that whatever is still and timeless ismore primal than anything historical. Narrative had to be replaced by pure and distinct ideas(Descartes) sense impressions (Locke) or fear and passion (Hobbes).

The Enlightenment concentrates on the task of education with new vigour. But it did notallow this education to have any specific content. The Enlighteners saw themselves asfinishing the work of the liberation of man that the Reformers had left unfinished. Nowhowever man had to liberated from the self-estrangement.

If our knowledge of the world does not come from God, it must come from some othersource. The crisis of the source of knowledge. This took the form of the dispute between theempiricists and the intellectualists. The sensualists, of which Epicurus is an example,maintained that the reality of things was to be found solely in the objects of the senses, andthat all other pretended sources of knowledge were fictions.

The second group, Plato as chief example, regarded sensory knowledge as false andasserted that only the understanding can distinguish what was true. Confusion results fromtrying to deduce normative principles from empirical materials (ie intellect from the realm ofsensations). This battle of intellectualism (idealism, metaphysics) and sentimentalism(sensation, science of phenomena, experience) also represented the battle of thoughtversus real life, theory versus practice. The Enlightenment proponents of unaccompanied

reason represent a movement that wanted to escape from the body and from the demandsof the emotions.

Each enlightenment provides a particular view of human nature, an anthropology andpsychology, a particular account of mans relationship with nature and the natural world anda particular ethic, that intends that man fashion himself selves suited to differentlyenvisaged worlds.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) regarded civilisation as loss of innocence, and as anact of violence perpetrated on every individual. The only moral agency is self-expression andthe search for authenticity. The progress of arts and sciences had corrupted human morals,not improved them. We have to teach the child to be wild and so free again, shedding all the

constraints of civilisation.

5. KANT

The thinker who, more than any other, has established our modern context is Immanuel Kant(1724-1804). Kant has made a simple declaration of freedom. He has declared us free fromthe whole tradition and from the apprenticeship it represents. But saying that we are alreadyfree doesnt make it so. It allows that the individual is the unchallenged sovereign, but ineffect this means one individual, or some individuals, over others. Only the few reallyexercise this untrammelled and commanding view over all others, and are able to make allothers the object of their sight and control.

First we must say that Kant is a moral thinker of profound vision. He is looking for a gentlermore cosmopolitan, tolerant, less sectarian world, in which each individual will be treated


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with respect regardless of their culture. We are looking for a world in which arguments arejudged on their merits, in which we can reason with one another and so in which reason issupreme. .

Why should we deal with this important turning point through this German philosopher? Itmight seem easier to discuss the Enlightenment in terms of the English, Scots, French and

Americans and so in terms of Locke, Shaftesbury, Rousseau, Hume, Bentham, Jefferson,Robespierre and John Stuart Mill. But since Kant philosophical work, which has a widerange, and his position in the founding period of the German university makes hisprogramme stand out more starkly. Kants own writings made a profound impact onnineteenth century thought, culture and politics, and on the German form of the universitywhich came to re-shape the university, and the arrangement of sciences, in Britain andAmerica.

Unity and New Division of ManThe thinkers whom we refer to and the intellectual phenomenon we call the Enlightenmentwere hopeful that man was progressing from lower to higher, from fables to clear knowledgethrough concepts and measurement. Some thinkers, such as David Hume, were also

sceptical about this, and some these are commonly referred as Romantics. Neverthelessthe hope is that man will discover the true underlying principle that unites all human thoughtand endeavour, and which unites the intellect and emotions of man (connecting head andbody), and which connects each man to all others (bringing about peace betweencommunities and nations). Man will find the unity of all things, and no longer be estranged,from them or from himself.

All earlier thinkers were trying to reason from man to the world and from man to God. Theywere trying to establish the path of rationality that takes us from us to the world and to God.Kant is the pinnacle, but at the moment that he seems to bring man and the world togetherinto one unifed system, the system cracks from top to bottom. There is the human world ofmind, judgment and value, and there is the natural world of the interaction of physicalbodies. Kant, the greater representative of the modern achievement decides that the searchfor their unity is in vain. There is no fundamental unity. There are two worlds. The hope ofgoing further, on towards which all human reasoning has strained is unachievable and has tobe abandoned. At the moment that man comes to himself, it is clear that his alienation fromeverything around him his own drives, other people and the natural world is as completeas ever. Modernity aims for a completion of the long-sought fundamental unity, but it stalls.

Kant is determined that there can only ever be two parallels worlds, of knowledge (science)and faith. They do not impinge on each other at all. In other words Kant ultimately cannotshow that we are persons, that is, that each individual person is one undivided person. Hehas only shown that each person is two one is inhabits the material world, and knows andis known in that world, while the other inhabits a parallel world of freedom, in which he isutterly independent of any material or social consideration. One man is both object andsubject of knowledge. The other is simply a free agent, a pure will. We have an outer and aninner person, a public (material) and an private (intellectual-moral) person. Thus we have thescientist (the knower) and we have the free man. But we cannot have both simultaneously.

Kant ruled that the rationalists and the whole Christian and or Platonist traditions of politicalphilosophy were at an end. He alone was able to provide what they had not and his claimhas not been seriously challenged. Kant regarded himself as Robespierre, the destroyer ofall previous metaphysics, of the possibility of knowledge of both God, and with it secured ourknowledge of the world. Kant claims to have summed up and made redundant the thoughtall these previous thinkers.


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The Impatient DiscipleFirst let us ask about Kant as a thinker who concedes the validity of Christianity. Kantinherited the Pietism of Lutheran Germany which regards religion as primarily the concern ofthe inner man.

In his Religion within Reason alone Kant turned this separation between public debate(politics) and internal personal reform (religion) into a theory. For Kant religion meansself-control. This is what all philosophy and theology has been about, nothing other than this,self-control. God is nothing than our own alienated and unadmit ted duty of self-control,hovering over heads. We do not need to be under other-control. You do not need to listen tome, nor to each other.

All religion is about the achievement of self-control. As Augustine showed us, the Christiangospel is a species of the genus religion. The Christian religion has to be inward: outwardreligion makes no sense, for then it is not self-control. This makes it no more than the truthabout ourselves alone, and that means that we establish our identity ourselves, against allothers. This religion of self-mastery consigns us to an exercise of power against otherpeople.

The tradition seems to have accepted Kants own view that had made all previousmetaphysical speculation redundant. The whole chase is off. All confidence in theknowability (and thus goodness) of creation is gone. The compatibility and suitability ofcreation for man is gone, as is the thought that the world is not identical with man or hisdesires, but has its own dignity. Scepticism has triumphed and declared all certainty ofknowledge impossible and foolish but it has let a new unadmitted Platonist dualism inthrough the back door.

Kant believed that the process of Reformation was not complete. The reformation of allpublic institutions, political power and life had to be continued, by removing power andinfluence from the institution of the Church and giving it to the citizens of nations. But

external institutional changes represented only the minor part of the real Reformation, whichis self-reformation. Kant cut out the master, announced that we must be our own masters,made Christianity a set of principles and so a self-help course. He preferred a self-imposedand self-interpreted discipline, ruling out the discipline imposed by others, both otherteachers and external institutions. Kant has taken the Christian talk of judgment and thewhole forensic account atonement transferred it to man. Man is now the judge, spectator andcritic of all that is before him. Kants much reduced gospel ended the need to be patientstudents of our subject. This new Law makes far simpler requirements of us than thediscipline and discipleship of the gospel. His gospel does not teach that God helps us, thatbecause God is distant and unconcerned we have no one to rely on but ourselves, and wecan replace Gods aid with our own. Kant turned gospel into Law we have the book and weare on our own therefore be brave!

Morality has to start with giving up the external disciplinarian. Morality is autonomy. Beingmoral is being independent. The first moral act is to dispense with all external sources ofmorality, and to dismiss the external disciplinarian, God. Real authority cannot be external,for to suffer external authority is not to be a moral agent, but a slave. This external agentmust be reconciled and united with the internal agent, so the internal agent is as complete asthe external agent (God) notionally is. The external must be absorbed into the internal, andextinguished, the inside and outside must be united, the barrier between them extinguished.

Kant understood the gospel to be a summons to personal development. We developpersonally by bravely setting ourselves apart from all others and eschewing all outsideinfluence. Kant decided that Jesus was important for this reason alone: he was an exampleor pioneer of this distinguishing oneself from ones people. Kant separated Jesus, first fromthe people of Israel, then from the Church. Kants initiative in separating Jesus from the


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Church, was followed by the nineteenth century quests for the historical (and ethical) Jesus.The truth of Christianity is just a picture-book version of what the independent individual canwork out for himself: Christian doctrines are at best illustrations of timeless truths, butpossibly just an obstacle. He changed the gospel from relationship-with-Jesus, to being-good, or being-an-independent-individual, rejecting all external norms and living as asociety of one, in retreat from the world, from embodiedness and from history. Kant andsubsequent Idealism and enlightenment is Platonism re-launched: it re-asserts the old pagandualism, and the triumph of the private sphere over all public truth and life.

This makes for a dramatically reduced Christology, in which Christ is our example. We followthe example set by Christ, or those of us who are more mature can work these things out forourselves. Christ worked these things out for himself and became free by throwing off thatapprenticeship and all external discipline. Most of all Jesus became himself by dispensingwith his own nation, the people of Israel and the Old Testament.

The Return of MarcionFirst we must examine Kants approach to the New Testament. Kant decides that Jesuscannot be truly representative of the people of Israel. He separates the God of Jesus, thefirst autonomous individual, from the God of the Old Testament and the Jews, that stubbornpeople with their primitive religion. Next Kant separates Jesus from the Church and itsteaching, and so from the apprenticeship of Christian discipleship. He initiated the nineteenthcentury quests for the historical (and ethical) Jesus, that proceeded by isolating Jesus fromhis people. To show that the Christians had misrepresented their messiah was the only waythat German intellectuals could protest against the smug alliance of Lutheran Church andPrussian state that held back the development of German civic and political life. Christiandoctrines are at best illustrations of timeless truths, but perhaps they are actually anobstacle, or even possibly a huge falsehood foisted on the German nation to keep themdown.

Apprenticeship SpurnedIn The Religion Within the Limits of Reason AloneKant argues that Christianity exemplifiesthe process of moral regeneration. Such a recovery from the evil propensity is not a gradualreformation but a revolution. Our will, though it is inclined to evil, can regenerate itself. Manmust first make himself worthy to receive grace. Our radically evil disposition requiressupernatural aid to overcome it and yet it must be in our power to deserve such aid. Wehave make ourselves worthy of divine grace. But if the individual does what he needs todeserve grace surely he does not really need it. We have met this account before. It isbelongs to Pelagius. Kant is offering the morality of self-improvement that we saw Augustinerefute because it was not the account of salvation offered by the Church.

Kant is looking for a progression from church-faith to pure rational religion; we calls this

progress the kingdom of God. False worship is anything that puts the statutory andinstitutional in place of the pure moral service. All life should be in a spirit of prayer of goodaction, but actual prayer is just an otiose wheedling of God.

Philosophy of religionintends to replace political philosophy, that is of all earlier public andpolitical discourse of how we may live together in societies. The discourse of the inner worldintends to replace the discourse of the public world, so that the discourse of the public worldmay not be heard again. Kant had made himself heir to those political elites that intended tostop people talking about public life (politics) and doing so in the language they learned fromscripture.

It may be fairer to regard him as a Platonist and therefore not as a Christian theologian at all,but a pagan one. Kant hoped to see the restoration of a republic like Platos. He hope toreplace Christianity with the more reasonable science of a revived Athenian academy and


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more sacred morality of a restored Athenian Republic. German idealism is the rediscovery ofPlato and attempt to make all Europe a new Athens.

In Religion within the Limits of ReasonKant separated religion from politics. Religion thenmeant internal personal control and reform, while politics meant public debate. From thispoint on religion meant whatever had no constructive role and no legitimate place in the

public arena. Kant turned theology from a public discipline into the esoteric science ofreligious studies. This decision has mean that ever since Christian theology has had tocounter first the assumption that religion is a private matter, and one which it isembarrassing to discuss.

New Man and New RepublicThe Society of Man without GodIdealism is the programme of the inauguration of Platos Republic. It is easier to see it as awhole in its German form at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It intends tocreate a single educated nation of worthy, self-governing sovereign citizens, led by itsthinkers. In Platos Republic the guardians are responsible not only for leading the citizensbut for teaching and disciplining them too. This movement intends to bring into being asingle nation and national self-consciousness.

But Kants ethics are not purely Greek, but mixed with a braver Roman spirit, owed toSeneca and Marcus Aurelius, with a dash of scepticism the mixture made familiar byCicero. Each of us has to make his own way and be his own master. This is the religion ofthe self-discipline of the noble Roman. Kants ethics are Stoic. He rejects all passions andextrinsic considerations, all external forces. He watches his own body, and make sure itdoes not betray him by giving in to emotions or needs. Kants fundamental law, theCategorical Imperative,is that we should act only in such a way that you can at the sametime will that your maxim should become a universal law. His Groundwork of the Metaphysicof Morals(1785), repeats Ciceros remark (De Officiis3.26-7). Universal truths drive outparticular ones: whatever is true must be so everywhere and for all time. We must promotethe interests of others simply because they are fellow men, and not for any other moreinstrumental reason.

Mind Without BodyKant took the pictures, doctrines and history out of Christianity to leave ethics, which hecalled pure religion. He separated the narrative and particular from the universal, andseparated reason from imagination. Kant believed in a self-imposed and self-interpreteddiscipline, and rules out the discipline imposed by others. He allows public discourse no partin constituting our desires and character. Kant is a overly fastidious (hypochondriac) mindwith a platonic distaste for bodies. He gives pure reason priority over language, theincidental. He was opposed by Hamann, who pointed out that all thought is founded on

language, and language in turn depends on the body. Pure reason, so-called, is not prior tolanguage and bodiliness. Language therefore has priority of pure reason, indeed languageisreason. To point out the bodily foundation of thought is not to exalt sense over reason, butjust to refuse to let the cerebral be exalted over the rest of the bodily faculties. We have toallow that the human being is a unity of mind and body: it is mind and body do their thinkingtogether. Kants dislike our human embodiedness threatens the unity of the human being.

Kant attempted to free the mind by distancing it from all the practices of social formation.This cerebral disembodiedness is a return to Socrates view of the world as an unfortunatemiasma from which the mind has to extricate itself. Kants determination to make thestrongest case for the powers of the mind reveal his distaste for the body, practices, habitsand crowds. The Mind is the supreme authority, and it can not defer to any authority but

itself. There is nothing outside that we have to give acknowledgment to.


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Kants gospel of personal development by bravely distinguishing yourself from all externalinfluence and refusing an apprenticeship now serves as the criterion for knowledge in theuniversity. His distrust of society has become the criterion of critical reason and analyticphilosophy. Can philosophy be reconciled to our embodiedness and sociality?

Dualism and PolarisationThe Vanished Unity of the WorldIn the modern view, we cannot know the upper realm at all, but we can know the lowerrealm, and man, utterly. The upper realm, the transcendent, does not function to control howwe know the world or one another, and because it has no purpose, this realm hasdisappeared from our discourse. This is very different from the teaching of the Church, whichunderstands that the world may not be known without God. God hosts the world for us anddoes not let it go. The unity of the world with God and the distinction of the world from Godare both intrinsic to the Christian doctrine of creation; there is a unity and duality,simultaneously.

The world separated from God and drifted away until God was so distant that it makes nodifference whether or not God exists. But this does not mean that this cosmos is without God for man has de facto become its god. Modernity believes it knows its world. It has leftbehind all questions of how our knowledge of the world appears. Yet the uppertranscendent realm has not disappeared after all, for it our very own action of knowing. Assuch the modern knowledge that sees through and pushes aside all mediation remainsindissolubly part of the one indivisible cosmology in which the upper sphere knows -intellects - the lower. The modern epistemological constitution, far from being an escapefrom this dualist cosmology, is a continuation of it. Action, chief of which are knowing anduniting, continues to represent that upper realm. Knowing is the whole mode of action. Thelower realm is defined as being quite without action and unity. Modern epistemology andcosmology is dualist. Yet, since it cannot concede that there is anything outside itself, it ismonist.

We have seen that the whole philosophical task is the unity of knowledge, and this means tore-unite science and morality, theory and praxis (life), to unify the scientific and the moralinto a single continuum. It reckons that the whole task is to stay in time with the rest of thecosmos, to learn to keep in step, to pick up the tune of the heavenly bodies, to avoidwayward irrational mindless non-divine movements.

Platos account related the individual human (psyche) to human society (polis) and to thenatural world (cosmos), and suggested that man had to grow (back) up to resume to hisproper relationship to the cosmos, through paideia to justice. But Kant declined thischallenge and instead followed Socrates, who declared that he would confine himself to theworld of men and not attempt to say about mans place in the cosmos. Kant has taken verymuch less than Plato is offering, leaving out Platos large concept of justice and paideia. Sowith Kant we have two worlds the world of human interaction, of politics, morality andfreedom, and the second world of nature, of cause and effect.

But Kant also distinguishes two worlds, the world we can know and the world beyond that wecannot. Science is able to know the world, but we can never know whether the world thatscience knows is finally real. We know the appearance (the economy), but can never knowwhether they correspond to reality (the theology). Kant wanted to award reason the higheststatus possible, and identifying a pure and general reason, that is to be found above all theparticularities of traditions. He wanted reason to be universally applicable and this universalreason to be supreme all other considerations. But Kant has also betrayed reason becausehe divided it into two. There is moral reason (the realm of ought) and there is pure reason(the realm of is) also called science, which of facts, existence and givenness. The attempt tounify these was over. The long search to find the unity of things was declared, by Kant, to beimpossible. Man had given up, turned around and started his retreat.


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Kant as Reduced AugustineKant is determined to complete what he believes Augustine and Luther had started but notfinished.

The route from Augustine has brought us to Kant. Is the modern individual who distinguisheshimself from his fellows the high point of the story we have been telling? Certainly there aremany intellectual influences identifiable in Augustine that Kant has made very good use of.Kant believes that he has expressed the greatest ambition of humankind, to be his ownmaster. Does the Enlightenment man hauling himself up onto a plateau? He has hackeddown all the bogeys that once held him in thrall?

We should remind ourselves that secularism does not start in the middle of the seventeenthcentury. Secularisation is the re-arrival of forces and ideologies that are in lesser degreealways present. The most cursory look at Machiavelli, Hobbes or Spinoza shows that this isa rediscovery of Roman thought. Secularism is then not a demythologisation but just thedemotion of the Christian account and the promotion of the pagan account of the world. wecould even say that a buying in to a cosmology that Europe had once seen as violent andwhich through its conversion to Christianity it was gald to see the back of. Does route startswith Plato, and with Aristotle, then it goes via the Stoics, sceptics, Cicero and Seneca, andatomists? In the early modern period does it then go via the proponents of a restored Greekor Roman Republic or commonwealth? Does it go like this: Machiavelli-Hobbes-Spinoza-Shaftesbury-Locke? Does Kant sum up this rational and republican tradition and finalise it forus as the modern world, made up of constitutions, the absorption of smaller communities byever larger ones, human rights, American Way, globalisation?

Kant wants also to complete what Augustine started. He wants to give a coherent account ofmorality and religion. But he wants to go further, and so not merely to state this religion butto reform it. He wants to improve and rationalize the Christian religion. Kant intends to bemore true and more consistent than Augustine himself was able to be. In this of course Kantis no different from any other thinkers we have met.

Reduced Anthropology of Forensic AtonementWe have said that it is the economy of modernity that reverts from the Christian and Platonicontology of love and of persons in constitutive relation to the much simpler, Roman ontologyof substance and debt. It is this Roman ontology (which modernity has returned to) whichunderstands us in financial terms, in which the models of ransom (satisfaction andpropitiation) belong. It is Kant and modernity which fails to ask what money is, or what thissubstance is, to which all human life is referred and reduced.

Kant has taken the Christian talk of judgment and the whole forensic account atonementtransferred it to man. Man is now the judge, spectator and critic of all that is before him.Kants anthropology erects the individual above society. This autonomous man, secure in hisknowledge of himself, looks down on the world with his whole panoptical technology, indetachment, viewing, registering, controlling. Kants high anthropology makes this individualunaccountable. Kants anthropology puts us beyond the language of protest. Perhapstheology is the one conceptuality that enables us to ask whether this man and thisanthropology has become a monster.

God is nothing than our own alienated and unadmitted duty of self-control, hovering overheads. We do not need to be under other-control. You do not need to listen to me, nor toeach other. Each of you is your own unchallengeable king. Kant has sanctified the atomisticself, incurvatus and autistic. He has normalised our disease. The pagan ontology is ourdefault. We live in the mind of Kant.

This modern man is an alternative account of man. Since Christ is the Christian account ofman, we can say that that modern man, Kants man, is an alternative Christ. He intends to


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draw us away from Christ and towards himself. He believes that his definition, offered andrepresented by himself, is superior to that definition offered by Christ, and indeed given inChrist and in which the church participates. We have to decide whether it is bigger, orsmaller, than the definition of man offered and represented by Christ, in which his bodyparticipates.

6. The Disappearance of The Good

Economic ManThe Christian faith insists on a large but coherent account of human beings and theirrelationships. This account includes ideas of being and freedom, and of good, truth and evenof beauty. But when the Christian faith is removed, these transcendent no longer function tohold together all the various aspects that make up our view of the world. In intellectualdevelopments in eighteenth century in which religion, ethics, politics and economics driftedout of a common framework to become separate domains. Ethics then dealt with a privatesphere and individual responsibility, while politics dealt with public action, and the disciplineof economics dealt with another domain of interaction and exchange. These three realmsdelineated respectively (private) lack of responsibility (ethics), public (cooperative)responsibility (politics) and no responsibility (economics). The older, and larger, discipline ofmoral philosophy, or ethics, distinguished between what I want and what I need, or betweenwhat I want and what is good for me.

The science of economics covers the issue of my material needs. It gives no definition ofthose needs, indeed it is premised on the avoidance of any the truth of any given account ofwhat is good, and what is beneficial for me. It makes no distinction between my needs andmy desires, and no distinction between those desires I control and those I do not, orbetween those of my desires fulfilment of which would be good for me or for others. All theseissues of what is good, and good for whom, are ruled out. I can make my claim about myneeds as large as I wish. Economics takes all my demands at face value, as givens ofnature. Economics is about the satisfaction of the desires of bodies and so it is the scienceof the distribution of bodies that is of the goods, the that body is going to use. We are notpersons. For economics, we are bodies and desirers (disembodied wills). Our bodies andthe world they inhabit are simply aggregations of desires. This is the world as a storm ofatoms described by Epicurus, from which we can only hope to flee into some inward place.

David Hume (1711-1776) championed an attitude of scepticism about all forms ofknowledge along with a Epicurean detachment. We cannot be sure that we are impartialenough for our beliefs to be firm knowledge. Hume dismisses the entire tradition ofmetaphysics by which Europeans had tied to establish the certainty of our knowledge. wecannot know anything about what is good or say with certainty that one thing is better thananother. There is therefore no support for of are any rationality underwriting our sense ofpurpose.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) represents the Stoic option. In his Theory of Moral SentimentsSmith followed Cicero in setting out the function of the natural empathy of human beings forone another. In The Wealth of NationsSmith argues that we do not need to be individuallygood, or to care for one another, in order to reach the best outcome. When we care forourselvesthe paradoxical result is that everybody gets the best deal. This is the result of theharmony or equilibrium that results from the working of large numbers of people. We are notreliant on the virtue of the people. Good comes about as an unintended consequence of themagic of large numbers. Society can work without virtue or a trained or practiced people. Wedo not need to exercise control because our desires are reconciled by the market throughthe price system. Like nature, the market tends to bring about a harmony.

But the science of economic regards the economy is a piece of machinery. Equilibrium is thebasic paradigm of economic. Fundamentally the market balances itself out, and though it is


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never static it is always correcting itself. But economics is not merely science but also a formof expertise in management. This expertise because the basic paradigm of equilibrium is notsufficient. It is not the case that economy balances itself, but it also requires to be managed.The economic machine also needs machine-minders constantly to alter its settings. It doesneed humans, and therefore minds and decision-making, in order to be harmonious.

Under the definition established by Smith and Ricardo, what is good is whatever individualsdesire and create demand for. Economics does not believe that we may decide which of ourappetites are important. We may rank our own desires. Economics decides to take them asall of equal value and to let the market decide which of them we may have.

Relations without PurposeThe disconnection of politics from conceptions of what is good continued with thedisconnection of economics from theology. Our talk about sin, guilt and morality has beenseparated from our talk about our financial description of our economic and materialrelationships with one another. This split of religious thought from the way we see ourmaterial and social and economic relationships has had extraordinary consequences. Thechief of these is that we cannot see how our own public and economic behaviour can have adevastating impact on people beyond our field of view. The split between religion andeconomics allows us to be insulated from the consequences of our (economic) actions. Thismeans that religion has been turned into an inoffensive metaphorical talk about our owninner spiritual or emotional states, that has no impact on the world. By allowing thetheological concept of sin and debt to become divided in this way between the moral and thematerial, one described by religion the other by economics, we have created two parallelworlds. In one in which the language of guilt describes some private state of our own, theother in which the language of credit and debt describes the external world of finance andcareer but is not thought to impact on our own inner being.

The economy of modernity reverts from the Platonic ontology of love amplified by theChristian ontology and of persons in constitutive relation, to the much simpler, Romanontology of substance and debt. These modern thinkers do not tell is what this substance,money, is to which so much human interaction is denominated.

The academic discipline of economics conceals from us that it is we ourselves who provideone another with recognition. We give one another the affirmation we require, and we alsowithhold the affirmation we seek from one another. Economics is premised on an account ofhuman being which is reducible to nature. But an Christian account of our materialinterrelating, a Christian economics, would insists that we are social at the same time thatwe are material, and that we cannot have our sociality stripped off to reveal some moretruthful core. Inasmuch as economics insists that we are first material, and that the materialis more basic than the social and inter-personal. We are not only bodies but also persons.We are not bodies first, wt bodily requirements that must be satisfied before our other lesstangible demands are met. We are at once bodily and more-than-bodily. The Christianteaching that the human is body and soul (person) must therefore regard economics asoffering a dramatically inadequate account of human being. There is another way to doeconomics, and that is in terms of inter-personal recognition, the workers who give us oursubstance and being are also our responsibility. An economics is just an evasion ofresponsibility which is ultimately also an evasion of the people that God gives us as gifts.

The Champions of AutonomyWe are searching for self-rule. We have two sets of rival theologians, Christian and pagan,who offer rival definitions of our identity of our place in the world and of how we may acquiresuch self-rule. The political philosophers of the seventeenth century and eighteenthcenturies represent a dramatic reduction of political ambition. They dismissed Platospolitical philosophy, with its central belief that man is subject to a process of formation


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(paideia) and they dismiss the tradition of Christian political philosophy, which understandsthat we are formed by a process of trial we call history, which is led by God.

Modern man lives in the mindset or intellectual environment created for him by thesethinkers. Although Hobbes, Descartes, Shaftesbury and Locke exist explicit Christian,together with Spinoza they are also the theologians of a tradition that is not Christian, and

which has another way of saying what human society is and what human beings are, andwhich involves power and necessity disguised by nature and contract.

Christian theology includes a political philosophy. Kant and the champions of secularautonomy such as Hobbes, Descartes, Shaftesbury and Locke, who led up to him hadsucceeded in suppressing the politics in theology and in taking theology out of politics. Theyturned theology into moralism, psychology and ethics. When Christian theology did not resistthis division and interiorisation it ceased to have anything distinctive to say to the world.Then theology just intellectualises and sentimentalises, prey to the rationalists who want todecide whether it does or does not correspond to canons of reason that have already beendefined in opposition to large Christian account of man. Through the nineteenth centurytheology fell to an oscillation between reason and emotion that produced endless new claims

to the status of science, and new forms of sentimentalism and the expression of theindividual who feels how undetermined his identity is.

7. The True and the False Son

The true son is with God and with man and with all men. This particular being, Jesus Christ,is the catholic and universal being. From him every human being receives their relationshipswith every other human being, and with God.

Modernity is a reduction of man. Modern thought offers us man bereft of relationship.Modernity has reduced man to a head without a body, an intellectual, and an individualwithout a community. It offers us the universal, but without any connection from any

particular, so we have no idea where this universal could merge from. The modern conceptof man (modern anthropology) is a christology without Christ, an account of man whoalways intends to be without God, and who is as a result, separated from his fellow man. It isa christology without connection to an assembly, and so without an account of our unitywith our peers in a society. It is an anthropology without an ecclesiology, an account withoutany understanding of our place in the assembly of mankind. The related person has becomethe individual without relationship. The modern has become the anointed and canonical formof man the man of the present has replaced the man with present-and-future. For thegeneration that does not challenge him, Kant has become their Christ.

11 Man as Single

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