Response to Randi Rashkover (1)
J. Ben Quash,
University of Cambridge
Randi Rashkover's paper is a hugely
suggestive meditation on the prophetic appropriation of the idea of the jubilee
in both Isaiah and Luke, and leads to a sharp and very pertinent question to
'landless' invocations of jubilee: do they spiritualise away the importance of actual
land, thus denying what must be a key part of an affirmative theological vision
of human life, illuminated by a levitical understanding of holiness?
Rashkover writes: 'Christianity needs a
theology of the land (...) a theology that restores the earth as the place of the
glory of God. It needs a re-reading of Leviticus 25. Arguably, without this
re-reading, (...) a vacuum remains concerning the character of right possession —
right holding — right materiality — the restoration of the created order as
God's order.'
I think that Christianity does have a sort
of theology of the land — and that it is bound up with the way it understands
the Holy Spirit's work. In a moment I'll
give an account of the figural way in which this idea was brought home to me
earlier this year. But I'm aware that
the question raised by the pneumatological Christian theology of the land that
follows is that it is metaphorical in some measure — and therefore precisely
falls under suspicion in Rashkover's perspective. So at the end I will return
to the question of whether this is a denial of materiality, and of the question
of actual land (with all the associated questions about politics and possession).
When I meditated on the story of Noah's ark
during the Easter Vigil in 2005, I was especially struck — and in a way I
hadn't expected — by the description of the sending out of the dove. The dove can be read as a figure of
Christ. The dove sent out from the ark
first time round is sent into unknown territory — across those deeps that are
maybe impassive or maybe wild. On Easter
night, this offers an extraordinary image of Jesus Christ departing this life and
going into the unknown domains of the dead. Like the beautiful creature released by Noah, he disappears from view:
all that can be seen are the great waters, which stand for primal chaos,
threat, danger, death. They seem to have
claimed him. And then, to the elation of
the expectantly gathered disciples, on Easter morning he comes winging back
from those deeps, brandishing life, demonstrating to them that there is a
future beyond the destructive power of the flood — a life springing up on its
far side. He gives them hope. They
respond to his return with amazement and joy.
And then this dove, Jesus Christ, vanishes
from sight again. His second departure
can be read as the ascension.And this
time the disciples are left scanning the horizon, but he does not
return. The resurrection had been the
return that followed upon the first departure. Jesus in his resurrection had come back with the announcement of new
life beyond death — as the bearer of that new life, and of all the promise
which it held out for the ark-bound huddle of people. Following the ascension, these people are
asked to interpret his departure from their sight a second time — and this time
he doesn't come back. What does it mean?
I felt a strange sort of poignancy on
Easter night when I heard the words, 'and the dove did not return to Noah any
more'. Noah has had to let the creature
go, and it goes this time without looking back, having performed the work it
was meant to perform. But it isn't really meant to be a sad moment.
On the contrary.
Noah knows what the dove's non-return means,
and it means a joyous new development to surpass even the joy brought by the
dove's earlier return. It means
something is now ready. It means there's
not just a freshly plucked leaf out there, it means there's a whole land
opening up — a new world full of new life; with dry ground to walk on once
again — and the dove has gone ahead of the others into that land.
Suddenly, the tables are turned, and the
ark-dwellers have to reconceive their options. They're no longer meant to wait for the dove to come to them, in their
confined space, which seems the only possible place to be if they're to have
any chance of survival. The dove is not
going to come into their space any more. They are to go out into the dove's space — where he is already at
liberty — the first inhabitant of the new world God has made after the flood.
Noah, the wise man, realises this with joy:
'he removed the covering of the ark,
and looked, and saw that the face of the ground was drying. (...) Then God said
to Noah, "Go out of the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons'
wives with you. Bring out with you every
living thing that is with you (...) so that they may abound on the earth, and be
fruitful and multiply on the earth." So Noah went out . . .' (Genesis
8:13-18)
Pentecost can be seen as the moment when
Christians receive their new world: a land to walk about in, and put down roots
in, and settle, and cultivate and grow. The Spirit is that land — that new world.
If the moment of salvation for Christians is
like the ark — packed with possibility just as the ark is packed with all the
living creatures rescued from the waters: people and birds and animals and
creeping things — then the coming of the Spirit unlocks all that potential and
sets it free. Our transfer to a
new world becomes the reality and fullness of life in that new world.
The ark is a necessary moment in the story, but its real purpose is only
disclosed afterwards, when the flood is past.
All that was confined in the ark becomes fruitful and begins to spread
once the ark has had its doors thrown open again.
The Spirit takes what was saved and begins to
multiply it and cause it to abound.
The image of the Spirit as being like a
land works in all sorts of ways. It can
also be a reminder of the land promised to the children of Israel after the
desert-time; and the land returned to by them after exile. It's the place
promised to God's children in which they will be able to serve God and truly be
themselves.It's a fruitful land — and
the Holy Spirit for Christians is regularly associated with fruit.
BUT — and here's the problem in relation to
Rashkover's challenge — the fruits of the Spirit are 'fruit' metaphorically.
As Paul reminds us (Galatians 5:22-23), they
are love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and
temperance — and in the letter to the Ephesians (5:9) we are told that the
fruit of the Spirit is 'in all goodness and righteousness and truth'.
As for the fruit, so for the land in which it
grows.The fact is that for Christians
the Spirit does not token a literal land.
Rather, it is a realm of existence: it is dry land — fertile land — metaphorically.
For Christians 'have no abiding country'
(Hebrews 13:14). They are 'strangers and
sojourners' in the world (Hebrews 11:13).
Yet Christians believe that in the working
of the Spirit they have been given space of some sort in which to be
fruitful and multiply. And the metaphorical land though not always a neatly
delimited geographical space is nonetheless dependent on certain material
conditions — on there being real spaces where their peculiar form of
citizenship is enacted.And this means
that the 'space of the Spirit' has a political character too — a power to
challenge and change the real configurations of territory in the middle of
which it opens up.Christians understand
themselves to be citizens of a realm which spiritually covers the whole globe,
for there is nowhere the Spirit is not, and they believe that wherever the
Spirit is, they can expect to find networks of people bound together in
gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance — people bearing each
others burdens; making room for one another; collectively making the space of
the Spirit — which is liberating space and fruitful space, like the dry land
into which Noah and his family entered when the waters had subsided.
To be sure, this is a 'spiritual realm'
stretching across the globe, but as spiritual it has concrete dimensions
to it — for example, the sacraments which the Spirit blesses and works through
— baptism and the eucharist — celebrated in all corners of the world, by people
of every nation and race; and the preaching of God's word of life in every
tongue.These activities need real space
— in many cases, such activities define space, and map and organise real
territory.
Reference to the eucharist here will
confirm Rashkover's insight that it plays a crucial role for me, as for many
Christians, in dealing with this issue of right possession and proper relation
to materiality.A eucharistic focus is
there in my essay on the trisagion where I indicate some of the ways it
can reconsititute responsible political and earthly life (as Rashkover shows),
and it is also central to ideas I developed in relation to the offertory in an
essay that appears in the Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics.[1]
Stimulated by Rashkover's paper, these
explorations seem more compelling and urgent.
In the service of Holy Communion in the Anglican Book of Common
Prayer of 1662, still used at many of the services in my church, the offertory
unleashes an extraordinary wealth of scriptural texts into the liturgy.
Directly after the recitation of the Creed
and the preaching of the sermon, and before the prayers of intercession, the
rubric instructs:
Then shall the Priest return to
the Lord's Table, and begin the Offertory, saying one or more of these
sentences following, as he thinketh most convenient in his discretion.
No less than twenty sentences then follow, all of them in various
ways inviting the congregation to make offerings.
We find there a stark reminder (also present
in the service for the Burial of the Dead) that the goods we have we have as a
loan not as an entitlement:
Godliness is great riches, if a man be
content with that he hath: for we brought nothing into the world, neither may
we carry anything out. I Tim. 6
And, overlapping with this reminder, there
is a vivid picture of how, when we use 'our' resources well, even in the
service of creaturely recipients, we are in fact entering a relationship of
reciprocal blessing with God, and we are promised that our giving is
a preparation for receiving back:
He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth
unto the Lord: and look, what he layeth out, it shall be paid him again. Prov. 19
The rubric then states:
Whilst these Sentences are in reading, the Deacons, Churchwardens,
or other fit person appointed for that purpose, shall receive the Alms for the
Poor, and other devotions of the people, in a decent bason to be provided by
the Parish for that purpose; and reverently bring it to the Priest, who shall
humbly present and place it upon the holy Table.
And when there is a Communion, the Priest
shall then place upon the Table so much bread and wine as he shall think
sufficient.
Modern liturgies are on the whole more similar to one another than
they are to this Prayer Book practice, but the link between the giving of alms
(in the form of a collection) and the presenting of bread and wine for
eucharistic use is if anything stronger. In many churches now, the bread and wine are brought to the altar in
procession, from amongst the people, in the same way that collection money
is. This liturgical action stresses that
fact that bread and wine are also, like money, the product of human labours in
the context of God's gracious provision (his provision of the conditions we
need for the work of our hands to prosper). The words said over the bread and wine make this even more explicit:
Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation;
through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and
human hands have made. It will become
for us the bread of life.
Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation;
through your goodness we have this wine to offer, fruit of the vine and the
work of human hands. It will become for
us the cup of salvation.
And in each case the people respond:
'Blessed be God for ever'. In these
liturgical exchanges the congregation learns to think about the whole creation
(in connection with these specific gifts of the creation) as belonging to God
('Lord God of all creation'). It learns
in appropriate humility to acknowledge that it 'has' these gifts only because
of life-giving forces wholly in excess of its own control ('through your
goodness'; 'which earth has given'). It
learns to make its offering in the trust that God's goodness will reciprocate
in ways that amaze it and confound normal expectations ('it will become for us
the bread of life'; 'it will become for us the cup of salvation').
And it learns to set this whole interaction
in the context of divine praise ('Blessed be God').
This rings true with Rashkover's argument
that, from a levitical point of view, 'we are to 'hold property' in order to
point to God as the final owner. "And the land shall not be sold in perpetuity;
for the land is Mine; for ye are strangers and settlers with Me." (Leviticus,
25:23) .' This does not require
renunciation of property — just as in the Christian offertory, the offering is
followed by a redistribution in which the gifts and returned to human use
(though somehow transvalued by having had displayed the real secret of what
Susannah Ticciati might call their 'thinginess' — their relation to God)[2]. So
there need not be a problem for Christians with Rashkover's claim that '[t]he
condition of the possibility of the doxological moment (...) is property holding
(not negation)', and her further point that:
[i]n this respect chosenness or
covenantal life is a life of possession whereby our possessions are themselves
a testimony to God's holdings. To be chosen is not to forgo one's property but
rather to render it holy.
As Rashkover hopes,
such reasonings allow both Jews and Christians to model a very particular and
extraordinary form of 'dominion'.[3]
In the Church, Christians have sometimes
espied that real Gospel dominion in the tradition of the first apostolic
communities in the Book of Acts is 'communicating and communicable possession'
(O'Donovan). The gifts of the offertory
are always distributed afterwards. This
shows that in the community of the Church, such 'possession' as there is of the
non-human creation is shared 'possession', and intended for further
sharing. 'Communicating and communicable
possession' represents a recovery of an original and good use of the earth's
bounty, mediated by participation in Christ through the power of the Spirit
(who also ecclesially 'shares out' all the goods that are in Christ).
'Evangelical dominion is, therefore, the just
communal possession and use of earthly goods that, shadowing God's own
dominion, conserve their being and assist them to realize their divinely
appointed purposes' (O'Donovan). Being
thus a 'possession' in the image of God's own dominion, it is far from being
the exercise of a lonely proprietary will, and therefore far from the notion of
dominion that has dogged much modern use of the term.
God's dominion is generously distributive,
and 'makes room' for being. It is
inherently to do with establishing relations of mutual love.
In the Eucharist, Christians learn how to make
their 'possession' and use of earthly goods a faithful image of God's
dominion. Recognising that they share
being with other creatures whom God has also chosen for existence, their
imitation of God's dominion leads them to try to conserve the being of
non-human creatures and help them to occupy and fulfill their God-given place
in God's purposes. In the Church, the
'land of the Spirit' opened by Christ's reconciling work, this 'possession' can
be learnt and practised together. Christians learn that coming to know and share in the love of Christ
means (indivisibly) coming to know and share in the fellowship of the Holy
Spirit: fellowship with all the other objects of Christ's loving regard.
How might this also apply to their occupation
of land, and their evaluation of how others too may and should occupy land?
ENDNOTES
[1] 'Offering:
Treasuring the Creation', in Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (eds.), The
Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
[2] Susannah
Ticciati, "The Castration of the Sign: Conversing with Augustine on Creation,
Language and Truth", short paper
presented at annual conference of the Society for the Study of Theology/ Irish
Theological Association, Dublin, April 2005
[3] This
is a word too often bandied around as the mark of a Christian high-handedness
and proprietary arrogance towards the material world.
And, indeed, in its roots as a Roman legal
term, dominium means precisely full ownership. Joan Lockwood O'Donovan
has shown in a fascinating historical study how in the early 14th century, the
radical Franciscan ethic of poverty (or non-proprietorship) was countered by a
papalist move to justify enforceable legal property rights on the basis that
rule over the human and non-human creation was part of Christ's perfect
humanity. Both sides appealed by analogy
to the divine life to make their case: for the Franciscans, the
rejection of all possessions was an imitatio Christi, and for the papal
side, the ownership with which Adam was endowed at the moment of his creation
was in the image of God's own dominium, and subsequent exercise of such
ownership could be legitimized by 'Christ's purported exercise . . . of
universal and immediate lordship over property'. The trouble with the papalist
position (apart from its influence on a subsequent secular tradition of natural
rights theory, and its exaltation of the proprietary will) is that it obscures
the fact made so clear by the offertory that human 'lordship' is to be wholly
set in the service of God and the neighbour.
The trouble with the Franciscan position is surprisingly similar in that
it too is individualistic. The Franciscan ethic of poverty is not the complete
theological alternative to the natural rights tradition:
For Bonaventuran, as for
all Franciscan theology, the communal features of the Minorite life were
incidental to, indeed in tension with, the practice of evangelical
poverty. The latter was inseparably
wedded to the eremitical pattern of the wandering apostle . . . and to the
towering figure of St Francis. . . . Thus did St Bonaventure fail to place his
idealistic and Christological epistemology and his Augustinian ethic of ordered
love directly in the service of elaborating apostolic community as distinct
from the apostolic 'way'.(Joan Lockwood
O'Donovan, "Natural Law and Perfect Community: Contributions of Christian
Platonism to Political Theory", Modern Theology 14:1 (1998), p. 34).
In other words, for both
positions there was not enough account of the Church (and O'Donovan herself
turns to the writings of John Wyclif for the corrective to this imbalance).
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