The Catholicity of David Ford
C.C.
Pecknold,
Loyola College, Maryland
On one level it is the world of Dante in which
every sphere of history is traversed, and where every moment of time is
penetrated and judged through an intense eschatological realism. Similarly it is the world of Karl Barth, a
strange new world of the Bible in which we learn to see things as they are in
Jesus Christ. David Ford’s vision is
both catholic and evangelical, and we can see it in his passion for God's
story, which is matched by a serious attentiveness to the shape of reality as
it is given (the ‘shape of living’ in his apt phrase). It is difficult not to get caught up in
Ford’s passion, contagious as it is. Spend enough time with him, and you will sense that “everything is
happening” right here and now as part of the history of redemption. Along with Ford’s pentecostal passion—a
genuinely Pauline shout of joy and rejoicing in the Spirit—there is also the
comprehensive, catholic, contemplative Christian for whom the “adoring act of
listening to the Word of God” is also “the primal cell of all fruitful action.”[i]
David Ford's intellectual labors have been
thoroughly systematic. Or perhaps it is
better to simply say, as I will argue throughout this essay, that his labors
are best seen in the light of a scripture-centered catholicity that
seeks the Wisdom of God. Those who will
attempt to fit him into a single category—narrative theologian, philosophical
theologian, liturgical theologian, dogmatic theologian, conversational theologian—miss
all the gathered-up coherence of the man, i.e. the particular-universal at
which he is aiming. We can see it in the
progression of his studies. In Barth
and God's Story we see the scriptural and dogmatic united in a single
voice. In Jubilate we see
dogmatics and liturgy in conversation. In Truth and Meaning in 2nd Corinthians we see his
interests in philosophical theology already insisting on a return to
scripture. In Self and Salvation:
Being Transformed, a pattern of thinking develops in which facing Jesus
Christ transforms human beings. Here we
can see him bringing each aspect together around the Trinitarian (prosopon)
image of ‘facing’: scripture, dogmatics,
liturgy, and philosophy all in conversation at once concerning the central importance
of facing Jesus. The whole trajectory
could be imagined as a kind of lyrical rhyme scheme, a poiema moving
from Scripture to dogmatics, from dogmatics to liturgy, and from liturgy back
to Scripture, before recapitulating the whole into a fuller dynamic. Recapitulation, then, becomes key for an
Irenean retrospective on his work, most recently seen in his Christian
Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love. Here we see the attempt to think the particular-universal of Christian
Wisdom, to envision the whole corporate destiny of humanity by a perichoretic
light of participation with the Triune God. I take such a cursory retrospective of his work to encourage this image
of Ford as aiming at catholicity. This
is to say nothing of the great ecumenical reach involved in his massively
influential editorial endeavor, The Modern Theologians, or the attempts
to cast a still wider net with A Very Short Introduction to Theology and
The Shape of Living.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given my argument,
two Greek words stand out in my memory of Ford’s intellectual habitus: pleroma and panta. The words have to do with a semantic field
concerning the fullness of all things, everywhere for everyone. The words belong especially to the Johannine
and Pauline tradition. In the Johannine
tradition, we can see how this passes to the martyr St. Polycarp and then to
his disciple St. Irenaeus who understands everything growing into the fullness
of the Word. Jesus Christ is the Word of
God who is also the new Adam, the One who is the fullness of humanity as it was
divinely intended to be. Jesus is the
restoration of original justice, and the lost unity of humanity is recovered in
Christ’s Body. Jesus moves through all
of human experience in order to fulfill it, to make it holy, free and obedient,
gathering up ‘all in all.’ Where St.
Irenaeus may single out the atoning significance of the Incarnation, Ford has
especially taught us that ‘facing Jesus’ in every aspect of his experience of
being human is central if we are to understand both the inter-personal, social,
political and cosmic significance of the atonement. Rather than enter the pleroma of God through
some esoteric knowledge (Ford is thoroughly anti-Gnostic) we enter through the
public face of Jesus: a face that we
know through the scriptural narrative, through icon, through sacrament, through
authority, through nature, through praise in the Spirit, through superabundance
(pleroma). We enter the pleroma
of God by growing up before the Father, living into the superabundant life of
the Son.
The so-called Christ hymn of Philippians is
also a helpful introduction to what these terms connote (Phil. 2-5-11). The kenotic gift of the Son emptying himself
in obedience to God on the Cross inverts the tragedy of the Adamic human fall
that had grasped at equality with God through disobedience; Christ’s descent
into hell means that even the darkest aspects of human experience are touched
by Jesus so that all of humanity might be sanctified and fulfilled in Christ‘s
new humanity. The risen and glorified
Christ, to whom every knee will bend, makes it possible for all humanity
to grow to full maturity. And this
ancient Pauline theme comes through clearly in Ford’s person and work. It is not easy to avoid the particular
universalism of Ford’s Christology here. It is not only the theme of pleroma, which is dynamically
conceived around the tri-unity of God’s life as Father, Son and Spirit, but
also the panta, God’s superabundant life is offered to all, in every
way and everywhere.
These two themes of pleroma and panta,
which of course can be found in Karl Barth’s Christocentric universalism as
well, aim at catholicity. Another Greek
term, katholikos, “according to the whole,” embraces our word
“universal,” though distinctions should be made between them. And I would not want to insist that Ford’s
catholicity is identical with Roman Catholic comprehensions of the term that
privilege the authority of the Petrine Office. But Ford similarly imagines a comprehensive catholicity in which all
people, everywhere and in every way might converse with the superabundance of
the Word of God. This is not to say that
Ford’s catholicity resides only in the conversational event of the Word being
revealed by the Holy Spirit, for to sum up Ford as a “conversational”
theologian, while accurate, would miss his traditionalism and his
catholicity. These conversational
moments are gathered up and carried by traditions, and especially institutional
forms of gathering these fragments into a coherent whole. But the centrifugal force of his catholicity
is precisely through the reach of God’s story as narrated in Scripture.
Before reflecting more in my conclusion on
Ford’s theopolitical vision, I want to extend my appreciative comments on
Ford’s catholicity by way of an admittedly incomplete comparison with the
catholicity of Henri de Lubac (and a brief comment on the political theorist
Sheldon Wolin). This comparison helps
support my comments concerning Ford’s scripture-centered catholicity, but I
also hope, in an age too often characterized by indifference to both real and
imagined ecclesial divisions, that it will encourage theological reflection on
the gifts and virtues needed for Christians who proclaim their faith in “one,
holy, catholic and apostolic church.”
Henri de Lubac’s Catholicism
Henri de Lubac wrote a great many books, shaped
more by historical circumstance than systematic calculation. He wrote monographs on Teilhard de Chardin
simply because the Society of Jesus ordered him to give an orthodox defense of
the thought of a fellow Jesuit who was under suspicion of heresy for his
evolutionary theology. His work on
Buddhism is also hard to place except as part of a whole theology of mission,
and a commitment to the dialogue of cultures. De Lubac’s retrieval of medieval exegesis, of the four-fold senses of
scripture read in the Tradition, brings a massive dose of Augustinianism into
the largely neo-Thomist bloodstream of the Catholic world, and his Surnaturel
makes the whole “supernaturalizing of the natural” the fundamental resource for
the kind of catholicity that nouvelle theologie so vigorously presents
to the world. De Lubac’s works must be
seen as ways of imagining the whole; his Catholic imagination is charged
with a theological vision of the “mystical body of Christ” comprehending the
entire shape of living (to use a favored phrase of Ford).
De Lubac is now seen in some quarters as a
theological conservative, but we should recall that he was not always seen this
way. As with those thinkers identified
with Nicene orthodoxy or Thomas Aquinas, de Lubac was a risk-taker, but in
retrospect we can see him as a conserver of tradition. Neither conservative nor
liberal, de Lubac certainly was a Christian humanist, and he found a way beyond
the impasse between Modernists and Veterists through the very category of
“tradition.” He certainly was a
“radical” in the sense of going to the source, or rather to the sources. His humanism flowed, not unlike Ford’s, from
the fount of Christological realism. We
now know the cumulative effect, largely through his impact on Vatican II, and
through the whole seismic force of his little book Catholicism.[ii]
In Catholicism, de Lubac examines the
patristic notion of the Church as a universal social reality. “Catholic,” here,
always denotes the “gathering up of the whole.” But for de Lubac, as for the Church Fathers and for Thomas Aquinas, it
is the Eucharist as the visible sacrament of Christ’s mystical body that does
the gathering. The Church certainly has
a crucial, even necessary, co-operative agency in liturgical acts of
consecration, but most truly, supernaturally, and mystically, “the Eucharist
constitutes the Church.” The Eucharist
is the “source and summit” of Catholic Christian life, it is what gathers up
all the fragments of truth, hope, and life into the mystical unity of Christ’s
Body, the Catholic One. In the words of
the encyclical Veritatis Splendor, “The presence of Christ to men of
every time is actualized in his Body, which is the Church.”[iii]
That is a highly particularized and concrete embodiment of Christ gathering up
the whole human race in the Eucharist. No other gathering practice, no other ‘religion,’ whether it is liberal
democracy, the global economy, or any other theopolitical vision of the
whole—so the red-blooded claim goes—is as comprehensive as this Eucharistic
gathering in the teaching of the Catholic Church. Against the backdrop of modern individualism,
de Lubac stressed the social nature of Christ’s Body in the sacrament of
Eucharist, and “the corporate destiny of mankind.” The human race itself
depends on the mystical body of Christ assembled in the Eucharist, extended
through time so that the world might mature into redemption. The Eucharist that constitutes the Church
enables fugitives from grace to become pilgrims of the promise in the fullness
of time.
The classical view that time is cyclical,
eternally recurrent, endless, is ruptured by the climactic view of time
revealed in Christ. But the rupture is
actually an opening for history to be charged with significance as the history
of God’s redemption, pulling humanity towards it true end in Christ. Time is now a gift given to grow a pilgrim
people. The Eucharist, and all the
sacraments, likewise, cultivates our openness to the gifts of the Spirit needed
for this growth in the Body of Christ. This can be seen especially in the Pauline theme of the Christian “body
politics” growing to maturity [e.g. Ephesians 4.15] and which I have said is a
helpful theme for understanding Ford as well. This bodily growth in time is not the “myth of progress,” for that is
but a corruption of the good, plain to see in the American notion of itself as
a “redeemer nation.” No, Christian time
suggests a particular kind of ecclesial growth. Perhaps not unlike Hubble’s theory of an
“expanding universe,” the Christian view of time also suggests “the Church is a
growing body, a building, in course of construction.” (123) But if we like the
organic metaphors of growth, some may wrestle uncomfortably with an exclusive
ecclesiocentric soteriology, as it immediately raises questions about
“unbelievers” at the very moment it claims comprehensiveness. Two lengthy quotations from Catholicism
help to explicate and illumine a point that de Lubac often tries to make
concerning the place of “unbelievers‘ in the providential ordo saltutis.
As
“unbelievers” are, in the design of providence, indispensable for building the
Body of Christ, they must in their own way profit from their vital connexion
(sic) with this same Body. By an
extension of the dogma of the communion of saints, it seems right to think that
though they themselves are not in the normal way of salvation, they will be
able nevertheless to obtain this salvation by virtue of those mysterious bonds
which unite them to the faithful. In
short, they can be saved because they are an integral part of that humanity
which is to be saved. (125)
Far from using catholicity as a weapon against
the unbeliever, de Lubac’s view suggests that “vital connections” between the
Body of Christ and “unbelievers” must be beneficial to the building up of the
Church. If this is going to be a truly
historical claim, then certain institutions will be necessary for the
connections to be sustainable, and for new imaginative possibilities to be
envisioned.
One more lengthy passage from Catholicism
suggests that it is not only beneficial but also the very grace and charism of
Catholic Christians to co-operate in the history and politics of God’s
redemption of the world, perhaps especially where we can make “vital
connections” with those who do not yet fully “share in this Body.”
The grace
of Catholicism was not given to us for ourselves alone, but for those who do
not possess it…Fidelity to that grace by which we are members of the Church
makes two demands upon us: we must
co-operate in the collective salvation of the world by taking part, each in
accordance with his own vocation, in the construction of that great building of
which we must be at once the workmen and the stones; at the same time we must
co-operate, by the impact of our whole Christian life, in the individual
salvation of those who remain apparently ‘unbelievers.’” (129)
It is not, in other words, by being “fugitives
from the world,” by withdrawing from “unbelievers,” or “escaping” in communal
solitude from the world (although that may sometimes be needful), but through
creative collaborations with “those who do not possess” catholicity. The suggestion that de Lubac makes is that
genuine catholicity requires that we fully co-operate in God’s work of
“bringing redemption to maturity,” by bringing all humanity into contact with
the fullness of Christ who is all in all (cf. Ephesians 1:22-23).
Written at about the same time as Catholicism
(1938), another early work stands out as central for understanding de Lubac’s
theology: Corpus Mysticum, recently
translated into English by Sr. Gemma Simmonds, a former student of Ford’s.[iv] We can expect to see a whole new generation
of theologians working in English-language theology discover this work for the
first time. This was a very influential
study when it was first published in French in the years immediately preceding
World War II. It was a work that secured
de Lubac’s reputation as the premier Catholic historical theologian working in Europe. The book
is an historical study of the medieval migrations of the term ‘corpus
mysticum,’ and, more fully than in Catholicism, it is here that we can
see a historiography for de Lubac’s catholic vision: the world comprehended as a whole, being
gathered up (for judgment and salvation) in the mystical body of Christ. It is also, here, rather than in Catholicism,
that we can begin to glimpse the significance of his work for understanding
what has gone wrong with the political imagination in the West.
It is well known, of course, that this idea of
the mystical body comes from St. Paul
who is most fond of organic metaphors for the ekklesia [e.g. Romans 12;
1 Cor. 12; Ephesians 3-5]. The identity
of Christ’s Body and the Church raises the whole question that occurs after the
Ascension: if Christ has ascended, how
is Christ’s Body present in the Church? Can Christ both be at the right hand of the Father and really present in
the community of the faithful? The idea
of the mystical or spiritual body of Christ is thus distinguished from his
historical body that has risen and reigns in heaven. The mystical body of Christ is that assembly
which Christ the Head gathers through history, through the scriptures that bear
witness to the Word of God, but especially and actually through the
Eucharist. The identity claim that is
made in the institution of the Lord’s Supper, “This is my body,” is an
utterance that performs the gathering of all humanity into Christ’s Body. A whole sacramental theology “grows up” to
describe the real presence of Christ in the Church, indeed as the Church.
De Lubac notes that in early Christian thought,
the presence of Christ’s Body was considered both in terms of Scripture and in
terms of the community gathered around the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist. It was not either/or. Without equating their catholic visions, here
we can see something of the way in which David Ford belongs to this early
Christian tendency to identify Scripture with Christ’s real presence in the
world. The way that Ford performs this,
both in his strong commitments to the one holy, catholic and apostolic church,
in his founding the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, and in his other labors for
a university that imagines a global constituency, we can see him participating
in a fundamentally catholic vision of Christ’s body present in the world, here
through Scripture, there through the Eucharist—his participation in one
energizes his participation in the other.
De Lubac is able to trace the subtle shifts
that enable the idea of the corpus mysticum to migrate from the complex ways in
which the term refers to the nexus of “Scripture, Eucharist and Church” in the
5th century AD to the way the term is carefully circumscribed to refer only to
the Eucharist in the 9th century AD, to the way the term becomes co-terminus
with the Church itself in the late medieval period. This last move was a logical extension of the
earlier movements which held them altogether because, as noted earlier, “the
Eucharist makes the Church.” (Corpus Mysticum, 88) Or, as he notes in Catholicism, “The
Church, without being exactly co-extensive with the mystical Body, is not
adequately distinct from it.” (41) There
is nothing problematic about these extensions, these theopolitical migrations,
except perhaps in retrospect, wherever we can see the movements as transgressions,
deteriorations of true catholicity. In
this, de Lubac helps us to be vigilant about false expressions of
catholicity.
Corpus Mysticum, as a term,
moves from a highly-particularized Eucharistic realism to a naturalizing of the
very notion of Society stripped of all its original history and theopolitical
vision, yet maintaining its value for providing a mystical sense of unity. It is the “condition for the possibility” of
a de- theologized society that nevertheless retains its religious quality of
mystical unity. It is no surprise then
that it gives birth to Leviathan, an artificial body whose mystical unity can
only be secured through a “civil religion” that, as Rousseau recognized at the
end of his Social Contract, requires devotion and sacrifice. The mystical unity that makes sense in the
Eucharistic realism of the Catholic Church is never more perverted, nor clearly
visible, than when nation-states go to war. The process of transferring the gathering power of the corpus mysticum
from the Eucharist to the Church to Society to the Nation-State is a process
aided as much or more by Machiavelli’s de-theologizing of politics as by
Luther’s de-politicizing of theology. It
is a process that makes it possible to have a universal vision of society
without the particular-universal of Jesus Christ. Because Church can become distorted when seen
as co-terminus with Society, what begins to emerge is a universal that is both
less and more comprehensive that the Eucharist. The tragedy is that the migrations of the term to the society, and then
the invention of centripetal politics in the modern nation-state, correspond to
the practice of violence on an ever-increasing scale.
Liberalism, Anti-Liberalism, and Catholicity
Interestingly, the unity of Corpus Mysticum
is maintained in the Romantic idea of the civil society only by breaking off
from the Body of Christ, cutting itself off from not only the Eucharist but
Scripture as well. It breaks from unity
with God, but it retains all the social power carried in the idea of a mystical
union. Stripped of all its ecclesial
attributes, the social arrangements secured under liberal orders make “society”
into a secular Church, but one that cannot exist without its exclusionary and
coercive instrument, the modern nation-state. John Milbank does indeed owe Henri de Lubac quite a lot on his allied
point, and he is right to note de Lubac’s reticence to extend his argument to
the political implications. Even if the
procedural liberalism of the nation-state seems far from “withering away,” it
does seem that the power of the nation-state has been transferred or perhaps extended
to other corporate agents in the global economy. And it is something to consider that at
precisely the point at which nation-state power seems in decline (according to
mainstream political scientists), or at least in transition, political liberalism
seems to be likewise, deteriorating under critiques from left, right and center
in ways that suggest that new political visions of the common good are sorely
needed. Perhaps theopolitical vision is
the most needful of all. It is telling,
for example, that even defenses of political liberalism, for example in debates
that have raged around the thought of Habermas and Rawls, always fall down
badly on the question of theology and religion.
But it might give us pause that de Lubac never
followed through on the political implications of his work. Was this because he believed that peculiar
form of modernity called liberalism to be a good thing? De Lubac was highly critical of liberalism,
though his was a critique of the Church before it was a critique of the
“world.” De Lubac was even concerned,
years after the publication of Corpus Mysticum that people might draw
the wrong conclusions from it; he worried that it encouraged some sort of
fortress mentality, a “Veterist” retreat into medieval life. Far from it! Like Maurice Blondel before him, he saw the political Catholicism of L’Action Français to be a failure of the
integrative, catholic imagination. And yet, despite his vision for a way beyond
the Modernist-Veterist controversies, he did not go very far to help us with
the political implications we are to draw from his argument.
The political theorist Sheldon Wolin risked a
political interpretation of de Lubac’s argument that has proved both
influential and controversial. Wolin has
made de Lubac’s narrative do important work in a massive, and persuasive
critique of political liberalism.[v] In
his eyes, we can see the mystical body idea very clearly shaping political
liberalism from the sixteenth century onwards. Liberalism tries to speak to all, and attempts
to embrace all. In this sense, liberalism
aims at catholicity that is ostensibly centered in the individual, but a
particular conception of the individual that, in the name of freedom, conforms
to the economic interest of the community. In Wolin’s critique, liberalism aspires to provide a kind of mystical
unity for society, whether through the instrument of the nation-state or
through a certain way of imagining social and political attachments through the
global economy. The myth of
inclusiveness is strongest in liberalism here, and yet we know that the
political and economic orders that liberalism has thus produced, namely
“democratic” nation-states and free markets, are actually terribly exclusionary
and in Wolin’s terms, tending towards the centripetal pull of totalitarian
forms of power. If we have our doubts,
Wolin might point out the problem of “stateless persons” as it highlights how
central the nation-state is for narrating human identity, or point out the
problem of “border security” in the face of the free movement of people as a
window into the inherently exclusionary, even violent, nature of
liberalism. Likewise, there are barriers
to participation in the global economic community that became apparent when one
takes into account where the vast majority of wealth is concentrated and who
controls its distribution. Or we may
simply observe the fact that a nation calls on the unity of its people, and
asks for “faith in nation,” most emphatically when it needs to go to war. Unlike true catholicity, which embraces
people of all races and nations, the catholicity of liberalism is concerned
with conformity to the economic interests of those with the greatest
concentrations of wealth, and defines political participation solely through
market consumption and cyclical voting– all in the name of freedom and
democracy.
Wolin provides a superb and provocative
analysis that is devastatingly critical of liberalism, and concerned to free
our idea of democracy from its false attachment to political liberalism. While his historical arguments are faultless,
and his criticisms penetrating, the theoretical speculations may not offer us
any way out. And this is a problem with
almost all the anti-liberal ways that could be imagined to follow de Lubac. We could, of course, pursue other
interpretive options. We could, for
example, argue that this “mystical unity” has been a gift that Christianity has
given to the world. It has given the
world a cosmic idea of social unity that enables us to aspire to a global
community in the first place. That interpretive
approach is very much alive in certain quarters, though I expect it will run
its course and die. Another approach is
to take a neutral position. Perhaps
liberalism does inherit from Christianity an errant catholicity, but it can
also strip itself of the idea of the corpus mysticum, it can self-correct, and
we can continue forward with some chastened version of liberalism. This revisionism is more attractive, but it
is filled with the very temptations to control that were so troublesome for
Christendom. In my view, it is the
anti-liberal interpretation that holds the most power. The power lies in that the anti-liberal
critiques identify falsehood, and likewise identify the need for a true vision
of the common good. But it is a critical
power that may need to become part of a better dialectic if it is to
participate more fully in God’s truth.
In medieval dialectical theology (Sic et Non),
the theological method is to reconcile diversity through careful
distinctions. The approach is to both
purify thought through complex distinctions, and also integrate it into a more
comprehensive vision. One can see a
similar pattern in the Church Councils as well; to state anathemas in order to
affirm belief worthy of the Gospel was the normative way that the Church dealt
with falsehood and truth-telling. One of
the risks of being dialectical is that the negations will be carried too far,
and the affirmation (the truth-telling) will not be carried far enough. Theological critiques of political
liberalism, for example those that might follow Wolin’s impressive arguments,
or critiques of theological liberalism, for example those that might follow
Karl Barth, may need to pay more attention to the way true catholicity handled
anathemas in the past. That is, properly
dialectical critiques of liberalism will make judgments that do not finally end
in negation. However ruthless they may
be in their denials, or how “purifying” their distinctions may be, beyond
liberalism and anti-liberalism (or in de Lubac’s context, between Modernists
and Veterists), there is only Catholicism.
De Lubac
actually helped the Church to find a way out of the fortress mentality that
seemed overly determined by either a rejection or embrace of modernity. He did this by cultivating the “virtues of
openness” that he thought the Church needed and practiced at Vatican II. And he almost always practiced these virtues
through a return to Scripture. De Lubac
wrote on scriptural interpretation more than any other theological issue that
he addressed. This was one of his great
contributions to Vatican II, where he had a profound influence not only on Lumen Gentium but also on Dei Verbum. The increased use of scripture in the liturgy
after Vatican II is a direct result of his influence. De Lubac asked us to pay attention to the Corpus
Mysticum as that whole nexus of Scripture, Eucharist and Church that
attaches us to God by inserting us into the Body of Christ. And thus his return to Scripture was at once
a return to the Body of Christ, arms outstretched to the world.
The political implications of de Lubac’s work
are already in the theology itself: it
is only in this ecclesia romana, this particular-universal “mystical
body” politics of redemption, that we are able to see what liberal society is
capable of doing, and what it is not capable of doing for humanity as a
whole. By being inserted into Christ’s
Body in the Eucharist, the Christian has an ecclesial vision of what counts as
the common good, and thus can see what “goes too far” and what does not go far
enough. If liberalism seems for some to
be an errant or transgressive catholicity, then anti-liberalism will be both
too much and too little. It would lack participation
in a larger dialectic of theological denial and affirmation; but that, of
course, will require real theopolitical vision and cooperation with God’s work
of redemption. De Luabc’s way is not to
fall into the house of anti-liberalism, critical though he is of liberal
individualism, but to draw our attention to the Eucharist as the primary way of
seeing and becoming a Christian people.
Participation in the Eucharist is not a one-way
trip, a procedure for attaching us to God by inserting us into Christ’s Body
but detaching us from the world. What
flows from this Eucharistic realism is real power and energy that is anything
but quiet and detached. Indeed, Sheldon
Wolin himself recognizes that the early Christians revivified Western political
thought paradoxically, not by trying to influence the political order, but by
attending to their own ecclesial order in which the Eucharist was “meaningful
participation in community.” (Wolin,
87) By attending to their own ecclesial
growth as the Body of Christ, Christians unwittingly expanded the Western
political imagination with theopolitical vision, seeing the world through
Christ’s eyes. Thus theopolitical vision
was formed in participating in the Eucharist, for this is the normative way in
which Christians receive the gifts of the Spirit, and are shaped into virtuous
people. As Thomas Aquinas teaches, the
gifts of the Spirit are necessary for our training in the virtues. In the modern period, Christians have
forgotten about the virtues and the gifts they receive in the Body. But early Christians were keenly aware that
they were being given spiritual gifts that would cultivate the virtues most
needful as they sojourned towards the beatific vision of God’s city.
The Gift of Wisdom and the Virtues of Openness
For the Church Fathers and Aquinas, the gift of
Wisdom given by the Spirit in the Body of Christ was always paired with the
virtue of prudence because, along with charity, prudence was required for the
practice of all the virtues. Wisdom was
the gift to seek above all others in the Body, because without it one could not
discern, make decisions, or act as part of Christ’s Body. Far from modern political definitions of
prudence as “careful deliberation” or “wise advice,” Christian prudence is both
more practical, and more reasonable than liberal political visions have
been. In David Ford’s terms, the gift of
wisdom and the virtue of prudence are necessary for the whole “shape of
living.”
David Ford seeks God’s wisdom above all. It is a gift of the Spirit in 1 Cor. 12.8 (logos
sophia) where it is seen to be necessary, according to St. Paul, “for the common good.”
Participating in Christ’s Body, then, is the key to receiving the gifts of the
Spirit, including the gift of wisdom. Where the gift of wisdom perfects in us the virtue of prudence, a
different politics than we have seen in the deteriorated forms of catholicity
that belong to political liberalism becomes possible. Ford has never taken the anti-liberal
position. In his gift of “wise speech,”
he has studiously avoided the fated negations of liberalism. Rather he has sought to cultivate the very
virtues of openness that defined de Lubac’s approach.
When working most closely with Ford in Cambridge, I often found
myself impressed with the man as a thoroughly theological politician. One of his favorite things to do, he often
will say, is to gather people together, to connect his diverse friendships in
ever-new combinations. This is part way
to appreciating Ford’s catholicity as well as his charism of wisdom in the body
of Christ. He gathers people, and almost
inevitably, gathers them around the Word of God, wherever they are, whoever
they are. In my memories of him, his
postures are almost always open. Sometimes his hands are thrown up into the air, as with his exultant
laughter, in a praise-like movement. Other times it is a vision of him with his arms stretched between
people, introducing them to one another, always with some key word or reason
(some logos sophia) as to why they should form a relationship, or seek a
common good. When the gathering gestures
have had their affect, and people are drawn to his office or some seminar room
to study Scripture, then we see a different kind of gesture that is, I think,
more fundamental. The vision I have of
him before Scripture is much more the contemplative man than the gregarious
gatherer. Almost always with a pen in
hand, his posture before the sacred text is relaxed but also highly
disciplined, intent on knowing the truth and being receptive to the gift of
wisdom. It is as if his participation in
the Eucharist has trained him to read Scripture with exactly the same
reverence. He feasts on the Word. Balthasar’s phrase, “the adoring act of
listening to the Word of God” sums it up nicely. His posture before the Bible is characterized
by a serious listening that entails the freedom of obedience, and the
expectation that God will reveal Himself. Ford’s open posture reflects that he has been trained in the virtues of
openness, especially the virtue of prudence, which he performs with excellence,
precisely because he seeks the gifts of the Spirit in the Body of Christ. His passion for the truth, his wise
decision-making, and his discernments of good action all flow from the pairing
of the gift of wisdom and the virtue of prudence that he has received in the
Body of Christ and cultivates in his reading of Scripture.
What makes Ford’s practice so different from de
Lubac, of course, is that his stress has not been on the Eucharist as much as
it has been on Scripture. That certainly
has to do with a Protestant catholicity that envisions opening the Scriptures
to all people. But Ford never personally
detaches the Scriptures from their rightful place in the nexus of
Scripture-Eucharist-Church; he rather sees the Scriptures as an opening for
both the performance of the love of God and the love of neighbor. The gift of wisdom and the virtue of prudence
are so important for cultivating all the virtues of openness, and we can see
that Ford has discerned the way in which people of all races and nations can
gather around the Scriptures to envision the common good. As a consequence, Ford provides a different
theopolitical vision of what is possible between Jews, Christians and
Muslims. This vision might be seen, in
de Lubac’s words, as co-operating in God’s work of “bringing redemption to
maturity.”
Finally, it would be unfortunate if Ford’s work
were seen to culminate in matters of “inter-faith.” Just as in the earlier description of de
Lubac’s labor as part of theology of mission, we can see all of Ford’s labors
as part of a whole theology of Wisdom. To put a finer point on it, it is a Spirit-Christology in which we learn
to read the Word of God in a way that helps us hit the target: the Wisdom of God. The sapiential approach has as much to do
with hermeneutical skills as it does with the Eucharistic imagination for the
“gathering up of the whole” in communion with God. It is the particular-universal of Jesus
Christ, the Wisdom of God that he is after. Ford’s activities are really incomprehensible unless one sees that “the
primal cell” of all his fruitful actions, the seed of his extraordinary
endeavors in building up the Body of Christ, flow from a life of praise, from
the “adoring act of listening to the Word of God.” This makes Ford’s
theopolitical imagination not only catholic, but also evangelical. And according to St. Paul's letter to the Philippians, that is, please God, what we shall all be in the end.
ENDNOTES
[i] Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work in Retrospect (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1993), p. 39.
[ii]
Henri
de Lubac, Catholicism (Sheed and Ward, 1964).
[iii] Veritatis Splendor, no. 25.
[iv] Henri
de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, trans.
Gemma Simmonds (London: SCM, 2006).
[v] Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton: Princeton
UP, 2004)
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