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12.

The City of Man


Man as Social and Political Being
Two men, Two societies
Christ is the true Body. He is not simply the head at the top but also the body, to be found in the very lowest position. Christ is the head of the procession of all creatures to God. But by the Holy Spirit he is also at the bottom of the cosmos. He brings up the rear of procession, carries the stranglers and ensures that no one is left behind. We may liken the history of the human race to a cross-country trek in which teams compete. Team Christ wins by holding together, to ensure the survival of all members. ing: the team that of which all members wait for all others, wins. The question is not simply who, that is, which culture, can get a competitor over the finishing first, but which team can get its whole team, and so the very last competitor, over the finishing line? So its captain is found in the least conspicuous or dignified place, bringing up the rear, gathering and helping along every straggler. But when Christ is understood without the Spirit, and without rest of Christian doctrine, we get a very different account of the man and God. On this logic, the Father way to the Son, who gives way to the Spirit, who gives way to the Church, which gives way to man the individual, and to society and secularity. Each is superseded and replaced by the next. The movement from the Father to the Son would then continue as an unrolling in which man was fthat rpo is equated with the beginning, the Son with the present, and the Spirit with the end. The order of salvation would then place God as origin. The movement Father Son Spirit would then be an unrolling of God in a process that starts as the history of God and ends as the history of man without God. But such a narrative does not stop with the Holy Spirit. At the beginning there was belief in the one God, who gave issue to the Son, who gave issue to the Spirit and to the Church, so the Church and Christendom gave way to humanity and to the individual, the disappearance of hierarchy, and arrival of secular society and diversity. In such a narrative we are always moving out of the age of the Son and into the age of the Spirit in some three or seven-ages schema, and a narrative of history which is smoother in prosperous times, and couched in more chiliastic terms of a future convulsion, when times are harder. This is the narrative of modernity, as the overcoming of all partial kingdoms and the final arrival of the universal man and the rule of the people.

The Passover of the Body


The Lord woos us, with the gift, of his only begotten Son (John 3.16). He has set the Body of Christ on view everywhere before the world. Will the world be won over? The world can decide to be pleased by this gift and receive it. It can receive it as the passage into communion with God, and so as its salvation. Or the world can decide to find this gift unpleasing, and decide not to receive the Son. It can decide that the Church is not an acceptable gift, and that it will not be propitiated by this body offered. The Lord gives this body to world as its way into its salvation. For the worlds sake Christ keeps his body present in the world. The Church is broken open and sacrificed for the world. Since he preserves and renews it, the Church can take the battering meted out to it. God is wooing the world, and the body of Christ is the gift or bride-price by which the world is wooed. The Lord seeks us, and having found us, calms us, treats our injuries and removes the cause of our pain and distress. God is winning over the world by this patient offering and

sacrifice of his Son. Since the Lord sets out to please us with this body, we can say that he hopes to propitiate us with it. God propitiates man. We have seen that when man does not identify the true God, he directs his love in all sorts of other directions and, constructing a world of substitutes and compensations, gives himself away. He has to be re-oriented, his worship re-directed and he has to be purified. Christ purifies man by directing all our offering to the Father, and gives us the love that purifies us of false loves. God expiates man, and so mans misdirection is expiated. The Lord expiates our sins, so that each of us may become as acceptable to each other as to God. Christ purifies us. The Church is made ready by Christ to be his body for the world. Since this purification happens in public, the Church is continually humbled before the world. We experience it as a passion. Christ performs this service and this liturgy before the world in order to show, through his body, that this is the way that the world may take in order to enter communion with God. We are the sacrifice of Christ. He offers us to the world. He is the fire that shines unceasing light through us and from us. The Lord is the fire that constantly burns off our sin so that we endure forever. Since this fire burns off whatever does not belong to him, it always appears as though we are being consumed by it and thus to the world it looks as though the Church is being punished.

1. Divine Liturgy and Secular Liturgy


If we do not sing along with the first liturgy, that of Christ, it is because we are borne along by the second, the liturgy of the world that aims to get along without Christ. But we must also say that this second, secular, liturgy is entirely dependent on the divine liturgy. The world that wants to puts as much distance as itself and Christ as it can, is able to do only because Christ sustains its freedom to do so. Christ is the guarantor of the secular sphere, and of the freedom of man to do without him for as long as he can. The secular liturgy is dependent on the divine liturgy. The worship of the Church , sustains the secular liturgy of this world. The Church makes this distinction between church and secular. This distinction does not divide the Church from the world, but indicates that Christ has made himself the servant of the world, and that we may participate in his service to it. All the activity of the Church is just a particular expression of the liturgy of Christ. This action is his, and ours only in the Holy Spirit, who glorifies him, and in him, glorifies us. Christian worship is a drama performed in public for the world first to watch and increasingly to participate in. The secular liturgy and the art and labour of man are entirely dependent on the gift to man of participation in this divine liturgy. Our songs are derived from the songs of Christ to man and our many loves are expressions of his one love for us. This true worship opens up the right way to live and it cleanses us from all lesser ways. All popular song with its language of love, and even all secular music with its rage against form, are derived from the songs of the Church which resound Christs love for us. The world that wants to puts as much distance as itself and Christ as it can, and receive the love, or the memory of the love, without the giver of that love, can do so because Christ sustains its freedom to do so. Christ is the guarantor of the secularity of the world, and so of the freedom of man to do without Christ for as long as he can. The Church intercedes for the world. It goes through a passion and it accompanies the world as it puts itself through a passion.

Christ speaks up for us before all others. He has interceded for us with those who were enraged at us. God speaks on our behalf to persuade all others to be patient with us. Christ intercedes with us on behalf of those with whom we are at enmity or of whom we are oblivious. His prayer is directed to us, to persuade us to be merciful with each other. Christ represent us to those whom we have made our victims. He asks them to give us more time, and another chance to turn around. Christ unceasingly asks us to release those whom, in our fear and rage we have taken into our grip. We may release them and so we ourselves may be released; we are blocked and immobilised by the grasp we have on others. He persuades our creditors and all those whom we have hurt to be forgiving of us. He asks us to speak and pray for all men and to pass on the forgiveness that we ourselves have received. .

2. Passover and the Continuing Passion of the Body


Christ leads us through In the passion Christ walks through the assembly of humankind. We are the storm we goes through: we lash out, our blows rain down, and Christ is pummelled and battered. The cross is behind Christ, but it lies ahead for us. Our cross is not a repetition of his. Christ suffered alone, entirely without us, and indeed against us, since it was our aggression that he suffered. But in our passion we are not alone, but with him. Since he cannot be separated from the Spirit, and by the Spirit we cannot be separated from him, our passion will not end in our destruction. Because we are joined to him our passion will not unravel us entirely. It will release us from what does not belong to us, so that we may finally be joined solely to him, and through him we will be truly joined to all men. We will be raised. The passion is the way we may experience the resurrection now. We must live life as this passion that must be endured until the whole number comes in and the body is complete. Our course through life is a passage through the storm caused by the ungoverned forces, social, political and natural forces that rage around us. The waves tower over us and close in on us so that we do not see how we will get through. They press in and try to break our selfpossession. As soon as we are pushed out of our composure and give in to that rage we become part of it. As psalm 124 puts it:
If the Lord himself had not been on our side they had swallowed us up quick, the waters had drowned us and the stream gone even over our soul.

We must resist and absorb the violence of the storm and not pass its buffeting on. We must remain holy, still and innocent.
Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain (Philippians 1.20-21). I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death (Philippians 3.10).

We display the sufferings and the unrecognisable and unwelcome sight of the Lord.
We always carry round in our body the death of Jesus (2 Corinthians 4.10-12).

It is a joyful labour. We are not left only with the bitterness of our labour and suffering, because we already know (and have constantly to remind one another) that our work is purposeful, its purpose is already fulfilled, so we are not working in vain, so our work is connected to its outcome and brings its reward with it. We already anticipate the joy we will have then together with the very people who are still presently opposing and persecuting us. We rejoice in our sufferings (Romans 5.3). They are not for nothing. We are not suffering for our own salvation, for this has come to us as a sheer gift. Our salvation came through the efforts of others who passed the gospel on to us, and who put up with us and suffered our antagonism. God has paid out their lives in order to win us.

But we may now work and suffer in order to bring salvation to others. Our suffering or resistance is the means by which the remains of this world are scoured off us. We learn how to suffer, how to be overlooked, and how to grieve with others. We mourn with those who mourn (Romans 12.15). Aversion to Christ Christ was unrecognised and regarded as repugnant. Christs people evoke the same disgust.
We always carry round in our body the death of Jesus Death is at work in us (2 Corinthians 4.1012).

Christians display in their persons the sufferings of Christ, unrecognisable and unwelcome, reeking of everything unpleasant. To the world Christians have their smell, the smell of death, and they cannot stand us. To the dying we are as unrecognisable as Christ, they cannot tell what we are, and recoil from us. Our entire lives Christian life are this baptismal passage through this sea and through this narrow defile. We have to pass through this storm. It is no inanimate trouble that we have to go through, but the deliberate resistance of the world, and the fury that other people now direct at us. We have make our way through them. They try to prevent us passing, so we have to run the gauntlet of them. The world attempts to stop us coming through this dark passage with whatever thumps and kicks it can. Christ takes us through our own passion. We ourselves have been part of that storm, for we were enemies of God, who tried to oppose this body. The procession of God has had to proceed against our resistance. But as the end of the procession goes past, and our resistance to him is finally exhausted, we are caught up by Christ and join the procession of his people. Now we have become members of the procession that goes through the world. We now attract the same rage that we once showed, but now we remain untouched and unmoved by it. The Priesthood of the Whole Church The Gospel has come to us through the hands of many generations of Christians. They were not universally loved and thanked for this. Some of them were opposed and persecuted for their faithfulness to us and to other generations in the future. These saints suffered for the Gospel for our sake.
All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.All these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect (Hebrews 11.13-40).

The whole Church is a intercessory and priestly body. The Church prays and speaks up for the world. The world does not always celebrate with us; we pray for them and they rely on us to do this for them. The world delegates its own responsibility to the Church. The Church appears loaded with sin, its appearance apparently entirely compromised, but it is the sin of the world that the Church carries, and is itself caught up in. Bearing accusation and ridicule is part of our priestly calling. The Church offers its account of human identity and the confidence which result from that high view renews civil society as a whole. The distinction between the Church and the world is fundamental, yet it is a permanent source of aggravation. The Church says that man is called by God and utterly restless until he heeds that call. He tries to distract himself from this restlessness by pursuing other goals, and yet no other goal provides the satisfaction and

release that man seeks, and this turns him to a rage that turns against the Church. As long as man is still restless it is because he is on way to his redemption, and regardless of whether he is at any moment moving backwards or forwards, yet he is unable to silence the call that motivates him. Christians suffer for the sake of the Church. We continue the sufferings of Christ until they are vindicated and completed by the reconciliation of all. As the Apostle Paul says:
I fill up in my flesh was it still lacking in Christs afflictions for the sake of his body (Colossians 1.24).

When we refer to Christ bleeding we are referring to the Christians, and to the people of Israel, whose lives have been lived in service of which we are the beneficiaries. They became martyrs for our sake. Christ reckons them his, and so refers to them as his own body and blood. He considers their labour to be his own so when they are persecuted that he is bleeding. To despise or persecute the saints, is to crucify the Son of Man all over again (Hebrews 6.6). The Church is the Passage for the World The Church is the way that has opened to us. With Christ, directed and enabled by him, we may now open ourselves and let the world enter him through us. The Church is the gate through which the world can enter Christ. The Lord commands the Church to become this opening. The Church and the Churchs passion is the path along which the world must go. The world is saved by the service and passion of the Church, the body of Christ. The Church suffers because it takes whatever the world metes out in its frenzy. This generation of the people of God are the conduit through which this generation of the world may enter the communion of God. Thus it is the Church which is present, with Christ, in the eucharist. Civil society springs up around the Church. When this secularity does not know its own source, in the patience of the Christian Church, it becomes an impatience, which we may call secularism, an ideological attempt to separate society from its source in the communion of God with man, given in the Church. But the Church is the one thing that prevents ideology, and which therefore keeps the world secular, open for the good judgment of man, given by the grace of God. The Church does not serve society by making out that there is no difference between Church and society. The Church is the source of the life of society, and the confidence with which the Church offers its account of human identity renews civil society as a whole. This distinction does not divide us from the world, but indicates Christ has made himself the servant of the whole world, and in him we may participate in his service for the world. This is the point of the distinction between liturgy and secularity, between ordained and lay, and between Sunday and the days of the week. This worship and liturgy generates all our public and secular activity in the everyday world. All our activity is just a particular expression of the liturgy of Christ. Our activism is only ours, because it is first his. All our outreach is the work of the Holy Spirit who hides and glorifies Christ, and in him, hides and reveals us and hides and reveals our work. He alone knows who we are and therefore what the purpose of all our activity is. The Church does not understand the secular week to be not Sunday. It understands that all the days of the week are just ways in which the fullness of Sunday spells itself out to us. Sunday is too much to take all at once, so this day of resurrection spells itself out to us slowly, as Monday and Tuesday, the days in which we encounter and in which we learn to encounter the world through saints. Only let us be faithful to the saints whom have been entrusted to us.

The fullness of time, eternity, is not yet. We may have no timeless direct rule from God. This faith insists that the rule of God is mediated to us through other persons, and thus there is a realm of interpretation, judgement and individual conscience to which we are all called. Without this space for the freedom of conscience given by Christian faith civil society shrinks. The Passion of Christs Body In the passion Christ walks through the assembly of humankind. We are the storm we goes through. We lash out and our blows rain down on him and he is pummelled and battered. The cross is behind Christ, but it lies ahead for us. Our cross is not a repetition of his. Christ suffered alone, entirely without us, and indeed against us, since it was our aggression that he suffered. But in our passion we are not alone, but with him. Since he cannot be separated from the Spirit, and by the Spirit we cannot be separated from him, our passion will not end in our destruction. Because we are joined to him our passion will not unravel us entirely. It will release us from what does not belong to us, so that we may finally be joined solely to him, and through him we will be truly joined to all men. The passion is the way we may experience the resurrection now. We experience it as passion until the whole number comes in and the body is complete. So we sing: Our course through life is a passage through the storm caused by the ungoverned forces, social, political and natural forces that rage around us. The waves tower over us and close in on us so that we do not see how we will get through. They press in and try to break our selfpossession. As soon as we are pushed out of our composure and give in to that rage we become part of it. As psalm 124 puts it: If the Lord himself had not been on our side they had swallowed us up quick, the waters had drowned us and the stream gone even over our soul. We must resist and absorb the violence of the storm and not pass its buffeting on. We must remain holy, still and innocent. Our entire lives Christian life are this baptismal passage through this sea and through this narrow defile. All creation is disordered and frustrated. We inflicted this disorder on Christ and, now we are in Christ, others inflict on us. This storm of disorder must also pass through us, for we have to drink it down, and as we do it will be pacified and come into its proper order. It is no inanimate trouble that we have to go through, but the deliberate resistance of the world, and the fury that other people now direct at us. We have make our way through them. They try to prevent us passing, so we have to run the gauntlet of them. The world attempts to stop us coming through this dark passage with whatever thumps and kicks it can. Christ takes us through our own passion. We ourselves have been part of that storm, for we were enemies of God, who tried to oppose this body. The procession of God has had to proceed against our resistance. But as the end of the procession goes past, and our resistance to him is finally exhausted, we are caught up by Christ and join the procession of his people. Now we have become members of the procession that goes through the world. We now attract the same rage that we once showed, but now we remain untouched and unmoved by it. The whole Church is a intercessory and priestly body. The Church prays and speaks up for the world. The world does not always celebrate with us; we pray for them and they rely on us to do this for them. The world delegates its own responsibility to the Church. The Church appears loaded with sin, its appearance apparently entirely compromised, but it is the sin of

the world that the Church carries, and is itself caught up in. Bearing accusation and ridicule is part of our priestly calling. Christians suffer for the sake of the Church. We continue the sufferings of Christ until they are vindicated and completed by the reconciliation of all. As the Apostle Paul says, I fill up in my flesh was it still lacking in Christs afflictions for the sake of his body (Colossians 1.24), so we are also poured out like a drink offering (2 Tim 4.6) and rejoice in this. When we refer to Christ bleeding we are referring to the Christians, and to the people of Israel, whose lives have been lived in service of which we are the beneficiaries. They became martyrs for our sake. Christ reckons them his, and so refers to them as his own body and blood. He considers their labour to be his own so when they are persecuted that he is bleeding. To despise or persecute the saints, is to crucify the Son of Man all over again (Hebrews 6.6). There is a penumbra around the Church, which we call civil society or secularity. Many birds find shade under the branches of this tree. When this secularity does not know its own source, in the patience of the Christian Church, it becomes an impatience, which we may call secularism, an ideological attempt to separate society from its source in the communion of God with man, given in the Church. But the Church is the one thing that prevents ideology, and which therefore keeps the world secular, open for the good judgment of man, given by the grace of God. The Church does not serve society by making out that there is no difference between Church and society. The Church is the source of the life of society, and the confidence with which the Church offers its account of human identity renews civil society as a whole. This distinction does not divide us from the world, but indicates Christ has made himself the servant of the whole world, and in him we may participate in his service for the world. This is the point of the distinction between liturgy and secularity, between ordained and lay, and between Sunday and the days of the week. The Lord commands the Church to break and distribute itself and make itself the opening that the world go through, so the Church suffers the world. The Church is the gate through which the world presently outside the body of Christ can enter and along which it must go. The Church is Passover for the world: they will walk over our bodies to their salvation. They are saved by our works, our service and passion. They will deal out whatever rage they want to us, and in Christ we will be able to take it without giving it back, and so without being moved by it. The Church the people of God present to us in this generation is the conduit and passage through which the world enters the communion of God. In the Holy Spirit Christ makes us present to one another, but he does not do this unilaterally, for this would be a unilateral imposition. He offers us one another, and he waits until we are able to receive one another as good gifts, bringing us to our proper relative places. Christ not only gives but waits. He does not give us one another all at once, but serially, through time. He serves us and waits on us and waits for us, and this waiting is what time is. The resurrection that raises us to Christ, will also raise us and bring us face to face with all men. He now sends us all these people ahead of him to us, so our resurrection, imperceptibly underway since our baptism, consists in meeting these saints who already make up his glorious body.

PART TWO Hegel to the Twentieth century


Growth of the State as Arrival of the Kingdom of God
The Romantics wanted to return to the virtues they associated with medieval Christendom, such as cohesive and orderly society, less deracinated and distant from our physical environment, and in which, they want to believe, we did not make petty and vicious calculations of our own interest. Hegel included every period in a grand synthesis. Time as the New Guise of the Old Metaphysics The ancient world understood that everything we have and everything that we are comes down to us from above. The ancestors pass down to us the life that they themselves received from those before them. Early in history represents a position higher up on the ladder of being. Modernity offers two accounts of our origins. One is that we are made by nature, which and which means that all that precedes us finds its rational in us. Our history makes us what we are, so the arrow of time pushes from behind us and drives forward into the future. The second is that we make ourselves; we are the agents, not patients, not the creation of history. Two metaphysics are at work here. One is the pyramid-like hierarchy of Greek idealism, in which all reality is at the top and some reality descends but every level is a reduction of the level above it. All reality flows down from above: we can represent this by a pyramid inverted to stand on its point or by a downward arrow. From the seventeenth century the hierarchy of being represented by this pyramid and arrow was regarded as an out-dated and oppressively totalitarian theory of everything. it was condemned as metaphysical. Kant and the Enlighteners thought they had got rid of this pyramid of reality. But in fact they succeeded only in turning the pyramid on one side. When the pyramid lies on its side, its tip points horizontally, from left to right. This tip and arrow still represents the flow of reality, outward from its origin, from the left to the right. The flow is horizontal, and is now represented by the left-to-right arrow of time. Through time things evolve to become more sophisticated; there is a movement towards diversity, from the one to many. This is seen as a process of increasing freedom, so we are freer now than any earlier generation. It is seen as an inevitable process. This arrow of time represents an eschatology, although it is very different from Christian eschatology, for this movement is by necessity, a general and a necessary truth, so it is a matter of nature, driven from the rear, rather than a matter of the call of God, the act of the will of God in freedom. The old top-down metaphysics had now turned into the left-to-right movement of the arrow of time, that separates us from one another in different periods of history. The ascent of man is still our narrative. Kant and Hegel represent two definitions of the ascent of man, and thus two definitions of human enlightenment. Kant puts the emphasis on the individual and Hegel the emphasis on mankind as a whole and thus on society. Metaphysics, represents by the ladder, chain of being or pyramid, is couched in terms of time and history, and so it appears to be a new issue. The top-down metaphysic, laid on its side, has become our left-to-right metaphysic, our concepts of history, progress and evolution. The concept of history became central in the nineteenth century and twentieth centuries and was experienced as a permanent sense of crisis, in declarations of the urgency of present issues and the new to look for new solutions. Whereas the ancients understood that underneath all that happens there is something that never changes and so timelessness is their ultimate category. The thinker who best represents this idea is Parmenides. In the modern metaphysics, its opposite, change

became the ultimate category. The emphasis had shifted from sameness and stability, to difference and flux. Modernity represented a shift away from Parmenides, who emphasised stability and the unity of all things, to flux and perpetual change. Not fact the case that underneath there is unending change was put by another ancient thinker, Heraclitus. The emphasis on the radical changeableness and incompatibility of all things, is represented by Heraclitus. So we can say that the transition from the ancient and medieval worldviews which emphasised timelessness, to the modern worldview in which the emphasis was on change, was simply a transfer of allegiance from one ancient philosopher to another: the West had simply deposed Parmenides and put a different ancestor, Heraclitus, in power. Identity or being ceased to be the chief god of the new pagans the European intellectuals, and now Flux had ascended to the top of the hierarchy. Change is God, and time is the. We are bound and defined by change. He is as relentless, remorseless and pitiless he cannot hear the prayers. Time and History The arrival of the twin concepts of time and history were a result of the impact of Christian eschatology on Western thought. Nonetheless, as these two concepts took hold of the public imagination through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they were used to challenge the Church. The claim was that the Church is left behind by history and consequently made irrelevant. The proponents of history, the all-dissolving and all-conquering process of time, we may call historicists believe that everything is eroded away by the remorseless current of time. But theology challenges the modern understanding of history. But what reality this forward march of history has? Is all history the same, or is competing versions that never move in any common direction, so that there is no forward? What is the criterion for its forwardness or unity? Perhaps time eddies and swirls in any and all directions at once? What can we measure time against in order that we can affirm that time does indeed move in one direction, forward, and thus that arrow of time is straight? The Church insists that without the direction retrospectively vindicated by Christs coming to us, we have no direction, so none of our hurry and movement can be said to be purposeful and indeed we cannot know whether any of it is ultimately real. They believed that we cannot share the worldview of the early Christians, for history has made it unreachable to us. Without Christian eschatology and hope there can be no direction to history and us no concept of time. Christian doctrine alone is able to give sense to the idea of time. As a result of there is similarly no sense of differentiation, so modernity believes that hierarchy has gone and that it should disappear. But it is not that the steep hierarchy has gone. It is rather that the majority of us Westerners are at the top, and from this position our perspective is so foreshortened that we gain the impression that everything is visible to us. But the view available to us is deceptive. We think the hierarchy is gone, but the fact is that we have ascended the hierarchy, and become members of the elite and we suffer the foreshortening of view that makes the world look flatter than it is. Modern thinkers believe that there is nothing more basic than time. Everything is comprehended by time and divisible by it. Time is the effective pneumatology of modernity. The Church of course insists that there is indeed something still more basic than time. The Spirit is more basic than time, and time is simply his economy for us. The modern concept of time is a poor imitation of the Spirit of the Lord. What time, the fundamental spirit of modernity divides and holds apart, the Holy Spirit holds together in unity. Modernity the Spirit, but no Christ We need an account of how others, other people and outside forces, impact on us. If we call our account of these forces and spirits, a pneumatology. The tradition has used the term

spirit to refer to any indefinable host and to the effect of a very large number of people acting on us and setting the context for our own action. Christian talk about time relates to the belief that we are in the world of Gods hospitality, being prepared by him for increasing relationship with him and with each other. But without the distinctively Christian narrative about the progressive hospitality of God, time is not determined by relationship. This concept of absolute unchanging time is derived from the Hellenic concept of fate or necessity: thus the secular modern conception of time is in part a pagan pneumatology. Kant is denial about time and change, so has no explicit eschatology. He already has what he has, so does not need to hope for it. His is a timeless system. Kant has a strong and static doctrine of Nature, which he then allows himself to be agnostic about it, with his reservation about being in itself. Kant is opposed to the idea of time and change, and thus has adopted the role of Parmenides. Hegel insists on the importance of change, history and flux, so has adopted the role of Heraclitus. Kants scepticism that created his dualism of appearance and the thing in itself, means that he has journeyed so far away from the old Platonic paideia that, as Nietzsche pointed out, he has he has crept all the way round to arrive back in the same place. He has left us with the old top-down cosmology in new attenuated, sceptical and agnostic form. He has man the scientist sitting in judgment on all with all the serenity of a deity. How did this happen? It was asserted that the Christian doctrine of providence put God in our time, which it was deemed was not appropriate to his holy transcendence. It was better that we was excluded by our time, and did not find it necessary to impinge on us or make himself felt by us. It was increasingly assumed that it was unworthy to suppose that God would occupy any of our time, for he would be trapped by it or eroded by it. The Word of God was historicized, and so thought to be being made irrelevant by changing circumstances. Then God's own being was made subject to the changes of time, as though our circumstances must impinge on God, so God seems always to be sliding into irrelevance ever deeper in the past. To this Christian doctrine must reply that God makes history and makes time for us, and in this time, he comes to us, and he receives us in our time. The eternal and transcendent God is quite free to sustain relationships with the creatures of time. Romantics wanted to recover the whole world of the emotion and empathy, referred to in this period as sentiment, and the associated ideas of the cultivation of sensibility. Romantics wanted to recover the experience of the whole body, which had been undervalued by the rationalists and in particular by Kant. Associated with this was a quest for the truths of history, and in the course of the quest for the truths of the Christian religion, there was the quest for the foundations of Christianity and for the historical Jesus. History distances the Church from its Head In the last chapter we saw that scholarship of the historical Jesus identified an opposition between Jesus and Judaism and so with the people of Israel. It was determined that Jesus could not be integrated into the background of Jewish piety of his time. Through the generations, representations of Jesus have shifted with the current, whether socialist or nationalist, sometimes making him a leftist revolutionary, it always makes him an opponent of Judaism. He represents the individual suffering oppression, but always the oppression of Jews. Jesus as critic of religious practices rather than of Judaism's morality or beliefs. The Jews are oppressed by their own religion, of which Jesus is a severe critic. In the nineteenth century Jesus was portrayed in opposition to the allegedly materialistic, superficial and even oppressive Judaism of his day, opposing the Jewish laws of ritual purity. The old polemical opposition of law and grace has become the contrast of purity versus compassion.

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The modern belief in time, with its continued and heightened sensation of change, is gnosticism. Without a proper account of the provision and patience of God for us, we become as more restive people, who fear that things are changing out of recognition, and that time is getting quicker. We are separating the past action of God (of rule, politics) from the present and ongoing action of God. We are separating (what we see as) the past role of God that is what we insist is past (though it is only past us). Without a proper account of God looking after us, we have the idea that change is accelerating, and things are changing out of recognition. This heightened sensation of change creates an assumption that nothing established will work, everything we know is now old. It obliges the Church continually to apologise for being out of date. This is gnosticism to which charismatic evangelicalism is particularity vulnerable. It separates the past action of God from the present and ongoing action of God. It does not trust God to perform his maintenance office for us. It is determined that new to re-invent the Church in the new media to avoid the direct meeting in one place at one time of all age-groups of the Church. The Church needs to give up on mission and withdraw from the world. The Church needs to be told again who it is and so be purified by the one voice that gives it its proper name. The Church is always in danger of ceasing to be Church to the world, and becoming just another institution that needs the worlds perpetual reassurance. It needs a cease supply of new consumers of its product to reassure it that it is not useless. It does because this only because it is not content to live off its Lord, to listen to him and remain faithfully dependent on him only. So all this long period of four centuries, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, is nothing but a wandering about and failure to get started in the right direction. But we do not have to be the old and indecisive Adam, now that the ever-living and decisive Adam, the Son who does hear and obey the Fathers word and goes into to vineyard to take up the Fathers work, understanding it as his own. If history buries Christ it also buries the Christian community. Historical criticism works against the claim of the ecclesial community to be the unity of the past and present communities. It refuses the doctrine of Spirit, that connecting past and present communities as one community. Such biblical exegesis represents the continuation of the rationalists, elitists and evangelicals that insist on interiority and deny the discourse of no public leadership and responsibility. The motive of historical scholarship of force of History as division of the Church, the indivisible community. History is the teaching that we are separated from them back there in the past. The Church insists that we are not ultimately separated from them, but they may turn out to be our future too. If the Holy Spirit is stronger than time, time is not ultimately capable of dividing us from one another. Christ, the Holy Spirit and Hermeneutics But Christ and the Spirit are never apart, and together with the Father, their communion is complete. The Spirit is therefore always there to support the Son. Christ is in history, but the Spirit is not; if we accept the confession that the Spirit is always with Christ we have to conclude that Christ is, and is not, identifiable by history. The hermeneutics which are not informed and disciplined by the church cannot tell us anything that will enable us to be the Church, or make our doctrine Christian. If Christ is without the Holy Spirit he is merely an individual, which means that for us he is a figure in the past. Any historical discipline will assume that Christ is sealed in history, trapped like a lone miner deep down there in the past. Perhaps they no longer hope to bring him out whole, but each of these sciences intends to recover some part of his body. But according to the gospel, this is the other way around, for Christ is on the surface, in the air and light, while we, held by the confines of time, are underground. But we are not beyond his reach. The rock that holds us is not rock to God: united with the Spirit, Christ is entirely able to move

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through the great and impenetrable distances that hold us apart, and where he goes the rock turns to the air and light. Jesus is not identifiable in the way modern historical critical scholarship supposes. New Testament studies imagines we will find him in the first century by distinguishing him from all other first century persons. If we construct a christology without the Spirit, Christ is an individual, without his people, without his church, its teaching and discipline. If Christ is confined to the past so will all his people be. They will need a resurrection, but so will he, and so the past will claim them both. If Christian doctrine is simply data about the dead, it is an already open set of data which can be taught in the university entirely without the Church. But doctrine that is Christian teaches that Christ is always with the Holy Spirit. He belongs to the Holy Spirit, and may only be known within that community that the Spirit sanctifies for the purpose. Then Christ cannot be isolated because he cannot be separated from the whole people of God. If this is to be Christian doctrine, we may not detach our knowledge of Christ from the present life of this community, its worship, sacraments, gifts and offices and people of the Church. First though we must see what happens when these are disregarded. Church Dismissed Religion as Social Reform We can see the nineteenth century as battle between the inner man and the outer man. Kant represent the inner man, for whom the world coincides with his mind. Hegel represents the claim of man as social and political being, who grows through the events of his life lived with others. Kant only allows discussion of the existence or non-existence of God, because is certain of the concept of mind, because he has effectively promoted the Mind to the place of God. Kant represents pure mind, a monastically austere intellect, with a dash of the high hopes of utopian idealistic revolution and one-world state. Hegel represents the mind and body united. He connects intellect with the emotions, the customs and practices, the law and institutions. Hegel keeps together the internals and externals together and wants a diversitytolerant social democracy. Hegel represents the proliferation of human and social sciences, with paideia, so they are not only sciences, but a political project and mission statement. Kant and the champions of autonomy want to prevent the Church from speaking and attempt to defend what it says in public. They want to prevent us from repeating in the public sphere what the Church sings and confesses in its worship. The church and its worship cannot be the authority for theology that speaks in public. The church must give up some of its claims simply in order to approach the public square at all. They remove the teaching of the church form the church and translate it into other terms for the public square. What the church teaches about the church, and thus about this actualised plurality and community, the champions of autonomy translate into a description of the individual. Secularised Gospel Kants Agenda The champions of autonomy insist that the individual is the truth of the church. The Kantian determination of theology is that Christianity is ethics. All the history of church is the history of the emergence of this ethics of the individual, which could only be of scholarly or antiquarian interest. Theology is theology of the individual, alternately in terms of the individuals head, intellect and reason, or his body, guts and feelings. It has to take seriously what non-theological sources says about the individual and his triumph over the world or his misery in being dislocated from the world and divorced from his feelings. The single mind and individual experience is the criterion of this modern theology. It understands that whatever it says must appeal to the individual, and re-describes the gospel in terms of the individual mind. It does not countenance that our will is halted by a contrary will, or that we are not yet in our right mind. But a non-modern theology must question the priority of the concept of the mind and free individual will. It must ask what freedom of the will

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there is, and whether the experience of individual self-consciousness is delusory, precisely that delusion from which we must be rescued, if we are to be rescued at all. The nineteenth century German tradition of historical studies and modern biblical exegesis, follow Kant in distinguishing a Jesus of critical historical science and the Christ of the faith of the Church. They contrast the biblical narrative about one member of a primitive people, and the real truth about the development of the autonomous individual that lies beneath the narrative about Jesus. The bible is a picture book for the immature that it dispenses moral truths dressed up in narrative form, for those who can only take them this way. Of course some of us grow to maturity simply by realising that we could construct the propositions of this religion for ourselves without all the picturesque narrative. This narrative religion is just there to be grown out of. The historical science that follows intends to strip away the particularities to get to the timeless truths underneath, if any remain. Contemporary biblical exegesis shares Kants determination that true religion is not public and contestable, but internal and self-imposed. Kant teaches that dogmatics is one domain, exegesis another, ethics another. There is no requirement that they be dialogue with one another for our ethics is not strengthened by historical research: it must be entirely unformed by other influences if it is to be truly ours and truly moral. The present separation into autonomous domains of Old Testament, New Testament, Christian doctrine, ethics and ecclesiology demonstrates that Kant is still in control. Separate academic domains do not allow theological discussion of the faithful ongoing action of God with his witness people. Marcionism and Moralism Christianity is an experiential not a cognitive matter, its doctrines are not so much claims about how the world is but religious and experiential claims about what it is to be human. He opened the way to examine Jesus as the first individual, Jesus without his people and who is thus no longer Christ. Nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship identifies Jesus as a moral or social or political reformer. He was contrasted with the people of Israel, so that they represented the old regime which Jesus wanted to drag into a more Enlightenment and ethical religion. The scholarship of biblical criticism distinguish dead history from present ethics. Nineteenth, as twentieth, century biblical exegesis distinguishes a Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith. It separates the God of the individual from the Old Testament God of the community, and the God of peace from the God who judges and condemns this world as inadequate. It divides what the Church must hold together. The claim of history that it makes represents an absolute, non-self-reflexive scepticism and relativism. It represent the same divorce of time and the timeless. The opponents of the One Testament promote a non-ecclesial hermeneutic that separates Scripture from Church. It must find considerable portions of the Scriptures, and the doctrine which records what the Church has found in those Scriptures, to be less than moral, and so dispense with it. Their mission was to get rid of the people of Israel, and of the Old Testament, and of unacceptable portions of the early Church and New Testament, identifying Hellenic from Jewish Christianity, dividing Paul from the other apostles, and the apostles and writers of Scripture from the subsequent generations of the Church. F. C. Baur (1792-1860) led the scholarship into the secular context of Christian origins, identifying a Jewish and a Hellenic Christianity. Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930) tried to rehabilitate Marcion as representative of true Christianity, which was being influenced by foreign forces (History of Dogma, The Essence of Christianity). Others wanted to recapture Christ for pietistic interiority or for social reform. Ernst Troeltsch (The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches) suggested that theology must talk the language of responsibility and commonality, which is the language of values and thus the language of the state. Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) conspicuously held out against the movement to turn the Christian faith into ethics. Religion is about personal obedience to Christ, not about meeting some definition of morality and faith is defiance of worldly rationality.

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Scholars found either that the roots of Christianity were fundamentally Hebrew or fundamentally Greek, and had to purged of contaminating Hellenism or Hebraicism. The mission of this historical scholarship was repeatedly to demonstrate to civilised Europe that its lord was buried deep in the past, and that that only they were in any position to mediate him either to the Church or to bypass the church and mediate him to civilized people. Wanting to be Greek, not Jewish The scholarly effort of the nineteenth century university was to reconcile the Hebrews and Greeks. The best way to do so what to find the Greek superior. Jews are a particular people with customs that are not generalisable beyond a certain point. The Greeks are universal. Jews were the living demonstration of the fact that the continent of Europe was not entirely coincident with Christianity, so though perhaps the Christian faith could seamless evolve into the rational faith and pure morality, this other community would remain a baffling presence and question-mark over Europes identity. The presence of this community became more visible due to czarist persecution and princely statelets gave way to national states and citizenries. Judaism was understood as failure to be religion of love, lacking the appreciation of beauty and harmony which was essentially Greek. The Jews held themselves aloof from other peoples for Judaism represented the alienation of man from everything else, and even from himself. Kant believed Judaism was about rules but had no rational or ethical core. Kant's reading of Spinoza's interpretation of Judaism as a set of regulations designed for a particular people at a given point in history stripped Judaism of any pretence of universality. Dogged obedience to irrational precepts made Judaism run counter to the development of civil society. Jews long restricted to occupations such as usury that made them more conspicuous than popular. Some called for restrictions placed on them to be lifted, in the expectation that they would be assimilated and Judaism would disappear as a public phenomenon. Jews in Germany and France were very largely assimilated until a different tide started coming in at the end of the nineteenth century. We shall see how this formed a number of intellectual currents at the end of the century. The modern project intends to eradicate particularities. This means that it wants to make the people of Israel indistinguishable from any other citizens of European states. This represented a threat to Judaism and meant a sense of inferiority for the Jewish diaspora. Marx and Freud wanted to show that though the Jew may be crude and primitive he does not suffer the hypocrisy of civilisation. The determination that the Greeks and Hebrews were deeply incompatible was stronger at the beginning of the twentieth century than at the beginning of the nineteenth. The two mindsets were incompatible: the Hebrews were formed by an alienation from life, while Greeks were formed by a spontaneous and enlightened love of life. Hegel and the Ascent of Man Our representative figure for the nineteenth century is GWF Hegel (1770-1831). He represents the hope for a comprehensive science in which, despite Kants despair at this project, man and nature, the irreconcilable halves of the cosmos, are reconciled. Hegel believed that the split between nature and evolution on one hand, and man, society, culture and history on the other hand, was the motor of world history, indeed of the cosmos. But although Hegel makes huge efforts to integrate all Christian insights into his account, he does allow the Christian gospel to determine the logic of the account, and so there is another retreat from the concept of the person, the great Christian conceptual break-though. The personhood of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is not conceded, and so God does not become a person or an agent, and the result is that man never becomes a person or agent either. Man is wrapped up into some process ostenibsle much greater and more important than himself

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and so man is lost and the individuality of human persons is lost too. Hegels account is a recombination of many of trends heresies that the ancient Church turned away from. Nevertheless Hegel has formed the modern worldview which we have inherited and since we are stuck with these heresies, the Church has to continue to argue that the completion of the person is fundamental, not forces, and that the individual person is formed primarily by his relationship God and with all other persons, and not by relationship with nation, market or state. Hegel is important for our purposes because his new expression of the unity and diversity of knowledge was given effect in the university, the institution that produces and controls knowledge. The form taken by the university in Germany, given its rationale by Hegel expressed effected the split between science and the humanities, between that is pure knowledge and the mediated and tacit knowledge that allows to make decisions. The rapid expansion of scholarship and of the university, led by Germany, and followed by Britain, France and the United States. Hegel was a social, educational and political reformer who looked forward to the arrival in Germany of a commercial, internationalist commonwealth, on the British pattern. Along with many other intellectual leaders, Hegel wondered which German principality could play host to and set up the set of institutions that would commence the process of nurturing first one nation and then more. By 1811 Prussia had become their best bet and Berlin became the place of the experiment in liberal social reform on the British model. The Prussian political authorities themselves were not prepared for this, and always under opposition from conservatives, Hegel spent much effort concealing the liberalism that European regimes regarded as threatening. In a set of lecture series covering, history, religion, logic and aesthetics, Hegel laid out increasingly full accounts of the system he had laid out in his early synthesis of knowledge, The Phenomenology of Spirit. We could subtitle this work The many appearances of our underlying Unity. His ambition is massive, for he intends to summarise and properly relate all accounts of knowledge in a single account of the ascent of man within the world. Hegels ascent is not to the pure reason of Plato. He does not want to jettison Christianity and return to pagan Greece. He intends to combine the best of all the culture of Christendom and northern Europe with the Greeks and so to bring the pagans and Christians together in a final reconciliation. The ascent of Spirit was Hegels account of the development of man from simpler to more complex forms of life and civilisation. We have to give two accounts of this ascension because man frees himself from his internal passions and from his external masters. In the external account we see man first frees himself from belief in the gods. Man is first under the mastery of every natural phenomenon, for in primitive animism everything is believed to have mind or spirit. Then man is under the mastery of many gods, each responsible for some aspect of existence and its disasters, and this is polytheism. Then in the religion of Egypt and Greece man is under the domination of a hierarchy, a priestly-and-royal elite and its pantheon, with many layers of intermediaries. In monotheism man is directly under God. Catholicism makes the clerical hierarchy the intermediary between man and his God. The Protestantism puts man directly before God, without intermediaries. Finally, the religion of pure reason takes away all intermediaries, leaving man face to face with himself without the mediation of God Man starts as many impulses. He learns how to withstand the impact on him outside impacts this we can term Stoicism. Man starts out under the mastery of every natural and bodily impulse. Each organ of the body responsible for producing or receiving one influence or passion. He begins to master his own impulses and develops intelligence. Slowly man brings his organs and members, appetites and temper, under control. Finally he masters all

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external forces and internal passions and becomes become pure mind. The ascent of man is the triumph of reason. The rule of the mind over the body accounts for the unity of man as mind and body. Hegel offers the most complex account of the of the ascent of Man. Hegel believes that man is growing up, progressing from simpler to more complex religious, psychological and political forms. This progress of man through history is the self-discovery of the Spirit. God is also getting something out of this. God is also growing up and becoming more fuller who he is. In the Phenomenology of the Spirit he sees all the ages of man, and the mentality that represents, as the masks that the Spirit tries out. Through this voyage the human mind and world of reason and experience come into being. In Lectures on Religion Hegel set out a comprehensive analysis of the history, sociology, anthropology and psychology of religion. Hegel believed that Kant was wrong to imagine that this ascent could take place by the unaided effort of the individual mind. Our mind is formed by the set of institutions we inhabit, families, groups, guilds and other institutions that form our mind. He looked forward to seeing a set of civil institutions that can support us in the course of our development: Man grows up by many stops, starts and reversals, through a series of mishaps, from which he gains experience. Life is series of strange juxtapositions and mismatches. We never foresee what turn things are going to take next, so we are never done and there is always more to be said. So it is not clear whether this really is mans ascent or that of the Spirit: has man been absorbed into a larger whole? This progress of man through history is the selfdiscovery of the Spirit. God is also getting something out of this forward march of man. But God is also growing up and becoming more fully who he is. The Spirit the Unifying Concept Truth is one, and so we seek a single unifying theory. Every scientist and philosopher is either looking for such a theory, or saying that such a theory is not to be found. Hegel looked for a theory that would re-unite the divorced worlds of nature and human action and of public life and politics therefore. Because these two have been separated, man is alienated from his fellows and from his world, and this makes him miserable. Hegel is saying that we have an ongoing obligation to set out the unitary account. If we forget it, and with Kant remain in solely analytic mode, we enter a spiral of increasing separation from one another and from the world. Hegel wants a dualist account, and he wants a unitary account. He wants both, and he is quite right to insist on both. Hegel chose Spirit for his fundamental concept. The concept of spirit combined being and becoming, stability and change. The enlightenment has split knowledge into two knowledge of what was, and faith as our relationship what was not yet present. Spirit combined past, the present and the future. Hegel as Modalist Hegel believed that the Father turns into the Son and then returns to himself, now as Spirit. Earlier we called this modalism. It represents a collapse of persons and of all difference and distinction that the personhood of these persons guarantees. The freedom of God for man had been turned into unfreedom for God and consequently also for man. But the Spirit is not the union of the Father and the Son. The Father is not succeeded by the Son, or rolled up into the Son, and the Father and the Son are not rolled up in the Spirit. The Spirit is distinct from the Father and Son, in order that he may also make the two of them distinct from each other. The Father is the initiator and the finisher. It is the Father, not the Spirit, who accepts and receives what the Spirit has done, and only when he accepts it is it definitive. The Spirit makes everything ready, but it is the Father who decides whether or not it is finally ready. Nothing is what it is until it has been confirmed by the Father, who is its

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proper arbiter and audience. The Father receives the act of the Son. The Holy Spirit enables us to receive and give thanks for the act of the Son, and to receive it as the act of the Father. Hegel believed that Christian theology had trivialised the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and so had failed to show that Christianity is already intrinsically the enlightening of man. The reason why modern thought has stalled, was that it did not understand the Trinity, so could only ever repeat opposite aspects of the full coming into being of man. He has insisted that Christian thought should not forget its roots in the political thought of earlier generations, and thus not to forget that it must have something to say to political thought and indeed to all other sciences, because it claims to be the whole truth (and the truth relates to the whole). Christian theologians had disregarded (and still do) the whole tradition of pagan and Christian theological political thought in the mistaken belief that it is not purely theological, and does not therefore concern Christians, concerned as they are purely with heavenly, and not at all with earthly, affairs. Hegel believed that the lack of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit was the reason why modern thought has stalled, and can only ever repeat partial aspects of the full coming into being of man. The West conceptualised action in terms of subject and object, and where there are only these two terms, they can act only one at a time and against each other. Two terms cause a alternation between two poles. Either man is object, or God is object, either one of them is subject and must struggle to subdue the other, so we have a battle of two titans. But Christology is only a moment within this pneumatology. Jesus Christ is not the centre and control on Hegels eschatological synthesis. Christ is the image of the final state of man, but this man is also an account of the cosmos, so Christ and man and cosmos are wrapped up in an account of a total process, so at the end we do not have a person, but this single God-and-world process. Everything emerges out of Spirit and remains in movement in it. But if we make God everything, is there any real particular identity either for God, or for anything that is not God? By making theology everything, Hegel has merged all objects and sciences into a great whole in which everything has ceased to be solely itself. The distinct identity of God, and of creation, and of man, are equally lost. Hegel has not only succeeded in following Spinoza, in making hyphenating God-and-the-cosmos into one undifferentiated entity, that oscillates between constancy and flux, between Parmenidean and Heracleitan poles. Hegels grand synthesis of knowledge is too costly. But our question must be, is Spirit any more than the movement in which all things are kept? Hegel, and all the evolutionist anthropologies and premature alliances of theology and science that have followed him, fail to let the Spirit be determined by the Father and the Son. Hegel fails to be a Christian theologian because he does not let the Spirit serve and manifest and glorify the Son, and the Son the Father. The Church teaches that God does not need creation. Creation does not make God who he is. Because God is freely, and not dependently, who he is, he can allow us to come to be who we are to be. Only a Christian theology understands that it is the Son, not we creatures, who by his obedience makes the Father who he is. Hegel cannot let the world be world, or God be God. We might say that he finally makes the unitary account more important than the dualist account, so monism prevails. In doing so he makes it impossible to show that God is different from the world, ruining the freedom of both. He allows the world to be absorbed into God so it is wound up and lost. Hegel rightly insists that ideas are not sealed off in an upper realm, but react with events in the world, unpredictably and yet not chaotically, and together events and ideas make up a single continuum. There is a continual mismatch between our aims and outcomes, but this mismatch keeps everything in movement. Each new person represents new possibilities; other people not only present us with competition but are also life enhancing and create an enlarged mentality and community based on freedom and reciprocity. The institutions of

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family, civil society, and state, are not impositions on or limitations of freedom but the conditions of the realisation of freedom. But although Hegel understood the Spirit to comprehend both ideas and intellect and events, bodies in material interaction, he did not manage to allow the Spirit to be a truly third term. Like Kant and the thinkers of modernity before him, he had two fundamental concepts instead of three and as a result the individual and society were the two concepts the thinkers of the nineteenth century had to work with. They therefore struggled to come up with any concept of place, or of world, as really there, different from ourselves. They did not understand that a place in time is created by a tradition. The concept of place is what ensures particularity and so prevents the vicious oscillation between the one and many that puts them in opposition. Hegel says that theology is public and political, not simply internal personal religion. Christian theology had once included political philosophy. Like Aristotle, Hegel understands that man is a social being and a political animal who lives from the recognition of others. To be a person is to be recognised as such by other persons. Each person is dependent for his formation on his contemporaries, and on the layered experience of previous generations, in inherited social practices and institutions. The development of man is supported by many intermediary institutions school, university, church, guilds, clubs, charities, trade and all the other associations by which responsible citizens are formed. Man is always at the very least a dual being, either servant or master, but in real life a complex layered combination. Hegel is determined not to let Kant and his predecessors get away with making the Christian religion either a cerebral-rational discourse or making it a discourse about our own spiritual, emotional and psychological states. It makes me responsible, it puts me in front of you and makes us converse. Without Christ, no concept of the Son cannot show how man may grow up to become a competent, social thankful animal. Without this basic christological and theological narrative, the development of man is just a story, each rival elite trying to implement their own version of it. Hegels account of the Trinity was not Christian or robust enough to reverse Kants simplifications. Without Christ as its criterion, and the church as its form, there can be no coherent account of formation, or of history as the outward form of that formation. There can be no education in general, that offers no specific form of human being: all education without definition is merely partisan, recreating the barriers that it ostensibly overcomes. Sociology, psychology, anthropology and economics, all now divorced from the apprenticeship, are seen merely techniques that share no central narrative about the formation of man, so that it is difficult to reason what does and what does not contribute to the good of man. A sub-Christian (non-trinitarian) doctrine of God only allows us to affirm the present state of affairs under whatever description our intellectual contemporaries give it. When theology was regarded merely as one discipline among many, it no longer accounted for the unity of knowledge, or gave these many sciences their coherence and mandate. As the logic of the earlier arrangement of sciences unravelled theology descended from the highest down to the lowest status, until it was regarded as the least respectable member of the academy. Hegel attempted to turn Christian teaching into a series of general truths that were to be found as much in the world as in the church. Thus the university became a source of knowledge of the world that rivalled the church. As we will see in the next chapter, the church is the anticipation of the universality of man and as such it is source of true knowledge both of man. Only Christian doctrine offer knowledge of man that does not make the whole of humanity captive to the generation presently in possession of power.

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We have been comparing two societies, two jurisdictions and the two men that come from them. The two societies we have been comparing are the Church, and the world, made up of all other communities. Which one will ultimately prove to be the true society and the source of all society? The Church is the source of all other society, and all other societies function well as long as they are refreshed from the Church and are able to recognise that the Church is distinct. The Church cannot be absorbed, for it is the body of Christ for us, and Christ is always held distinct from us by the Holy Spirit, and the society that understands that flourishes. Then we have asked about the relationship of man and society. With Luther we saw man on his own before God. With Kant we saw simply on man on his own. With Hegel we will see man amongst men, and so see society and individual in perilous balance, that by the end of the nineteenth century was clearly a balance lost. We saw that our archetypal modern, Kant, wants to rule himself and thinks that this mean not accepting the rule of any other. This means that he rules his passions, he rules his body, and thus he is his head. But who rules this head? For Kant there is no head for this head, no authority above him from which he head sources his ideas and gets his concept of the good. No panel of experts and no tradition of thought is acceptable. No one can offer him any help. The man of modernity had to move away from the particular, local and national customs, to what was universal. He no longer went to war for his ruler against the people of another nation. The man of peace had arrived at last. Kant has made being and stillness more fundamental than movement, change and life. Hegel tries to find the balance between being (constancy) and life (change) but the result is that he turned the Christian doctrine of our formation by Christ into a general truth about change, in which everything is developing and evolving. The element of adventure and mystery has been pushed out by the demand to know everything explicitly, controllably and as science. Kant regards the head and body as opposites and antagonists. Hegel understands that the body is derived from the head, the body is the work of the head, and so that the world of mans doing as derived from thinking. But he has subordinated faith and practical knowledge to explicit knowledge, and so he has collapsed tacit and explicit, faith and knowledge, mystery and control. He has pulled the future down into the present and made a secular eschatology. We take the insights (of practical and tacit practices as knowledge) from the Church and generalize it. Everything becomes education, and the goal of that education is that we all become everything, but without specific definition this education can have no content. Specific definition can only be given by a specific tradition, such as the Church, which for its definition of man points to Christ. So far Protestantism represents the highest point of the development, the ascent, of man. The local law had been a reflection of the universal law and helped us to obey that higher law. But now man had to make a further breakthrough. He had to leave behind his culture with its local particularities. He did not want to be a citizen merely or this or that state, but to become cosmopolitan and universal man, the citizen of the world. Hegel decided that not all mankind could become this self-powered moral and intellectual aristocracy that Kant had in mind. There had to be a balance between this elite and the people as a whole. Society would always be composed of those who could govern of themselves and be able to offer their government to others, and those who would simply need to be governed. There would always be experts. The only point is that society would explicit recognise them as such so the power they exerted would be an authorized and

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publicly accountable power. There had to be a mixture of self-control and control by those best able to support us. In order that we become as far as possible individually mature we have to be members of a well-ordered people under a mixed constitution. The ordered people and the mixed constitution We have said that in order to become self-governing we also have to be governed by others, and that we have to be an ordered people, and that is a people ordered towards one another. We do not become a people by replacing our rulers with the people, or by replacing all other forms of government by democracy. In order that the people really come into their own, and become a well-ordered people, all forms of government must be present. Good government must be composed of democracy and aristocracy and monarchy. In order that we have an ordered people, we need not just democracy but those other forms of government but that these other forms of government are present. There must be a rule by the best (aristocracy) that is, excellence. There must be unity, which is what the idea that the whole people are under one single law and rule (monarchy) and even that this can be made plainer through a figurehead, a single person who represents the singleness and unity of this people. And this governing class must be authorized by the people, and so the people must give their assent. A democracy therefore requires the active participation of the people in giving, or when necessary, withholding their assent. The people must be participants in their own government. Each of us must attempt to be first governor of ourselves, to control our own desires, and achieve a measure of personal autocracy, in which our head rules our body. It must be seen that the rulers, the best and the monarch, are themselves servants of the people and themselves members of the people. And these experts are truly the best, by merit, and thus the aristocracy must be a meritocracy, and the best will be few. We cannot be governed by everybody but must be governed by some specific, dedicated and formally accredited group. The teachers of the church are that group for the church. The one enables the few who enable the many; while the many affirm the few and the one. There is a flow of authority, service and its acknowledgement both downwards and upwards, for only so do we have a single functioning national community. If everyone rules, no one specific takes responsibility, and there is no actual government. If every member of society is equally able to decide, which is what democracy represents, whatever decision we have taken can be as easily reversed. If we make a new decision with every opinion poll or news bulletin, we have no real leadership. To avoid this we must understand that rule must take these three forms of simultaneously: rule by all, by some, and by one. We want someone specific whom we can identify to take responsibility (for whom Aristotles term would be monarch); we want to be lead by those publicly recognised to be good at the task of government, those who have recognizably achieved excellence, and so a ruling elite. And we want everyone to participate to some degree in the government and feel responsible for it, so we need the democratic component. We want government to be received by the whole nation and owned by it: we have to own up to the fact that this government is our government, and we have to and to give our leaders credit, and tell them that they are public-spirited. The people are truly the people when they are ordered and well-ruled. The people need their to orient themselves to the panel of expertise that the church refers to as the apostles. The people come to themselves and win their own voice when they join in chorus with those sanctified to lead them, the apostles of the church. The Dissolution of the Person Kant turned head and the body, and the individual and the crowd, into antagonists. Hegel did not succeed in reversing this move. Hegel understood that the head is the source from which the body comes, that the present world springs out of the earlier generations and that earlier generations are therefore the head from which the body of the present generation comes.

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Thus they understood that world and all our present activity derives from what those earlier generations understood as the soul or spirit. All human interaction and the world that it gives rise to, come from what Hegel now refers to as thought. What has been thought, by all previous generations, still lives and thinks and our present society is the form in which it does so. Hegel gives the most comprehensive account of the ascent of man. But the decades after Hegel saw the faltering and beginning of the break-up of man. He is no longer an integer, who lives publicly among his peers and who is responsible and able to give an account of himself to them. He is a bundle of urges; his primary relationship is with the state. Man is challenged by the inner world of his body and its passions, and by the outer world of crowds. Man is challenged by vast economic movements and by revolutions in technology. The governing and middle classes abdicate responsibility to govern and lead the people towards self-government. The discourse of self-control is replaced by the discourse of rights. All politics became class politics, in which their irreconcilable economic interests pitch all rulers against all workers, creating the perpetual stand-off of opposed interests that Weber described. The body has no head; the people have no leaders brave enough to give them the leadership they require. The body, the passions and the people, have only to shout for what they want, so rulers merely attempt to provide what the loudest sections of the crowd demand. The nation must ask their leaders to bring to the task of government all the wisdom that they have received through whatever apprenticeship they have undergone. It must acknowledge that the good judgment learned through this apprenticeship is to be exercised for the nation as a whole. it must therefore give its leaders the authority they need to lead and to govern. Perhaps it is true that a nation gets the leaders it deserves. But at the end of Hegels century, the prospect of finding the proper harmony between government and self-government, by balancing responsibility and control, the inner and outer aspects of man, look as far away as ever. The people, their class representatives, their worker movements, their industries do not demand responsibility and seem to demand no self-control or good judgment from the individual. He had to be controlled and government had to keep the lid on his violence. The individual receives his identity from his relationship with the state. The question of how man the individual could possibly be reconciled with society was as poignant as ever in the twentieth century. What of the people? In this chapter we have turned from the mind (psyche) to the material world (cosmos) and material bodies. We have also turned from the individual to society (polis). In the nineteenth century we turn to the issue of the people, and the social question, the condition of the working classes, the franchise, the social question and the economic issues The voices of working people can be heard at last and the power of their numbers was felt. Through the revolution of communications through the rise of railways, shipping and international travel that creates a single world, a global economy. In this global economy a request made on one side of the world can be answered and met by the production of a material good from the other side of the world. The world is implicitly, and therefore economically, though not yet explicitly and politically, a single economy and so one world. Hegels successors gave up on Kants search for the perfectly self-ordered man, alarmed that this rational man was no more than a calculating machine. They were alarmed by the violence of political revolutions and demonstration of the power of the workers through the nineteenth century. They gave up looking for the soul of man that would create the true polis and turned their attention to the body and to the search to the fulfilment of the material needs of the people. Kants high ambition that the mind would come to govern the body and subdue its desires is replaced by the much more modest goal of satisfying the (bodily) demands of the workers. The hope that man can become a united person suffers a reverse, as man is again divided into soul and body, in the hope that the material demands of the body and the of the workers can at least be met. Material and economic requirements come

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first, in the hope that this will bring political peace, but the requirements of persons, that involve freedom are deferred indefinitely. Hegel has turned the Christian doctrine of our formation by Christ into a general truth about change, in which everything is developing and evolving. The element of adventure and mystery has been pushed out by the demand to know everything explicitly, controllably and as science. Traditions and religions are training regimes that serve as preparation for life together. The humanities investigated these tradition and so formed the course of education by which we can acquire the whole range of the virtues, arts and skills that make us mature persons. The humanities are those traditions of thought that make up the apprenticeship in judgment, by which we can become decision-makers. The humanities teach us not only that we can and must make decisions, but also that we may and must accept many of the decisions made for us, by our leaders, by earlier generations and by our natural and social environment. By such an apprenticeship we learn to argue for our decisions in a public square, and learn that they are all open to challenge and so part of a properly political process. We may learn that is good to accept many of the restraints on our action that other people represent. It is good to conceded that not everything can be within our control, for it is because we are unable to control circumstances that we have a future. Kant subordinated practical judgment (humanities) to pure knowledge (science). Knowledge mediated through particular community and practices is pushed out in favour of knowledge that is not mediated but general and universal. His successors turned practical knowledge and faith into explicit knowledge and science, collapsed the tacit into the explicit, and collapsed faith into present knowledge. The result is that man now believes that he is entirely in control of what he knows, that he will not encounter anything that he has not willed or foreseen, or that he cannot be taken by surprise. The future is pulled down into the present and made a secular eschatology. The apprenticeship in judgment, by which we learn to make decisions and to accept the decisions made by others, was increasing replaced by the apprenticeship in science. Scientists do not learn that decision have to be made, or that they should be tested in the public square with reference to traditions of thought. The scientific apprenticeship does not teach the scientist to accept any limits to knowledge. Knowledge that is scientific is knowledge of objects that cannot hide, the cooperation of which is not required, and who do not have to be reasoned with. In the university those areas which were the territory of the humanities have become the territory of the social sciences. Because man has made himself a scientist and thus a subject beyond challenge, he has also become a object from whom nothing is expected and on which vast social experiments may be carried out. Though such experiments may be said to be for his own good, the criteria of this good are also beyond challenge. Man is the object of the sciences and social sciences. Man has succeeded in making himself a thing. The events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represent the triumph of the people. In this modern society every human will have the same value as every other. But each individual has suffered a breakup, and is no longer an integral person, but a mere combination of impulses. The struggle of the mind and the body, the mind and the passions remains.

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SUMMARY
1. The apprenticeship has come to an end. Education is no longer a transformative process, voluntarily taken on by a few, in which we acquire of self-knowledge and the skills of selfcontrol and self-government and grow into mature agents. 2. The Christian understanding of the relationship of doctrine and discipleship is replaced by an understanding of knowledge as mere information. In the modern conception, education is the acquisition of data to which the individual must give his own meaning. 3. The educated elite attempted to get rid of the distinction between the Church and nation, and between Church and state. The state attempted to take the place of the Church. Without the Church, there would be no authority from which we can challenge the powers the states awards itself. 4. The view in which man is a rational and social being was replaced with a conception of man as a passion-driven self-destructive being. Other people are a threat that must be controlled, and we need to grant the state greater powers to provide this control. 5. In the modern conception we are in conflict with our predecessors. We have to escape the hold that the past exerts over us in order to become ourselves. 6. Moderns define mind and materiality as opposites: the dualism of the ancients has returned. Implicitly, the world is the creation of an unfriendly god, an unfortunate and hostile place 7. The canon of Modernity suggests that we disregard history and so hold with an equal disdain all the traditions that defer to truth and promote judgment .

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