JM Bonino, Towards a Christian Political Ethics

Chapter 1, The need for a political ethics – pp. 11-21

p. 11

Omnipresence of politics – modern life has created the politicization of all life
 Urbanization, science-technology, bureaucratization, communications has tended to
politicize life by making every act a social or public act

p. 12

‘all acts have become collective acts’ – we are responsible but cannot exercise responsibility
individually or in isolation, ‘but only collectively through structures of responsible
participation’

p. 13

The tendency to replace political norms and goals by objective exigencies of scientific-
technical civilization – replacing political will with objective exigency – is a reversal of
Aristotle
 It is a trick because politics does not disappear, but is simply masked

p. 16

Four points that pose a challenge

1) Life has become socialized
2) Collective prospect is critical, and violence is everywhere – inability to work for
common good, structure an economy of solidarity, make of diversity an occasion for
mutual encounter and enrichment etc
3) Intense and resolute effort needed to bring complex reality under human control
and subordinate it to human ends – cannot be left to exigencies of scientific-
technological reason or economic laws
4) Christians must join in human effort to articulate a political ethics for today’s world

p. 17

Aristotle – basic elements of politics – social classes, nature of the state, relation between
different forms of human sociability, economic organization – were grounded in nature
p. 18

 Aristotle’s conviction was interpreted theologically in Middle Ages – Ethics and

politics were one, even if the actual conduct might conflict

Natural law increasingly inadequate in Renaissance, and Machiavelli expressed a different

view – the autonomy of the political
 Necessity and autonomy of political beyond moral good and evil, a grammar of
power

p. 19

Hobbes tried to spell out this grammar of power, through explicit rejection of Aristotle
 nature not “an instinct of sociability inborn in all human beings” (Cicero) but the
individual existence turned to the quest of egotistical interests – “the war of all
against all”
 polis is therefore not a natural result of sociability or quest for common good, but a
contract through which humans resign authority to a sovereign in order to be
protected from others
 Hobbes blamed by many for subordinating law to power and legitimizing absolutism

p. 20

For liberals, power must be subordinate to freedom

 Locke: absolute right of private property as guarantor of freedom – establishes
function of state (to protect this right) and its limits (state must stop before this
inviolable sign and sacrament of individuality)
 Kant: deeper and universal foundation for ethics sought – 1) what ought I to do? 2)
what may I hope for?
o Answer to 1 is categorical imperative – a priori moral sense demanding we
act as if the maxim of action become a universal law of nature
o Answer to 2 is kingdom of ends/God – every human treated as an end rather
than a means
o New world of meaning and value – ethics not an objective order “out there”
within reach of “pure reason”, but a subjective order in individual conscience
where it is perceived by “practical reason”

But liberals are unable to escape the basic fact that power is at the base of any political
entity – even Kant ended up accepting external and absolute legal coercion

Chapter 2, Christian Responses to the Ethical Dilemma – pp. 22-36

Epilogue, Love Incarnate – pp. 111-115

p. 111

When we speak of a project of liberation, we speak of persons – not in the isolation of

individualism, or as private possessors, or yet as amalgamated into a mass reduced to
occasional bearers of natural and social determinations
 Liberation is a long struggle, and is therefore also about suffering and death
 Suffering not only of the oppressed and those who struggle, but also of the
oppressors – their anxiety, fear of being dispossessed etc
 This is essential for an authentic political ethics

p. 112

1) Personal identity – reality of human subject engaged in the project

a. Cannot be established in isolation, as a monad related to some absolutely
transcendent ground or cause of existence, nor can it be established in
separation from the project to which he/she is committed
b. Temptation to establish identity in relation to the enemy – the other as
threat
c. In base communities, the tendency is to find identity in the brother, with
whom one lives, struggles and for whom one is willing to lay down one’s life –
this other is perceived not as a denial but an affirmation
[is this a rebuke of Laclau and populism?]

p. 113

2) Hatred – inevitably generated in the struggle

a. Nietzsche: “Your virtue is worth nothing if it cannot become indignant”
b. Dialectic of love for the brother and hatred for the enemy always present –
but which is a function of the other?
c. ‘If hatred of the enemy is subordinated to love for the brother and sister,
then the struggle is made “functional”, and the possibility of affirming the
 humanity of the enemy during and after the struggle remains open. This is
the kind of ethics of liberation which many – Christians and non-Christians –
are trying to develop within the project of liberation’

3) Transcendence – is liberation conceived of an eschatological perspective and

therefore run the risk of idolatry and absolutisation?
a. Transcendence must be discussed in relation to love, where both eschatology
and history – God’s kingdom and human society – find their meaning, goal,
distance and unity

p. 114
b. ‘A project of liberation is freed from the danger of absolutization not by being
relativized from the outside by some extrinsic principle or perspective –
which in the final analysis always becomes reactionary – but by being related
to its own inner meaning, which is love’
c. ‘Love is the inner meaning of politics, just as politics is the outward form of
love’ – when this is made operative in liberation struggle, there is necessary
flexibility for humanizing the struggle itself and necessary freedom for
humanizing the result of the struggle

4) Death – as long as death and suffering is there, faith is necessary

a. Not enough to merely recover the context of Christ’s death in a situation of
political conflict, but must take up the remembrance of the passion, death
and resurrection
b. When Jesus is condemned and execute, he is abandoned by God => but
Christian faith rests on the fact that God is present in the death of Christ, not
‘as transcendent power overruling human injustice and oppression from the
outside, but as Jesus’ own power of truth and love operating “from within” to
surrender his life “for the many”’.

p. 115

 It is in this gap of God’s presence that ‘faith finds its own possibility and praxis’ –
resurrection comes not to cancel out the cross or to ensure visible victory, but ‘to
confirm Jesus’ praxis of love and justice and thus to invite a participation in that
praxis’