Between Kin and Cosmopolis. Nigel Biggar
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and asserting his Jewish identity, he nevertheless developed an understanding of religious faith that is not oriented toward the particular location of Jerusalem, which transcends ethnicity, and which has no proper interest in the restoration of a Jewish nation-state. Out of such an understanding emerged the trans-national religious community known as the “church.”
Given these origins, it should not surprise that some interpret Christianity as implying a liberal, cosmopolitan stance over and against a partisan, nationalist one, and as preferring love for humanity in general over love for a particular nation. One expression of this can be found in Richard B. Miller’s argument that Christian love for others is properly indiscriminate and unconditional: “Christianity requires an indiscriminate, unconditional love of others, irrespective of political, social, or national affiliation. . . . Christian agape, exemplified by Jesus’ teaching and example, is altruistic and cosmopolitan.”5
This claim has two main grounds, one biblical and the other theological. The biblical ground comprises those passages in the New Testament where “natural” loyalty to family is severely downgraded. Among them are those in the Gospels where Jesus is reported as saying that only those who hate their mothers and fathers can be his disciples,6 that those who would follow him must “let the dead bury the dead,”7 and that his “family” now consists of those who have joined him in his cause;8 and also, by implication, those passages in the Epistles where St. Paul recommends virginity or celibacy as a higher good than marriage.9
The theological ground consists of the typically Protestant concept of God’s love as showered graciously on every human creature regardless of their moral status—a concept that was most fully developed in the 1930s by the Swedish Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren. According to Nygren, God’s love is utterly spontaneous and gratuitous; it is not attracted to the beloved by any of their qualities (how could it be, since those whom it loves are all sinners?) and it is in no sense beholden to them; it is simply and absolutely gracious.10 As God loves us, so should we love our neighbors: with a pure altruism that entirely disregards their qualities. It is quite true that Nygren himself was not directly addressing the question of whether or not a certain local or national partiality in our affections and loyalties is justifiable; and that his focus was on the religious relationship between God and sinful creatures. Nevertheless, he made it quite clear that Christians are to mediate to their neighbors the same unconditional and indiscriminate love that God has shown them.11
What should we make of these biblical and theological grounds? Do they really imply that Christian love should be oblivious to local and national bonds? I think not. Certainly, the so-called “hard sayings” of Jesus imply that natural loyalties are subordinate to the requirements of loyalty to God; and that sometimes the latter might enjoin behaviour that contradicts normal expressions of the former. But, given that Jesus is also reported as criticizing the Pharisees for proposing a piece of casuistry that effectively permits children to neglect the proper care of their elderly parents;12 and given that, notwithstanding his affirmation and commendation of Gentiles,13 he apparently maintained his identity as a Jew;14 there is good reason not to take these “hard sayings” at face-value, and to read them as hyperboles intending to relativize rather than repudiate natural loyalties. As for St. Paul, it is notable that, although he reckoned virginity and celibacy superior, he persisted in regarding marriage as a good. In other words, in spite of his urgent sense of the imminent ending or transformation of the world by God, and of how this revolution of the current order of things would severely strain marital and family ties, St. Paul never went as far as to say that investment in society through marriage and children should cease. What he thereby implies is that, although the arrival of the world-to-come will involve the transformation of this world and its natural social bonds, it will not involve their simple abolition.
Upon closer inspection, then, the New Testament grounds for supposing Christian love to be properly unconditional and indiscriminate are not at all firm. That is even more so in the case of the theological ground. Certainly, if we take Jesus to be God incarnate, we can infer that the love of God for wayward human beings is gracious, or, to be more precise and specific, forgiving. As I have argued elsewhere, the word “forgiveness” commonly means two different things. It points to two distinct moments in the process of reconciliation: first, one of “compassion,” and then one of “absolution.”15 Compassion is unilateral and unconditional and meets the wrongdoer before he has repented; absolution is reciprocal and conditional and meets him only afterwards. God’s love is compassionate in that it sympathizes with wrongdoers in their weakness and confusion and ignorance; and it is absolving in that it is willing to set past injury aside and enter once again into a relationship of trust. But note how limited is the scope of this love: it operates only between an injured party and the one who has done the injury. It is a mode of love, but not the whole of it. Accordingly, it is unconditional and indiscriminate only in part. As compassion, its being proffered is not conditional upon the demonstration of repentance, and it is therefore made available indiscriminately to all sinners. As absolution, however, it is only offered in response to an expression of genuine repentance, and therefore only discriminately to penitent sinners.
Since this analysis, with its denial that all of forgiveness is unconditional, might sound counter-intuitive to Christians, especially Protestants, let me offer a brief defence. I have two points to make, one biblical and one empirical. First, in Jesus’ paradigm of forgiveness, his parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32), the heartfelt repentance of the son is already fully established before we learn of his father’s eager forgiveness: “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘. . . I will set out and go back to my father and say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son . . .”’” (vv. 17–19a). This he proceeds to do. While it is true that the father is filled with compassion and rushes to embrace him before he has so much as opened his mouth, the very next moment in the story has the son give explicit voice to his penitent intentions: “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned . . .” (v. 21). What this implies, I suggest, is that the parable does not tell a story of simply unconditional forgiveness. Yes, the father’s compassion is unconditional. Nevertheless, the son’s repentance is a prominent part of the story, and not at all incidental, and that gives us reason to suppose that what follows depends on it.
My second line of defence is empirical and briefer, and invites the reader to reflect on her own experience. Such reflection will confirm, I suggest, that it is unloving and foolish to absolve someone who has shown insufficient awareness of what they have done wrong, both because it forecloses their moral education and growth and because it makes it likely that they will proceed to cause further injury.
Such is my defence of the assertion that God’s love, as shown in Jesus and his teaching, is not simply indiscriminate. Let me return now to the larger point: that the kind of love that Jesus mainly models bears on how we should treat those who have wronged us. What it does not bear upon is how we should distribute our limited emotional, physical, temporal, and material resources in caring for the millions of fellow humans who can now claim to be—more or less closely—our neighbors. The argument from God’s agape to Christian cosmopolitanism does not work.
So how should we relate to near and distant neighbors? My view is that Christians should begin their answer to this question with the concept of human being as creaturely. On the one hand, this implies basic human equality. If all human beings are creatures of the one God then they all share a common origin and destiny, and a common subordination. If human creaturehood is then specified in terms of being made “in God’s image,” then all human beings are thereby dignified with responsibility to manage the rest of the created world;16 and each is the subject of a vocation to play a unique part in God’s work of bringing the created world to fulfilment. If we add to the doctrine of creation that of universal sinfulness, then humans are also equal in the fact (if not the degree) of their sinful condition and so in their need of God’s gift of forgiveness, and consequently none has the right to stand to another simply as righteous to the unrighteous.
Given these various kinds of basic equality, each human being owes any other a certain respect or esteem, such that, for example, he will not to take the other’s life intentionally or wantonly, whatever his national affiliation may be. Persons from Britain or America cannot regard the life of a person from India or