Between Kin and Cosmopolis. Nigel Biggar
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and set of customs and institutions. Now I want to contend that the creaturely quality of the human condition also implies that a diversity of communities, including nations, is a natural necessity that is also good.
Human communities, being creaturely, can only exist in particular times and places; and different geographical locations and historical experiences are bound to generate diverse communities. Human communities, being human, will all share some common characteristics; but experience of different places and histories is bound to generate differences in political constitutions, institutions, customs, received wisdom, and outlook. As a natural necessity, such diversity could be regarded simply as an unhappy feature of the human condition, providing as it does the occasion for inter-communal incomprehension and conflict, and therefore one to be transcended as soon as possible. But Christians, believing as they do in the unqualified goodness and wisdom of the divine Creator, should be disinclined to regard anything natural—whether created or following necessarily from it—as simply evil. Further, human experience confirms that diversity among peoples can be a source of value as well as of conflict. As postmodernists never tire of reminding us, there is beauty in difference. But to restrict this value simply to the aesthetic dimension would be to trivialize many of the differences that concern us here. For differences between constitutions, institutions, customs, wisdom, or outlook, if taken seriously, should provoke not merely wonder but reflective engagement. It should move each community to ask itself whether others do not order their social life better, or whether foreign wisdom should not correct, supplement, or complement its own. The value of communal (and so national) difference here is not just aesthetic, but intellectual and moral: it can enable human beings to learn from each other better ways of serving and promoting the human good. In other words, its justification is not just postmodernist, but liberal (in the style of J. S. Mill).
This argument that a Christian vision of things should affirm national diversity is supported by history. For, according to Adrian Hastings, Christianity has been a vital factor in the historical development of national diversity through its habit of communicating its message by translating it into vernacular languages.21 Since “a community . . . is essentially a creation of human communication,”22 and since the writing down of a language tends to increase linguistic uniformity,23 the movement of a vernacular from oral usage to the point where it is regularly employed for the production of a literature is a major cause of the development of national identity.24 Therefore, by translating the Bible into vernacular languages, by developing vernacular liturgies and devotional literature, and by mediating these to the populace through an educated parish clergy, the Christian church has played a major part in the development of diverse nationalities.25
And there is good reason to suppose that this role has not simply been the accidental effect of a particular missionary strategy. After all, different missionary strategies are possible; and we must ask why Christianity chose the one that it did. It could, like Islam, have chosen to spread the Word by assimilation rather than translation. Muslims regard the Qur’an as divine in its Arabic, linguistic form as well as in its content, and the consequent cultural impact of Islam has been to Arabize, “to draw peoples into a single world community of language and government.”26 In contrast, Christians do not ascribe divinity to any particular language, and they thereby implicitly recognize that the Word of God is free to find (somewhat different) expression in every language.27 Accordingly, in the New Testament story of the birth of the Christian church on the day of Pentecost, the disciples of Jesus “were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues,” so that the multi-ethnic crowd who heard them “were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language.”28 Whereas the story of the tower of Babel in the Hebrew Scriptures presents linguistic diversity as a degeneration (caused by God’s punishment of sin) from an original state when “the whole earth had one language,”29 here the Spirit of God is presented as graciously accommodating Godself to it. This divine self-accommodation implies a respect for and affirmation of the historicality, and therefore diversity, of creaturely human being. Such affirmation is also implicit in the orthodox Christian doctrine of the divine incarnation, according to which God almighty became human in Jesus of Nazareth, and in becoming human became historical—that is, a particular man living in a particular time and place. According to the Christian story, it is characteristic of God to be willing to meet human creatures in the midst of their historicality and diversity. Although transcending time and space, God is not alien to them; in this case what is transcended is not repudiated and may be inhabited. The Christian theological affirmation of human diversity finds further confirmation in the orthodox doctrine of God as a Trinity. In Christian eyes, as in Jewish and Muslim ones, God is certainly one; but the divine unity is not simple. God is more like a community than a monad splendid in isolation. The divine Origin and Basis of the created world, then, is a unity that contains rather than abolishes difference—a unity in diversity, not instead of it.
In case my affirmation of national diversity should appear idiosyncratic, let me point out that it is a consistent characteristic of Anglican thought from at least the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. So, for example, in 1869 F. D. Maurice affirmed “the sanctity of national life”;30 distinguished a nation’s reverence for its own language, laws, and government from a contempt for foreigners;31 envisaged Christ’s kingdom as “a kingdom for all nations” and not a “world-empire”;32 and argued that war is lawful only as “a struggle for Law against Force; for the life of a people as expressed in their laws, their language, their government, against any effort to impose on them a law, a language, a government which is not theirs.”33 Such views survived the First World War. In his 1928 Henry Scott Holland Memorial Lectures, William Temple affirmed the variety of nations against a non-national cosmopolitanism; and argued that a state has not only the right, but a duty, to defend itself against annihilation, because “each national community is a trustee for the world-wide community, to which it should bring treasures of its own; and to submit to political annihilation may be to defraud mankind of what it alone could have contributed to the general wealth of human experience.”34 A little later in his 1935–36 Gifford Lectures, Hensley Henson drew a sharp distinction between genuine patriotism, which is an extension of neighborly love, and “self-centred, vainglorious nationalism”: “Patriotism pictures humanity as a composite of many distinctive national types, enriched with the various achievements of history. Nationalism dreams of a subject world, an empire of its own wherein all men serve its interests and minister to its magnificence.”35 Most recently, this affirmation of distinctive national life against global imperialism or cosmopolitanism has found expression in the thought of Oliver O’Donovan. In his The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (1986), O’Donovan invokes biblical authority in favour of an international order that is unified by universal law rather than by universal, imperial government, and which is constituted by a plurality of nations, each with their own cultural integrity.36 Unlike empire, “[l]aw holds equal and independent subjects together without allowing one to master the other.”37
IV. National Responsibility to Natural Law
Let us pause and review the route taken so far, before we take a further turn. On the ground of an understanding of human being as creaturely, I have argued that it might be preferable to benefit compatriots over foreigners, and that it is justifiable to feel affection, loyalty, and gratitude toward a nation whose customs and institutions have inducted us into created forms of human flourishing. I have also argued on the ground of the doctrines of creation, the incarnation of God, and the Trinity—as well as by appeal to the consistent witness over more than a century of at least one Christian tradition—that a diversity of nations is a natural phenomenon that generates certain benefits and should be affirmed. That is the rearward view. Now let us turn around again and move forward into different but complementary territory, in order to explore the matter of moral responsibility for the common good and the limitations this places on national loyalty.
Again, our theological point of departure is the doctrine of creation. As creatures, human beings are bound not only by time and space, but also by the requirements of the good that is proper to their created and universal nature. Service of the human good is what makes actions right, and failure of such service is what makes them wrong. This good is not just private, but common; the good of the human individual—the good of each human community or nation—is bound up with the good of others, both human and non-human.