Abstract
The newest volume from Anglican theological giant Ephraim Radner may shock readers foremost interested in reading a primer for how a Christian might engage politically in the contemporary era, especially in light of the major occurrences of the past decade or so, and even more so the reelection of Donald Trump in the United States. The text is bookended by first discussing the motive and then producing the result of writing a letter to his children about the kind of life he hopes and prays they will lead. Insofar as that life is considered “good,” Radner confesses, it reflects our offering back to God (avodat Hashem) the good gifts given to us. But the extent of what those good gifts are, and decisions involved in the act of offering itself—what essentially constitutes the “political” life we all lead—has over centuries been muddied. Here, then, Radner seeks to clarify that our Christian calling is to limit our politics to the boundaries of our actual created lives and to the goods that stake out these limits: our births, our parents, our siblings, our families, our growing, our brief persistence in life, our raising of children, our relations, our decline, our deaths. (p. xiii)
This is a much more restricted scope than most Christians will have ever considered for political duty, but Radner’s thoroughly scriptural argument is captivating.
Those expecting to find shades of Rod Dreher or even Francis Schaeffer will, I think, be disappointed. But there is something of their shared spirit of dissatisfaction here. Radner’s argument presents more as fatigue than pleading, however. And, truly, Radner’s proposal has more in common with Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of Rod Dreher than with Dreher himself. 1 We are given a combination of ontology, theodicy, and eschatology where Radner aims at taking fear of anything but the Lord out of our minds; not because the world is unpredictable to us, but because creation cannot but continue to bear the marks of her creator. The dichotomies between life and death, creation and destruction, simplicity and complexity, are not false. Yet, neither are they to be resolved. They are simply outside our sphere of understanding, which is limited to the giftedness of our lives and the “mortal goods” both extraneous to our personhood and yet constitutive of it. Radner’s perspectives in this volume grow naturally out of his explication of life as gift in his previous volume, A Time to Keep, and readers would do well to familiarize themselves with his arguments there before tackling this volume.
Each chapter necessarily builds on the previous, leading to a methodical journey through Radner’s reasoning. Throughout, various themes may cause some readers to pause with gratitude. Radner’s persistent case for the goodness of mortality, in many ways formed as both an explicit and implicit critique of Augustine, is timely and welcome. The goodness of a life does not coincide with the mere collection of virtues that are meant to detach us from the created world, but rather with the practicing of offering our mortal goods back to God as their source. The stuff of our everyday lives, as much as they do not lead to vice (one would assume), are goods because they are given and created by God. Although Radner does not explicitly discuss idolatry in this work, he does offer the building blocks for understanding what the contrary position (the “bad” life) would entail. Perhaps this will appear in a follow-up volume, but there is enough re-catechizing needed for the good that one hardly needs to spend time dwelling on the bad. I found chapters nine and ten, both on the subject of catastrophe, to be especially creative and fascinating. Radner’s historical tracing of the definition of catastrophe as a political element, and indeed the Christian perception of it from the New Testament growing out of Israel’s narrative, is illuminating in and of itself. His spotlighting of Martin Luther on the subject is an unexpected moment of ressourcement that, I wager, will spur on further study by some readers. There is truly no era of Christian history about which Radner is not qualified to speak.
There is much wisdom to be gleaned from this text, but of course those who have read any of Radner’s other works will know there are many things unsaid and implications which may be grappled with. For example, how are we meant to apply what Radner says concerning “normal” and “abnormal” politics in chapter twelve to our lives as people who, in the west, are not actively being threatened with the restriction of their mortal goods (pp. 172–173)? At least at the time of the writing of this review, there are no political policies in the United States or Canada that seek to restrict the vast majority of mortal goods under the bounds of “normal” politics—heterosexual couples are not being physically forbidden from procreating via intercourse, nor are people whose sex and gender coincide being forced to transition in some way, for example. Rather, in most cases, these definitions are being further expanded—allowing anyone to marry anyone else, allowing couples who cannot sexually reproduce within their dyad to adopt or use surrogates, and so on. Perhaps the closest to a true sort of restriction is the liberality with which barriers to medical assistance in dying (MAiD) have been broken down. A once-taboo medical option, MAiD is now preferred by individuals who are not facing terminal illness due to encouragement from healthcare providers, at the most extreme, and by governments who are not providing necessary social supports, at the most common. But even with this point, the individual liberty of a Christian is not being impinged. Radner suggests that a catastrophe could change this arrangement (p. 175), and that is certainly possible. Thus, the ultimate resolution of his argument, that in an “abnormal” time “the Christian is indeed called to gauge the protection of those mortal goods to which he or she is privileged: the lives of family and children; the freedom to teach them; the integrity of a home, with food and work; the ability to engage neighbors and friends with generosity” is frustratingly vague, with the exception of some specific atrocities to which Radner contends the church universal should respond (e.g., the residential school system in Canada and the homelessness epidemic worldwide) (p. 189).
Likewise, I am left with many questions concerning the church’s relationship with, and at times in history control over, systems of capitalism. I am grateful for Radner’s brief treatment of “charity” and the Christian conception of the neighbor in chapter twelve, but there seems to be dissonance between what is said explicitly in those sections and some of the components of “abnormal” politics. If one’s neighbor is defined by (and not limited to) local proximity, why then should Christians care at all about national or even state-wide policies on welfare, for example? Especially if, as Radner argues throughout chapter eleven, even present-day states and provinces are too large to be trusted in any major moral capacity? Radner does give an anthropological answer to this—that through Christ, the stranger (the one who is far off) is made neighbor. The ethical response, perhaps, is that I would wish to do my part, as much as possible, to ensure that I might preserve life when given the opportunity and power. But the political response is less than clear, especially as enmeshed in politics as these individual planks currently lie. Christians will always be stuck; if they decide to vote, they must engage in an impossible calculus. The only real solution appears to be deciding not to participate at all.
Of course, one should not be surprised at arriving at this place at the end of the book when Radner explicitly states in the introduction that he takes the position of “political indifferentism” (p. xiv). It is crucial to note that the “reimagining” of political duty is more remembering that, throughout most of history, Christians (as a large collective of individuals who are not the monarch or executive decision-maker of a nation-state) have only very recently been able to participate in politics at all outside one’s family. In that sense, Radner’s most successful argument is explaining how the anxieties of the present-day are, in essence, manufactured and not essential to our lives. A real transition took place in the early modern period from people considering themselves and their neighbors in ecclesial to civil modes, and from identifying as individuals in communities to mere psychosocial constructs. While Radner does not make space for a Yoderian judgment of the Constantinian shift in the fourth century, neither does he explicitly judge the secularization of the West as something Christians should try to escape—it just “is.” What he does very clearly judge, however, and in a provocative way for some readers, is that the Christian capitulation in the modern era to notions of societal “betterment” has proven systemically impotent—and indeed was always an impossible task, one not given by Christ but assumed by some. Jesus’ own dying words in the Gospel of John were, after all, not to politically transform the world, but for his disciples to take care of his already-grieving mother (p. 185). And, most importantly, we have neglected to pass this simple faith down to subsequent generations in our catechesis.
According to Radner’s own concluding remarks, just before his letter to his children, this book is “not meant to be a guide to politics or a systematic treatment of the logic and ethics that ground our politics” (p. 202). It functions this way just the same as does Ecclesiastes, as he notes in the introduction (p. xxvii). Although Radner might, in this volume, just be describing “the basics” of life, he nevertheless does so in a foundational and surprising way. For this reason, I would commend this work to any Christian patient and humble enough for the necessary task of unfolding the narrative of Scripture—which figures the narrative of the rest of history—in order to rediscover our limits as creatures.
