the assembly with the promise of god

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Hope and Responsibility

The Assembly with the Promise of God

Douglas Knight

What can we know of the future? What confidence may we have inthe future of mankind? Is it better to say something about it, even ifunverifiable or banal, in order to keep the question of the futurebefore us? Or should we stifle the issue in case it turns out that theonly future we have is to be dreaded? Surely it is better to raise thequestion and venture to say something about the future than to letour fears silence us. We should not be afraid of appearing foolish orexceptional to those who want to confine us to less ambitiousquestions. One human community is under an obligation tocountenance the future and to say something about it for the rest of

us. They talk about the future as a matter ofhope. We can weightheir talk of hope by examining this community, and this communitymust be examined through its orientation to the future.

The community that has been addressed by God has hope, and thishope enables, and mandates for them the thought of the future.They are able to ask this question, and so for all humankind thequestion exists. They hope because God has addressed them, andthey expect him to do so again. This hope of his address determinestheir future. God has called them into existence simply so that hecan address them and they address him. For this community, hopeis cognizance that a promise has been made, expectations beenraised and obligation created. What we can say about hope, thefuture, and human responsibility derives from what this communitysays about itself, which is that there is an ongoing covenantbetween God and Abraham. It is not simply that Israel had, but hasand always will have this relationship with God and therefore knowsat least two things about the future, that it is the love of God forthem that gives them a future, and that the God who does so is thetrue God and therefore the God of all men. Yet the community forwhom the thought of the future takes the form of hope theirhope

is the exceptional community, and feeling abashed, may playdown this hope of theirs in order to avoid the resentment of those

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without such hope. Yet we must talk about this community in termsof its future-orientation.

The God who has brought Israel into covenant with himself hasrevealed that this relationship is the truth of the relationship of God

with man. Israels covenant with God is for Israels sake. Then wehave to add that the covenant with Israel is also for the sake of theworld. Since Israel is in covenant with the God of all mankind, thiscovenant is the truth of all mankind, and there is no mankind forwhich some other kind of existence is true.1 Each human is inrelationship, fundamentally and immediately, with God and, throughGod, with every other human being. Humans are in relationshipbecause God has made them so; our existence is dependent on thisprior relationship. We do not exist first and at some later datedecide to enter our first relationship. Man is with his fellow men:

none of us is first on our own and only subsequently andproblematically with other people. Each human exists only becauseGod calls them into existence, and each is called into existence sothat they may be called into communion:thecommunion is thepurpose of this existence. Since Israel is covenantal, Man iscovenantal.

This covenantal view of mankind has direct consequences for theflourishing of all persons and societies. The call of God brings eachhuman being before their fellow human. God calls each of us before

the other so that we can recognise one another and render oneanother the affirmation appropriate to each of his creatures, inparticular to the human creature, who bears the image of God andparticipates in the love and freedom that are proper to God. Each ofus is called before both those who are ready for us and those whoare not. Each other person is the image of himself that Godpresents us with and so represents the call and claim of God on us,and we may each hope that the other can discern that image andglory in us. Each encounter with our fellows represents thischallenge to hear this call of God to enter the communion, with the

God and with all men, that takes the form of this covenant withIsrael.

Two things must said of this covenant. First, Israels covenant withGod is for Israels sake. There is no further rationale than the loveof these persons for each other. But then we also have to say thatIsrael is in the world the world of the Gentiles as the presenceof God with man, and so as the witness of God to man, and theembodiment of mans proper worship of God. Thus this covenant,that is for its own sake, also has this further purpose and

1Karl Barth Church Dogmatics III

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responsibility. Israel is for the sake of the world. The purpose ofIsrael is man, and Israel is the destiny of Man.

In this paper I am going to suggest what might be involved in theseissues of true worship, witness and responsibility. I am going to

show what more extended uses of the concept of covenantChristians make and how they relate to the issues of hope and thefuture. Lastly I will point to the threats to the world, which are alsothe threats the twofold community of hope. I will suggest thatIsrael, along with the Church, has to find ways to describe the fearsand compulsions that characterise the world of the Gentiles,sometimes has to call the product of their imagination idolatry andadvise them to repent, and be converted and delivered. I willsuggest that, though Modernity may be a proper form of secularity,it may also be a ideological and religious force, even a cult, directed

against the particularity of persons and the possibility that personsthat have a future different from their present. This force isoccasionally even aimed against the particularity of the people ofIsrael. Modernity is a positive development inasmuch as it receivesfrom Israel, but becomes an idolatry when it declines to do so; itsidentity emerges as Modernity receives its definition from Israel andthe Church in gratitude or refuses it in aggression. For better or forworse therefore it is Israel that gives Modernity its identity. Withoutthe witness of the Jewish, and Christian, community the world canonly despair of discovering any future and drift towards shutdown.

It is the presence of Israel in the world that keeps the world openand gives it a future. The identity of Israel depends on taking upthis responsibility as model and teacher to the Gentiles who look toher. She must receive them because they are the gift of her glory given to her by her Lord. Thus there will not finally be twoassemblies, but one, in which Israel will be at the front while theGentiles take their place behind her. They are two assemblies,perhaps necessarily so, for now; each may appeal to the other notto make what divides us appear bigger than it is, and to offer oneanother tokens of recognition that, at the appearing of that future

assembly in which all will be reconciled, these two must be one.2

Tosay all this is the responsibility of Israel.

Israel

God has made man his covenant partner. More than that, God hasmade one specific man (Abraham) his covenant partner and withthe one specific people (Israel) who are the children of this man.He, and they, are the covenant partner of God. Covenant is not a

2Robert Spaemann Gott ist kein Bigamist, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung11 April 2009 Jedenfalls

ist der Gedanke von zwei Bundesvlkern dem Neuen Testament vollkommen fremd. Es gibt nur das

eine Volk Gottes, dessen geborene Mitglieder die Juden und dessen adoptierte Mitglieder die Heidensind.

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general truth or a universal right but a specific communion,membership of which is by invitation. The covenant of God is withman through this people only, and with this people for their sakeand for the sake ofall mankind. It is exclusive and it is inclusive.Israel is the future of mankind, held out by God to man. This

covenant is simultaneously with Israel and for all mankind, at onceparticularand only so universal. It is good news for all mankind thatGod loves Israel for Israels sake, for Israel is Man with God.

Israel is Knesses Israel the assemblyof Israel. This assembly ofIsrael worships, from the beginning and forever, before the throneof God. The Church (ecclesia) is the assemblycalled into beingaround the assembly of Israel, so Israel is the centre around whichthe Church gathers. We baptised Gentiles worship the Lord withIsrael and we see the Lord as Christ, surrounded by this company of

his people. Often in Christian worship the assembly of Israel isshrunk to the figure of Mary and disciples in adoration of Jesus, orto some schematic of prophet, priest and king, but nevertheless theChurch is present, only, where the Scriptures of Israel are read andthe patriarchs and prophets heard. The one divisible testament ofGod makes itself heard in the sequence of readings Old Testament-Psalm-Epistle-Gospel of every service of Christian worship. TheNew Testament is not the antithesis of the Old Testament, butsimply the Old Testament opened to the Gentiles. Christians refer tothis one testament in its two fold form as Old and New

simultaneously. It is Old because it is the original, from thebeginning, the unchanging testimony of God, and it is New since itmakes all things new.3 Christians worship the Lord as Christ, thatis, as he is anointed and surrounded by his people Israel, and by allmankind and by all creatures. They are his glory and his anointing;without them Christ would be without his kingdom and so would beno Christ. Each of the prophets sent by the Lord is a member of theassembly that surrounds him; each is vindicated by all who followhim: the arrival of the whole does not replace the parts, butglorifies them, revealing their place in this whole whom we call

Christ. This understanding of the simultaneously plural and unitarynature of the ecclesia enables Christians to insist on the centrality ofthe assembly, and so to call attention to it when this assembly isnot present at the centre of Jewish thought.

Jewish thought appears to the outsider to point in two directions.On the one hand is the Law, which some contributors to this volumewant to reserve to Israel, not for others. She is in an exclusiverelationship, in which the Gentiles have no part. About this privaterelationship, they suggest that Christians have no more to say than

any other Gentiles. On the other hand, Jewish thought is committed3 Irenaeus Adv Haer IV

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to the discourse of philosophy. Since philosophy represents anengagement with Gentile wisdom, this suggests that there is somerequirement to wrestle with the Gentiles, make sense of them, offerthem some wisdom and in some measure act as witnesses to them.

But to do philosophy is not only to let the Gentiles speak as equalsbut often and unfortunately to extend more credit to them thanthat. Gentile wisdom sets the questions, while Jewish thinkers carveup Jewish wisdom in order to present answers that Gentiles willrecognise, and which will support rather than confront the paganunderstanding of the world. Jewish thought seems ready to ready toreceive as allies the various deisms, theisms or a-theisms of Gentilewisdom that can be identified in different centuries with Athens andAlexandria, Rome and Paris, Knigsberg and Berlin, and New Yorkand Chicago. Yet the basic questions asked and answers expected

by his heirs in successive restorations of the Academy remaindetermined by Platos vision of the universals. Nothing in the worldis eternal, everything passes away. What is eternal must alwaysremain above the world. God cannot come to man or love man, orchoose one man rather than other and so cannot make covenants.

Can such philosophy affirm universality without casting off allparticularities? Is it not bound to blind out the actuality of theevents and so for example of the event in which the God of all mencalls one people out of another, and chooses to be the God of all

men only as the God of this particular people? Has Jewish thoughtsucceeded in defending this point? Or how often does it step backfrom the dangerous doctrine of election, which alone secures thefundamental nature of the particular, to wave towards a vaguer andmuch less demanding morality to which gentiles may wish toadhere, if only they could?

But, since it is not informed by the covenant of God, Gentilewisdom, knowing only the fundamental fact of death, is mesmerisedby the processes that dissolve away all particularity. Since all must

bow before all-powerful, all-dissolving, time it finds it difficult toconcede the fundamental significance of any person or people.Gentile Wisdom Philosophy represents the tug-of-war betweenthe one and the many and the inevitable triumph of the One. Allparticularities will eventually dissolve into a unity-without-distinction (Parmenides), or into a flux without stability or identity(Heracleitus). Gentile wisdom is determined by a logic ofparticularity-eradication. Is Jewish thought robust enough toidentify the presence of this threat within philosophy ?

Thought that isJewish will insist that the one true God is the God ofIsrael, the universal God is this particular God. While universality

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dissolves particularity away in the pagan conception, in thecovenanted conception universality and particularity are no threatto one another. Thought that is Jewish, and which therefore startsout from the worship and Scriptures of Israel, must subjectphilosophy to the given that is the assembly of Israel, and to the

events set out in those Scriptures. It must secure the truth thatthere is a people, simultaneously many and one, whose identity ismore fundamental than time or death. These persons will never besublated into any other higher or lower unity, nor be turned intoanything that is not themselves. This assembly is fundamental.

Jewish thought will surely take the existence of this assembly andthe covenant that has created its hope as its starting point. It willtherefore surely subject every doctrine of God and of man to thegivens of Israels history, the events of recorded in Scripture which

the God of all makes himself known as the God of this one people.It will offer its own particular history as the means by which everypeople may interpret their own histories, and by which everyconcept of man and of God may be disciplined. Can Jewish thoughttherefore really maintain that Law and Philosophy are independentareas of concern, and that Jewish Scripture has so little to say toGentile wisdom? Surely Jewish thought will use Jewish Scripture todiagnose Gentile thought as engrossed in by the prospect of its ownextinction? Though engaged at a deep level with the Gentile wisdomof philosophy, Jewish thought inexplicably wants to avoid the term

theology, in case the Gentiles get the impression that the universalGod of whole world, about which philosophers wonder, be also thelocal God of this particular people, knowable through the worshipand the Scriptures of Israel and in no other way. Should there besuch minimal correspondence between Israels private existenceand her public existence?

But Jewish thought seems to suggest that there is a gulf, on oneside of which is the Law, which denotes Israels private life with herLord, and on the other side of which is Philosophy, which is Israels

discernment of what sense there is in the wisdom of the nations. Itdoes not seem to encourage much traffic between the two, asthough there are some questions which may not be asked. In hisignorance and conceit, the outsider may wonder if Rabbinic thoughtdoes not underplay, even suppress, three crucial factors. The first ofthese is the assembly. Israel is gatheredby God, and gathered onearth and so before the world, where the rest of mankind is prettymuch guaranteed to notice and take an interest. The second is theworship of this assembly. This people is unique because theirworship is true and their prayers are heard; sourced from this true

worship, Israels talk about God distinguishes it from all other

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peoples.4 The outsider therefore asks whether it is really the Law(together with its interpretation), or whether it is not rather Israelsidentification of the true God in its worship that is the fundamentaldistinctive of Israel. Then Israel might say that the Law gives them613 ways to examine themselves, check that their worship is free of

the idolatry and gentileness that might otherwise creep in. Thirdly,this impertinent outsider might suggest that where there is thisassembly and this worship it is because thepresence of God bringsthem into existence, so we have to say that this worshippingassembly is the presence of God here on earth, before men.5 It isthepresence of the Lord who enables his people to be the peoplewho can observe this Law, and declare that it is indeed the Truth,and which God graciously enables Israels heeding and following.Without these three terms, assembly, worship andpresence, wehave this gulf between Lawand Philosophy.6

Though Israel may perhaps not need to make these three termsexplicit for her own sake, Gentiles have to make them explicit, andChristians do so. They say that the worshipping community of Israelis where God becomes nameable, and so makes himselfaddressable and accessible to man. Without this explicit confessionof this presence, worship and assembly, Jewish thought wouldcommunicate only that the Torah is a private possession withoutwider consequence, as though God meant nothing, or nothingpublic, by placing Israel here amid the curious Gentiles. Yet Israel is

not created a merely angelic race, beyond the perception of thenations of the earth.

Among the gentiles it is not the philosophers who worship God, butanother group, one that hears the Scripture of Israel and hopes forinclusion in that assembly the Christians. So we have threeassemblies: Israel and the two gentiles assemblies, one of thephilosophers, who do not acknowledge the God of Israel, and theother of the Christians, who do. Yet the single assembly that hearsthe Scriptures and so gathers around the patriarchs and prophets

appears to us as two parallel, even rival, communities which declineto look one anothers way or do so only with disdain. Could it be

4Lenn Goodman The God of Abraham p. 211 The life of Israel becomes a symbol of

God's holiness, Israel itself is made holy and godlike but only if the meanings areretained and the symbols not made ends in themselves.5Alan Mittleman Hope in a Democratic Age p.143 The normative act of thrice-daily prayer,

the sturdy backbone of covenantal action for the traditional Jew, becomes itself a ritualenactment of messianic time. Rabbinic prayer is thus a prolepsis of the days of the messiah.6Lenn Goodman The God of Abraham concedes the significance of ritual, which is a step

towards worship, in the identity of Israel, but this small nod to piety comes only after, andyet without connection to, an extended sociological discussion of ritual. p. 207 A subtext

in all Jewish ritual, perhaps all social ritual, identifies the we. Thus we say Our God andGod of our fathers, Our God, king of the Universe, in so many ritual blessings.

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assembly of Israel. The only way that this may happen for Gentilesis through the particular member of Israel given them for thispurpose. Christians participate in the promise given to the wholecompany of Israel, and thus to Abraham, Moses, David ... throughChrist. This participation is both second-hand, since Gentiles are not

descended from Abraham, and it is first-hand, since the Holy Spirit,the God of Sinai, gathers all nations into the company of God'speople in Christ.

Since God is present to the world in Israel, this must mean that Godis present in each and every member of Israel. Each Jew is all Israelin miniature, each is man-with-God. Israel has no other existencethan in the specific individual people of whom Israel is made up,through all history. Christians point out that if we see Israel as thepresence of God to man we must also see each member of Israel as

the presence of God. God sets each man before his fellow man sothat each may recognise this as the beloved creature andcompanion of God, the gift given to him by God and the image ofthe invisible God so that in each of his fellows man may recogniseand know God. We could term this presence embodiment orincarnation.8

Here the concept of person allows us to relate the concepts ofcovenant, and of man as bearer of the image of God, and of man asthe creature open to the future. If God and man are conceived

without relation to one another, we have two puzzling individualunits. Then Man is himself a god, a rival for God and we have aparadoxical encounter of monads, each of which claims to be allthat is. Each can only be a limit on and rival of the other. Personsare not monads. They can only be in relation with all other persons.For createdpersons, this means we are in time, drawn and calledtowards our fulfilment, always possessing what we have in the formof apromise. All humans are persons because God regards themso; each of them is sustained by the call of God, and this call hasthe nature of a promise. Thus each Jew is a Jew because of the

promise of God. The promise is always delivered on and yet morepromised, and intrinsic to the promise to Israel is that the Gentileswill acknowledge her for who she is. No Jew is a Jew apart fromGodor in any other form than this promise. Yet this identity ofIsrael depends on the arrival of the Gentiles who make up theworld, and thus on the future reconciliation of the Gentiles withIsrael and of Israel with the Gentiles. Israel is not only for Israels

8 Michael Wyschogrod has led recent recognition of this. The Body of Faith p.256 The

circumcised body of Israel is the dark, carnal presence through which the redemption makesits way in history. Salvation is of the Jews because the flesh of Israel is the abode of the

divine presence in the world. It is the carnal anchor that God has sunk into the soil ofcreation.

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own sake but also for the Gentiles, so Israels identity takes theform of a promise. Thus a Gentile may become a Christian, and sohave hope, because Israel has the promise of God and ongoingdelivery on that promise. If God proves unreliable with any onepromise, to any member of Israel, he is of no use to the rest of us.

Each Jew is all Israel in miniature, anointed, that is, Christ-edIsrael for the Gentiles sake. Israel is Man-made-holy, that is, theGentile-made-holy. Jesus is the means by which the nations can seeIsrael as she will be, vindicated and glorious. Christ is our glimpseof all Israel, as both distinct from mankind and identified withmankind. Israel will truly be herself when the Gentiles are given toher as her glory. The future of mankind is hidden, but hidden inevery member of this assembly. This assembly includes thoseGentiles who see this glory and the future of mankind here. In this

perichoretic understanding of the person, each person relates to allothers, so the personhood of each is dependent on the eventualpersonhood of all, and thus on the delivery of the promise of Israeland her vindication which, in the eschaton, will simultaneously bethe reconciliation of all men and the vindication of God for allmankind.

Witness

What about the exclusivityof the covenant of God with Israel? Isthis covenant solely a private affair, or is it also missional? Israel is

the community that correctly identifies God. By identifying him so,Israel identifies all else as not-God, and calls excessive devotion toanything else as idolatry. Such idolatry is the way that Gentiles givethemselves to what-is-not-God, and are lost by doing so. Their falseorientation and the misdirection of their passions sets the Gentilesagainst one another, with the result that the world is a violentplace. The Gentiles are enslaved and in misery, but since theycannot help themselves they are to be pitied. Simply byworshipping God, and refusing to give worship to any othercreature, Israel is the witness of God to all. The witness and mission

of Israel is intrinsic to its worship of God, not something additionalto it. By its worship Israel witnesses that the true object and goal ofmans life is God. This orientation reveals that all others are false.The true God is the true orientation for man, by which alone he maybe at peace with himself, with his neighbour and with all othercreatures.

Israel is given to the world, that is, to the Gentiles. Israel has topity the idolaters who, in their misery, give themselves away inworship to every creature, and are captive to the tyrannies that

result. Israel is holy, thus Jews are here to resist the world, notcapitulate to it. When they are inviolable, the Gentiles will know that

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to throw themselves against Israel is to throw themselves againstGod, and against their own true orientation, which Israels Godalone secures. Thus Israel must bear the Gentiles. The whole nationof Israel is priestly, invited to carry the sin of the world again, ofthe Gentiles into the sanctuary, where it is burned up and

transformed from sin to holiness. For long periods of history thismeans that Israel must bear foreign masters, even bear lawless andviolent foreign masters. The harsh historical oppression (Korn)which Israel suffers does not begin with Rome, but with Egypt.Every subsequent regime Assyria, Babylon, Persia and Greece,and medieval European Christendom, or modern Europeannationalisms is a continuation of Egypt. But Egypt is not onlyoutside us but also within; the passions, resentment and rage thatbubble up within us are, until we can master them, as dangerous asany external Egypt.9 Israel is confronted by, often subjugated by,

the nations, but must never be suborned by them, or imitate them.But equally Israel can only be threatened by them because theyappeal to the violence within each man that is yet to be mastered.

Jewish thinkers who blame the Gentiles for persecuting Israel,which is to say, for being violent, owe a debt to the juridical mind-set of Rome, an approach that Augustine unfortunately sometimescommunicates to Christian theology.10 In the Scriptures, however,gentile and violent are near-synonymous, so it cannot be asurprise that Gentiles are violent, but only that occasionally they

are not. Gentiles are without the Law, thus law-less and helplesslyviolent in the same way that animals are. It makes more sense topity than to blame them. When under pressure from Gentileaggression, Israel might blame God for not having given theGentiles the Law. Yet it might receive the answer that the Lord hasindeed given the Gentiles the Law, and the existence of the peopleof Israel in the worldis the form in which he has done so.

Israel identifies God in its worship. The gentiles gathered in theChurch are able to identify God because, in the person of Christ,

they identify Israel as the true witness and worshipper of God. Theyhave taken Israel as their guide and teacher, their expectationshave been awakened, and they have found hope. It is defined byIsraels hope of vindication, and Gentile acknowledgement of herwill be the form that Israels vindication will take.11 Israel will not betaken away from the Gentiles, or they from her; she will be raisedover them and, gathered around her, they will be her glory. Withoutan account of the extrinsic purpose of the covenant, and thus of theresponsibility for the world that attaches it, Israels testing

9 Philo

10Augustine11Jon D. Levenson Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel

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relationship with the Gentiles is surely incomprehensible. Without adoctrine of election that understand that this witness is its purposeand this vindication its climax, it is hard to see why God subjectsIsrael to this cruelty. Since these connections between covenantand purpose and between worship and public witness, are made in

such minor key, if at all, by Jewish thought, that God would seemunready to help or to care, which is perhaps why theodicy, andapostasy and atheism, are such prominent options for Jewishthinkers.

Gentiles are without the Law and so, in their passion and misery,the nations lash out at each other. Israel can surely look on this asa form of self-harming. The holiness of Israel is not sustainedsimply by removing itself from the Gentiles, but by beingdemonstrably holy amidst the Gentiles, so that they can see this

holiness, marvel at it and even desire it. Israel is the communitythat can say that mankind gives itself away to the wrong gods andthat murderous forms of behaviour result from this idolatry. It is notmerelypossession but continued offering of that truth to the world,as its deliverance from the false gods, that is required from Israel.But it is not self-harming only, for the nations also lash at Israel,and sometimes come up with ideological articulation of why Israel isuniquely the one against whom they must lash out. When Israel ispersecuted and suffers she cannot but wish to tell the Gentiles thatit is only their failure of true orientation and ignorance of true

worship that creates the misery that drives their rage. Israel canalso point out that there is release from this violence and self-destruction through conversion to true worship. For Gentilessalvation means deliverance from false to true worship andorientation, whereas for Israel salvation means that God does notlet the Gentiles prevail against her, but vindicates her before them.Meanwhile, however, the Gentiles represent the storm that Israelhas to walk through, for life amid the Man without Godis the life towhich the Man with God is called.

In the assembly of Israel we see humankind with God. This meansthat we see our own future selves there in that assembly. The truthof God is of interest to us because it is the truth of our ownorientation. The future, and with it ourfuture, is there in thatassembly, united and completed around the throne of God. Butpresently for the Gentiles it is a promise and a question: we are notcompelled to acknowledge or receive it but are invited to do so infreedom. From the future the Lord God has sent this assembly backto in one person. All the individual epiphanies that make up thehistory of Israel are appearances of this future assembly, and all are

recapitulated for the Gentiles in this person. Christ is the epiphany,the decisive view, of the whole. He is the eschaton, making itself

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diffidently available, in a single moment of our space and time, sothat we may receive it, or refuse it, in freedom. The Gentiles arebrought to edge of this worshipping assembly by one member ofIsrael. Jesus is the Jew who is unafraid of the Gentiles and not onthe run from us. He goes through all that the Gentiles hurl at him

without reviling, unmoved by this rage, so he is the person of Israelvictorious and vindicated. So Christians say to Jews: Be Jewish!Beunafraid! Pity Gentiles! Defy Gentiles! Inasmuch as Christians fail tosay this, Jews only have evidence only of Gentile pitiableness. Israelis planted and established in the world, through all generations,withstanding all assaults, worshipping the true God and no otherand the Gentiles may see this and wonder at it. Israels worship isnot hidden, or is only hidden so the extent that the Gentiles hidethemselves from that glory. Though the Gentiles may fear and hateit, and from time to time attempt to extinguish it, this witness is

invincible and eternal, for God is faithful to Israel. Since this meansthat their violence will not be allowed to overcome the world, it isalso good, indeed it is salvation, for the Gentiles that he is so.

Philosophy and theisms

Israel is Emmanuel, the sole evidence of himself offered by God tothe world, and so the single and inescapably theological fact bywhich man is confronted. Israel is Man-is-with-Godand the hopethat God-is-with-Man. Thusfor the pagans who insist that noenduring relationship between God and man is possible, Israel is the

evidence that confounds them. Man without God is miserable andalso ultimately unsustainable, for the man who is determined to bewithout God will give way to Man who is with God. The man whoholds out against his fellow man will give way to man who is freelyand gladly with his fellow man, content to receive each and everyhuman being from God as his fellow.

Israel is this witness in the face of the Gentiles. Philosophy Gentilewisdom has determined that God is not interested in man. Whatcomprehension can the philosophers, imitators of Plato, have of this

God who engages with creation, with man, with the vulgarassembly, and who enables man to worship him and so allows aforetaste of heaven to reach earth so that it is renewed? What canthese elective Hellenists make of a world that exists in time yet isnot dissolved, but renewed by it? But the Jewish thought that isunwilling to let Jewish worship shape its wisdom, or the inner aspectof the covenant shape the outer, admires a deistic conception of theGod who disdains to take any interest in man, a negative theologyin which God is so vanishingly distant that nothing can be saidabout him. It concedes too much to the Gentile belief that Israel is

not addressed and her prayers not heard, and that there is noliving, speaking and prayer-receiving God, but only emptiness and

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absence. Philosophy is a coy expression of a deism that believesthat any indication of God's concern for man is the unseemlyanthropomorphism arising from an immature religiousconsciousness. Could it be that, when Jewish thought is reluctant tolet Israels Scriptures frame the dialogue with Gentile wisdom that a

non-covenantal account of a disengaged God rises from the chasmbetween Law and Philosophy? If you have a disengaged God, itmakes no difference whether he exists or not. Such a theism or a-theism puts what is notpersonal above the living person, or putsthe lifeless above life. The God of the philosophers is either a thingor a no-thing, and is either way indistinguishable from Death. Thetheist God that is too high to be concerned by man and tootranscendent to appear in his own creation is no ally but an idolatry.The Bible insists that the materiality of creation is not repugnant toits Maker and the sin of man is not so appalling that that it keeps its

creator God away. If it were, how inadequate this creator would be.For our sake, so that we may come to acknowledge him, God doesnot come to us without creation; whether as fire and cloud orgarments of flesh he clothes himself with materiality in order toappear as the Angel of Lord, for how else may man know him? ThatGod makes himself one person among the many created persons,does not diminish him. For Israel worships the God who hascommitted himself to man, specifically to Abraham and his childrenand the God who has notdone so is an untruth and idolatry.

The Gentiles cannot withhold their worship from the God of Israelwithout giving themselves to some other divinity. They may namethis Zeus, Woden, Gaia, Kismet or Moloch, or they may insist that itis above all names as das Nichtige or the One. They maybelieve that the unconcerned, disengaged God, or the God withoutexistence, is higher and more compelling than the covenanted andthus concerned and engaged God who has made himself known toAbraham and who shares his fortunes with Israel but they pay anawful price for this monotheism. Their god is an angry tyrant, forwhose sake they consume one another. Israel must then put it to

such Gentile cultures that they are bewitched by their ownextinction and flirting with death.

Israel can ask whether modernity is a manifestation of an Other-phobia, a failure to come to terms with the fact that we are notourselves without our fellow man. Israel can name the idolatry ofthe world around her for what it is. Idolatry can take the form ofpolytheism or monotheism equally. Polytheism is as much athreat to us as to primitive societies in the ancient world; we aretempted to give up our hope of discovering the truth of the world

and capitulating to the relativism of many truths without unity.Jewish thought should direct itself outward to the metaphysical

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polytheism of modernity that degrades the environment in whichmeaningful public discourse can take place. Should not Jews saythat relativism is idolatry and consequent descent into culturaldecay and that it is as much a temptation for them as for anyoneelse?

Moderns defer to a range of pressures and powers, articulated withgreater or lesser clarity. The world is gripped by gods because weplay on one anothers fears and impose obligations that over timeare regularised as ideologies and cults. They articulate the awfulcreatures of our imaginations the shadow-existence of which free-rides on our anxiety before our fellow man, our reluctance to seehim as our fellow or to receive him as the creature, and gift to us,of the true God. As in our fear we imagine ourselves as anindividual without-relation, so we image all the creatures in the

world as similarly as individuals without intrinsic relation to oneanother or claim on us. We thereby turn ourselves and everycreature into a dark god, a monad-without-relation, that regardswhatever is other than itself as a threat to be shunned.

It is for Israel is to say that these pressures are rival cults thatarticulate the fears and compulsions of modernity. Israel maysuggest that we may find that true knowledge of God comes as arelease from them, and enables us to discover the truth of ourneighbours claim on us and with it our own proper identity. The

truth of God gives a less conflicted way of being with one anotherand so of being ourselves.

Monotheisms are not inevitably allies. Monotheism in which Godcannot tolerate what is not God, is no theism but simply mon-ism.The monotheism that defers to an ogre angry with the world is noally. Such a God is a stranger to this creation; it confronts him assomething alien to it and he expresses his rage at his helplessnessbefore it. The oneness of God is not a doctrine about phenomenonof number, for the revelation to Israel is not simply that there is an

underlying unity but that the true God has made something that isnot himself. All mankind is his creature, the whole world is theproduct of his own creating and he loves what he has made. Godloves and has created something that is not himself, so thatalongside the underlying unity is an underlying duality, of God andMan. On the basis of this unity in duality man can be with what isnot himself, and each human being can come into relationship withsomeone who is other than himself.

The monist god, confronted by the world he did not make andcannot love turns that anger against this most particular nation.

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Two forms of monism set themselves against her, both appalled atIsrael as fundamental theological fact, so Israel has enemies. ThePrimitive and explicitly theist monism of the Middle East is one.Modernity, the ostensibly atheist and non-religious monism of theWest, is another. Aggression against Jews, and against their self-

determination in the state of Israel, indicates that these twomonisms are moved by intolerance of one people in particular.

The suggestion that Israel has been supplanted in the affections ofGod is sometimes termed supersessionism. From the first theChurch identified it as the heresy of Marcion. Christianity is entirelydependent on the witness of Israel; it does not attempt to displaceit, but defers to it, indeed bows before it. This is not to deny thatindividual Christians and churches have not, and do not, speak andact against Israel but this the pagan within speaking, in defiance of

the Gospel. When this occurs the Church as a whole must hold outto them the oxygen mask from which these Christians can drawdraughts of the Scriptures deep enough to return them to lucidity.

The high view of Israel at the centre of the Christian doctrine of Godmay represent unwelcome attention, but it surely means that, forIsrael, Christians are not the enemy. Jews can surely distinguishbetween Christians and other Gentiles. Christians are those inwhose worship of God Israel is central. Ideological Moderns on theother hand Gentiles who are opposed to the witness of Israel or the

Church, who are committed to a metaphysics, whether theism, a-theism or anti-theism, which resists the distinctiveness of thispeople. Modernity is defined by its antipathy to its own origins thataims towards universalisation that will level and homogenise all,and especially whatever nation presumes to remain distinct.Judaisms opponent is not Christianity, but the modernity that hastaken exception to its own origins in the Christian gospel and thusin the worshipping assembly of Israel to which the Church points.

But supersessionism continues in the two monisms of Ideological

Modernity and Ideological Primitivism. Each represent the Gentileform of life, in which man-without-God is also without hope. It is, asKarl Barth pointed out, typical and inevitable that Gentiles lift theirhand against the Lords anointed.12 Identification of Israel as thepeculiar enemy may turn to murderous violence, but is primarily aform of self-harm by the Gentiles without hope. The culture thatintends to supplant Israel defies God, and is likely to destroy itself

12Karl Barth Dogmatics in Outline p. 67-68 The attack on Judah means the attack on the rock of

the work and revelation of God, beside which work and revelation there is no other... A nation which and that is the other side of National Socialism chooses itself and makes itself the basis and measureof everything such a nation must sooner or later collide with the truly chosen people of God.

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as it attempts to do so. In the case of the Modernity, hatred ofIsrael warns us how advanced the decay of our culture is.13

A monist understanding of God gives support to a monistunderstanding of man, in which each human is a single unit of

uncovenanted will, and so a little tyrant. There is then no greatdifference whether the monist account takes the form of furiousassertion of the rights of God against man (ideological Primitivism)or of the (deist or theist) irrelevance, or the (atheist) non-existenceof God to man, represented by Modernity. It is the concept of thewill without covenantthat determines the account of man operativein that society. Without a concept of covenant, we are left with manbaffled by the world and by his neighbour and unwilling to commithimself to the disciplines by which he could grow into responsibilitytowards them. If, in our conception, God is without intrinsic relation

to anything that is not himself, so will man be; if God is simply awill, each human will suspect every other of manifesting a willcontrary to his own. If in our conception God acts as a tyrant, wewill very likely act as tyrants towards one another. Such anindividual can acknowledge no relation, no Other and thus norestraint: everything is an offence to him as soon as he identifies itwith the will of another. Such a tyrant-individual, suffering anotherness-phobia, will consequently be without offspring and thesociety in which this phobia is advanced will be a one-generationphenomenon. The long-term result of this autistic account of man is

that we give away the responsibility that we do not know how tohandle, give up hope of sustaining our own covenants of family andcommunity. Israel may hold up its high, covenanted view of manso that this can be contrasted with all more reductive views. Theworshipping assembly of Israel may ask each society in which itfinds itself whether the gods of that society enable the growth ofeach individual into responsibility and citizenship, or whether theyrather teach only that each must exert their will against the worldand, when exhausted, fall back baffled and miserable. The assemblyof Israel may ask therefore ask members of these cultures impacted

by the monism of Modernity or Primitivism whether they have theconceptual means to see one another as fellow-citizens, asmembers of a society, and ask what they look forward to.

The human covenant

The covenant of God with man in Israel gives a complex account ofman in which we are persons, each of us simultaneously a uniquebeing and a social being. As a creature of covenant, man is notsimply an individual unit of will, indifferent or hostile to all others.

13

I am indebted here and several other places in this paper to David Goldmans Spenglercolumns in First Things andAsia Times.

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Man is with God, and not known without God, or apart from God, orother than as the creature loved by God. The Lord brings eachbefore the other so that through him they may turn to hear oneanother and wonder at the image that each presents to the other.We must seek one anothers recognition and approval, and wait for

one another to receive that recognition. Each member of Israel, andthrough Christian baptism each Gentile, may receive thediscipleship by which he can repent and confess his sin, and ask forforgiveness: these are the skills of self-judgment by which humanautonomy may be established. Any society benefits from thepresence of the community that can hear and speak the truth incritical self-judgment. The society that receives these skills even atsecond-hand will not be entirely a captive to its own resentmentand the cycle of retribution, in which blame can only ever be givenbut fault never admitted. Man is in receipt of the act of God, and so

may look for continuing acts of God. Because it is the source ofhope, this covenant opens the question of the future. As Godspeaks to us, and hears from us, so we receive our existence andpurpose. He is our audience, so whatever we do has the promisethat there is someone who will follow our progress. We maypersevere in our projects on the basis of this promise that God willcontinue his concern for us, and may give us neighbours andsuccessors who will give us our recognition so that our projects sonot die but continue throughout all generations. We may term this ametaphysics of promise, or an eschatological ontology, by which we

can speak to the world in hope, indeed, in faith, hope and love.

We seek other persons and demand their wisdom, judgment andapproval and so we cannot intend to be without them. Manflourishes as he knows he is loved and is enabled by love to givehimself in service. All communities and societies are entities of love.Loves aspires to permanence: we desire its growth, not its breakdown; love aspire to greater self-control, so that it becomes truerand more permanent.

Each society must seek its own continuation, and thus hope for ageneration that will recognise it as good. No generation can besufficient to itself for it needs another other to give this affirmation.Our shared present depends on a larger covenant of the present-and-the-future. Our present existence therefore requires that wepass life on, and pass on the culture by which those who come afterus can affirm that life as good. If we live as though there is only thispresent, and so set ourselves against the emergence of future, wewill deny existence to the very people who could give us theaffirmation that we desire. Thus we must live in a way that enables

the medium and long-term to emerge; were we to live in such away that nothing came after us, even our present life would be of

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no value. Each person, this would suggest, is a dual being: he isboth himself and the possibility of another, and indeed of manyothers. Each of us is more than a single self.

Fundamental to the concept of hope is the prospect of new

generations to continue the human race. Israel is the future-oriented people because they acknowledge the obligation to honourtheir parents, and do so by presenting them with anothergeneration by which the life of this people may continue. Since theyacknowledge the summons of God, the future is a real question,and thus they are ready to serve and wait for not only their own,but past and future generations.14 By extension from the covenantof God with Israel, we can see that all mankind must be a creatureof covenant in other ways too. There must be these two covenants,one which takes place within one generation, and which holds that

generation together as a functioning society; the other of whichtakes place between one generation and another, and holds thegenerations together. Let us look at the intra-generational covenantfirst. Man is a covenanted being because humanity is not unisex,but sexed and so dual. We are eitherman orwoman and so maygive ourselves to one another as man to woman or woman to man.Each may desire the one who is not like themselves, and in loveeven give themselves to that other, in freedom and for good, notholding themselves above this relationship, ready to extricatethemselves from it. Marriage is the covenant in which each partner

recognises the lasting uniqueness of the other. As husband andwife, a man and woman may desire one another to the exclusion ofall others. They may do so now, and hope to do so more and thusmay welcome whatever discipline supports their love so that theirfuture love may be greater than their present love.

A family and household are created by this relationship of one manand woman. Marriage is the public recognition given by society, thatthey make this single new unit. Each marriage creates a new littlesociety, each of which serves the renewal of, and is as fundamental

as, Society itself. Their relationship is exclusive, and it recreatesand renews society as a whole only because it is so.15 This covenantexists both for these two people and for those outside. It is good forsociety that two people make this fundamental identification of oneanother as good, not relatively or provisionally, but finally andunchangeably. When marriage is not understood as covenant,singleness is promoted over life together in the covenant which we

14Michael Wyschogrod The Body of Faith p. 253 The Jewish family is thus the space in

which the future membership of the Knesses Israelis prepared...The bond of the Jewish

parent to his child reflects the faith that the Jews of future generations are already membersof the house of Israel and that redemption will come to humanity through them.15Robert George and Jean Bethke Elshtain (eds) The Meaning of Marriage

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can enter freely, and we become dependents of that other covenantthat we have not entered freely, the state.16

Then marriage acknowledges the possibility that a new third partymay come into existence. Children may arrive. Covenanted together

this man and woman can concede the possibility that, though itdisrupt their autonomy, a third person may be created through theirlove. One generation can love the next enough to give it existence.Marriage is public recognition that this child is not simply abiological phenomenon but aperson, who fairly expects the loveand service of the woman and man from whose bodies they come.Marriage intends to provide children with security in which their ownreadiness to enter covenants and start families may develop.17 Therecognition of the irreducible particularity of persons secured bymarriage has the long-term effect of creating the culture in which

persons are irreducible and are ready for the commitment to othersthat will generate new covenants and thus give a future to thatsociety. It represents a further a covenant between this generationand all possible future generations and so between the present andthe future. But, again, only the community that understand itself interms of covenant is able to say this.18

Marriage creates a distinction between this particular household andthe wider world made up of all other households. There is the innersphere of the household, and the outer sphere of the public square

in which these many households meet, do business and sustain acivil society. The household and the market serve each other soneither should attempt to absorb the other. The household is theplace in which the next generation of workers, savers andconsumers is prepared, while the market is where the goods andservices that serve that household are sought. For the sake of theproduction of new generations and thus for its own continuationgeneration by generation through time, society must honour thedistinction between the household and the wider public sphere ofthe market, culture and politics.

There is a distinction between the inner sphere of family andhousehold, and the outer sphere of market and employment. Thereis a public and a private sphere and mutual dependence betweenthem, but there cannot be any perfect symmetry between them.

16 Patricia Morgan The War between the State and the Family(IEA), Douglas Farrow Nation ofBastards.17Jonathan Sachs Faith in the Future: The Ecology of Hope and the Restoration of Family

and Faith (1997) p.23 The family is the best means we have yet discovered for nurturingfuture generations18

Michael Wyschogrod The Body of Faith p. 253 The community in which the Jew lives isnot only the community of his contemporaries. It includes those Jews who have been andthose who will be.

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Lack of symmetry creates the tension that generates the movementfrom one generation to another, and so ensures the continuation ofsociety through time. Too much symmetry forestalls this movementby which one generation brings another into existence. Thedistinction between public and private is not only analogous to the

distinction between this present time and the future, but ensuresthat this present continues to give way to that future.

The continuation of society rests on an understanding that thepresent is not sufficient to itself and that much has to be investedwithout present reward. The concept of love, exercised in self-givingand service, together with the freedom of every human being to actpublicly by forming covenants, is essential to the trans-generationalcontinuity of a society. There can only be freedom of action,initiative and risk-taking when we concede that we are prepared to

wait for our recognition and reward.

The human economy is about the transfer of life from onegeneration to another. Each generation has a debt to all previousgenerations; in some measure it pays, or at least acknowledges,this debt when it produces children to present to its own parents.The material economy is the flows of services and goods thatenables this transfer of life.

With its understanding of covenant, the community of Israel is able

to put a question to every modern society. Can the moderneconomy find the sustainable balance between the claims of theshort-term and the long-term, and so between the present and thefuture? Or is modernity, self-defeatingly, simply the prejudice of thepresent against the future? The economy of modernity intends thateach act and service should be immediately and entirely explicit.Our work is instantly acknowledged and rewarded by the currencyof recognition that we know as money. But not everything canreceive instantaneous acknowledgement, nor everything be paidfor, because not everything is immediately recognisable for what it

is. We cannot see how anything will turn out so all identificationrequires an eschatological reserve, and thus a little humility aboutour knowledge of the present.

Modern economics is unable to account for the motivation of man toserve a generation that does not yet exist, and so for the continuityof the human race. It does not concede that the household has areal, economic, function in the production of the next generation. Ittherefore attempts to absorb the household into the short-termeconomy of the market.19 Modern economics is valid only within an

19John D. Mueller The Stork Theory of Economics

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existing generation. It is the triumph of the present over the pastand so, disastrously, the triumph of the present over the future.

Each generation must see its children as an extension of itself, asecond self. A readiness to acknowledge this debt and pay our

predecessors the honour they are due makes for a confidentsociety. We may acknowledge that our forebears learned the virtuesthat, over the long-term, made Western societies peaceful, openand prosperous; and conversely acknowledge that our failure to dothe same may mean that our successors do not inherit the samepeace or prosperity. In recent decades Western societies haveneglected the inter-generational covenant. The expectation ofparents that children will, when adult, produce grandchildren andthus keep their society in business, has been disappearing and aconsequent orientation to the future is going with it. The inter-

generational covenant depends on the implicit promise that, when itis time for this generation to retire, and later become infirm anddependent on the provision of the generation then in employment,that younger generation will supply that provision and care to theirelders. But this promise will be broken because their elders havenot kept to the equally implicit undertaking to produce children insufficient numbers so that, when the time comes, there will beenough of them not to find the burden of that care economicallycrippling. As a result of the first broken promise, each of us now inemployment faces the realisation that we have to compete with all

our peers in order to win the much reduced provision that will beavailable when we are elderly enough to need it. Most of us realisethat our earnings will not be sufficient, so we attempt to step aheadof our peers by placing our earnings, and even our borrowings, inthe capital markets, as a result of which those markets havemassively expanded.20

The moment we first left home to enter employment we gave upour place in the household that was then led by our parents. Thathousehold then began to dissolve as all but a sentimental tie. We

allowed the family and household to dissolve again when our ownchildren left home. Since it does not exist as functioning inter-generational economic unit, there will be no family to take us inwhen we ourselves become elderly and infirm. Though we may havebeen able to convince ourselves throughout our adult lives that weare a single unchallengeable unit of will, that fiction is over whenour own body ceases to obey us, and we require the care of others.But the only home that will take us will be the care home that hasto be paid for: this is the unspoken thought that determines themodern economy.

20 Reuven BrennerLabyrinths of Prosperity

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The expansion of capital markets and money stock is a function ofthe belief of each of us that we will have to accumulate muchgreater funds in order to buy in the care that our own familialrelationships will not provide. The expansion of money, and thedominance of the formal economy over the domestic household, is a

function of our, justified, belief that there will be no one to takecare of us in our last years. The proliferation of money into everyrelationship is a consequence of the dissolution of ties, a dissolutionthat was first experienced as the freedom of leaving home, andthen the compulsion consequent on the need to compensate for thislost home.21 We did not understand ourselves as social, embedded,covenantal beings but as individuals without relation. The societythat does not understand itself as a societyof covenanted personsis becoming an aggregate of individual wills, individually facing adeficit of value and thus in a state of anxiety: none of us is

surrounded by enough people who value us highly enough toprovide the love and guarantee the care we are going to need whenage brings the mutiny of our own bodies.

Since we are not confident of our future, we are not willing toreceive our public recognition in the long-term and implicit currencyof honour but insist on receiving our acknowledgement in thatexplicit and immediate currency that is money. We need that moneybecause our own children will not be there to support us. We insiston receiving our payment in this single hard currency against which

every relation can be measured, and reduced to, every other. Wedemand to be paid in this currency because with it we can setanybody, anywhere else in the world to work. The massiveexpansion of the money stock through the expansion of credit-and-debt represents the cashing in of family and other social capital.When we do not acknowledge the fundamental nature of suchcovenants, we understand one another only as an undifferentiatedindividual, for whom all relationships are equal and equally short-lived. The monetised economy strips us of relationship to family andinherited capital. Money is relationship, dissolved of specific relation

and made liquid. Social capital is money in the bank: as soon as it iscashed out into explicit money to compensate for love not received,or relationship dissolved, it is gone. When social capital is turnedinto the formal capital of money it is not sufficient to buy all theservices that social capital itself would have provided.

Modernity is the economy in which a more or less explicitly singlecurrency runs through the hands of every human on the globe. Thedegree to which this economy has expanded to take in all humanrelationship is the degree to which we have opted out of our many

particular covenants and relationships. We refuse whatever21 Roger Scruton

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in covenants that will continue our society into new generations.The individual who puts himself beyond challenge, and theexpanded market and state that service his consequent desires andneeds are the modern result of the ancient assumption that unity ismore fundamental than plurality, that the One is prior, and that

persons derive life and a merely temporary freedom from it. Thesetwo aspects of this monad with which the tyrant-individual identifiesreinforce our fear that everything is already present to us and wemay hope for nothing that we do not already have. Modernity is thecult of a dark God, which disdains to give his name or hear prayers,and everyone of us is a function of him until we are snatched fromhim and brought into the assembly that worships the true God whois with man, allows man to acknowledge him and so be saved.

The large public square of the West is the outcome of the long

presence of the community that acknowledges the God who gavehis name and promise to Abraham. The assembly that worship thisGod, in its twofold form of the Jewish and Christian communities,also practise the skills and virtues of self-examination, and fromthem Western societies have learned the art of taking criticism. Aswestern societies dispense with the witness of this God-worshippingassembly, so our ability to give and take criticism will diminish andour public squares shrink. The crisis of confidence felt by ourcontemporary society of individuals without covenant expressesitself through our disavowal and even state-led eradication of our

inherited differences. As a result the cultural self-abjuration hasbecome a public policy directed against the faith that generated ourinherited culture. Such self-reviling comes from a great ingratitudeand unhappiness.

Once Europe was once a continent of feud. Over centuries thepractices of Christian life broke the cycle of violent retribution. TheChristian form of life tamed the extreme violence of warrior society;it taught obedience to the law, brought about a corpus of law thatallowed national law to emerge, and so made nations out of these

tribal societies. It is not the nursing of grievances, but judgment,repentance and reconciliation that keeps a society together.23

Christians do not consider any situation without looking for God'sjudgment of it, and with that judgment, release from the brute factsthat bring only condemnation, and thus they consider each situationalong with the prospect of its redemption. Through prolongedexposure to the Scripture of Israel they too have become future-oriented people.

The presence of Christian witness brought about an open and thus

secular culture, in which our various accounts of man could be23 Oliver ODonovan Ways of Judgment

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tested by public speech. Without this inherited culture of ours, thatrelies on an ongoing relationship to this God-worshipping assemblyand its tradition, will we continue to have the culture of self-examination and public judgment that has produced the secularpublic square and market? True secularity demands the exercise of

such public virtue, even including the courage required to be theexceptional people. We can assess Christianity only by the extent towhich its presence ameliorates our own intrinsic warrior culturethrough the, at best partial, conversion of any society. Since it is afaith, the Christian faith is not the permanent possession of anysociety. This faith ebbs and re-grows in this people, and when theChristian tide goes out it reveals more of the pagan beneath. If overthe long-term Europe ceases to receive the witness of these twocommunities it will not continue to be secular, but descend into thevarious forms of collectivisation, totalitarianism and tribalism from

which it once emerged.

When it does not deign to hear from these witnesses, Westernculture is baffled by the question of the permanence of the humanperson. Without the fundamental given of the concept of covenant,this society has no conception of ontological debt and gratitude toprevious generations, moderns begrudge leaving anything to futuregenerations. It endeavours to draw the future towards ourselvesbecause we are not confident that it will come in its own time. TheMan of Modernity knows nothing about any past or future. He

believes he is only what is present to himself, and so is withouteither forebears, without parents to honour or children who will prayfor him when he is gone, he is a one-generation only phenomenon.But those who hear the promise of God hold out against the all-demanding present for the sake of the future, without which thispresent has no continuation, vindication or purpose. It is thereforewhat does not yet have existence that gives them their definition,so they are the future-oriented people.

We have to identify two societies, mingled together. One is the

society of man trying to be without Godwho inflicts on himself aprocess of disintegration and suffers a passion without conclusion.The other is the society of man who is with God,whose witness tous is the people of Israel and communion of the Church. This oneassembly, presently in its two forms, travels through the societywithout hope, and sometimes suffer the aggression that resultsfrom the misery of that society. The society that does notacknowledge the covenant of God with man, and thus does notknow that it is loved and sustained by God, will suffer a crisis ofconfidence manifest as specific political and economic crises, at a

deeper level as cultural and demographic crises, but which are

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fundamentally always the same crisis of faith, of man in paralysisbefore the summons of God.

Without the concept of person, there is only fate, under which theparticularity and freedom of each of us is in doubt, and each lives

under threat of being absorbed into the whole, with the result thateverything they are and do is in question. The society that cantolerate and even welcome the witness of this God-worshippingcommunity may continue to be an open, healthy and a prosperoussociety, but societies that do not receive the confidence derivedfrom this covenant may give up not only hope but life, and sodisappear. Societies come and go, but the God-worshippingcommunity will remain.

The greatest favour that the assembly that worships God can do is

to be distinct from that society to which it is sent, and remain holywhilst still a public part of that society. Made confident by thecovenant of God with man, this assembly can say that it is God whosets us before one another, inviting us to receive one another asgifts, and to look for his image in one another. It can look into thefuture without fear, can name as idolatries the threats it sees andits confidence will sustain the open economy against the closedeconomy of paganism. To say that we are the people summoned byGod to be his witnesses is the single constructive thing we can dofor our society and for the human future.

the assembly with the promise of god

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