How Followers of Christ Can Serve the Common Good
Thoughts after re-reading A Public Faith by Miroslav Volf
I recently re-read A Public Faith by Miroslav Volf in preparation for a future book I’m writing on the church’s moral witness as an apologetic for the truth of God’s revelation. I don’t agree with all that Volf has to say, and his final recommendations are—in my view—practically unworkable. Still, there is much to glean from A Public Faith.
In the end, Volf seems not to perceive politics as I do, as a society’s organized pursuit of justice—a position which I unabashedly derive from Augustine’s The City of God against the Pagans and from the combination of biblical and classical sources that formed Augustine’s thinking. Instead, politics is, for Volf, an organized social enactment of power. As a result, there is a basic rift between my views and Volf’s that most likely cannot be bridged.
Volf rightly recognizes that, in many contemporary Western contexts, there is no longer any common consensus grounded in shared metaphysics, rationality, or morality. Yet he does not seem to recognize this loss of common ground as an unsustainable crisis. Instead, with Nicholas Wolterstorff, Volf advocates the notion that every perspective, whether religious and non-religious, should address political issues in its own voice—that is to say, from the perspective of its own tradition—and that each of these voices should have an equal say in the social order.
The problem is that, if no common ground remains, no consensus can emerge from such cacophony. Some transcendent reality must be shared if a social order is to be sustained.
This shared reality might be a core set of values that engenders a commitment to mutual obligations. Or it might be a shared commitment to a generic deity with the assumption that this deity has formed the grain of the universe in such a way that conformity to certain natural laws are more likely to result in human flourishing. Until relatively recently, some form of this arrangement has sustained many Western societies.
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