Theology and Human Flourishing

Essays in Honor of Timothy J. Gorringe

Mike Higton, Christopher Rowland, Jeremy Law, Higton, Rowland

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781608997558
  9781498212892
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621898849
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

This collection of essays is a celebration of the work of Timothy Gorringe. Like his theology, it is animated by a delighted and critical engagement with the diverse facets of human social life, and by a passionate concern to wrestle with the Bible and the Christian tradition in pursuit of human flourishing. The built environment, politics, education, art: these essays by leading Christian theologians ask what it means for Christian theology to concern itself with, to immerse itself in, and to risk critical commentary on, each of these and more. The collection follows the same rhythm that animates Gorringe's work: insistent attention to the Christian tradition in the light of the particular contexts where human flourishing is imagined, fought for, embodied and betrayed; and a critical, constructive and celebratory examination of those contexts in the light of the Christian tradition. The contributions are very diverse, touching on everything from city life to human curiosity, poverty to genocide--but they are united by a passion to make theological sense of human flourishing.

1

The Theology of Tim Gorringe

Mike Higton

Eucharist

If you turn to the bibliography of Tim Gorringe’s work at the back of this book and look down the list of titles, one of the first things that might strike you is the astonishing diversity. There are books on farming, on crime, on the built environment, on capitalism, on punishment, on culture, on art; there are books on the eucharist, on providence, on atonement, and on pneumatology. Delve deeper into the books themselves, however, and you will discover that the diversity is held together by a consistent theological vision—a vision already clear in the earliest books on the list, but then elaborated, refined, and improvised upon in each of the titles that follows.1

Tim’s work proclaims that the whole world, in all its real historical complexity and social and environmental interconnectedness, is the arena of God’s redeeming work, so that to be caught up in that work is necessarily to be caught up in the world. Theology must engage with society, culture, politics, economics, and the environment because it serves a God who so engages, and because to do less would be to risk bowing to a “non-engaged God”—which is to say no God at all.2

Tim’s engagement with the world, displayed in all those books, is indeed complex and varied, but that complexity and variety are held within a simple and coherent pattern that can best be described as eucharistic. That is certainly not a characterization that should bring with it any whiff of priestly exclusivism, or of an ecclesial enclave protected from the pollution of the world. Rather, Tim’s work is eucharistic because of the way the eucharist “intersects with our daily life—the whole fabric of our social, political and economic reality”;3 his is a eucharist that cries out to be celebrated in the market square, in the midst of ordinary life, not hidden from view in a chancel. In fact, for Tim, the eucharist can and should be a school in which Christians are trained to live in the world—to live fully, wholeheartedly, unreservedly in the world. It can and should provide a context within which the people of God are reshaped and reoriented for life in the world, and so caught up “into the stream of God’s continuing and liberating activity” in the world.4 It can and should stand at “the heart of the Christian education of desire,” opening the worshipping community’s eyes and hearts to more of the world.5 Tim’s theology is eucharistic because it is worldly, and worldly because it is eucharistic.

Jesus’ instruction to his disciples to “do this in remembrance of me” should not, in Tim’s eyes, be understood simply to refer to Jesus’ handling of bread and wine on the night before he died, nor exclusively in relation to the death that he was about to die. Jesus was, rather, calling the disciples to recognize and to remember the whole pattern of his table-fellowship—his profligate, decorum-snubbing, purity-endangering habit of sharing of bread and wine with sinners.6 The first eucharistic note that we may recognize in Tim’s theology is therefore not sacrifice but welcome—or grace, where “[g]race is God’s love reaching out to us absolutely irrespective of our worthiness, restoring us, making us more human, by acceptance and forgiveness.”7 This first note of Tim’s eucharistic theology is therefore an alarmingly, disarmingly indiscriminate yes to the world. It is a theology of God’s free welcome of sinners to God’s table, God’s lavish and irrepressible mercy. A eucharistic theology is a theology for Zacchaeus (see Luke 19:1–10), and for all his many contemporary brothers and sisters.

That mention of Zacchaeus, whose meal with Jesus led to a redistribution of rapaciously accumulated wealth, recalls a second way in which Tim’s theology is eucharistic. One cannot extend an indiscriminate welcome to the world’s crowd without running up against the question of how that crowd’s very uneven needs can be met. Tim therefore notes that Jesus’ actions at the Last Supper recall the stories of the great feedings—or the great sharings, as he would have it. The story as he sees it is not one of the supernatural multiplication of scant resources, but of a crowd awoken by the uncalculating generosity of a small boy to the possibility of sharing rather than hoarding the food they had brought with them,8 but which they had hidden from fear of others’ needs.9 Tim quotes Gandhi to the effect that there was enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed. “The eucharist comes out of the great feedings: it is a sign act of a need to share what we have.”10

The eucharist, then, is a feast focused not just on grace, but on justice. We are welcomed to Jesus’ table, and are to welcome others indiscriminately to that table—but what we and they are welcomed to is a shared feast. The invitation to such a feast is a call out of hoarding and defensiveness, and a call to share what each of us has been given, for the sake of all, and especially for the sake of those who have least. Paul’s eucharistic instructions to the church in Corinth (1 Cor 11) bear out the centrality of this question of justice, or of fair sharing, and witness to the fact that, unless we have managed to hide the nature of this feast under a blanket of piety, questions of fair sharing are bound to arise when rich and poor are invited to feast at the same table. The indiscriminate welcome that God offers and calls us to offer is not a welcome to a shapeless throng, but to a life with a particular shape: it is an invitation to a common feasting.

When we note, however, that this sharing is not simply of elements that “earth has given,” but of products that “human hands have made,” “we remember that these products represent the ‘life’ of those who made them, their time and creativity”11—and there turns out to be no safe way of isolating the eucharistic call to share from deep questions about economic justice and the political order within which the eucharist is celebrated. And that brings us to the third route into the interpretation of the eucharist that Tim offers: it is indeed connected to the death that Jesus was about to die. The call to live in the light of God’s unfettered welcome, and the just order that such a welcome demands, is a call to live against the grain of the present world order.12 It is a call to live by “a truly alternative order,” one characterized by “the refusal of all arbitrary and tyrannical power”—and in such a contest “for fullness of life, for the right to feast and drink, as Jesus loved to do, it may be necessary to take on the powers that be, and to die.”13 The eucharist does speak of sacrifice, in other words—but it is sacrifice for the sake of liberation and life.

It is here that the theology of indiscriminate welcome becomes also a theology of discriminating protest. By displaying what happens to the life of grace and justice in a world like ours, the cross exposes the death-dea...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Theology of Tim Gorringe
• Chapter 2: Prophetic Imagination toward Social Flourishing
• Chapter 3: Being Planted
• Chapter 4: Tree-Hogging in Eden
• Chapter 5: Nonhuman Flourishing?
• Chapter 6: Reading Matthew’s Gospel with Deaf Culture
• Chapter 7: Gerrard Winstanley
• Chapter 8: The Emergence of Schleiermacher’s Theology and the City of Berlin
• Chapter 9: “There Is No Wealth but Life”
• Chapter 10: Not Anarchy but Covenant
• Chapter 11: Redefining Sainthood and Martyrdom
• Chapter 12: Reformation, Renaissance, and Enlightenment
• Chapter 13: Does God Care?
• Chapter 14: More, Or, A Taxonomy of Greed
• Chapter 15: Curiosity
• Chapter 16: Charity and Human Flourishing
• Chapter 17: What Are Universities For?
• Chapter 18: Theology, Happiness, and Public Policy
• Chapter 19: On Finding Ourselves
• Chapter 20: Theological Imagination and Human Flourishing
• Select Bibliography of the Works of Timothy J. Gorringe
• Index