Klein Wittgenstein and the Metaphysics of Grace Oxford University Press, USA

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.From Ethics to Epistemology 33Johannine polarity between Jesus and the world.The world is sup-posed to be good.In Judaism, it comes forth from a benign creator.So why does John, who wants to proclaim the incarnation of Godinto the world, employ a negative concept of the word? The conceptof the world in John can only be understood when one reads theword as the converse of Jesus and his activity.It is that which resiststhe new initiative of God.With his pneuma/sarx (spirit/Xesh) di-chotomy, Paul fashions a similar duality between that which actsunder the impetus of the Christ event and that which oVers resist-ance. [T]he resurrection has a cosmic, universal signiWcance.It is notsimply one more event to be viewed in the march of history; on thecontrary, it reveals the very meaning of it (Ladaria 1983: 25).(SeeRom.8: 29 and 1 Cor.15: 20, 49.)What would have once been a foundational blessing is now cursedbecause of its relationship to, here its failure to acknowledge andaccept, the second great initiative of God.(Cf.John 1: 10, 12: 31, 14:19, 14: 22, 16: 18 V., 17: 9; 1 John 2: 16, 5: 16, 19.) Indeed, as LuisLadaria notes, sin for the Christian can henceforth never be reckonedmerely as moral failure, as a potency in nature culpably negated.It isalways a rejection of God s initiative in Christ and is thereforeintrinsically Christological. One cannot speak.of sin as thoughthe redemption of Christ did not exist, since this is determinative ofthe human person in all aspects of life (1983: 217).Thus to sin is todo more than negate nature; it is also to shut the ear to the summonsof history that is the Christ.Likewise, the devil, who in the Hebrew and Islamic scriptures actsas a subservient and somewhat impish functionary of God, takes onthe character of the Satanic adversary in Christianity.The NewTestament calls Jesus the way, the truth, and the life (John 14: 6);Satan in contrast becomes the Father of lies (John 8: 44).Goetheperfectly captured the Christian understanding of Satan when hisMephistopheles is asked his identity and answers, I am the spirit thatalways negates. He continues, and rightly so, since everything thatcomes into existence is only Wt to go out of existence and it would bebetter if nothing ever got started.Accordingly, what you call sin,destruction, evil in short, is my proper element (1971: 780).Goethe sSatan is the implacable denial of the grace that is creation.Tounderstand the depth of Goethe s deeply Christian insight into evil,34 From Ethics to Epistemologyone need only compare the evil one s identity, the one who says no ,to the last verse of the Wrst chapter of Genesis in which God evaluatesthis world. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it wasvery good. Satan becomes the necessary shadow surrounding thelight, which is Jesus Christ within the world.In Christ, God aYrmsthe goodness of creation and his acceptance of it (cf.Mark 13: 19;Matt.11: 25, 19: 4; Acts 4: 24, 7: 49 V., 17: 24 8; Rom.4: 17; Eph.1: 4,3: 9; 1 Tim.4: 4, 6: 13; Heb.11: 3; 1 Pet.3: 5; Rev.4: 11).Whateverelse Satan represents to Christianity, he embodies the existentialdenial of that singular divine aYrmation.Christianity understands itself as eliciting an all-encompassing re-sponse from a humanity summoned to recognize what God has donein Jesus Christ.Freedom, around which grace pivots in the constella-tion of Christian anthropology, requires the possibility of the humanrejection of God s oVer of self.Hence the darkening of the shadows atthe penumbra of the gospel.As Thomas J.J.Altizer insists,nothing is more historically distinctive of the New Testament than itscontinual naming of demonic power, a power that is manifest and realonly in the context of an apocalyptic ending and therefore only in thecontext of the actual advent of the Kingdom of God.Jesus was the Wrstprophet who is recorded as having seen the fall of Satan (cf.Luke 10: 18), aWnal fall of Satan that is an apocalyptic epiphany an apocalyptic epiphanythat is a decisive sign of the Wnal advent of the Kingdom of God.(1998: 207)After Wittgenstein, it is hardly denigrative to view Christianity as amatrix of language games, which are always built upon dichotomiesthat become fecund through juxtaposition.So, for example, Chris-tianity maintains two pretensions, which are not always easily rec-onciled at Wrst glance: its universality and its exclusiveness (Ladaria1983: 31).The Church sees herself as constituted by election.She isfavored, and therefore is herself an act of grace.Members of the ek-klesia of God are those who have been called out.Note the obvious:a call, to be eVective, which is to say, to be a call, must be heard.66 An essentialist, rejecting the notion that all meaning is linguistic, which is to sayrelational, might Wnd herself insisting that a call can be a call without being heard.One can certainly call out, perhaps in distress, without a response.But there is adiVerence between calling out and shouting in glee.While they may sound exactly thesame, the former is ordered toward a response; the latter isn t.From Ethics to Epistemology 35This community is, in the most radical sense, a community of be-lievers. [T]he Gospel is an oVer and an oVer that is urgent indeed.Otherwise there would be no gospel .But it is also true that God sactive love or grace or mercy is only complete when it is accepted.It is consummated in fellowship.Consequently, when these terms arestudied in the New Testament, the stress is upon qualities thatare active in those who accept them through Christ (Smith 1956: 56).The New Testament presents itself as an axial delineation, whichto ignore would be to eviscerate. To quote one text among many, theperspective of the New Testament appears in the great summary, God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, thatwhosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life (John 3:16) (Smith 1956: 56).Indeed the New Testament uses thesame expressions to designate the call of the elect to salvation (Rom.8: 30) and the call of the world into existence.The identity of termsdemonstrates that St Paul doesn t see a structural diVerence betweenthe divine creative will and that which confers free gifts (Flick andAlszeghy 1982: 44 5).Creation itself is being reread in the light ofthe Christ event.2.1.3 More metaphor than metaphysicsIn the Septuagint, the Hebrew hen is translated as charis, a Greekword meaning favor [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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