Post Edited (One Love) : 11/15/2010 3:51:22 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Daniel M) : 11/15/2010 4:07:54 PM (GMT-6)

But when it was day, the magistrates sent the police, saying, “Let those men go.”  And the jailer reported these words to Paul, saying, “The magistrates have sent to let you go. Therefore come out now and go in peace.”  But Paul said to them, “They have beaten us publicly, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens, and have thrown us into prison; and do they now throw us out secretly? No! Let them come themselves and take us out.”  The police reported these words to the magistrates, and they were afraid when they heard that they were Roman citizens.  So they came and apologized to them. And they took them out and asked them to leave the city.  So they went out of the prison and visited Lydia. And when they had seen the brothers, they encouraged them and departed.

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/15/2010 4:29:20 PM (GMT-6)

Paul didn't seem to have a problem using the political situation of his birth towards his advantage.  He never said "I'm a Christian, not a Roman."  Nor did he try to circumvent that policies already set in place BY Romans FOR Romans.

Post Edited (Daniel M) : 11/15/2010 5:56:32 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Daniel M) : 11/16/2010 9:51:30 AM (GMT-6)

I’ll just step off the edge here. I’m probably painting a bull’s eye on my shirt.

I’ll say it first then qualify it:

To own is to misrelate.

There.

On to qualifying. OK, so maybe not misrelate, because we can “use” the world’s system without misrelating personally. But ultimately speaking, personal ownership is a form of fallen misrelation. To the extent that we “own” things as the world defines ownership, we’re complicit in the world’s fallen structures and ways of misrelating. I’m not saying such complicity is sinful. I don’t think it is because I think Christ is complicit in the fallen social structures of his day (on some level) in spite of challenging those structures while speaking to them prophetically.

But I don’t see “ownership” as such even existing in the eschaton. I don’t suppose we’ll “own” anything in heaven because I envision us all owning (i.e., “belonging to”) each other and being owned by each other. Every “other” will share in constituting every “self” and every “self” will be in every “other.” This oneness exists NOW by virtue of the omnipresent Spirit in which all our personal identities hold together, but it will one day be the only context in which we shall forever explore the beauties of divinity within created persons. In such a worldview there can be no “ownership” in the popular sense. What can one perfected in love claim as one’s “own” that one does not in fact possess and enjoy only by giving it to the “other”? That, as I see it, is what shall happen when we fully embrace/participate in the divine life.

And that’s the problem I’m having. It seems like some think personal property (retaining some unique claim upon a 'space' that is ONLY mine) is necessary to human sociality and rational argumentation PER SE, and I just don’t see that. I think that is D’s essential point. Yes? No?

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 11/16/2010 4:51:58 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Asher) : 11/16/2010 7:15:41 PM (GMT-6)

I guess I like to start with the end (eschaton) in mind and then work backwards from there. In that case, I think the question “Who has final say over what is to be done with a given resource?” assumes a) a certain scarcity that won’t obtain in the final state, as well as b) competing aims/goals that create the conflicts that require a final say-so in the first place. And since neither scarcity nor conflicting aims obtain in the eschaton, I don’t think the question can get off the ground (in the eschaton). To me, Asher, the question can only be asked in a fallen context. And so far as that goes, I think you make good points! Yes. I think a case can be made for believers making the best use of the structures that be so far as they’re able to do so without obviously compromising their faith and allegiance to Christ. I just don’t think the contextual constraints that create a space for such a question are inherent to human being per se, so I don’t require the question to understand life in the Kingdom. And I think that’s what D is trying to get at. Where do we start if we wish to describe believers’ relationship to the material world in terms of ownership. Do we start with the givens of the fallen contexts that force themselves upon us in an as yet unredeemed culture? Or do we start with a vision of fully redeemed human relations and keep that vision at the center and work out from there. I think the latter.

This applies to the scenarios you present (“Tom, don’t eat that apple, I want it,” etc.). I appreciate the sense in which someone would have to effectively deny their own existence as a self-determining creature to believe that they are to blindly give in to every request made of them. If you think that’s what I’m suggesting the Kingdom amounts to or that it’s entailed in what I’m suggesting, then you’re missing my point wide of the mark.

But all your scenarios apply to fallen contexts (with limited resources, conflicting aims, and limited perspectives laden with as yet unredeemed passions). Do they apply to the eschaton? In other words, what of the following scenario?

Asher: There you are Tom in the eschaton. And I am there with you. We turn to each other and say at the same time: Tom: “I want to go, and I want you to go with me, to hear Paul give a talk about his missionary journeys,” and Rob: “I want to go, and I want you to go with me, to hear Mary and Martha talk about what they thought and felt as Jesus raised their brother from the dead.” The problems do not magically disappear in the eschaton.

Tom: What “problems” Asher? What “problems” will obtain in the eschaton? We might be talking past each other. Not sure. But let me try to clarify what I’m trying to say.

I don’t think we stop being self-determining persons in the eschaton. You know that. I’ve fought tooth and nail for that here for years. But I don’t think that being irreducibly and uniquely “self-determining” entails problems or conflicts of will that shall need to be “solved” by establishing, say, property rights. If you see this imagined scenario in glory as describing something that needs to be solved, then we may have different views of the eschaton and what sort of beings we shall then be.

Imagine fully redeemed persons, cognizant of the overflowing and endless possibilities of glorified existence, cognizant especially of the fundamental truth of their being which is not, as I see it, who gets to decide whether you get what you want or I get what I want in some imagined conflict, but rather the truth that my highest good and your highest good are both necessarily, by definition of the mutual participation of our existence in Christ, always mutually achievable. Indeed, their only achievable mutually. Think “No scarcity” and “no possibility of conflicts of will.” We can both enjoy what we need and desire as fully redeemed persons.

So to pose the sort of scenario you suggest, though innocent in its bare description and quite appropriate for a fallen context, nevertheless labors under the unredeemed assumptions of a fallen world—about scarcity and conflicting interests and aims. I mean, if we HERE AND NOW within the Church are to consider others as better than ourselves, if we are to look out for the needs of each other, if we are now to spur one another on to love and good works, can you not imagine a form of existence so purged of conflict, so full of the mutuality and interdependence of love, that no request can create a conflict of desire? What you suggest shall be impossible…I suggest. I know that’s a radical claim on my part. I could be wrong, but I feel it deeply. If I’m wrong, then I still think the answer is perhaps farther than I’ve gone in the same direction.

If I had to break it down (which is hard), I suppose that in the scenario you offer I would not begin with what “I” want and then ask you to sacrifice what “you” want SO THAT I could get what “I” want. That’s too fraught with the conflict and scarcity of this world. It’s got privation written all over it. No. I’d ask you what it was you desired to do, go hear Peter and then Paul? Or Paul and then Peter? Or something else—and whether there was anything I could do to help you enjoy it as much as possible. And you’d have the same default starting point. We’d really DO our own individual lives WITHIN the belief that the highest good of each is found IN the highest good of the other. I don’t think we’ve begun to scratch the surface of such an ontology of redeemed human society.

But to reduce this to fighting with each other over who’s gonna be the other's servant, as if “No, let’s do what YOU want!” back and forth endlessly, then I’d suggest we’re letting the world squeeze us into its mold and we need to think more about the non-conflicting, peaceful give-and-take which the triune persons instantiate--without conflict! Can we not imagine redeemed human beings participating of that peace and fullness where each gets what each wants/desires?

But if heaven is a place where existence is the endless choice between mutually exclusive goods, where every time somebody gets what she wants she gets it at the expense of someone else not getting what he wants, then I’m not sure I want to go. I have that kind of existence already. See what I mean?

Loving the convo!

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 11/16/2010 8:16:53 PM (GMT-6)

What I see is this:

Asher is showing us that the burden of proof is on those of us who claim to know how to adjudicate the exceptions to the most simple conception of justice. And I don't assume I know all the exceptions. I think we each have to make those judments for ourselves.

Where I come down, for now, is this: the State is authorized to do JUSTICE. Individuals ought to love as they want to be loved. You expect compassion? Then show compassion for the kinds of things and in the kinds of ways you expect it from others. You expect forgiveness? Then forgive for the kinds of things you expect others to forgive you for. You expect people to tolerate your weaknesses? Then be tolerant to the same extent of the weaknesses of those people you expect tolerance from. Etc.

But the State has a DUTY to do justice, for that institution is DIVINELY AUTHORIZED. It has no right to do OTHER than what God authorizes it to do. It makes no DIFFERENCE what individual politicians want. They have a God-given DUTY to do that which is conducive to the divine ENDS of the institution of government.

And at least one of those ends is FEAR generated by VENGEANCE (i.e., just recompense), seemingly to deter and, thereby, minimize incivility (is that even a word?). IOW, the very thing individuals are duty-bound NOT to do, governments are duty-bound to DO.

Post Edited (Similitude) : 11/16/2010 8:30:42 PM (GMT-6)