The Limit of Responsibility: Engaging Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a Globalizing Era 9780567679345, 9780567679369, 9780567679352

Citation preview

THE LIMIT OF RESPONSIBILITY

T&T Clark Enquiries in Theological Ethics Series editors Brian Brock Susan F. Parsons

THE LIMIT OF RESPONSIBILITY

Engaging Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a Globalizing Era

Esther D. Reed

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London,    WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Copyright © Esther D. Reed 2018 Esther D. Reed has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: ePDF: eBook:

978-0-5676-7934-5 978-0-5676-7935-2 978-0-5676-7938-3

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Abbreviationsvii Acknowledgementsviii Forewordx Prefacexiv Chapter 1

1 Accountability5 Attribution11 Unbearability13 Thoughtlessness26 Plurality37 Spectacle40

FRAMING THE QUESTION

Chapter 2

GENEALOGY OF A CONCEPT

Capacity Possessed by the Self Inherent in Individual Freedom Subsumed within a Totalizing Logic Bourgeois Diversion Integral to Instrumental Rationality Having an Affinity with Capitalism

Chapter 3

WHY BONHOEFFER?

Responsibility and the Problem of ‘Act’ Self and Other Bonhoeffer’s Critique of Hegel Responsibility as Corollary of the Problem of Selfhood Responsibility in Freedom Responsibility and the Problem of ‘Being’ Responsibility Reversed Christ the Limit The Concrete Church and the Problem of Guilt

47 50 56 60 68 74 82 87 90 94 96 98 99 102 105 107 113

Contents

vi

Chapter 4

121 Being miteinander in Sin 122 Postcolonial Readings of Bonhoeffer 127 Revisiting Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Work 128 Learning in Silence 130 Being füreinander across Global Inequality 134 Tax136 Holding Corporations to Account 145 Why Human Rights Agendas Matter 152 Stellvertretung as the Lived Meaning of Responsibility 155 Stellvertretung Learned from the Land 156 Giving the Land a Voice 158 Truthing165

RESPONSIBILITY: MITEINANDER, FÜREINANDER, STELLVERTRETUNG

Chapter 5

CONFRONTING THE VICES OF HUBRIS

‘Sell all that you have’? The Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative Partners in Sustainable Development? Overcoming the Resource Curse? Responsibility Lived as Church Learning from Advocacy Agents

171 173 176 181 188 194 201

Chapter 6

205 Focused on the Empirical Church 206 Maintaining a Chalcedonian Framework 210 Church under Judgement 213 The Politics of Pentecost 219 Empowerment221 Penultimate Conclusions 226

RESPONSIBILITY AS POLITICAL EVENT

Biblical References 229 Bonhoeffer Works 230 Names231 Subjects235

ABBREVIATIONS DBWE 1

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communion, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Nancy Lukens, ed. Clifford J. Green (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998)

DBWE 2

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, trans. Martin H. Rumscheidt, Hans-Richard Reuter, ed. Wayne Whitson Floyd (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996)

DBWE 3

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, trans. Douglas Stephen Bax, ed. John W. de Gruchy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997)

DBWE 4

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Barbara Green, ed. John D. Godsey, Geffrey B. Kelly (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003)

DBWE 5

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible, trans. James H. Burtness, Daniel W. Bloesch, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004)

DBWE 6

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, Douglas W. Stott, ed., Clifford J. Green (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008)

DBWE 8

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Nancy Lukens, Lisa E. Dahill, Isabel Best, ed. John W. de Gruchy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010)

DBWE 12

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932–1933, trans. Douglas W. Stott, Isabel Best, David Higgins, ed. Larry L. Rasmussen (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009)

DBWE 14

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935–1937, trans. Douglas W. Stott, ed. Mark Brocker, H. Gaylon Barker (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013)

DBW 1

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio: Eine dogmatische Untersuchung zur Soziologie der Kirche (München: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2005)

DBW 2

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Akt und Sein: Transzendentalphilosophie und Ontologie in der systemantischen Theologie (Wien: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1988)

DWB 6

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethik (München: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book has its origin in January 2014 with an ‘out of the blue’ invitation from a Social and Public Affairs Adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury who asked me to join planning meetings for an event around social responsibility and the mining industry. A proposal for conversations between industry-scale mining and the churches – which became the Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative (MFRI) – had come from senior echelons of the mining industry wanting to discuss partnering for development in local communities close to mine sites. A Day of Reflection for both church and industry had already been held at the Vatican.1 I accepted the invitation and had continued to play an active role in the Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative (previously the Faith Groups and Mining Industry Faith Groups Engagement Process) up to and including the time of writing. Involvement with the Faith Groups and Mining Industry Engagement Process gave me opportunities to visit mine sites and see at least some of the training processes of one company with respect to community engagement that it would have been impossible for me to obtain by other means. Since January 2014, I have been fortunate enough to have visited the iron ore mines at Kolomela mine, Postmasburg, and Sishen mine, Kathu, in the North Cape of South Africa. I have also visited Richards Bay Minerals at KwaZuluNatal in July 2014, the Antapaccay copper operation in Peru in July 2015, the Los Bronces copper mine located in the Atacama region of the north of Chile, and I have met people affected by the Changres smelter in September 2015. I have met with Benchmarks Foundation and revisited Richards Bay Minerals in June 2017 to witness the early days of a mine site chaplaincy. Others on site visits have shared their reflections with me and the MFRI more widely, and I have been fortunate to play a role on the steering committee. Beyond this, involvement in the MFRI has provided me opportunity to investigate relations between community relations managers employed by the companies and faith groups, especially local churches. I am grateful also to report participation in the Anglo American Plc Advanced Social Management Programme (ASMP) run by Anglo American in collaboration with the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership and the University of Queensland’s Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining. Spanning a six-month period (part-time) and built around two workshops (in South Africa and Chile), this was a group project exploring a critical social performance issue for the mining industry, and included individual tutor and peer-supported 1. News.va Official Vatican Network ‘Pope’s message for day of reflection on the mining industry’, http://www.news.va/en/news/popes-message-for-day-of-reflection-on-the-mining (accessed 11 September 2017).

Acknowledgements

ix

work to improve personal practice in managing sociopolitical issues. Targeted at senior managers across the Anglo American Group and designed to develop informed, skilled and effective managers able to offer leadership in response to the sociopolitical pressures and trends affecting the mining industry, participation in the ASMP gave me an unusual opportunity to ‘see from the inside’ how a leading mining company seeks to give its senior staff a deeper understanding of how emerging global pressures and trends may impact their regions, sectors and roles, to develop their own company and the sector’s adaptive capacity to anticipate change, to develop innovative and creative responses to support the company’s growth in partnership and for sharing of benefit with local communities where the mining actually happens. Portions of this manuscript have appeared previously and are reproduced here with kind permission of the publishers: • ‘The Limits of Individual Responsibility: A Pneumatologically-Informed Reversal of Agent-Act-Consequence’, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics (JSCE 37.2, Fall/Winter 2017). • ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Limits of Responsibility in a Globalizing Era’ in conference proceedings Engaging Bonhoeffer in a Global Era: Christian Belief, Witness, Service XII. Internationalen Bonhoeffer-Kongress, Christoph Ramstein, Christiane Tietz and Phil Ziegler, eds., Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht series ‘Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie’. • ‘Bonhoeffer and the Re-Forming Church in a Globalizing Era’ in Clifford Green and Michael DeJonge, eds., Re-Forming the Church of the Future. Bonhoeffer, Luther, Public Ethics (Fortress Press, forthcoming). • ‘John Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology’ for a Syndicate symposium (https://syndicate.network/theology/). Quotations from the Bible are from the English Standard Version unless stated to the contrary.

FOREWORD A good book on theological ethics helps us formulate proper questions. Much mischief occurs when we pose improper or meaningless questions, such as ‘How might I replicate the maritime architecture of Noah’s ark, or what is the digestive system of large fishes in Jonah?’ Wittgenstein taught us to consider well the questions we ask. It makes little sense to ask someone to explain the aroma of coffee, and just because it cannot be explained does not mean it does not exist. Of course, just as important as formulating proper questions is learning to ask questions that are not being asked. I open my computer or turn on my smartphone and a virtual world appears seemingly infinite and without material conditions. This illusory virtual world tempts us not to ask the proper question – what are the material conditions that make this putative virtual world possible? From whence comes the tantalum, platinum, palladium, tungsten, gold, copper that combine for its operability? As we can fail to ask this question about something that has become as central to our lives as cell phones and computers, we can also fail to ask it about the source of our energy, food, clothing and so on. Yet once we know we need to ask questions, how can we ask them in an intelligible way? If we ask how each of us is individually responsible for the entirety of the conditions that provide these goods, then there can be no adequate accountability for the conditions are so vast and complex that no individual accountability would ever suffice to address them. If we ask about a finely calculated responsibility for which we can provide a quantitative accountability, something like an accountant’s ledger, then we ignore how difficult it is to trace the benefits we accrue from others’ arduous and often oppressive toil. If we don’t ask the question at all, then we are ignorant of the conditions for our own existence. Getting the questions right matters for the sake of our ethical agency and it is what makes us human. Esther D. Reed’s The Limit of Responsibility marks a significant achievement because it teaches us to ask the right questions. It reformulates the question of ethical responsibility in a world, as she notes, ‘where the relationship between agent, act and consequences are often untraceable’. She knows these relationships are ‘often untraceable’ because she has attempted to trace them in practice. She has seen first-hand the places where minerals are mined. Her journey began with the Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative that she explains in Chapter 5 of this work. Knowing that they had a legacy problem, some transnational mining corporations created an organization that would hold them accountable for political, environmental and ethical actions. Despite her initial reluctance to get involved because of the legacy of mining, Reed has been instrumental to the ethical reflection on accountability that these corporations requested.

Foreword

xi

In 2013, several CEOs of mining corporations approached the Vatican to explore how the faith community might hold them accountable for sustainable mining practices. A Day of Reflection occurred at the Vatican followed by the establishment of on-site visits to mines by clergy and theological ethicists from around the world. A second Day of Reflection was hosted at Lambeth Palace in 2014 followed by a second round of on-site visits. At Esther Reed’s invitation, I was part of this second round of site visits. As she notes, most of us who were invited to participate in these on-site visits did so with some suspicion. Few theological ethicists write or think approvingly of transnational corporations, especially ones devoted to mining. While we may find current populist forms of economic nationalism much worse than economic globalism, the legacies of the transnational corporations that traverse the global market beginning with the East India Company extending through the international slave trade and into today’s massive mining operations have been constantly critiqued. Developing an ethics of ‘responsibility’ in the light of this history is no easy task. As Reed notes, ‘The fact that the Oxford English Dictionary cites the affairs of the East India Company as the first recorded instance of the word “responsibility” cannot pass unnoticed.’ Both the faith and mining initiative and an ethics of responsibility could be superficial responses to intractable political and ethical problems. Reed almost turned down her initial invitation to join in this project for fear that nothing good could come of it. This book proves otherwise. I was a member of a team that visited the Las Bambas mine in Peru in 2015. Most of my previous experience with mining had occurred in the Appalachia region of the United States. I had also lived in Honduras in a village that had been greatly affected by a transnational shrimp and lobster corporation. That experience opened my eyes to the harsh reality that labourers could work for wages in a local economy producing a commodity for global export that they could not afford even though it was a staple of everyday life. Because of those experiences, I too entered the on-site mining visit with suspicion. Yet no one had ever asked me to observe what was occurring in that lobster and shrimp plant in the Honduran village or coal mining in Appalachia as a theological ethicist and hold their practices accountable so I was intrigued by this project. Nonetheless, I entered it with some sceptical questions. Would we primarily be engaging in advertisement for the mining industry? Would our visit be orchestrated and the results preordained? The site visit was educational. The Las Bambas mine was more than a work site; it was a small village of 18,000 people placed in a remote area that would forever change that place. The young men and women who worked there were overwhelmingly delighted to have jobs. Life was austere. There was no drinking allowed in the compound. It was clearly demarcated by gates and fences, and the mine had its own police force to ensure order. The four-storey grinder with powerful teeth into which the mountain was poured and the copper extracted was like something out of Dante’s Divine Inferno. Its power to level a mountain was technologically impressive and ethically alarming. The awareness by the mining company about the environmental impact and the plans in place to restore the

xii

Foreword

land to its original were reassuring. A question we had is if the mine would follow through with the plans for environmental restoration. Like most mining operations, people lived in the area that was now being mined and they were displaced for the mining operations to take place. The people of Fuerabamba had been moved to a new village called Nueva Fuerabamba. We visited them and discussed the pros and cons of their relocation. Clearly, the mining company sought to make the transition as ethical and sustainable as possible, having built a new village complete with its own school and medical facility. It is still the case, of course, that mining requires the displacement of peoples and cultures and affects the surrounding areas in a variety of ways. The neighbouring town of Challhuahuacho exploded overnight, causing housing prices to rise and bringing with it new industries and problems. The persons we spoke with had mixed reactions to the impact of the mine on the village. Some saw it as progress and necessary for development. Others lamented the affect it had on their village. We were invited to speak with a diversity of opinions without the oversight by mining executive. The local Catholic bishop offered a measured response. He acknowledged that the mine had brought order and stability to a region that did not have it before. He did not romanticize rural life before the mine, but he also found that the massive changes brought about by the mining operation called into question bonds of solidarity that unite people synchronically and diachronically. As an object lesson, he took us to a village some distance from the mining site that enabled us to compare the pace of life in the two areas. The difference in speed was striking. Transnational mines have power and wealth that easily exceed local, regional and national governments. When minerals are discovered, the presence of the transnational mine challenges the power of local politics. They also contain amazing technology that reduces mountains to rubble that is carted off by trucks the size of which few people ever see. Minerals are seldom found in isolated, easily accessed areas. Roads must be built for transport; massive trucks transporting minerals through communities, villages and cities change everyday life, raising ongoing cultural and ethical questions. What could be viewed as a ‘comparative advantage’ by communities – local resources that are needed globally – has functioned as anything but, leading to the legacy of the ‘resource curse’, a legacy made possible by a colonialism in which those who had rights to the resources, who were often far removed from the consequences of mining practices, were enriched and those who were proximate to the resources were impoverished. Given the tainted legacy of mining, it would be easy to suggest the remedy would be to abandon it altogether, but asking for that would be to ask for the near impossible – like asking for the aroma of coffee. Life as we know it would have to be so drastically different that survival for many would be called into question. I cannot turn on my computer or open a cell phone without thinking of Las Bambas. How am I responsible for what takes place there? I admit I have been unsure about what questions to ask, which is why I am grateful that we now have The Limits of Responsibility before us. Reed first frames the question of responsibility and accountability by acknowledging how traditional elements

Foreword

xiii

of moral acts – agent, act and consequence – have become as complex as the connections between our cell phones and the mines that make them. Rather than leading to despair and the surrender of responsibility, she develops a theologically rich understanding of responsibility drawing upon the work of Bonhoeffer, which means careful attention to Christology and ecclesiology. Her work offers a genealogy of the concept of responsibility that connects her Christian ethics to broad philosophical treatments; this is no sectarian ethic. But in the end, she is also unapologetic in finding resources in the Christian tradition, especially Bonhoeffer, for an ethics of responsibility. At the risk of taking away the reader’s sense of discovery, let me suggest that the heart of her project unites Christology, ecclesiology and our local consumption with its global connections through a conception of responsibility as ‘vicarious representative action enacted by believers, with and for other believers, within the church community’. It is a conceptual project that neither moralizes by setting forth an ethic of responsibility that could not be inhabited by finite creatures nor easily forgives our debts by letting us throw up our hands and abandon our responsibilities because they have become near impossible to name. Nor is it a project that is concerned with individual purity. None of our hands are clean, and there is nowhere anyone can go – no desert to flee to – that allows us to evade our corporate responsibility. Writing about the economic problems with transnational corporations is easy to do. Many of the problems are obvious, even the mining companies can name them. Naming the problems does not free us from complicity in them. We need the minerals from Las Bambas to write about the problems with places like Las Bambas. Here is the difficulty we face, and it is one that Reed never overlooks as she explores the limits of responsibility. No simple answers are given because no simple answers are possible. Yet the questions that need to be asked are posed well and provide the means for a theological ethics that reclaims an ethics of responsibility from its critics. D. Stephen Long Cary M. Maguire University Professor of Ethics Southern Methodist University

PREFACE I am responsible for the seven open pits at the Kolomela mine, situated 22 kilometres from Postmasburg in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. There is no investment account in my name holding shares in Kumba Iron Ore. But the building in which I’m sitting is supported by steel girders. The train journey that I took last week required a track and wheels, passed over a bridge and included a cup of tea made from water boiled in a steel heater, all of which required iron ore. I am responsible for the mine-dredging of a 2-kilometre-wide by 17-kilometre-long strip of sand dunes at Richards Bay in KwaZulu-Natal Province. I do not know whether my pension fund is invested in Richards Bay Minerals or its parent company. But it is to meet my requirements for a fresh coat of paint on the bathroom walls, sunscreen to protect against UV-induced skin damage, splashback tiling in the kitchen, and more, that Richards Bay Minerals is mining this strip of land rich with ilmenite, rutile and zircon. Responsibility is not a new topic in Christian ethics, but too many accounts are delimited to the immediately personal. Christian ethicists are ill-equipped to think about questions of responsibility that extend beyond a tightly drawn agentact-consequence causality nexus wherein individuals may be held to account for harms that are traceable one way or another to decisions which they made. Christian ethics as a discipline is familiar with the topic of consumption where, for instance, wanting to know who made the clothes purchased might lead fairly directly to purchasing choices.1 Raised levels of consciousness around shopping might result in lifestyle changes with respect to purchasing locally produced food, decisions about whether or not to travel, whether to buy books electronically or from a local shop, renovating furniture rather than buying new and such like. The big topics of climate change, globalization and human rights are all engaged in such questioning.2 Too often, however, the discipline does not address these

1. See the ‘I made your clothes’ campaign run by The Fashion Revolution. http:// fashionrevolution.org (accessed 9 September 2017). 2. There is debate about the world’s entering a post-globalization era. E.g., Robert Latham, The Politics of Evasion: A Post-Globalization Dialogue along the Edge of the State (London: Routledge, 2016) in which is debated the idea that ‘the fable of a hope-filled postcold war globalization has faded away’ due to heightened nationalisms, thickening borders, hyper security measures and the politics of evasion. Mindful of this debate, I presuppose that the post–Second World War forces of globalization, which include the easing for transnational corporations of international trade and the flow of finance, the transmission and spread of dominant cultures across diverse media and the communications technology

Preface

xv

big topics with an ethic of responsibility adequate to the task. Christian ethics needs a revitalized approach to moral reasoning for a world where the relationship between agent, act and consequences are often untraceable. Insistently theological and in dialogue with Dietrich Bonhoeffer throughout, this book is an attempt to develop a post-liberal ethic of responsibility that reckons with situations where the agent-act-consequence line of traceability fails.3 The key argument is that in Christ and because of Christ, the meaning of responsibility is reversed from an I-You-I to a You-I-You dynamic. I explain and appropriate Bonhoeffer’s reversal of Western philosophical ways of thinking about responsibility (agent-act-consequence), and his reframing of an understanding of responsibility that originates in ‘You’, that is, learned from Christ and neighbour, in ways that grapple with at least some of the realities of a globalizing era. With Bonhoeffer, the affirmation is that when the ethical problem becomes ‘How can I live responsibly’ and ‘How can I take responsible decisions?’ rather than ‘What is the meaning of responsibility learned in Christ, neighbour and land?’, the focus is ourselves rather than God as first and last, the alpha and omega (DBWE 6:49), and revolution during this period, remain sufficiently powerful to warrant sustained ethical attention. Books that have informed by thinking especially include William I. Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), for drawing attention to the problems of policing global capital; Antoinette Handley, Business and the State in Africa: Economic Policy-Making in the Neo-Liberal Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), for in-depth sensitivity to the many problems that arise when African states variously elect to grow their economies on the back of foreign investment; William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics in the Time of Many Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), for bringing questions of globalization into conjunction with traditional ethical considerations of greed, integrity and the need for a renewed theological humanism. 3. I use the term ‘post-liberal’ in the second of two senses outlined by Mattias Marinson in ‘Postliberal Theology’ in Anne Runehov and Luis Oviedo, eds., Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions (New York: Springer, 2013), 1817–1823. I do not understand post-liberal theology as the ‘school’ which developed during the 1970s mainly at Yale Divinity School under the leadership of Hans Frei, George Lindbeck et al. and mainly in the fields of historical, systematic and ecumenical theology, but, rather, as a designation of various antisecularist, mainly neo-Barthian and postmodern theological programmes or movements in the contemporary debate (especially from the early 1990s until the present). I use the term ‘post-modern’ to mean that theology and Christian ethics need no longer work under the conditions of modernity. See Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ‘Theology and the Condition of Postmodernity: A Report on Knowledge (of God)’, in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3. Theology is liberated from certain constraints, notably for our purposes the notion of a sovereign individual subject for whom questions of responsibility are always and only questions of agency. In this sense, this book is also a postmodern theological ethic of responsibility.

xvi

Preface

we are no longing doing Christian ethics. Because what is true in the resurrection is true for all, the reversal of the dynamic of responsibility from I-You-I to a YouI-You has implications for a common ethic, that is, an ethic that originates in the resurrection but has implications for everyone and opens the way for Christian ethics to engage in constructive dialogue with non-believers.4 This book proceeds in three stages. First, it frames the question of responsibility as a problem of agency in relation to the systems and structures of globalization. Responsibility understood in juridical terms as traceable linkages between agentact-consequence is shown, in some contexts, to be a failing concept, unable to meet the realities of today. In an era of speed-of-light money and commodity flows across territorial borders, when social media rises to new levels of political influence, when global economic, environmental, geopolitical and technological risks do not respect national borders, and more, problems of agency are problems entailed in holding self and others to account through the association of praise or blame with given actions.5 When considered too narrowly as problems of act, agency and individual freedom, traditional accounts of responsibility cannot explain connections between one-third-world consumers of the products of mining and people close to mine sites whose lives are affected – for good or ill – by the extraction, transportation, refining, smelting, or such like, of metals and minerals. As part of this framing of the question of responsibility, this book constructs a short genealogy of modern liberal and post-liberal concepts of responsibility as variously presupposing an individual capable of choice and autonomy, and, alternatively, starting from the ‘other’ who is potentially infinite and thus unbearable. This is, in 4. With George M. Newlands, I affirm Bonhoeffer’s ‘insistence that the church should be concerned for society in general and not simply for its own structure, and this precisely as obedience to Christ, was echoed in a new theology centred on the kingdom of God’. Christ and Human Rights: The Transformative Engagement (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 94. 5. The meaning of ‘action’ can be limited to a single thing done, such as a gesture made or word spoken. It can be understood more broadly. Like the phrase ‘industrial action’ or the imperative ‘action!’ when spoken in a theatre, the word is used in this context to exceed something done by a single agent; ‘action’ is used as a mass noun denoting something which cannot necessarily be counted as a substance or quality but which may be counted as referring to different component parts. Thus ‘industrial action’ might entail action short of a strike, strike action, picketing, lobbying employers, action to obstruct normal affairs and so on. As a mass noun, ‘action’ is understood as having the syntactic property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete subsets. So, I talk both about single things done and about profit alongside other motives as reasons for an action, that is, an action such as mining in a particular way (transparently subject to the highest international standards of environmental protection, proactively planning with local communities to leave the locality stronger economically and socially after the mine site closure than before, planning plant infrastructure in ways that might leave benefits to the local community and much more).

Preface

xvii

part, to evidence disagreement about how responsibility has been understood and also to explicate why dominant modern framings of the question of responsibility are inadequate for our globalizing era. Second, the book introduces Bonhoeffer as the most promising of theological dialogue partners for a rethinking of the meaning of responsibility today. His sociopolitical context was very different from our own. As a man of his time, Bonhoeffer’s concerns were not systemic climate change, irremediable pollution, gross global inequalities, rising religious fanaticism, mass migration, nuclear threats and the diffusion of weapons of mass destruction and such like. Even so, he knew that modern framings of the problem of responsibility were inadequate for the social and political needs of his time and sub-Christian in formulation. The claim is that Bonhoeffer’s learning of responsibility from the risen Christ present now in the global church is a welcome provocation to new thinking about the meaning of responsibility learned from land, distant neighbour, global church and the Bible. Bonhoeffer’s challenge is to find a way of talking about responsibility that does not collapse into individualism – that is, the problem of the agent incurvatio in se ipsum (curved inward on itself) – or become ensconced within a univocal logic that subsumes socio-economic, cultural and religious differences within itself. As a theological endeavour, this book interrogates with Bonhoeffer what it means to affirm that responsibility is Jesus Christ’s vicarious representative action (DBWE 1:146–148). Responsibility is vicarious representative action (G. Stellvertretung) enacted by believers, with and for other believers, within the church community (DBWE 1:178–192) and vicarious representative action taken by the church for the sake of the world. ‘You’ who are Jesus Christ and ‘You’ who are my neighbour encountered in Christ hold the meaning of responsibility for me. His reflections on the centre, boundaries and limits of responsibility are shown to be helpful to Christian people struggling with an increasingly exhausted concept of responsibility, when linear agent-act-consequence connections to distant others and faraway harms are difficult to trace. Third, the book moves beyond Bonhoeffer’s explicit writings to develop an account of the politics of Pentecost that treats directly the public and political witness of the church. The challenge is to consider what responsibility looks like when the dynamic, whereby meaning is reached, is reversed from I-You-I to a You-I-You and, in particular, what it means for the one-third-world church to think and live this meaning of responsibility. Mindful of Bonhoeffer’s pioneering work on socio-theology and his focus on the empirical church, the question is how to live the You-I-You structuring of an ethic of responsibility as the sanctorum communio globally, whereby the church locus imperii gives up control of the meaning of responsibility and relearns it from the church in the two-thirds world. The challenge is to lose the concept of responsibility from modern logics of subjectivity and possession that construe responsibility as a problem that is ‘mine’, that is, that belongs exclusively to me and is up to me alone to solve. Bonhoeffer’s Christological reframing of an ethic of responsibility, which includes the principle of vicarious representative action [Stellvertretung], yields at least some of the constructive theological rethinking needed for a Christian ethic of responsibility

xviii

Preface

appropriate to current global demands. Centrally important is how Bonhoeffer’s destabilization of the meaning of both selfhood and responsibility as based on knowledge available to the self-reflexive subject, his related reversal of modern concepts of the self and abandonment of liberal concepts of responsibility help us to develop a different concept of responsibility learned in Christ and from neighbour. Bonhoeffer provides at least the beginning of the ‘ground clearing’ that we need for a more workable concept of responsibility today. More work is required, however, to think through what a reversal of the meaning of responsibility from I-You-I to You-I-You entails for Christian living. In order to keep close to the practicalities of everyday life, readers might find it helpful to think of ‘I’ as a relatively privileged one-third-world consumer of the products of mining and ‘You’ as someone more immediately affected by the production of the products of mining.6 This book considers the concept of responsibility as it links (or fails to link) average citizens in the United States, UK and other developed countries to the drilling, blasting, shovel-and-truck loading and hauling production processes and dredge mining techniques at the many other industry-scale mine sites around the world that supply the products of mining necessary to sustain my lifestyle, and ensure that my pension fund, insurance company and savings account get the returns they need to meet liabilities to me upon retirement. Industry-scale mining runs throughout this book as a linking theme that provides our practical focus. Other sectors would have served the purpose as well. We could have focused on agriculture, the energy sector, fashion and more besides. My reason for concentrating on mining is self-avowedly contingent. For reasons that will become apparent below, I was fortunate enough to be invited into a sustained conversation between major companies in the mining sector and the churches.7 Chapter 1, ‘Framing the Question’, considers responsibility as a concept under strain. With Paul Ricoeur, I broadly suppose that, in a globalizing context, responsibility understood as accountability or attribution is ‘a shattered concept’.8 Chapter 1 sets the scene for an argument that runs throughout the book, namely, that the meaning of responsibility can no longer be assumed by moral and political theologians to be determined (at least not exclusively) by the self-reflexive, variously capable subject, their knowledge, sense of reasonable duty or capacity to compute foreseeable consequences. The question of responsibility is asked initially in terms of accountability and attribution: if a person cannot be held personally accountable for distant harms because of the sheer complexity of connections between consumption patterns and the impact upon the lives of people far away, the question is whether the concept of responsibility is becoming meaningless. 6. ‘Two-Thirds World, majority world, Three-Fourths World’, Dictionary of Christianese, http://www.dictionaryofchristianese.com/two-thirds-world-majority-world-threefourths-world/ (accessed 29 August 2017). 7. See Chapter 5. 8. Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, in The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 19.

Preface

xix

Chapter 2, ‘Genealogy of a Concept’, seeks to understand better the relationship between dominant modern framings of the meaning of responsibility and the strain under which the meaning of the concept now labours. The meaning of responsibility in the writings of major modern theorists (Schleiermacher, Hegel, Marx, Weber) is examined, with further attention paid to how a range of postliberal theorists (Buber, Levinas, Derrida, Badiou, Butler, Young, Critchley et al.) shift from an ethic of responsibility built on notions of accountability and attribution to an ethic of responsibility that starts variously from the ‘other’. Tensions are seen to abound between the failing adequacy of responsibility cast in terms of the self ’s feeling, thinking and formulation of responses to the other, and the converse risks of losing attachment to personal accountability, fault, blameworthiness and judgement. Chapter 3, ‘Why Bonhoeffer’, investigates the meaning of responsibility primarily, though not exclusively, in dialogue with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s early writings, in which he rejects the foundational modern concept of the autonomous ‘I’ for whom the will is the locus of responsibility. The chapter considers responsibility as a problem of act, that is, as a problem of agency and individual freedom, and shows that Bonhoeffer’s early critique of ideas of personhood in the philosophy of Kant, Hegel, Husserl et al. is surprisingly applicable to the problem of responsibility today. Chapter 3 considers responsibility as a problem of ‘being’, that is, as a problem for which the reality of responsibility never wholly, truly or fully arrives, and shows that Bonhoeffer’s critique of Heidegger’s concept of existence as ‘always-being-already-guilty’ speaks directly to present-day experiences of ‘wicked problems’. Bonhoeffer is shown to cut through questions about the limits of responsibility understood exclusively as a reflexive relation that links agents to actions by a causal tie, and to remind readers that the problem of responsibility is not a failure of knowledge, lack of attention to history or myopia, but an abyss in the human heart. Chapter 4, ‘Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung’, builds from Bonhoeffer’s conviction that responsibility is Jesus Christ’s vicarious representative action (DBWE 1:146–148).9 A Christian ethic of responsibility is developed as vicarious representative action (G. Stellvertretung) enacted by believers, with and for other believers, within the church community (DBWE 1:178–192) and as action taken by the church for the sake of the world. The chapter begins to ask in practical terms what Stellvertretung might mean for Christian people locus imperii who have benefited for centuries from sinful social structures that have destroyed natural environments, perpetuated the arms race, disrupted local barter economies, fuelled corruption at every level and more: What follows practically from universal solidarity in Christ given the legacy of colonialism? Can the terrible dissymmetries of history be overcome to reach a new understanding 9. The Complete Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (English) Series 17, Vol. 1, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014).

xx

Preface

of responsibility? How are we to be church with such large inequalities of income and wealth between (and within) countries? The claim is that a post-liberal and theological reversal of the structure of the concept of responsibility from I-You-I to You-I-You, or You-We-You, must be relearned from the land, from those most vulnerable to pollution, soil erosion and acid water, and in solidarity with those affected most immediately by mining. Chapter 5, ‘Confronting the Vices of Hubris’, gathers evidence regarding the problem of responsibility and digs in, so to speak, with reference to industryscale mining. The chapter illustrates the problem of responsibility when treated in terms of tight lines of causality and begins to suggest that new ways of thinking about responsibility that are practically, as well as theoretically, possible. Bonhoeffer’s challenge inter alia is to attend to everyday considerations and to concrete neighbours in their concrete reality. Few things are more everyday than the processes and products of mining.10 It is difficult, however, to attend to one’s neighbours who lives far away when their lives do not impinge directly on our own. Chapter 5 discusses how the lives of the consumers of the products of mining are linked to the lives of those most affected by mining and reckons with some of the financial realities of church life, at least for some church institutions that churches hold investment funds. The spirit of what Bonhoeffer says about law and order as a divine mandate in the nation state is brought to bear inter- and transnationally. Chapter 6, ‘Responsibility as Political Event’, develops reflections on the public and political character of ecclesial witness. Bonhoeffer stopped short of developing reflections on the public and political life of the church. Responsive to impetuses in his later writings especially, Chapter 6 ventures a reading of Acts 2:1–41 that delineates a matrix of conditions when and under which phenomena may be deemed political and unpacks further what the public, political witness of the church might entail with respect to the meaning of responsibility learned in Christ. Mindful of a suggestion that runs throughout the book that Christian

10. E.g., the following are found in most cell phones: gallium arsenide in the amplifier and receiver (mined in China, Chile, Morocco, Peru, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belgium and Mexico); copper circuitry (mined in Chile, United States, Peru, China, Australia, Russia, Indonesia, Canada, Zambia, Poland, Kazakhstan and Mexico); gold for the circuitry (mined in China, United States, Australia, South Africa, Peru, Russia, Canada, Uzbekistan, Ghana, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico and Chile); magnesium compounds in phone casings (mined in Russia, Slovakia, Austria, Spain, Australia, Brazil, Greece, India and the United States); palladium for the circuitry (mined in Russia, South Africa, Canada, United States and Zimbabwe); platinum (mined in South Africa, Russia, Canada, Zimbabwe, United States and Colombia); silver (mined in Peru, Mexico, China, Australia, Chile, Russia, United States, Poland, Bolivia and Canada); tungsten (mined in China, Russia, Canada, Austria, Bolivia and Portugal). Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration, ‘What’s in My Cell Phone?’ https://mineralseducationcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/ mec_fact_sheet_cell_phone_0.pdf (accessed 11 September 2017).

Preface

xxi

people will not ask the question of responsibility, or understand the meaning of responsibility adequately, without better attention being paid to what it means to be a community of faith globally, the chapter heeds Bonhoeffer’s warning that the empirical church disappoints while probing the doctrinal foundations of a You-IYou structuring of the meaning and dynamic of responsibility.

Chapter 1 F R A M I N G T H E QU E ST IO N

As a consumer, I could buy clothes only from shops such as Sancho’s Dress in the city where I live. This small, independent shop stocks clothing made from pesticideand-fertilizer-free cotton, and decides which suppliers and manufacturers from which to source goods according to various indices that measure public disclosure of brands’ policies, procedures, goals and commitments, performance, progress and real-world impacts on workers, communities and the environment.1 In addition to stocking the shop only with products that rate highly on ethical reports, the owners raised eleven thousand pounds by crowd-funding to develop a small factory in Ethiopia to produce shawls, scarfs and ponchos. Co-founder of the business, Kalkidan, wrote in her blog entry ‘Hand-Made: Why less is more?’: Sometimes it can feel as an understatement to say that our scarves are ‘hand-made’, as they are in fact the result of a long and ancient chain of skilled hand-crafting. The cotton is of course hand-picked (for better or worse), then hand-spun into twine by an elderly community affected by leprosy before it is put into a wooden loom, which is of course pedal powered (by feet not hands) made from fast growing locally sourced wood before it is hand-woven and finally handwrapped by us before sending out into the world. We chose this process because we understand that the real value of things lies in the hands that they have passed and the lives that they have changed. A balance which can work for overall good or overall bad, as if they pass through the hands of low skilled low wage workers it can have a negative and impoverishing effect on individuals and their futures. 1. These are the measures assessed by the Fashion Transparency Index which reviews and ranks 100 of the biggest global fashion and apparel brands and retailers. http://fashionrevolution.org/faqs-fashion-transparency-index-2017/. See also http:// fashionrevolution.org, which is a global movement calling for greater transparency, sustainability and ethics in the fashion industry, and Baptist World Aid Australia, which produces an annual ethical report to help consumers make purchasing decisions. https:// baptistworldaid.org.au/resources/2017-ethical-fashion-guide/ (all accessed 10 September 2017).

2

The Limit of Responsibility We just wanted to let you know how powerful you are as a consumer, and also to promise that we will keep things well made and quite small in order to do justice to the process of making, and to be able to always measure the externalities we are creating.2

In Sancho’s Dress, the externalities, or third-party effects such as environmental damage and human suffering, are minimized at every stage of production, processing, shipping and sale.3 Mobilizing consumers to take responsibility for issues of global social justice is integral to their business plan and resonates positively with the rise of ‘ethical’ consumption in recent years that has created sizeable markets for fair-trade goods in most developed countries. Living close to this shop, I am fortunate in being able to ask the shop owners the names of the women who stitched the blouses and trousers. Most towns and cities now have similar shops that sell traceable cotton and wool goods. It is increasingly common in the farming industry to boast proudly of fully traceable meat – ‘farm to fork’ – for the best possible eating experience.4 The problem is that only a very few examples come to mind of consumer purchases more directly originating in the products of mining. The Fairphone social enterprise company aims to develop smartphones that are designed and produced with minimal harm to people, and the planet marks a step forward in this regard: ‘We want to integrate materials in our supply chain that support local economies, not armed militias.’5 Its strapline ‘the smartphone with social values’ stimulates consumers to think about issues at every stage of a phone’s life, from the mining of metals and conflict-free minerals to fair factory wages and disposal. Fairphone wants customers to make purchasing decisions for a range of reasons including not only performance and reliability but

2. Sancho’s Dress Blog (8 July, 2015) http://www.sanchosdress.com/blogs/news/34995972hand-made-why-less-is-more (accessed 31 August 2015). 3. Recent research has investigated ‘egoistic’ or ‘hedonistic’ motives versus ‘altruistic’ or ‘moral’ motivations. E.g., Margaret Levi and April Linton, ‘Fair Trade: A Cup at a Time?’, Politics & Society 31, no. 3 (2003): 407–432; Simon Zadek, Sanjiv Lingayah and Maya Forstater, Social Labels: Tools for Ethical Trade. Final Report (Luxembourg: European Commission, 1998), 32f. Matthias Varul and others speak of moral or ethical ‘selving’ or consumption choices as important in self-identity and in becoming the ‘type of person’ one wants to be. See Dr Matthias Zick Varul (Principal Investigator), ‘Fair Trade Consumerism as an Everyday Ethical Practice – A Comparative Perspective, An ESRC-Funded Research Project at the University of Exeter Results and Policy Implications’ (June 2008), http:// people.exeter.ac.uk/mzv201/FT%20Results.pdf (accessed 31 August 2015). See also Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke and Alice Malpass, ‘Consuming Ethics: Articulating the Subjects and Spaces of Ethical Consumption’, Antipode 37, no. 1 (2005): 24–45. 4. E.g., V.G. Meats which boasts high standards of care for cattle and full traceability: http://vgmeats.com/traceability/ (accessed 14 August 2016). 5. See Fairphone’s own publicity at https://www.fairphone.com (accessed 14 August 2016).

Framing the Question

3

supply chain and sourcing, repairability, worker welfare, the benefits of business to society and more too: ‘We’re producing a phone to improve the electronics value chain. One step at a time.’ The majority of consumer goods, construction and plumbing supplies, materials needed for heavy engineering, shipbuilding, and so on, have untraceable supply lines. The deliverable purchase of fair-trade coffee, T-shirts, phones, and so on, are examples of what theologian and economist Albino Barrera, O.P., refers to as ‘individuating collective responsibility’, that is, attempting to tie blame or praiseworthiness to ourselves as discrete individuals.6 Writing in the fecund space between modern economics and Roman Catholic social teaching, Barrera distinguishes three types of responsibility relevant in this debate: causal responsibility, that is, identifying the individual or collective action that brought about the outcome of interest; moral responsibility, that is, praiseworthiness or blameworthiness for a particular event; and responsibility that pertains to liability, the duty to correct or mitigate the ill effects of a particular outcome.7 Not all three types of responsibility are coincident, says Barrera, but the task of individuating responsibility remains both viable and necessary. Similar to my emphasis in this book, Barrera wants to avoid any methodological individualism that isolates one person from another in their purchasing choices and to acknowledge instead that there is a collective obligation to respond to distant harms. Yet, very sensibly, he underlines also the need to individuate collective responsibility: In a globalized marketplace that is driven primarily by contracts rather than by shared values, it is even more important to individuate collective responsibility, if only to sensitize people to their moral obligations to distant others. In the absence of a clear-eyed method for specifying this collective obligation even further, it is very likely that talk of collective responsibility for social change will not result in concrete action. Indifference and free-ridership are problems that economic globalization has exacerbated in the marketplace. As the saying goes, when everyone is responsible for a harm, no one ends up taking responsibility for correcting the injury.8 6. Albino Barrera, O.P. ‘Individuating Collective Responsibility’, in Distant Markets, Distant Harms: Economic Complicity and Christian Ethics, ed. Daniel Finn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), ch. 9, esp. p. 221. 7. See further Albino Barrera, Economic Compulsion and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), which looks inter alia at the effects of pricing on decision-making; God and the Evil of Scarcity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), in which Barrera contrasts theological truths of divine abundance with market economies; and Globalization and Economic Ethics: Distributive Justice in the Knowledge Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), in which Barrera explicates these issues in relation to digital economy and its related markets. 8. Barrera, Economic Compulsion and Christian Ethics, 238.

4

The Limit of Responsibility

Hence the benefit of initiatives such as Sancho’s Dress and the Fairphone social enterprise company in pressing home to consumers the need for traceability, transparency and accountability in business. The problem is that the individual consumer can become overwhelmed by complexity and be overtaken by a sense of powerlessness in the face of systemic corruption and trans-border interactions beyond our ken. Moreover, few purchases that contain the products of mining are traceable.9 It is much more difficult to ask the question of responsibility with respect to products of mining than with respect to clothes, bed linen, food and so on. While most of us could live more simply, few, if any, could live without the products of industry-scale mining – and few of these products have supply chains traceable by consumers or standards of certification that consumers may readily consult. Even crofters in the highlands of Scotland, who take no electricity from the national grid, eat only local produce and let children walk to school, need the products of mining in wind turbines, asphalt, concrete and kettles. Even if we try to source our wardrobes and fridges carefully, few of us have much, if any, control over the ethical sourcing and production of the infrastructure facilities and systems that serve the country in which we live, its transportation and communication systems, power plants and so on. Sinful social structures are all around: Man … is also conditioned by the social structure in which he lives, by the education he has received and by his environment. These elements can either help or hinder his living in accordance with the truth.10

Sin is both an act and the condition in which we all live. Even an unborn baby locus imperii will have a carbon footprint as expectant parents prepare for the happy day. While the structures and conditions of sin are rooted in personal sin and do not arise independently of the choices of persons individually, and while not all sinful structures have been constructed with sinful intention, the multi-strata complexity of human existence today means that few can separate themselves from structural evil.11 There is never a clear line, as Daniel Finn observes, between the causal influences of structure and free choice, since structural influence occurs through the exercise of freedom:12 9. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) measures company performance against global standards for the good governance of gas and mineral resources. This is an explicit attempt to end anonymity in these sectors and marks real progress towards this goal. Despite this progress, too much about high-street purchases remains opaque to the consumer. 10. John Paul II, Centesimus annus §38, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/ encycli- cals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html (accessed 22 August 2017). 11. For one of the most cogent considerations of this topic, see Daniel K. Finn, ‘What Is a Sinful Social Structure?’, Theological Studies 77, no. 1 (March 2016): 136. 12. Finn, ‘What Is a Sinful Social Structure?’, 159.

Framing the Question

5

Social structures are systems of human relations among (preexisting) social positions. They are ontologically real, emergent ‘things’ that exist at a ‘higher level’ than the individual persons from whose actions they emerge. Structures exert causal impact on persons who take on positions within them by generating restrictions, enablements and incentives that influence the (free) decisions those people make. Structures can appropriately be called sinful when their causal impact encourages morally evil decisions. What ‘evil’ means depends on the sort of social structure under discussion (e.g., political evils differ from parish evils).13

The question of responsibility cannot be abstracted from sinful social structures, Finn says. An understanding of ancestral or original sin, informed by the social sciences, is needed urgently today if Christian ethics or moral theology is to ask the question of responsibility in practically meaningful ways.

Accountability It is increasingly difficult in some contexts to make sense of responsibility understood as accountability. It is simply not possible to determine specific links between agent, action and consequence – even though we know in broad terms that many of our actions are bad for the environment and perpetuate poor working conditions. Hence the limitations of traditional accounts of moral agency whereby an agent can be held morally accountable for their actions if they have control over decision-making and implementation processes, and if the consequences may be traced back to particular decisions and actions. It is important to be clear at this point that not every situation exceeds the agent-act-consequences model of responsibility. So, for instance, I may be held responsible for putting my family into debt if I purchase too many consumer goods. I may be held accountably responsible for my judgements and actions in this regard, and may reasonably be asked to respond to questions about the moral, as well as practical, rightness or wrongness of my decisions. This is not under dispute. Nothing in the following pages should be understood to imply an undermining of the practical meaning of responsibility as the individual’s being called to give an account for their actions in most situations. The problem is that the relationship between agent, act and consequence is not always so readily traceable. To underline the point: we are not concerned in this book, at least not primarily, with responsibility understood as accountability or answerability for actions taken within a delimited moral community of family or neighbourhood – the kind of responsibility that might interest psychologists working on the dynamics of relationality or philosophers working on criminal responsibility. As jurisprude Anthony Duff elaborates, the meaning of responsibility in criminal law entails a 13. Finn, ‘What Is a Sinful Social Structure?’, 163.

6

The Limit of Responsibility

triadic relationship between an agent A who is responsible, that is, who may be held accountable before the law, for an action X done to somebody B in virtue of both A and B being members of a unit of responsibility, for example, a neighbourhood or a nation state. The title of Duff ’s book Answering for Crime: Responsibility and Liability in the Criminal Law points to a conceptual structure in the idea of responsibility as accountability upon which the social health of communities depends.14 Our interest, rather, is with those instances when it is more difficult to trace a ‘rational relation’, to borrow Angela M. Smith’s term, between an agent’s action, their own account of moral responsibility, their own and others’ evaluative judgements and likely outcome of their actions.15 Philosopher of legal and moral theory Joel Feinberg provides further elucidation: Of course, to be responsible for something (after the fact) may also mean that one did it, or caused it, or now stands answerable, or accountable, or liable to unfavorable responses from others for it. One can be responsible for a result in all those senses without being to blame for it. One can be held liable for a result either because it is one’s fault or for some quite different kind of reason; and one can be to blame for an occurrence and yet escape all liability for it. Still, when one is to blame for a harm, one can properly be said to be ‘responsible for it really’; that is, there is a sense of ‘responsible for’ that simply means ‘chargeable to one as one’s fault.’ One of the commonest uses of the expression ‘morally responsible for’ is for being responsible for something in this sense. (Another is for chargeability to a fault of a distinctively moral kind. Still another is for being liable to responses of a distinctively moral kind.)16

The concept of responsibility, Feinberg argues, can be variously construed. Even the lack of direct lines of causal accountability or assignability do not exhaust its meaning. Simple agency of defective, faulty or otherwise morally or legally problematic action does not exhaust the meaning of responsibility. That she kicked the ball which smashed through the window or that he intended to steal money from his acquaintance are both scenarios that entail relatively straightforward descriptions of the facts and ascriptions of fault. In the absence of such descriptions of the facts and ascriptions of fault, it might still be meaningful to charge something to a person as their fault, and thus to hold them morally accountable. Such scenarios will require careful weighing of the issues and judgement, and are likely to remain partial: ‘that causal ascriptions are selective becomes clear to anyone who tries to give a complete causal explanation of some event in terms of all 14. Anthony Duff, Answering for Crime: Responsibility and Liability in the Criminal Law (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). 15. Angela M. Smith, ‘Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: In Defense of a Unified Account’, Ethics 122, no. 3 (April 2012): 577. 16. Joel Feinberg, Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 188.

Framing the Question

7

the conditions severally and jointly sufficient for its occurrence’.17 So, for instance, while it is impossible to give a complete and full account of the causes of a crime wave, or outbreak of illness, yet the question of responsibility as accountability remains meaningful in many contexts. I am not accountably responsible in this juridical sense for the seven open pits at the Kolomela mine, situated 22 kilometres from Postmasburg in the Northern Cape province of South Africa, and so on. It is preposterous to suggest that by virtue of buying a kettle or fridge, I should be held accountably or answerably responsible for harms (or goods) experienced by people at the end of long production and supply chains. It is not (yet) realistic to suppose that consumer X is answerable to Y many miles away for her conduct in purchasing a fridge, or, potentially, for slipping into a high-maintenance lifestyle, because the relationship between X and Y is so tenuous as to render unviable a relationship of accountable responsibility. I cannot reasonably be expected to know with any degree of precision whether harms or goods will result to people far away, to the natural environments in which they live and so on. I cannot be held accountably responsible if I cannot be held to know about or understand the actions taken by mining companies far away, and potentially a host of other companies, traders and investors too, who play diverse roles in sourcing the materials and financing the production of my kitchen appliances. The sheer complexity of connections between my consumption and distant harms, or goods, renders these connections untraceable, and thus unavailable to scrutiny with respect to questions about responsibility as accountability. Yet, I am connected in unknown and unknowable ways with people affected by mining precisely because I bought a kettle and fridge, and because my savings or pension fund might be invested in the company that mined or traded in the minerals and metals necessary for its production. Capitalist forces in a globalizing era connect every high street in the so-called developed world to people far away, but in ways that cannot necessarily be traced via tight lines of causality. This is the sphere of difficulty in which we explore and attempt to develop the meaning of responsibility in this book. The question becomes in what sense, if any, I am responsible for the harms, or goods, experienced by people involved somehow in the production, supply and finance chains of kitchen appliances that I might purchase or who are affected somehow by the companies in which my savings and pension are invested. In what sense am I responsible for the seven open pits at the Kolomela mine in South Africa? How can we ask the question of responsibility in a globalizing era? Philosopher Paul Ricoeur helps us at this seeming point of impasse in at least three ways. First, he acknowledges the problem by speaking of responsibility understood in terms of accountability as ‘a shattered concept’.18 Writing at a time when questions 17. Feinberg, Doing and Deserving, 142. 18. Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, in The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 19.

8

The Limit of Responsibility

concerning the gas leak at Bhopal, the catastrophic nuclear accident at Chernobyl and the 1993 case of a person with haemophilia receiving HIV-infected blood in France were in the news,19 Ricoeur knew that the meaning of responsibility cast in terms of juridical culpability had been complicated and was at risk of being lost. Aware that lines of connection between agent and consequence in contemporary discussions of responsibility are becoming entangled, untraceable and apt to dissolve, Ricoeur looks nonetheless to retain some sense of blame or fault for harms done to people far away, an ‘idea of giving an account, in the sense of reporting, recounting … ’.20 He is aware of the complex of issues with which we are dealing. Indeed, Ricoeur’s reflections in the 1990s opened this topic for consideration. Second, Ricoeur ties the discussion of responsibility to the dynamics of personhood and the constitution of the self in the dialectic between the ego and the ‘other’, thereby helping to expose the shortcomings in analytic philosophy with respect to this debate. Thus, the third study in Oneself as Another asks the question ‘who acts?’ against the backdrop of the analytic tradition of philosophy (central figures in this development were Peter F. Strawson and G.E. Anscombe and Donald Davidson), whose approaches variously underplay what Ricoeur understands as ‘persons’ and do not adequately allow for the identification of the actor, or the ‘owning’ of the action by the actor; that is, they do not account for ascription or responsibility.21 In the fourth study, Ricoeur deals further with the question of action and establishes a difference between ‘an event’ and ‘an action’ in terms of the latter originating in a person and being ascribable to a person. Using Strawson’s term ‘ascription’ for the attribution of both physical and mental predicates to persons, Ricoeur relates an action to an agent in terms of the agent being the principle of his or her actions, that is, of the action being dependent upon the agent and therefore not only attributable to them causally but ascribable to them as ‘theirs’: ‘the modern theory of action gives to ascription a meaning distinct from attribution … and places it on the same side … as the capacity to designate oneself, a capacity related, as we know, to the theory of utterance, and to speech acts’.22 Hence attention to the pronouns ‘mine’, ‘yours’, ‘hers’, ‘each’, and so on, as having universal meaning and as being applicable to both action and intention. Later studies in Oneself as Another further negotiate the idea using the concepts of narrative self-designation, imputation and attestation. Ricoeur is aware of the potential dissolution of the concept of responsibility in a globalizing era (for reasons discussed preliminarily above) and thus refuses to relinquish the question of agency and the relation of an action to its agent: ‘It is a question of the meaning attached to answers to the question “who?” (who 19. I am indebted for this observation to Kelty, ‘Responsibility: McKeon and Ricoeur’, Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory Working Paper No. 12 (May 2008), http://kelty.org/or/papers/Kelty-Mckeon-Ricoeur-WP12.pdf:5 (accessed 23 August 2017). 20. Ricoeur, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 14. 21. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). 22. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 94.

Framing the Question

9

speaks? who acts? who recounts his life? who designates herself as the morally responsible author of her acts?).’23 To lose sight of the question ‘who?’ would result, says Ricoeur, in a complete and perverse loss of the sense of culpability and of the idea of responsibility as entailing fault. The idea of responsibility without fault is conceivable, but to be avoided as the kind of bad faith entailed in the ‘washing of one’s hands’ of what follows. While quasi-juridical notions of responsibility that begin from the self are becoming difficult to sustain, questions about the personal character of responsibility are neglected at our peril. We must face the reality that simple ascriptions of causal agency oftentimes preclude any meaningful understanding of responsibility as either accountability or attribution in contexts where the individual agent cannot maintain links between decision-making, courses of action and their consequences. Equally, the question ‘who is responsible?’ cannot be relinquished if this debate is to have existential traction for people everyday. Third, Ricoeur alludes to a history of ideas regarding the relationship between modern concepts of responsibility and older, oftentimes theological, notions of imputation that we cannot examine in much detail here. He alludes to how premodern Christian discourse used the concept of imputation to debate how the good or bad features of an act were put on someone’s account, so to speak. Thus, in ‘The Concept of Responsibility: An Essay in Semantic Analysis’, Ricoeur connects modern concepts of responsibility to a history of Christian theology from the New Testament, through Ockham and Duns Scotus, to the Lutheran doctrine of justification sola imputation justitiae Christi (only by the imputation of Christ’s righteousness), and related discussions of the capacity of the person to receive this divine grace. We need to grasp the concept of imputation, he says, before rethinking the meaning of responsibility.24 Ricoeur traces the shift from biblical and Reformation notions of the attribution of human sins to Christ and His righteousness to humanity. The term imputation – linked to the New Testament Greek logizethai by way of the Latin imputare – is in this way absorbed into the gravitational space of the doctrine of ‘justification by faith’.25 Allusion is made to Luther, William of Ockham, John Duns Scotus and back to St Paul’s interpretation of the faith of Abraham as recounted in Genesis 15–16 – ‘Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness’ (Gr. logizomai autos eis dikaisoynē Rom. 4:3; Gal. 3:6). Imputation means, broadly, ‘to put on the account of someone a condemnable action, a fault, therefore an action initially marked by an obligation or a prohibition that this action infringes or breaks’.26 To impute something to someone is to attribute it to them as its actual author: ‘We must not lose sight of 23. Ricoeur, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 23. 24. For overviews, see Brian Vickers, Jesus’ Blood and Righteousness: Paul’s Theology of Imputation (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006); John Murray, Imputation of Adam’s Sin (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2012); Mary C. Moorman, Indulgences: Luther, Catholicism, and the Imputation of Merit (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2017). 25. Ricoeur, The Just, 15. 26. Ricoeur, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 13.

10

The Limit of Responsibility

this reference to an agent’.27 … ‘In this way we move back to the semi-mythical figures of the great book of debts: The book of life and death’.28 Ricoeur reminds us that the modern era produces a change whereby the concept of imputation is replaced with that of responsibility. While Kant still uses the language of imputation, underlying suppositions are changing as reason not God imputes the action to the subject, thereby attaching praise or blame: An action is called a deed [Tat] insofar as it comes under obligatory laws and hence insofar as the subject, in doing it, is considered in terms of the freedom of his choice. By such an action the action is regarded as the author [Urheber] of its effect [Wirkung], and this, together with the action itself, can be imputed to him, if one is previously acquainted with the law by virtue of which an obligation rests on these. A person is the subject whose actions can be imputed to him …. A thing is that to which nothing can be imputed.29

Kant’s use of the concept of imputation (Zurechnung) reflects a different set of associations to that of ancient and medieval theological usage. He also gives us insight into how the strength of Kant’s approach which is his retaining of the tension between agential freedom and determination, that is, the freedom of the agent to cause effects and the various influences upon the agent that cause them to act in particular ways,30 is simultaneously its weakness for our purposes. It is precisely the notion of responsibility as a something that the ‘I’ can control, and over which I have sovereignty, that comes under strain in a globalizing era. It is our loss that Ricoeur did not develop these ideas. In the current book, however, the idea of imputation is incorporated into our account of vicarious representative action; Bonhoeffer’s theology of Stellvertretung presupposes Reformed teaching about Christ’s vicarious action as the founding of the church, his alien righteousness imputed to human beings, such that any righteousness they merit is essentially his.31 Taking the harms (or goods) attaching to mining and crediting them to consumers 27. Ricoeur, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 14. 28. Ricoeur, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 14. 29. Immanuel Kant, ‘The Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Right’, Part 1 of The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 49–50. 30. On ‘imputation’ in Kant’s moral theory, see Andrews Reath, ‘Agency and the Imputation of Consequences in Kant’s Ethics’, in Agency and Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory: Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 250–265. 31. For what Bonhoeffer took from Luther in this regard, see Hans-Walter Krumwiedge, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffe Luther-Rezeption und seine Stellung zum Luthertum’, in Die Lutherischen Kirchen und die Bekenntnissynode von Barmen: Referate des Internationalen Symposions auf der Reisenburg 1984, ed. W.D. Hausschild and Georg Kretschmar (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), 210.

Framing the Question

11

locus imperii, relying utterly on the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to all who call upon his name and striving to make sense of this practically in the church community globally are all integral to the substance of this book.

Attribution Insights from critical realist scholars like Margaret Archer warn against any illusion that addressing such questions will be easy.32 Critical realists like Archer confront us with the stark reality that attributing responsibility in any sense is more difficult than working out ‘who dunnit?’, and help us further in asking the question of responsibility as attribution in relation to the new structures of globalization.33 It is exceedingly difficult to ask what should be attributed to me in any meaningful sense as blameworthy or chargeable to me as my fault. Working from the presupposition that the dominant approaches taken by modern Western theorists to the question of responsibility are fundamentally inadequate in a globalizing era – that is, the methodological individualism associated variously with John Locke, Immanuel Kant, J.S. Mill and Max Weber, and methodological holism associated primarily with Emil Durkheim, but also with structuralists such as Lévi Strauss, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault – Archer posits that responsibility can no longer be explained as causally uninterrupted connections between agent, act and effect. ‘Event 2 does not always follow event 1: we simply need to consider history and social situations to realise this …. Reality does not conform to the constant conjunction of events.’34 Rather, the world consists of stratified but open and differentiated systems in which there is more to the world than we know. All human knowledge is fallible. Agents and systems might mutually influence each other, but humanity’s dependence upon one another, and upon nature, is increasingly evident. Today’s global realities demand instead a recasting of responsibility as links between observable facts and what critical realists call ‘the open-systemic world’. Every social happening 32. Margaret S. Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 342–350; Being Human: The Problem of Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), passim, esp. 86–120; Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), passim, esp. 31–64. 33. The words ‘attribute’ (from Latin attribut- meaning ‘allotted’ from the verb attribuere, from ad- ‘to’ + tribuere ‘assign’) and ‘impute’ (from Latin imputare ‘enter in the account’, from in- ‘in, towards’ + putare ‘reckon’) have different etymological roots but are close enough for our purposes to appreciate some of the likely difficulties that will be entailed in taking the harms (or goods) attaching to mining and crediting them to consumers locus imperii without clear lines of traceability. 34. ICCR International Centre for Critical Realism, ‘Basic Critical Realism’, http:// international-criticalrealism.com/about-critical-realism/basic-critical-realism/ (accessed 31 August 2015).

12

The Limit of Responsibility

or event occurs on at least four planes: material transactions with nature, social interactions between people, social structures sui generis and the embodied personalities of individuals.35 Similar insights have been identified and expressed differently by theorists who distinguish between stratified, complex and so-called ‘wicked problems’.36 Complex problems might have many diverse elements, but they are potentially capable of solution. Traffic flow in a large city, for example, is not an example of a ‘wicked problem’ because it is potentially capable of solution. While often entangled with other problems such as urban planning, social patterns in the working day, adverse weather conditions and so on, traffic flow can be improved significantly when certain factors are addressed. ‘Wicked problems’, on the other hand, have no identifiable boundaries or solutions, but are typically comprised of multiple elements including social impact, social governance, community and political expectations, behavioural dimensions and so on, where manifestations of the problem are episodic, symptomatic and incomplete.37 Our digital, globalizing age renders some (moral) problems of attribution so fluid, complex, multifaceted, unprecedented and changing that they cannot be solved in any absolute sense. Climate change, the quintessential ‘wicked problem’, has multiple causes and manifestations, is beset by uncertainty and the prospect of partial solutions and changes as we observe its effect.38 That is to say, climate change defies resolution. For this reason, crafting legislation to address the problem is notoriously difficult. Exacerbating factors multiply and change even as they are observed. The concept of responsibility in the face of climate change remains meaningful to people with any degree of control over how many flights they take in a year, how often they use the tumble dryer, whether they don an extra pullover or turn up the thermostat and so on, but it is impossible to trace lines of responsibility between immediate actions and their consequences. In the face of ‘wicked problems’, linear conceptions of responsibility as accountability are no longer adequate. But questions of responsibility as attribution also begin to slip and slide. Technical developments in managing money flows have reached the point at which no political goal may be able to correspond to their speed and complexity. 35. Karl Georg Hoyer and Petter Næess, ‘Introductory Perspectives’, in Ecophilosophy in a World of Crisis: Critical Realism and the Nordic Contributions, ed. Roy Bhaskar, Petter Næss and Karl Georg Høyer (Abingdon, OX: Routledge, 2012), 4. 36. Roy Bhaskar, ‘Critical Realism in Resonance with Nordic Ecophilosophy’, in Ecophilosophy in a World of Crisis, ed. Roy Bhaskar et al., 11. For Bhaskar, each of these planes is irreducible to the other. Representing these planes as somehow stratified helps with the process of distinguishing between each, understanding the relationship of each to the other and seeing the need for interdisciplinary study. 37. The seminal paper in this regard was Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’, Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 155–169. 38. Richard J. Lazarus, ‘Super Wicked Problems and Climate Change: Restraining the Present to Liberate the Future’, Cornell Law Review 94, no. 5 (July 2009): 1153.

Framing the Question

13

The question thus becomes how to talk about responsibility as attribution in ways that do not suggest closed systems of connections occurring in situations comparable to a laboratory, or similarly controlled environments, but are closer to the lived experience of our global age. Archer’s morphogenetic approach acknowledges that ‘society has no pre-set form or preferred state’ but rather is formed by agents who may or may not intend the consequences of their activities.39 Archer et al. have recognized the need for different ways of bringing together the multi-plane, micro and macro facets of personal actions, social norms, and trans-social and transnational systems and structures. The moral problem is about how the ‘small’ acts of individuals connect to the ‘big’ affairs of transnational finance, trading regulations and stock markets activity, but also about how to keep hold of the very idea of responsibility, as its meaning begins to disappear beyond the decision-consequence nexus experienced by individuals into some vague notion of aggregated actions, in which individuals do little more than act out the imperatives of their group. Hence the need in early sections of this book to attempt to take seriously Archer’s challenge that a person’s individual actions occur on at least four planes (material transactions with nature, social interactions between people, social structures sui generis and the embodied personalities of individuals 40), by asking how a consumer’s decision to purchase new white goods, perhaps, connects in untraceable ways to the land and the lives of people affected by mining. When cast solely as questions of accountability and traceable attribution, questions of who ought to accept some blame or pay for the collapse of tailings dams and the resulting pollution, or damage to a local economy when a mine site closes early due to a drop in global commodity prices and subsequent downward pressure on company profits, are more or less meaningless. The point is that ethical discourse today must do more than ask questions that cannot be answers: Is it my fault that a family far away is having to relocate to a designated plot of land that they have not chosen, moving to a house that they have neither inherited nor purchased nor designed and having to cope with disruption to ancestral burial grounds? Should I feel morally praiseworthy if someone unknown to me has a factory-based manufacturing job making a line of blouses from which I purchased one? Such questions might raise awareness of how agents may or may not intend the consequences of their activities but are inadequate per se to give any worthwhile answer to the question of responsibility.41

Unbearability Here we must face a different issue, namely, the potentially unlimited and therefore unbearability of the burden of responsibility that rapidly becomes an 39. Archer, Realist Social Theory, 5. 40. See further Chapter 3. 41. See also Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 95.

14

The Limit of Responsibility

issue in any restructuring of the concept of responsibility from I-You-I to a YouI-You. Philologist Georg Picht introduces us to some of these issues, before we consider further the major shift in post-liberal moral philosophy associated with Buber, Levinas, Derrida, Badiou, Butler, Young, Critchley, et al., away from Kant’s assumptions about the autonomous self, acting from duty and subsequent notions of responsibility as a something that the ‘I’ can decide upon, towards an account that is inherently relational and learned from You. In 1967, Picht challenged the centrality of the ties between agent, act and value judgements within the modern concept of responsibility. Picht’s essay ‘Der Begriff der Verantwortung’ pays particular attention to the development of the concept in relation to its core ideas of response (L. respondere, responsio and responsum).42 Picht’s call is for a concept of responsibility that is structurally responsive to the realities of the world before it is inward-looking to the state of the soul. Responsibility, for Picht, remains a concept concerned centrally with the pronouns ‘to’ and ‘for’, but involves looser links initially to self-conscious awareness and focuses instead upon responsivity to the ‘facticity’ of nature, that is, to how the natural environment is affected by our actions and to how the future is likely to be impacted by what we do, or fail to do. Picht’s essay has not received the recognition it deserves, but marks four significant achievements in connection with the concept of responsibility. All are pertinent to our topic. First, like Ricoeur, Picht questions but refuses to relinquish all associations of the concept of responsibility with accountability. Indeed, he emphasizes that the core juridical context of meanings about responsibility should remain central in all our debates about the changing demands of responsibility. Picht traces analogies with the Latin responsio and responsum in Roman law, to suggest an ethical meaning strongly influenced by the paradigm of a courtroom, that is in turn influenced largely by Jewish and Christian theologies of the last judgement.43 He detects core theological ideas of all human conduct being subject to divine judgement, with every person due to appear before the judgement seat of Christ (2 Cor. 5:10), as being at the heart of Western notions of responsibility: ‘As a moral concept, responsibility is therefore of Christian provenance … an eschatological idea.’44 When taken together, the courtroom paradigm in Roman 42. Georg Picht, ‘Der Begriff der Verantwortung’, in Wahrheit, Vernunft, Verantwortung: Philosophische Studien, 2nd edition (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1996), 318. The citations here and below are, unless stated otherwise, from Winston Davis’s translation: ‘The Concept of Responsibility: Introduction and Translation’, Religion 28, no. 2 (1998): 190–203, here at 190. Winston’s translation is a slightly condensed version of the German text. For a theological engagement with Picht’s critique of Max Weber’s concept of responsibility, see Wolfgang Schoberth, ‘The Concept of Responsibility: Dilemma and Necessity’, Studies in Christian Ethics 22, no. 4 (2009): 423–441. Picht and H. Richard Niebuhr are complete agreement, says Schoberth, regarding the fiction of the autonomously responsible subject (p. 439). 43. Picht, ‘Der Begriff der Verantwortung’, 318. 44. Picht, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 190.

Framing the Question

15

law and a widely influential theology of divine judgement establish the concept of responsibility as the response of the accused to an accusation, the relationship of the accused to the harm caused and to the community or persons for the harm suffered. The implication is that this core meaning remains central in everyday usage up to the present day. Hence, ‘The concept of responsibility contains a double reference. We are responsible for a thing or for other people. And we are responsible to authorities or judges who impose tasks upon us.’45 Everyday usage in English and German presupposes this courtroom paradigm.46 Despite increasing emphasis on responsivity, Picht is clear that this core, judicial notion of responsibility should not be abandoned. Second, Picht censures Christian tradition for allowing the problem of the agent incurvatio in se ipsum (curved inward on itself) to overwhelm the usefulness of the concept of responsibility: ‘According to the tradition of the church, only by tracing all relevant references back to consientia is a Christian understanding of self and the world possible.’47 For Picht, deriving the criteria for responsibility from inwardfacing reflection on the soul has brought the world to the edge of destruction. His purpose in writing is to break open inward-looking modern concepts of responsibility and recast responsibility – if not in explicitly Augustinian terms, at least as responsivity to worldly realities, including the world’s starving population, threatened atomic catastrophe and need to preserve the natural order. He attempts to break open the subjectivism of modern Western philosophy and theology with regard to the concept of responsibility while laying much of the blame for the inward-looking character of responsibility on Christianity’s focus on the inward life of the soul – as ‘the turning of the soul into itself ’. Thus Picht makes responsivity to others and to the natural environment central to his concept of responsibility. Moreover, this framing of the question of responsibility is learned in part from Christian tradition and the notion of being responsible or accountable before divine judgement. The meaning of responsibility does not originate from the agent’s subjectivity but from an external party. While recognizing that the term ‘responsibility’ was not used until the modern era, that is, relatively late in Christian tradition, his point is that the notion of personal answerability (L. respondere, responsio, responsum) before the judgement seat 45. Picht, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 191. 46. For more on this, see Kurt Bayertz, Mit Beiträgen von Kurt Bayertz, H.W. Bierhoff, Dieter Birnbacher, Christoph Hubig, Werner Krawietz, Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, Hans Lenk und Matthias Maring, Verantwortung: Prinzip oder Problem? (Darmstadt: Wiss.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), 16–20; and an overview by Ina Ranson, ‘“Verantortung” in Germany: Encountering the Sense of Responsibility’, in Responsibility and Cultures of the World: Dialogue around a Collective Challenge, ed. Edith Sizoo (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010), 193–212, esp. 195–198. The point is that the contests of the courtroom are analogous to wrestling with questions of responsibility. Multiple relationships are in play, including relationships of authority. 47. Picht, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 192.

16

The Limit of Responsibility

of Christ has been uppermost within Christian tradition since Augustine. The conscience is the inner realm of the soul where the demands of judgement before God are faced. Picht’s concern is with the narrowing or abridgement of what modernity has bundled into the concept of responsibility to the moral agent’s attitude to their own action,48 to the inwardness of the soul or itinerarium mentis (journey of the mind).49 ‘Christendom cannot turn its back on the fifteen hundred years of ecclesiastical practice devoted to reflection on the individual soul. The turning of the soul into itself is an incurvatio in se ipsum which, theologically, is difficult to justify. Clearly, this return of the soul to its inwardness … lead it to the edge of an abyss.’50 For Picht, this abyss – or modern understanding of responsibility – has no home in theology and philosophy influenced by Augustine whose anthropology did not provide for the individual to be the bearer of their own problem of responsibility.51 Third, rather than searching for the criteria of responsibility in the life of the soul, Picht urges attention to the facticity of the world: ‘Responsibility therefore is not a matter of moral consciousness but, rather, is given in the structure of events.’52 ‘Events’, for Picht, include occurrences ranging from the derailment of a train for which lines of responsibility might be traceable to occurrences in nature for which it would be preposterous even to try to trace a causal line of responsibility. His point is fundamentally anthropological: ‘Our essence is determined by history as mediated in nature.’53 Until we peel off constrictive and unrealistic concepts of responsibility that exclude many of the world’s realities, and relearn the meaning of responsibility from the facticity of the world, the term is more or less useless. Morality and right exists because of responsibility: ‘the scope of responsibility is broader than morality or right’.54 Simple chains of causation barely begin to provide for the scope of questions about responsibility. The problem of causality opens before us to a void, as it were, in which connections cannot be made from the effects of an action back to agent. The challenge is to respond to the realities of the world, including the consequences of actions and events that traverse generational boundaries, and ensure that the concept of responsibility is fit for the kind of moral thinking needed today. Fourth, Picht recognizes and attempts to address the problem of the potential infinity of the demands of responsibility when rethought responsively from the facticity of the world. ‘The truth’, he says, ‘is that we must bear the consequences of past guilt whether we can be made liable for them or not’.55 This is because the 48. Picht, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 193. 49. Picht, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 192. 50. Picht, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 192. 51. Picht, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 192. 52. Picht, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 192. 53. Picht, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 195. 54. Picht, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 196. 55. Picht, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 196.

Framing the Question

17

good fruits of any past actions are enjoyed by subsequent generations. But what is to prevent a society or individual from being crushed under a potentially infinite burden? How is the universality of such a burden of responsibility to be borne? Picht’s observation is that we can take responsibility for the future only if we take responsibility for the past: ‘A generation that forgets that it owes its own thought and action to centuries of tradition will not be able to pass on the things that later generations should preserve.’56 For all its failings, he says, Christian theology teaches as much when its eschatological dimension is not narrowed to the individual soul’s inward life. The eschatological dimension of Christian theology is what opens the concept of responsibility to its past and future dimensions. Any society or person who does ‘this’ or ‘that’ must also bear the responsibility of any wrongdoing that contributed to these fruits. Equally, anyone who benefits from or declares support for the actions of previous generations is inseparable from some element of moral responsibility in the present: ‘what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’.57 Picht’s response is to focus the question of responsibility practically upon tasks that fall within the remit of given agents. Tasks change in the course of history, he observes, but tasks constitute the bearer of responsibility as agent of the action.58 Picht is one of several theorists for whom responsibility begins in encounter with the other person. Picht is familiar with the landmark work I and Thou (1922), in which Martin Buber described human life, or its basic ontology, as essentially a movement in response to the other, the eternal Thou. The opening pages of this famous text lay out convictions learned inter alia from Hasidic texts. Buber’s fundamental conviction, learned from ancient Jewish traditions, is that every person is presented with two options in regard to their attitude to the world: I-It or I-Thou.59 I-It is an orientation or stance that objectifies the other person and expresses an attitude of separation and detachment. The self experiences the world as ‘other’ and encounters other people as ‘its’. The primary locus of experience is within the self: The man who experiences has no part in the world. For it is in him and not between him and the world that the experience arises. The world has no part in the experience. It permits itself to be experienced, but has no concern in the matter. For it does nothing to the experience, and the experience does nothing to it.60

56. Picht, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 196–197. 57. Picht, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 96. 58. Picht, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 200. 59. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner, 1958), 62. 60. Buber, I and Thou, 21.

18

The Limit of Responsibility

An I-It attitude delimits the self ’s relationship with the other to an external relationship of abstraction, analysis and utilization. In considering a tree, for example, Buber says, the self can look at it, see its movement, dissect its parts, subdue its physical presence and so on. In this I-It relationship, the tree and the self remain apart and opposed, within a purely numerical relationship. Alternatively, the self can understand itself as being in relationship with the tree in such a way that the tree is no longer It but rather is encountered differently as integral to the life or event of which both are part. The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it – only in a different way.61

For Buber, the self and the tree share a relationship. Such relationships are all the more meaningful when shared between persons, but the same basic attitudes apply: I-It or I-Thou. I-It relationships are focused on the use that can be made of the other. I-Thou relationships are open to different kinds of encounter, during which each person is on a journey of discovery. The self becomes truly a self, an ‘I’, in encounter: ‘Here is the cradle of the real life.’62 Only in I-Thou relationships, in which each party is recognized for their uniqueness, does the self truly become and grow as an ‘I’. Only in recognition of the eternal Thou, the God who is Being over and above us, does the self truly become a person called into life by the Other: For he who speaks the word God and really has Thou in mind (whatever the illusion by which he is held), addresses the true Thou of his life, which cannot be limited by another Thou, and to which he stands in a relation that gathers up and includes all others.63

God does not need to be sought or drawn into encounter, because the divine being incorporates – it ‘gathers up and includes’ – all other relationships. Recognizing God as the eternal Thou precludes the reduction of any other person to the status of an It. While some I-It relations with objects are inevitable and intrinsic to human existence, objectifying others demeans both parties: ‘[I]n all the seriousness of truth, hear this: without It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man’.64 The self loses in terms of the meaning of their existence and is vulnerable to living an unfulfilled life that fails to reach its potential. This is a significant issue that will run throughout this book, namely, whether a reversal of how the question of responsibility is framed from I-You-I to YouI-You or You-We-You becomes too difficult to handle because of the potentially

61. Buber, I and Thou, 21. 62. Buber, I and Thou, 24. 63. Buber, I and Thou, 77–78. 64. Buber, I and Thou, 44.

Framing the Question

19

unlimited scope of responsibility. If, for instance, we hold with Buber, Levinas, Butler, et al., that I exist ethically because You hold me irreplaceably in your gaze, human living and ethical relationship starts in and with the other.65 Someone other than oneself draws one into relation: The other concerns me in all his material misery. It is a matter, eventually, of nourishing him, of clothing him. It is exactly the biblical assertion: Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty, give shelter to the shelter-less. The material side of man, the material life of the other, concerns me and, in the other, takes on for me an elevated signification and concerns my holiness. Recall in Matthew 25, Jesus’ ‘You have hunted me, you have pursued me.’ ‘When have we hunted you, when have we pursued you?’, the virtuous ask Jesus. Reply: when you ‘refused to feed the poor’, when you hunted down the poor, when you were indifferent to him! As if, with regard to the other, I had responsibility starting from eating and drinking. And as if the other whom I hunted were equivalent to a hunted God. This holiness is perhaps but the holiness of a social problem. All the problems of eating and drinking, insofar as they concern the other, become sacred.66

65. So, for instance, Emanuel Levinas wrote about ‘the face of the Other’ (Fr. L’autrui) as the ground of ethics. [Emanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Dusquesne University Press, 1999).] His ethics is about personal encounter, intersubjective relations, but with awareness of the potential infinity of such encounters. The face of the Other is a living presence; it is expression. The face speaks (p. 66). The face overflows all images made of itself (p. 297); the face at each moment destroys and overflows any plastic image that I might make of it. The face of the Other is more than an idea existing to my own measure. It expresses itself (pp. 50–51). The face is present in its refusal to be contained (p. 194). The face resists possession, resists my powers (p. 197). The face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation (p. 98). The face is a source from which all meaning appears (p. 297). The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation (p. 201). The Other faces me and puts me in question and obliges me (p. 207). The face is what forbids us to kill (p. 86). Face-to-face encounter alone can elicit an ethic of responsibility for and with the other. For David F. Ford’s helpful account of how Levinas’s ‘face’ does not equate to the concept of an event but is utterly and uncompromisingly ethical because of its personal content, see Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 62. See also Sandor Goodhart, ‘The Self and Other People: Reading Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation with Rene Girard and Emmanuel Levinas’, Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry 7, no. 16 (Fall 2001): 14–25. 66. Emanuel Levinas, cited from Jill Robbins, ed., Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 52. This citation was first drawn to my attention by Kajornpat Tangyin, ‘Reading Levinas on Ethical Responsibility’, in Responsibility and Commitment: Eighteen Essays in Honor of Gerhold K. Becker, ed. Tzewan Kwan (Waldkirch: Edition Gorz, 2008), 155–172. Tangyin specifically draws attention

20

The Limit of Responsibility

For Levinas, encounter with the face of the other means that the responsibility of self to the other is immediately personal, concerned with basic material needs, not reducible to calculation but, rather, potentially infinite. Responsibility is not born by the individual alone, but is asymmetrical in the sense that the person without immediate and basic material needs bears less responsibility than the person capable of responding to the demand inherent in the other’s experience of need. The problem, as Simone Drichel further observes, is that ethics, and especially an ethic of responsibility, becomes a form of sacrificial masochism.67 My responsibility to the other never ends.68 Levinas’s account of responsibility is summarized helpfully by Kajornpat Tangyin, as follows: To be responsible for the other is, for Levinas, essentially to be a ‘substitution’ for the other. Being a substitution means: to put myself in the other’s place, not to appropriate him or her according to my wishes, but to offer to the other what he or she needs, starting with basic material needs. To be an I is to substitute for the other. To be an I does not begin and end in itself, but departs from the self to the other without any return into the self. To substitute for the other is to leave oneself for the other. It is to transcend one’s egoism.69

To be responsible is not merely to respond intellectually, emotionally and practically to the other, but to become their substitution, that is, to put one’s very self into their place. Indifference is overcome as the self becomes so identified with the other person that their needs become their own. To be responsible is to give not only one’s cash and possessions but one’s very self. As Tangyin summarizes, ‘To be human, for Levinas, is therefore to be for the other, to bear responsibility for the other, to substitute for the

to Levinas’s concern with basic material needs, how responsibility is not reducible to a calculation and how responsibility is held by the individual but not exclusively; every individual is part of wider social groupings. 67. Simone Drichel, ‘Face to Face with the Other Other: Levinas versus the Postcolonial’, Levinas Studies, 7 (2012): 22. 68. On the related debate around whether language mediates between Self and Other, that is, whether modern assumptions about the relation between Self and Other are somehow repeated in Levinas’s philosophy despite appearances to the contrary, see Derrida’s challenge in Adieu to this effect. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 19–20. And John D. Caputo, ‘Adieu – sans Dieu: Derrida and Levinas’, in The Face of the Other and the Trace of God. Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jeffrey Bloechl (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 294. See further Simon Critchley, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 17. For a useful overview, see Drichel, ‘Face to Face with the Other Other: Levinas versus the Postcolonial’, 21–42. 69. Tangyin, ‘Reading Levinas on Ethical Responsibility’, 158.

Framing the Question

21

other, and to be a hostage of the other.’70 This is the essential structure of subjectivity. Ontology and epistemology are subordinate to ethics. The self is responsible before they are free. Freedom does not mean the ability to exercise an autonomous will, but rather the ability to sacrifice their liberty before the primordial call of the other.71 Freedom is obligation to the other. Responsibility is the living out of this freedom. Subsequent theorists have picked up Levinas’s particular style of humanism to construct philosophies of justice fit for a globalized world. The most developed, perhaps, is Ernst Wolff ’s Political Responsibility for a Globalised World: After Levinas’ Humanism in which he argues that there is a global, and not merely personal, scope to Levinas’s ethic of responsibility. After Levinas, Wolff argues, how citizens of the world think about the conditions of responsibility in a globalized era requires attention to the kind of humanism that he advances. The primordial nature of Levinas’s encounter with the Other must set the tone for every debate about the meaning of responsibility.72 All discussion about the human being, in political mode as every other, presupposes the basic human ontology: ‘as Levinas summarises’, writes Wolff, ‘the most important lesson he learned from Sein and Zeit, the whole human being is ontology’.73 There is no escaping how the Other calls the Self into being. The question of motivation, for instance, is the question of how one responds to the prior, ontological source of meaning encountered in the face. Here the problem of infinity becomes apparent: ‘Levinas’ philosophy is one of demanding ethics, one of remaining responsible for the other even up to the point of unsaying the Said that you are yourself, that is, up to the point of giving yourself in saintliness to the other.’74 There is a delimiting political dimension to this demand: the state is the institutional condition within which this ethic is liveable.75 Fundamentally, however, it is the face-to-face proximity of Self and Other that yields Levinas’s philosophy of responsibility, and that, potentially, offers no answer to the problem of its potentially infinite scope. As Susan Handelman remarks, in Levinas’s ethic in his later writings becomes close to unbearable: ‘the terms he uses to describe subjectivity and responsibility often become disturbing: trauma, wounding, hostage, obsession, persecution, sacrifice without reserve’.76 70. Tangyin, ‘Reading Levinas on Ethical Responsibility’, 159. 71. This is reported in Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 63. 72. Ernst Wolff, Political Responsibility for a Globalised World (Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2011), 17. 73. Wolff, Political Responsibility, p. 21. Citing ENT 2 or EN 13, ‘Tout l’homme est ontologie’. 74. Wolff, Political Responsibility, 27. 75. Levinas, Ethics of the Infinite, 66. 76. Susan Handelman, ‘Facing the Other: Levinas, Perelman, Rosenzweig’, in Divine Aporia: Postmodern Conversations about the Other, ed. John C. Hawley (London: Associated University Press, 2000), 277.

22

The Limit of Responsibility

The burden grows even heavier with reference to the child who represents a future other than my future; the future of the child does not merely represent the continuation of the time that I experience but a commitment to future generations beyond my time.77 Judith Butler stands in this tradition and concludes Giving an Account of Oneself with the observation that the central questions of moral philosophy, including the meaning of responsibility, demand a willingness to be ‘undone by another’, that is, to vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’ as a kind of possession, to risk new meanings, new conceptions of selfhood and new perceptions of what constitutes a moral relationship, at points of deep unknowing.78 To ‘be undone’ by another is to be anguished, moved, prompted to act, rendered uncertain, unable to give a full account of oneself and yet irreducibly oneself in relation to others. To ‘be undone’ is to have established and functional definitions of responsibility disturbed, and, indeed, to have unsettled the subject’s capability of attaining to the meaning of responsibility: When Adorno tells us that only by becoming inhuman can we attain the possibility of becoming human, he underscores the disorientation at the heart of moral deliberation, the fact that the ‘I’ who seeks to chart its course has not made the map it reads, and that it does not have all the language it needs to read the map, and sometimes cannot find the map itself. The ‘I’ emerges as a deliberating subject only once the world has appeared as a countervailing picture, an externality to be known and negotiated at an epistemic distance.79

Adorno faults Kant and his followers for not recognizing human fallibility, the conditions of knowledge, situatedness, the limits of perception, and so on, as being the basis of accountability and responsibility. Foucault attends further to the coercive powers and effects that bear upon the individual: There is no possibility of a pure and unmediated relation of myself to my will, conceived as free or not, apart from the constitution of my self, and its modes of self-observation, within a given historical ontology.80

The modern philosophical heritage understands being human in ways that cut the individual off from the world, espouse the will as the defining condition of the human and eviscerate vulnerability from selfhood. In this context, responsibility is conceived as a form of narcissism that recoils from the Other – the myriad forms of bad conscience that Freud and Nietzsche et al. analysed so deftly:

77. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 268–269. 78. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 79. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 110–111. 80. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 109.

Framing the Question

23

I do not mean a heightened moral sense that consists simply in an internalization of rage and a shoring up of the superego. Nor am I referring to a sense of guilt that seeks to find a cause in oneself for what one has suffered.81

Responsibility, Butler says, cannot be left to languish among philosophies where self-preservation is the highest goal, and the defence of a narcissistic point of view is the most urgent psychic need. That we are impinged upon primarily against our will is the sign of a vulnerability and a beholdenness that we cannot will away. We can defend it only by prizing the asociality of the subject over against a difficult and intractable, even sometimes unbearable, relationality.82

The modern I-centred subject is undone by the realities of existence. Responsibility can no longer function as a heightened moral sense that props up a failing conceptuality of selfhood. Rather, if we recognize unfreedom, that is, inescapability, from the Other to be at the heart of selfhood and our relations, responsibility is no longer a matter of cultivating the will but of allowing pre-willed responses to the Other to make ethical demands upon us. Butler cites Levinas’s philosophy of the face, to which the I is obligated to respond, as significant in modern philosophical history: Whatever the Other has done, the Other still makes an ethical demand upon me, has a ‘face’ to which I am obligated to respond – meaning that I am, as it were, precluded from revenge by virtue of a relation I never chose.83

Butler develops this line of thought with respect to the possibility of obligation upon Jews under Nazism, and the suffering of Israel, not to kill in response to persecution. Mindful of how close this line of argument might drift towards affinity with those who would blame the Jews and other victims of Nazi genocide for their fates, Butler insists upon the need to rethink responsibility on the basis of the unfreedom, situatedness, limitations and conditions that bear upon the self, rather than asserted freedoms of the will that are, in effect, delusions. It is not reason’s limit but wounded unknowingness from which the problem of responsibility first emerges. Modern notions of responsibility are, too often, she says, attempts at selfcare and self-mastery: ‘unsatisfiable efforts to “return” to a self from the situation of being foreign to oneself ’.84 Socrates’ injunction ‘Know thyself!’ is possible only if the subject has a relation to truth and not merely to oneself. ‘I have a relation to myself ’, says Butler, citing Foucault, ‘but I have it in the context of an address to the other’.85 Responsibility begins when the modern subject is recognized as undone, 81. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 99. 82. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 100. 83. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 91. 84. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 129. 85. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 131.

24

The Limit of Responsibility

when notions of self-sufficiency and self-willed possession are vacated and when forgiveness is sought. With Buber, Levinas, Foucault and others, Butler redefines responsibility in terms of responsiveness to the others, and the conditions in which one finds oneself, rather than as a moral-philosophical category built upon practices of holding oneself and others accountable for actions and their consequences. Responsibility as judgement, justification or blame with respect to particular actions is exposed as a problematic and narcissistic endeavour that focuses on the self ’s moral status while concealing what’s really entailed in responsiveness to others and the demands of the future.86 Together, this cluster of theorists variously unsettle accounts of responsibility that issue from the isolated albeit empathetic subjectivity of the ‘I’.87 Responsibility 86. Others have picked up Butler’s challenge to develop accounts of responsibility that do not seek the moral purity of the self, and start by arguing against modern accounts of responsibility as accountability before seeking thereafter to reclaim some notion of responsibility as accountability relearned from the Other. See Annika Thiem, Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), esp. 4–6. ‘The challenge’, she writes, ‘is to undo the certainty that where there are experience, action, and knowledge, there must be also subjects who precede these acts, cause them to happen, and undergo them’ (p. 11). The self is not given as an ‘I’ but rather emerges as a subject during ongoing processes of relation to others. 87. Jacques Derrida’s discussion of difference in Of Grammatology (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) is, in many respects, a reaction against the ‘sameness’ of the ‘I’ in modern Western philosophy. As a word that refers primarily to what may be differentiated between the audible (spoken) and written meaning of words, difference escapes close definition but is used by Derrida to alert his readers to the delimiting character of philosophy and ethics that starts from the subjectivity of the ‘I’ and looks outward to the other. Following Levinas, Derrida thinks that ethics (although he resists use of this word because of its logocentrism) comes back always to ‘the other’, who exists beyond the calculating freedom of any individual ‘I’. Feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray tries to awaken readers from the rationalist dream that allows neo-platonic Western philosophical assumptions about the thinking of ‘I’ to go unchallenged. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), she argues that the Cartesian-Kantian ‘I’ was a man and that sexual difference needs to be factored into Western thought. Jean-Luc Nancy seeks to resituate ethics in the ‘We’ of operative communities rather than the isolated ‘I’ of modern philosophy. Starting from relation rather than isolated identity as the condition of existence, he draws from Heidegger’s notion of being (G. Dasein) understood as in difference from itself and exposed to alterity or otherness. Jean-Luc Nancy, Être singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilee, 1996). Being-with (être-avec) is, for Nancy, a first-level, ontological commitment that overturns the presuppositions upon which modern, Western neo-Cartesian ethics is built. The question of coexistence becomes primary. On this point, see Simon Critchley, ‘With Being-With? Notes on Jean-Luc Nancy’s Rewriting of Being and Time’, Studies in Practical Philosophy 1, no. 1 (1999): 53–67, esp. 54.

Framing the Question

25

is always and already a relationship of which one is already a part, and into which one is summoned by the Other. Responsibility is not about care of the soul, inwardness or instrumental rationality, nor is it reducible to the calculation of consequences; it is whatever demands a person’s moral attention regardless of their will. But who are You who demand my moral attention? Everyman? Everywoman? Can I bear such responsibility? Does this kind of responsibility not become infinitely demanding and unbearable? Will I not be condemned, as Simon Critchley suggests, to disappointment and despondency because I cannot bear such responsibility?88 Does responsibility become ‘an ethical demand that is “onesided, radical and unfulfillable”’?89 Will I not be rendered passive and impotent before an unfulfillable demand? In a globalizing era, the burden will be excessive. Or will responsibility become so generalizable in meaning that its traction slips? Whereas classical legal concepts define responsibility as the obligation to make up or compensate for damage caused through one’s own fault, the concept of responsibility has acquired a more recent usage that refers to a seemingly unlimited obligation to fulfil certain duties or carry out certain commitments, such that the concept overflows any single meaning.90 ‘At the limit, you are responsible for everything and everyone.’91 And this is at least potentially nonsensical. Can the concept of responsibility remain meaningful in connection with membership of political communities and living in the face of the violence caused by the mere fact of my existence in the world? What happens following the realization that responsibility does not reside merely with modernity’s sovereign individual but is constituted by response and interdependence? How are we to retain the question of personal fault when the juridical idea of responsibility is rivalled by extensions of meaning that include not only the notion of ‘to answer for’ but also inter alia ‘to respond’?92 Butler’s own response to the potentially unlimited scope of the problem of responsibility when cast responsively before the face of the other is to develop an ethic of cohabitation, precarity and shared need. As Buber alludes to the vulnerability of the self unresponsive to the other, so Butler draws attention to the illusion of self-sufficiency: ‘[E]thical responsibility presupposes ethical responsiveness.’93 Her central point beyond this move, however, is that ethical responsibility presupposes also that we all share the same planet and have similar bodily needs; it is not only the unchosen, open-ended and plural character of the other’s demand upon me but also the unchosen, open-ended and plural character 88. Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (New York/London: Verso, 2007), 93. 89. Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 40, 53–54. 90. Ricoeur, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 11–12. 91. Ricoeur, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 12. 92. Ricoeur, ‘The Concept of Responsibility’, 12. 93. Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 110.

26

The Limit of Responsibility

of our cohabitation that gives rise to ethical obligation. For Butler, it is not only the sheer existence of the other but also the precariousness of our coexistence that gives rise to ethical obligation: ‘My point is not to rehabilitate humanism but rather to struggle for a conception of ethical obligation that is grounded in precarity.’94 It is not from pervasive love for humanity or for a desire for peace, says Butler, that we strive to live together: We live together because we have no choice …. We can be dead or alive to the sufferings of others – they can be dead or alive to us. But it is only when we understand that what happens there also happens here, and that ‘here’ is already an elsewhere, and necessarily so, that we stand a chance of grasping the difficult and shifting global connections in ways that let us know the transport and the constraint of what we might still call ethics.95

Ethical obligations that are global in character emerge across vast distances, says Butler, not because we might empathize with the sufferings of others but because we cohabit on the earth. My motivation for ethical action is not that something affects me from what I know about your life. What I know about your life might paralyse me into inaction. Only when I reckon with our shared need, precariousness and the vulnerability of every human body to damage and threat, says Butler, can I rise to the challenge of the otherwise unbearability of the extent of my responsibility to You. Chapter 6 picks up this issue and argues that only as Christ’s body the church is the burden bearable because it is His already. The answer is not escapist because, as Bonhoeffer states so clearly, practical implications follow: ‘The attention of responsible people is directed to concrete neighbours in their concrete reality’ (DBWE 6:261). For the moment, this issue of the potential unbearability of the burden of responsibility encountered responsively in the infinite You is part of our framing of the question of responsibility.

Thoughtlessness Despite the desire of many to live more simply, industry-scale mining is not about to stop any time soon. The lifestyles of those in relatively developed countries demand the products of mining. Recycling and processing efficiencies alone are not likely to meet global demands. According to the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration Foundation, every person in a typical developed country will, during their lifetime, have provided for them 212 lbs of phosphate rock for fertilizers and animal feed supplements, 66 lbs of aluminium (bauxite) used in buildings, tin cans, cars and aircraft, 13 lbs of copper used in buildings, electrical and electronic 94. Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 119. 95. Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 122.

Framing the Question

27

parts, plumbing and transportation, 11 lbs of lead used mostly for batteries in cars and other transportation, 7 lbs of zinc used to make metals rust-resistant, and in paint, rubber and skin creams, 6 lbs of manganese used to make almost all steels for construction, machinery and transportation, 330 lbs of iron ore to make cars, truck, planes and so on.96 Yet few of us pause to contemplate these realities. This is the problem of thoughtlessness. Rooted in the horrors of the Second World War and their aftermath, Hannah Arendt’s writings on responsibility are curiously relevant to our purposes. Born in the same year as Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906), Arendt’s reflections on personal responsibility under dictatorship, the relationship of responsibility to freedom defined in terms of action rather than will, collective responsibility and the political dimensions that the exercise of responsibility allow are especially useful in allowing us to trace the changing shape of the question of responsibility in the decades surrounding the Second World War. Many critics have wrestled with Arendt’s often fluid answers to these questions and have variously presented her as an agonistic political philosopher,97 an aesthete,98 a predominantly Socratic moralist,99 a philosopher of forgiveness 100 or as an ethicist of plurality.101 She points to how an ethic of responsibility must become more complicated than previously supposed and inter alia reclaims the notion of conscience as necessary in contexts where crimes and horrors are being committed beyond the limits of one’s own proactive initiative or compliance.102 Arendt’s writings on responsibility in contrast to thoughtlessness are scattered throughout her writings. Responsibility and Judgment is an edited collection that gathers together unpublished writings from the last decade of her life, which deal with fundamental questions and concerns about the nature of evil and the making of moral choices. This collection contains the especially well-known essays ‘Personal

96. Minerals Education Coalition, http://www.mineralseducationcoalition.org (accessed 5 February 2016). 97. Bonnie Honig, ‘The Politics of Agonism: A Critical Response’, Political Theory 21, no. 3 (August 1993): 528–533. 98. D. Villa, ‘Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche and the Aestheticization of Political Action’, Political Theory 20, no. 2 (May 1992): 274–308. 99. Mika Ojakangas, ‘Arendt, Socrates, and the Ethics of Conscience’, Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 8 (Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies), 67–85. 100. Andrew Schaap, ‘Forgiveness, Reconciliation and Transitional Justice’, in Hannah Arendt and International Relations, ed. A.F. Lang and J. Williams (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 67–93. 101. Alice MacLachlan, ‘An Ethic of Plurality: Reconciling Politics and Morality in Hannah Arendt’, in History and Judgement, ed. A. MacLachlan and I. Torsen (Vienna: IWM Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conferences), Vol. 21. http://www.iwm.at/publications/5-juniorvisiting-fellows-conferences/vol-xxi/alice-maclachlan/ (accessed 31 August 2015). 102. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 48.

The Limit of Responsibility

28

Responsibility under Dictatorship’ (1964) and ‘Collective Responsibility’ (1987). The former recognizes explicitly that personal responsibility under dictatorship is difficult because historical trends and dialectical movements sweep individuals along within processes that appear to have some sort of deeper meaning but that, in practice, relieve the particular person of specific blame for actions undertaken or omitted.103 Arendt distinguishes between personal responsibility with its moral dimensions as lived out among family and one’s local acquaintances, and the political responsibility exercised by governments that has little to do with the moral imperatives that pertain to individuals. To have acted wrongly in a personal context leads properly to an individual’s feeling guilty. Personal responsibility should be distinguished from political responsibility, however, because feeling guilty for deeds that we have not committed leads to absurdity: Morally speaking, it is as wrong to feel guilty without having done anything specific as it is to feel free of all guilt if one actually is guilty of something.104

Guilt is intensely personal: There is no such thing as collective guilt or collective innocence; guilt and innocence make sense only if applied to individuals.105

Responsibility, by contrast, exceeds the personal life of individuals because every individual participates to some degree in public life. Individuals support governments, unless they purposefully take a stand against their policies and actions. Even under dictatorship, it is not enough to claim obedience to orders: The question addressed to those who participated and obeyed orders should never be, ‘Why did you obey?’ but ‘Why did you support?’106

Obedience is an inappropriate political concept: ‘there is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters’.107 This goes against manifold streams of thought in Western political theory since Plato and Aristotle for whom every body politic, says Arendt, is constituted of rulers and ruled. No ruler is more than first among peers. Every person ‘ruled’ can withdraw their tacit support for policies undertaken and for which they might bear responsibility as a cog in the wheel of government and its activities. Only those who withdraw from public life in its entirety – which few can do – can avoid moral and legal responsibility for crimes and moral offences that they might not themselves have committed but have been committed by democratic government or dictatorship. For Arendt, it is ultimately 103. Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’, in Responsibility and Judgment, 20. 104. Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’, 28. 105. Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’, 29. 106. Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’, 48. 107. Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’, 48.

Framing the Question

29

self-respect and a sense of personal dignity, not the love of some neighbour, that produces the strength needed to take such a stand.108 The individual reaches a point of saying ‘This I can’t do’ rather than ‘This I ought not to do.’109 Only the former is likely to result in this individual’s holding of a moral line. Morality concerns the individual in their singularity, including the question of the company among which they want to spend their lives.110 Responsibility falls upon anyone who participates in public life. But how does this responsibility fall? What follows from every citizen’s being present politically in the world, inseparable from the responsibility of the ‘We’, not merely obedient to the law or tied to social mores?111 Here Arendt brings the term ‘collective responsibility’ into play: No collective responsibility is involved in the case of the thousand experienced swimmers, lolling at a public beach and letting a man drown in the sea without coming to his help, because they were no collectivity to begin with; no collective responsibility is involved …. Two conditions have to be present for collective responsibility: I must be held responsible for something I have not done, and the reason for my responsibility must be my membership in a group (a collective) which no voluntary act of mine can dissolve, that is, a membership which is utterly unlike a business partnership which I can dissolve at will.112

As a member of a political community, the citizen is collectively responsible along with their fellows for the life of this community. Only by leaving it entirely can they escape responsibility. That the individual feels powerless and isolated is a real consideration, but such feelings are subjective, and the more fundamental matter is the choice between doing wrong and accepting the suffering that would probably follow from refusing to support wrong. Arendt’s critical position on collective responsibility is summarized best by Annabel Herzog, who draws attention to the responsibility attaching to citizenship: I am responsible for the endless consequences of my acts because they will happen in a world that I will be sharing and experiencing with others, both actively and passively: I am responsible for the consequences of my acts because I do not disappear after I act, and I also participate in the web of relationships. Put differently, my responsibility for the consequences of my own acts is a kind of collective responsibility that I now endure like any other fellow citizen. For example, if I participate in the election of a particular government, I am 108. Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, in Responsibility and Judgment, 69. 109. Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, 78. 110. Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, 146. 111. Arendt, ‘Collective Responsibility’, in Responsibility and Judgment, 156. See also Annabel Herzog, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Responsibility’, http://www.sussex.ac.uk/ cspt/documents/10-3.pdf (accessed 23 August 2017). 112. Arendt, ‘Collective Responsibility’, 149.

30

The Limit of Responsibility responsible for my doing, that is, for influencing a given political situation. Subsequently, I will be responsible for the policy of this government not because I voted for it, but because it reflects the chosen policy of my community. From this point forward, there will be no difference between me, who voted for this government, and my neighbour who voted for other candidates.113

Regardless of one’s personal moral and religious convictions, the person who lives publicly in community is never excused their part in the collective responsibility of that community. To fail to accept this responsibility, whether from fear or a sense of powerlessness, is, Arendt says, to live in despair and impotence. This is not only personally demoralizing but also anti-political because fear and despair result in either the will to dominate or to be dominated.114 Politics is based on the fact of human plurality, but fear and despair isolate. The question of responsibility is the question of whether politics is possible or will vanish entirely from our world, when the meaning of politics is freedom.115 Yet the meaning of responsibility is contested. In Arendt’s 1961 essay ‘What Is Freedom?’, she writes: In its simplest form, the difficulty may be summed up as the contradiction between our consciousness and conscience, telling us that we are free and hence responsible, and our everyday experience in the outer world, in which we orient ourselves according to the principle of causality.116

The freedom that allows persons to regard themselves as responsible is taken to be a self-evident truth, Arendt says. But this freedom is a mirage because each of us is subject to a host of forces and motivations that are hidden to onlookers and to ourselves, and that bear upon our actions. Thinking can expose this truth but is unlikely to effect the freedom needed to make a difference. For the moment we reflect upon an act which was undertaken under the assumption of our being a free agent, it seems to come under the sway of two kinds of causality, of the causality of inner motivation on the one hand, and of the causal principle which rules the outer world on the other …. But it does little to eliminate the greatest and most dangerous difficulty, namely, that thought itself, in its theoretical as well as its pre-theoretical form, makes freedom disappear.117

113. Herzog, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Responsibility’, 46. 114. Arendt, ‘Montesquieu’s Revision of the Tradition’, in Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 68–69. 115. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, in The Promise of Politics, 96 and 108. 116. Hannah Arendt, ‘What Is Freedom?’, in Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Classics, 1968), 142. 117. Arendt, ‘What Is Freedom?’, 144.

Framing the Question

31

Freedom is the condition necessary for personal responsibility. Significantly, however, Arendt problematizes the traditional Western philosophical emphasis on freedom as a phenomenon of the will, with its focus on both inner motivations and outer influences that can cause a person to act in a particular way and shifts attention towards the freedom to act. In contradistinction to the social theories of the modern world in which the will to act is primary, Arendt’s claim is that freedom is not predominantly intercourse with oneself, whether as a quasiSocratic inner dialogue of the mind, Pauline-Augustinian reflection of heart and soul or Nietzschean will-to-power, but rather a coincidence of ‘I will’ with ‘I can’, that is, the moment at which the interiority of the self can speak into the political realm and find public expression.118 Every human being is a new beginning. The freedom to effect other new beginnings is what matters: In the birth of each man this initial beginning is reaffirmed, because in each instance something new comes into an already existing world which will continue to exist after each individual’s death. Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the same. God created man in order to introduce into the world the faculty of beginning: freedom.119

Arendt’s notion of natality is about how, in the process of thinking, ontological newness manifests itself ‘as the unique point at which past and future meet’.120 The mind’s dis-ease and irritation about the present opens a space into which the new may be born. Responsibility is understood by Arendt in relation to this concept of freedom and the capacity to act. Responsibility was evidenced (prior to her 1961 essay ‘What Is Freedom?’) in the 1954 essay ‘The Crisis in Education’ where the responsibility for the education and development of a child is cast primarily in terms of care and protection.121 What matters more than the particular content of an educational schema are the conditions necessary for a child’s growth and flourishing. Nor is this a responsibility that rests upon parents alone or that may be abstracted from wider care-related considerations: Anyone who refuses to assume joint responsibility for the world should not have children and must not be allowed to take part in educating them.122

Responsibility for children is inseparable from a wider sense of responsibility for the world. The child is our humanity and prospects for survival: 118. Arendt, ‘What Is Freedom?’, 159. 119. Arendt, ‘What Is Freedom?’, 166. 120. John Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology (London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2016), 210. 121. Arendt, ‘The Crisis in Education’, in Between Past and Future, 182. 122. Arendt, ‘The Crisis in Education’, 186.

32

The Limit of Responsibility Vis-à-vis the child it is as though he were a representative of all adult inhabitants … : This is our world.123

Our attitude of care and protection to the child should be the same as our attitude to the wider world. In the specific context of the debate about education, Arendt’s reflections develop into a discussion of professionalism, authority and the experiences to which a child should be introduced. Her scattered comments about responsibility more generally touch upon the relationship between the responsibility of the individual, the potentially unmanageable scope of responsibility and the need for authority in political and public life. If every child represents ‘our world’ to every individual, then the scope of responsibility is unfeasibly vast. Only a realistic wrestling with the question and practice of authority can mediate between the individual and ‘our world’: If we remove authority from political and public life, it may mean that from now on an equal responsibility for the course of the world is to be required of everyone.124

Such a high demand upon individuals would be unbearable and would lead to a repudiation of responsibility either consciously or unconsciously. The problem is that resistance to authority is undermining a politically viable exercise of responsibility: All responsibility for the world is being rejected, the responsibility for giving orders no less than for obeying them.125

For Arendt, the loss or dissipation of responsibility is inseparable from a more general, societal loss of authority. Responsibility must be understood in political terms if it is to mean anything in individual, personal terms. The conditions for the political exercise of responsibility are personal freedom and truth telling. No one possesses all truth. Half-truths are commonplace. Opinions are diverse. Tyrannies of truth have devastated countries. Sometimes politics, when viewed from the perspectives of questions about truth, demands individuals to take a stand against those in power.126 The political significance of academia as somehow standing guard over factual truth and documented human records is easily overlooked. Responsibility exercised amid untruth is very difficult. For our purposes, we take from Arendt her focus on the political as being about setting the requisite conditions for freedom and making possible the togetherness of human plurality in community. Responsibility is exercised in the public arena, 123. Arendt, ‘The Crisis in Education’, 186. 124. Arendt, ‘The Crisis in Education’, 186. 125. Arendt, ‘The Crisis in Education’, 187. 126. Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics’, in Between Past and Future, 255.

Framing the Question

33

if only by refusing to support the exploitation of others and having the courage to accept whatever follows from taking a stand because one simply cannot support the continuance of evil. We further take from Arendt a refusal to posit an opposition between theory and action because, as for Cato whom Arendt cites in The Human Condition, there is no contradiction between doing nothing and being active.127 More than this, we take from Arendt the idea that the question of moral responsibility is very often the question of thoughtlessness: He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the world’s greatest criminals of that period.128

Adolf Eichmann, says Arendt, was no Nazi fundamentalist, no main antagonist in the play like Iago or Richard III but, rather, was heedless and complacent, confused and a little reckless – all of which, she says, have become outstanding characteristics of our time.129 Hence Arendt’s famous thesis about evil and banality: ‘the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil’.130 ‘She is the intellectual companion who challenges us not to be content merely to repeat what our predecessors have said but to do the thinking that our predecessors now demand of us.’131 John Kiess thus concludes his introduction to Hannah Arendt and Theology, in which he engages Arendt as public philosopher for whom thinking has the power to condition us against evil, to play a gadfly role with respect to all established criteria, and values and measures, and to direct how we befriend fellow citizens while together tending our world. The main suggestion that I take from Kiess is that Arendt’s work on thinking remains one of the most suggestive, if still largely unexplored, areas of her thought, and that Augustinian practices of meditation inform her contemplation.132 We find in Arendt someone ‘profoundly invested in healing divides between theory and practice … a voice that is eminently public and engaged’.133 ‘No man can keep his conscience intact’, says Kiess, citing from The Life of the Mind (1973), ‘who cannot actualize the dialogue with himself, that is, who lacks the solitude required for all 127. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 325. This is noted by Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 189. 128. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 287–288. 129. Arendt, The Human Condition, 5. See Larry Busk, ‘Sleepwalker: Arendt, Thoughtlessness, and the Question of Little Eichmanns’, Social Philosophy Today (31 July 2015) https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=socphiltoday&id=so cphiltoday_2015_0999_7_30_23 (accessed 23 August 2017). 130. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 288. 131. John Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 8. 132. Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 212. 133. Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 8.

34

The Limit of Responsibility

forms of thinking’.134 For Arendt, the wonders of human existence are found in both solitude and amid plurality. Whether alone or amid the wondrous variability of human beings, the activity of thinking can unfreeze our minds from all established criteria, values, measurements of good and evil, and so on, and is necessary for a well-functioning political community.135 Kiess’s portrayal of Arendt is as public philosopher for whom thinking frees us to judge, which then frees us to act.136 Arendt herself is not optimistic about Christianity being able to grasp or function with such an understanding of the political life and the responsibilities it entails. Arendt cites Tertullian more than once: ‘Nec ulla magis res aliena quam publica’ – ‘no matter is more alien to us than what matters publicly’.137 Early Christianity refused to become associated with the public affairs of Rome, she says, because rival gods were operative and because of expectations of the eschaton. Early Christianity took a step back from practical, political concern for the world. Kiess mentions but does not labour Arendt’s repeated statements about how Christian morality, from earliest times, urged everyone to mind their own business while regarding political responsibility as a burden to be shouldered by some in order to ensure the well-being of the people.138 Jesus’s exemplifying of goodness was that it should be hidden from the world: A community of people that seriously believes that all human affairs should be managed according to goodness; that is therefore not afraid at least to attempt to love its enemies and repay evil with good; that, in other words considers the ideal of holiness to be its standard of behavior, not only to save their individual souls by turning away from mankind, but also to manage human affairs – such a community has no choice but to retreat from the public arena and avoid its spotlight.139

Arendt does not perceive early Christianity as turning away altogether from the realm of human political affairs, but she is alert to the charge of hypocrisy that will inevitably fall against a community that strives for holiness. To her eyes, the Christian focus on privacy and the inner life, the call to love neighbour does not lend itself to public observance. While, she observes, for Augustine, a few might be called to honourable public service and the ordering of human affairs, the main concerns of Christian life unfold among the society of the faithful. For Arendt, the Christian message was always ambiguous with respect to politics, and its followers poised to flee into seclusion where the life of love can at least be attempted 134. Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 204, citing Arendt, Life of the Mind, Vol. 1, 25. 135. Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 203. 136. Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 41. 137. Tertullian, Apology, 38, cited by Arendt in ‘Collective Responsibility’, 152. See also Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 84 and 136. 138. Arendt, The Human Condition, 60. 139. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 137.

Framing the Question

35

meaningfully. In the Augustinian tradition, political responsibility is envisaged in patriarchal terms as analogous to the head of a household providing for the welfare of those in his care: Obviously, this kind of responsibility resembles the responsibility of the household head for his family more than political responsibility, properly speaking. The Christian precept to mind one’s own business is derived from I Thess. 4:11 ‘that ye study to be quiet and do your own business’ (prattein ta idia), whereby ta idia is understood as opposed to ta koina [‘public common affairs’].140

The Reformation, Arendt says, represents a success in removing everything connected with public affairs from the appearance and display of churches, in turning churches into places of assembly for seclusion and was itself a preparation for the secularization of public life that followed in its wake.141 How, then, is the theologian to read Arendt as public philosopher for whom thinking frees a person to judge, which then frees them to act? Kiess’s reminder is that, for Arendt, ‘our very ability to remain political actors depended upon our willingness to continue to think’.142 Do not Arendt’s observations about the patriarchy, individualism, apoliticism and focus on the privacy of Christianity preclude this? Kiess’s book has no chapter on responsibility and relatively few sections on thinking about the political, the relationship between ethics and politics, theory and practice, plurality, human rights, empowerment and freedom and so on. The one subheading in this area, ‘Political Freedom and the Limits of Action’, is about action as an ongoing relationship of the thinker with ‘who we are’,143 becoming what we are, beginning something new and as antidote to the tyranny of thoughtless know-how.144 Despite Arendt and Theology having no chapter on responsibility, two significant further features emerge that describe her understanding of that concept. First is Kiess’s reminder in the final pages of the book that Arendt deems Augustine to be one of the most astute observers of the representational nature of thought that facilitates healing between theory and practice.145 Augustine’s account of ‘vision in thought’ explains how the person who thinks is at least two steps removed from the immediacy of the world and its objects of sense, which creates space for the work of imagination to increase, diminish, alter and put together differently.146 ‘It is this distance’ for Arendt, Kiess says, ‘that gives thinking its character of being “out-of-order,” not entirely in step 140. Arendt, The Human Condition, 60. 141. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 140. 142. Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 190. 143. Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 168. 144. Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 176. 145. Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 205. 146. Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 206.

36

The Limit of Responsibility

with common sense, which is what enables it to disrupt our established routines and open up the possibility of critical distance’.147 For Kiess, this mode of thinking yields the power ‘to make present what is absent, to summon individuals or places from across vast distances … to move from this deed to Justice, from a courageous person to Courage’.148 Future and past operate as active forces weighing upon the ego in the present, or the question of ‘the Now’.149 Arendt uses a range of theological metaphors to describe this kind of thinking, including Augustine’s notion of hodiernus or ‘lasting “todayness”’ that distinguishes God’s eternity from human temporality and allows expressions of the three tenses of time to be co-present in the mind that thinks.150 Arendt learned this representational thinking at least in part from Christian tradition, and so can, perhaps, give back the gift to Christian theology again. Second is Arendt’s locating of responsibility beyond the personal life of individuals in the public realm. Neither freedom nor responsibility is reducible to an attribute of thought, quality of the will or property of the soul but demand public space to make their appearance. Critical of early Christian suspicion of and hostility against the public realm as such, Arendt expounds the interdependence of freedom, responsibility and politics.151 Witness her many writings on education, authority and personal responsibility under dictatorship: Responsibility must be understood in political terms if it is to mean anything in individual, personal terms. Individuals support governments unless they take a stand against their policies and actions. Even under dictatorship, it is not enough to claim obedience to orders. These two points emerge clearly from Kiess’s book and a yet further observation may be ventured – namely, Arendt’s use of the concept of vicariousness when describing the responsibility that citizens bear for acts that they have not themselves committed: This vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but … in one of the many and manifold forms of human community.152

A familiar concept to Jewish and Christian traditions, Arendt’s insistence that the person who lives publicly in community is never excused their part in the collective responsibility of that community is clear. Responsibility is exercised in the public arena, if only by refusing to support the exploitation of others and 147. Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 206. 148. Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 207. 149. Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 208. 150. Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 209. 151. Arendt, ‘What Is Freedom?’, 149. 152. Arendt, ‘Collective Responsibility’, 157–158.

Framing the Question

37

having the courage to accept whatever follows from taking a stand because one simply cannot support the continuance of evil. The allusion to vicarious responsibility in Arendt’s writing is fleeting. One challenge in what follows is to think about the meaning of vicarious representative action (Stellvertretung) for Bonhoeffer and for the global community of faith today. For the moment, we heed Arendt’s provocation to understand responsibility in political terms as for the tending, care and protection of our planet, and to be mindful of ‘the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil’.153 The problem is that thoughtlessness in the church, as elsewhere, remains one of the most pressing threats of our time. Apathy allows consumers to turn their faces away from the consequences of purchases upon others and the natural environment.154 As Orthodox scholar Paul Evdokimov laments, in the so-called West ‘Christians have done just about everything to sterilize the Gospel. … Everything … that transcends and turns things upside down, has … become inoffensive … flat, shrewd and above all, reasonable, and remains simply to be vomited out’.155 As will become apparent, my framing of the question of responsibility picks up Arendt’s allusion to vicarious responsibility and asks further what it means to affirm Bonhoeffer’s theology of vicarious representative action and members of the faith community acting-with-and-for-each-other [füreinander] vicariously, across such vast distances and across entrenched structures of sin, when asking for forgiveness can become just another form of thoughtlessness, or posture in a game of self-delusion and yet more exploitation. Chapter 6 further picks up questions about the inherently public and political nature of ecclesial existence following discussion of why the problem of responsibility in Christian ethics demands an ecclesially focused response.

Plurality Framing the question of responsibility becomes yet more complex when we realize that the concepts translated into English as ‘responsibility’ carry different nuances in other languages and cultures. Edith Sizoo’s edited collection Responsibility and Cultures of the World (2010) sheds light on these differences in a project linked to the 2001 publication of The Charter of Human Responsibilities at the World Assembly 153. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 288. 154. Rebecca Todd Peters’s volume, Solidarity Ethics: Transformation in a Globalized World (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014), is intended to offer first-world Christians ‘a new strategy for navigating the morally precarious waters of neoliberal globalization’ (p. 27). Something is deeply amiss in our world, she cries, where basic education for everyone in the world would cost 6 billion US dollars annually, while US citizens spend 8 billion dollars on cosmetics and Europeans spend 11 billion dollars on ice cream (p. 1). 155. Paul Evdokimov and Michael Plekon, In the World, of the Church: A Paul Evdokimov Reader (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 49.

38

The Limit of Responsibility

of Citizens.156 Not knowing at the outset of her project whether the French/ English words ‘responsabilité/responsibility’ would have equivalents in nonWestern languages, or how difficult it would be to convey meaning across cultural differences, the results of Sizoo’s project quickly acquired a reference status for studies in cross-cultural moral philosophy and anthropology. Practically focused, Sizoo’s initial intention was to contribute to an avoidance of misunderstanding in international communications when the question of responsibility is discussed.157 The Charter of Human Responsibilities includes the affirmation: The Earth is our one and only, irreplaceable home. Humankind, in all its diversity, belongs to the living world and is part of its evolution. Their fates are indivisible.158

Never before, says the preamble, have human beings had such far-reaching impacts on one another’s social, political, economic and cultural lives. Never before have they possessed so much knowledge and so much power to change their environment. Never before has it been more important for the peoples of the world to talk about similarities and differences in the sense of responsibility that is found among all human groups albeit with different nuances of meaning and expression: ‘Global co-operation and global governance, indeed, are inconceivable without certain universally accepted ideas and principles which, whatever their origins, can be considered beneficial to all humankind, non-human life forms and the ecosystems of life.’ Just as the world’s nations are finding it possible to accept the idea of ‘human rights’, says this Declaration, the time has come to introduce the concept of human responsibilities and labour together over shared and differing meanings. Hence the birth of Sizoo’s project to investigate the transferability between cultures of the French/English words ‘responsabilité/responsibility’ and their heritages of meaning, and to detect and make sense of cultural variety with respect to whether or how other cultures have the concept conveyed in these words, and, indeed, how to go about asking these questions without predetermining the results. The findings represented by Sizoo’s edited collection are, broadly speaking, that not all non-Western languages have symmetrical equivalents to the words ‘responsabilité/responsibility’, but that a broadly similar idea resounds everywhere along with broadly similar struggles to draw lines when deciding who is responsible before whom and for what. So, for instance, the closest Lingala word to responsibility is mokumba, which is a synonym of weight and pregnancy. Lingala is a Bantu language spoken throughout the north-western part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo where mokumba is used not only of expectant women 156. http://www.alliance21.org/lille/en/ 157. Edith Sizoo, ed., ‘General Introduction’, in Responsibility and Cultures of the World: Dialogue around a Collective Challenge (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010). 158. In Edith Sizoo, ed., Responsibility and Cultures of the World, Appendix, p. 234. http:// www.response.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/RESPONSIBILITY-CHARTER-+.pdf

Framing the Question

39

but of tribal chiefs and elders who carry the weight of ‘social pregnancy’.159 The word mokumba could be translated as responsibility because it entails a sense of obligation, a charge to be fulfilled and the burden of care. Isidore Ndaywel È Nziem’s essay on duty and responsibility along the shores of the Congo river notes that this word mokumba, which can mean pregnancy, is also used of a task to be accomplished.160 Another word kizitu is used of both the carrying of a load and the fulfilling of obligations. The shared root is luzitizu which means to show respect.161 Uses of the word depend upon the roles of a person within the family hierarchy and social structures. This movement between concepts of obligation, weight, pregnancy and respect is also found by Tarek Al-Noman in an equivalent Arab word mas’ol that literally means ‘the one being asked’, but has further applications that extend to being entrusted to safeguard something for a second party or to bear a burden or load. Like the Lingala word, but not the most obvious associations of French/English words ‘responsabilité/responsibility’, Arab mas’ol has particular associations with child bearing. The responsible one is the ‘mas’ol’ or the one questioned, being asked or questioned. More specifically, the word has associations with the biblical story of Eve’s pregnancy which is presented, in part at least, as a punishment for committing the sin of questioning and testing God.162 ‘God’s reaction to Eve after she has been blamed for the responsibility of sin was: “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children” (Genesis, book 3, v. 1)’. Arab-Islamic culture, says Al-Noman, has been influenced by these pre-Islamic sources: ‘the scenario of that narrative is still the dominant scenario in the discourse on responsibility in Arab-Islamic culture’.163 Responsibility is conceived in terms of burden and question. Other metaphors also function in relation to responsibility, however, notably, testing, accountability, guardianship and a ruler being in the shadow of God. In Confucian thinking, says Jin Siyan, the English word ‘responsibility’ is conveyed with a double-character word comprising ze and ren meaning ‘charge’ and ‘worthy of trust’, respectively.164 The distinction turns on the difference between ‘demand’ and ‘being entrusted with a task’. A person can take responsibility as in the West, observes Siyan, when they use their free will to assume accountability, or they can be given responsibility by a person or the group to which they belong. In such contexts responsibility is pragmatic, discursive and cultural: ‘it means 159. Sizoo, Responsibility and Cultures of the World, 23–24. 160. Isidore Ndaywel È Nziem, ‘Duty and Responsibility on the Shores of the Congo’, in Responsibility and Cultures of the World, 104. 161. È Nziem, ‘Duty and Responsibility on the Shores of the Congo’, 104. 162. Tarek Al-Noman, ‘Responsibility in Arab-Islamic Culture’, in Responsibility and Cultures of the World, 144–145. 163. Al-Noman, ‘Responsibility in Arab-Islamic Culture’, 144. 164. Jin Siyan, ‘Responsibility in Confucian Thinking: Being Worthy of Trust’, in Responsibility and Cultures of the World, 157.

40

The Limit of Responsibility

“entrusting a person worthy of confidence with a responsibility, or demanding assumption of a responsibility from a person worthy of confidence”’.165 In Filipino culture, says Sylvia H. Guerrero, understanding the concept of responsibility requires familiarity with the history of the region, indigenous belief systems and practices that the four centuries of colonization marginalized. The words translated by ‘responsibility’ imply accountability, duty and answerability (legal or moral), but there is considerable variety and nuance among the major Filipino languages. The Tagalog word is may pananagutan, or answerability to duty, but there are Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Ilokano, Pangasinense and Pampango variants too. In yet other regions of the country, still more Filipino languages have variants of the root word tungud such that translations into the English word ‘responsibility’ hide the nuances of associations variously with rights and privileges, duties and obligations, answerability, a reason for or importance and necessity.166 Nor does the English word ‘responsibility’ convey the shared identity of the self and the other that inheritance of Filipino history and culture brings. This brief overview of the meaning of the words and concepts that might be translated into the English ‘responsibility’ is enough through which to observe that the concept of responsibility is something historical and contextual. As Jacques Derrida remarks, ‘the concept of responsibility has no sense at all outside of an experience of inheritance’.167 To say what responsibility means, we must tell a history and understand its roots in the culture that is retold and relived by its inheritors. Many genealogies of the concept are required to bring all these meanings to light. The meaning of responsibility is always situated not only in the sense that the finiteness and singularity of human existence demands something different of every person but in the sense that the very meaning of responsibility is historically and culturally conditioned too. ‘Responsibility is always taken in a specific moment, for specific people, at a specific place, in a specific decision for which a specific account can be given.’168 At issue for our purposes is how to take up this challenge of plurality, how to resist sweeping up the meaning of responsibility into a westernized, neo-Platonic conception that is dependent upon an idealized vision of the good.

Spectacle A further problem in framing the question of responsibility is that the meaning of responsibility is regarded by some as tainted by association with CSR (corporate social responsibility) agendas or smokescreens that allow large companies to 165. Siyan, ‘Responsibility in Confucian Thinking’, 157. 166. Sylvia H. Guerrero, ‘Filipino Notions of Responsibility: The Shared Identity of the Self and the Other’, in Responsibility and Cultures of the World, 174–175. 167. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue (Stanford University Press, 2004), 5. 168. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 98.

Framing the Question

41

justify exploitative practices and structural injustice behind the illusion that moral behaviour is integrated into the operating business model. Eren Karaca Akbas suggests that we view free market capitalist CSR discourse through Guy Debord’s lens of ‘the spectacle’, so that we see the construction of responsibility as increasing the distance between reality and appearance, commodifying humanitarian values and hiding the real contradiction under a moral gloss: The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomised images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.169

CSR is a kind of illusory humanism, Akbas says, that produces a power independent of itself that masks exploitation and class division, the realities upon which capitalist modes of production rest, thereby pacifying and depoliticizing the workers.170 Akbas uses Debord’s analysis to situate CSR discourse as a type of commodification that objectifies social relations for economic purposes, accumulates images of blissful social communication while hiding essential poverty and soothes social unrest with its chosen means of economic development and the circulation of money. CSR solves problems in capitalist economies, commodifies relationships with workers and local communities and creates for companies a rhetoric of moral value and pseudo-humanism of which Nietzsche might have been proud. The very concept of responsibility has itself become commodified as part of management strategies that require peaceable relations with communities, governments and investors. As Debord again puts it: The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class division underlying the real unity of the capitalist mode of production. What obliges the producers to participate in the construction of the world is also what excludes them from it. What brings people into relation with each other by liberating them from their local and national limitations is also what keeps them apart. What requires increased rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchical exploitation and expression.171

CSR uses humanitarian values to promote economic success, thereby commodifying not only the values but also people on the receiving end of the CSR policies of 169. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press, 1984), 7. 170. Eren Karaca Akbas, A Sociological Study of Corporate Social Responsibility: A Marxist Perspective, June 2012 https://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12614474/index.pdf, 64–65 (accessed 23 August 2017). 171. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 35.

42

The Limit of Responsibility

‘responsible’ capitalism. Such policies, says Akbas, mask the real reasons for global inequality and the extreme poverty of some while marketing and packaging CSR programmes. At the very least, we must be suspicious of ‘responsibility as spectacle’ when investigating why and how companies work with local communities, declare their credentials in protecting the environment, pay taxes and so on. In the second essay in On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche considers the history and origins of responsibility and concludes that the human animal has a sense of responsibility (Verantwortlichkeit) because of harsh experiences burnt into the memory, spiritual and physical torments, and blood and torment that have given rise to moral formation. Religions have played their role as systems of enforcement and torture, but the self-regulating animal recognizes the almost hypnotic effects of this history and its fixing of ideas as an illness to which humans were forced to succumb. The basic instinct of freedom, the will to power, is no longer repressed and forced back and turned against itself in the ‘sovereign individual’ who has freed themselves from the morality of custom but is available now for self-mastery. The ‘free’ man, the possessor of an enduring, unbreakable will, thus has his own standard of value: in the possession of such a will: reviewing others from his own standpoint, he respects or despises … and is sparing with his trust …. The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom and power over himself and his destiny, has penetrated him to his lowest depths and become an instinct, his dominant instinct: … his conscience.172

Individual self-responsibility, for Nietzsche, is integral to an experience of freedom expressed as saying ‘yes’ to oneself. Neo-Kantian juridical concepts of responsibility that emphasize causal links between agent and action, duty and blame, and utilitarian foci on the criterion of social well-being are challenged by neo-Nietzschean construals of responsibility as an instinct in the human animal. Responsibility becomes the gift of oneself to oneself and to others. ‘Responsibility in the sovereign individual is the privilege of giving and promising oneself to another and seeing in this gift the greatest extension of one’s power … freedom as responsibility extends the limits of the self toward the other.’173 Today we no longer have any pity for the concept of ‘free will’: we know only too well what it really is – the foulest of all theologians’ artifices, aimed at making mankind ‘responsible’ in their sense, that is, dependent upon them. Here I simply supply the psychology of all ‘making responsible.’ 172. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 37. 173. Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 40.

Framing the Question

43

Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct of wanting to judge and punish which is at work. Becoming has been deprived of its innocence when any being-such-and-such is traced back to will, to purposes, to acts of responsibility: the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, because one wanted to impute guilt. The entire old psychology, the psychology of will, was conditioned by the fact that its originators, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves the right to punish – or wanted to create this right for God. Men were considered ‘free’ so that they might be judged and punished – so that they might become guilty: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (and thus the most fundamental counterfeit in psychologicis was made the principle of psychology itself). Today, as we have entered into the reverse movement and we immoralists are trying with all our strength to take the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment out of the world again, and to cleanse psychology, history, nature, and social institutions and sanctions of them, there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue with the concept of a ‘moral world-order’ to infect the innocence of becoming by means of ‘punishment’ and ‘guilt.’ Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman.174

I have cited Nietzsche at some length because of his piercing observation that at least some modes of Christianity have a vested interest in maintaining the problem of responsibility. A sense of responsibility as experienced by the sovereign self becomes part of the self ’s own claim to power. A sense of responsibility as administered by Christianity as an institution plays into the prevailing sociopolitical moral coding of the day and becomes a method of control. As becomes clearer below, the post-liberal Christian ethic of responsibility developed in this book is sympathetic to some of Nietzsche’s critique. To the extent that Christianity assumes and operates an ethic of responsibility based on modern philosophical assumptions about the sovereign self, it will fail. I share much of Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the modern problem of responsibility, although not his solutions. With Nietzsche, we must be fully aware that the risk of self-delusion is always present for the individual, as the exercise of free will is always vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation by others. Responsibility as instinct, or saying ‘yes’ to oneself, demands attention to the animality of human existence and has, since Foucault, been discussed in political theory in terms of the ‘biopolitical’. To enlarge the role of instinct in oneself is a ‘magnification’ [Vergrößerung] of the human being; to recover one’s animality is to strengthen oneself by learning forgetfulness of the past and a more spontaneous relationship with the future. Freedom cannot be 174. Friedrich Nietzsche, Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, eds., Nietzsche: The AntiChrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 167–169.

44

The Limit of Responsibility

institutionalized because it is grounded always on domination. Only by recovering the animality of the human can the individual become responsible to themselves and thereafter contribute to social and political forms of life characterized by this same liberation. Knowing how to forget like an animal is critical because only forgetfulness renders one free from domination and exploitation. The task is not easy: ‘the desire to bear entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and … to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness’.175 Pulling oneself out of nothingness is a lofty, rigorous and noble self-responsibility that demands a conscience of steel and heart of brass. Those with the capacity for self-responsibility might use their religious education to this end, but it requires continuous self-overcoming of the kind of belief in oneself that equates to the self-sovereignty of human action. When viewed politically this means that moral responsibility is not subsumed within the social contract: Have these genealogists of morality up to now ever remotely dreamt that, for example, the main moral concept ‘Schuld’ (guilt) descends from the very material concept of ‘Schulden’ (debts)? Or that punishment, as retribution, evolved quite independently of any assumption about freedom or lack of freedom of the will? … Throughout most of human history, punishment has not been meted out because the miscreant was held responsible for his act … but, rather … it was out of anger over some wrong that has been suffered. … And where did this primeval, deeply-rooted and perhaps now ineradicable idea gain its power, this idea of an equivalence between injury and pain? I have already let it out: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the very conception of a ‘legal subject’ and itself refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling, bartering, trade and traffic.176

For Nietzsche, a contractual basis of civil and political responsibility is backwardfacing and not the forward-projection of miraculous selfhood. True responsibility is, for the singular, forgetful animal who stands alone, an empty space into which to stride. The limits of responsibility are the limits of the will to power and the lack of courage to take risks. Any other conception of the limits of responsibility is slavery in some sense or another. The meaning of responsibility is always in the future and only really for those savage selves capable of self-preservation, selfelevation and self-redemption.177

175. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), VII, sect. 21. 176. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 40. 177. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, § 262.

Framing the Question

45

To summarize: framing the question of responsibility is difficult for a variety of reasons. It is difficult for consumers to acquire enough information about the operations of large companies to be confident that they do not become complicit in distant harms. In this respect at least, responsibility cannot easily be cast in quasi-judicial terms of accountability understood in terms of praise and blame for identifiable actions; it is not possible to maintain clear lines of connectivity between agent, act and consequence. To respond by taking the post-liberal move of finding the meaning of responsibility in the face of the other is to encounter a potentially unbearable burden. The problem of responsibility extends to infinity and so cannot be borne. This is one of many reasons, perhaps, why people opt for thoughtlessness as a way of coping day to day. When taken alongside the confusing plurality of meanings of responsibility across diverse cultures, and the many ways in which the problem of responsibility rapidly becomes an exercise in power and control, we might wonder whether abandoning rather than relearning and rehabilitating the concept of responsibility is the better option. Given the many problems that we encounter associated with the concept of responsibility, the question of whether to abandon or relearn and rehabilitate the concept is a real one. Like the post-liberal philosopher Judith Butler, albeit for very different reasons, the concept of responsibility is not abandoned in this book but reworked. Better, Butler decides, to reclaim and rethink the term than to dispose of it entirely: political debate would become very difficult, and conventional discourses in jurisprudence, criminal law and so on, which we still need, cannot be disclaimed. Excising the word from moral debate would be unfeasible. However problematically the notion of ‘responsibility’ has been reappropriated for neoliberal purposes, the concept remains a crucial feature of the critique of accelerating inequality. In the neo-liberal morality, each of us is only responsible for ourselves, and not for others, and that responsibility is first and foremost a responsibility to become economically self-sufficient under conditions when self-sufficiency is structurally undermined.178

Better to rethink its meaning in some contexts and employ the term differently than exclude the word from use. Better also to use the word advisedly, and to exclude certain associations, than to proceed with some sort of meaning mush wherein the word ‘responsibility’ conveys significations other than those intended.179 At issue is how to relearn the meaning of responsibility and to think about how the church as a public, political entity lives in witness and service alongside those who advocate different meanings of the term.

178. Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 25. 179. Chapter 6 engages critically with how Butler reclaims and rethinks the meaning of responsibility.

Chapter 2 GENEALOGY OF A CONCEPT

Responsibility is a modern concept. So says Richard Peter McKeon in his 1957 article ‘The Development and the Significance of the Concept of Responsibility’.1 I broadly agree and use this chapter to explicate how the concept of responsibility is variously tied to modern Western philosophical, political and cultural contexts. Mindful that Chapter 1 concluded with the question of whether to abandon or relearn and rehabilitate the concept, this chapter further problematizes the concept of responsibility by probing associations with sub-Christian understandings of personhood and relationality, instrumental notions of rationality and capitalism.2 Responsibility is a modern concept.3 But this means different things to different people. For McKeon, the concept of responsibility in this period means 1. Richard Peter McKeon, ‘The Development and the Significance of the Concept of Responsibility’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 11, no. 39 (September 1957): 26. 2. With Geuss, I understand a ‘genealogy’ as a task directed towards narrating the history of a concept, its significance and how it came to be widely conceived as meaningful, with due attention to as many of the relevant aspects as possible. Geuss concludes his essay ‘Genealogy as Critique’ to the effect that genealogy demands historical investigation of a kind that probes the reasons for different perspectives on whatever concept might be under scrutiny, why a particular meaning became binding, how the meaning has changed and what factors might lead to a different understanding: ‘Genealogy does not lay down the law, nor is it a policing discipline. Rather it is a summons to develop an empirically informed kind of theoretical imagination under the conditions of perceived danger.’ [Raymond Geuss ‘Genealogy as Critique’, trans. Nicholas Walker, European Journal of Philosophy 10, no. 2 (2002): 213.] Geuss’s allusion to ‘the conditions of perceived danger’ is informed by Foucault’s notion of the necessity of questioning of all givens. With Geuss, I understand this kind of work is necessary if the concept of responsibility constructed in later chapters is to be functional. 3. There are occurrences in French of responsabilité and the Latin responsabilis as early as the fourteenth century, but these link to translations of the Greek aitia (L. causa, meaning cause of imputation of praise or blame) and amartia (missing the mark or guilt or sin). [McKeon, The Development, 8–9.] McKeon notes an early occurrence of ‘responsibility’ as recorded in the lexicographer James Murray’s Oxford English Dictionary from a 1787 paper, published in The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John

48

The Limit of Responsibility

at least three things. First, he suggests, the modern concept of responsibility must be understood as an expression of the natural philosophies of Hobbes, Locke and Hume, Pufendorf, Wolff and Kant that variously distinguished free action from necessity. Thus, for Hume, a person is answerable, or the proper object of punishment, for actions that are blameworthy and contrary to all the rules of morality and religion only when they ‘proceed from some cause in his character and disposition … human actions which are not free, in the sense defined, are not susceptible of any moral qualities, nor can they be objects of either approbation or dislike’.4 From the seventeenth century onwards, McKeon says, debates about causality and necessity in the natural sciences and the philosophy of nature have influenced the meaning of accountability. Prominent accounts of responsibility as accountability are cast in terms of morality based on free action whereby freedom is distinguished from necessity through examination of the nature of reason and will: The evolution of the concept of responsibility depends on a[n] … evolution of the concepts of freedom and understanding. Accountability is an external and negative restraint on action imposed by law and punishment; imputation is an external constraint, positive as well as negative, imposed by public opinion …. Accountability becomes internal when it depends on the moral judgment of the individual, rather than on the prohibition of the law.5

Responsibility takes philosophical form in freedom over nature, alongside its taking political form in the provision of strong institutions, as well as their overcoming through individual decision. Second, the history of responsibility in the modern era is the history of tension in modern Western philosophy regarding responsibility understood variously in philosophico-metaphysical, internal and subjective, over against legal and political usage. Understood legally, the core idea of responsibility depends on a reciprocal relation of individual and state: A person is responsible under law if they are accountable for the consequences of their action, and they can be responsible only if the law is not subject to arbitrary change or enforcement.6 Understood subjectively, in discourses influenced by Kant, responsibility is linked to individual autonomy in the struggle for freedom from determinism of various kinds and freedom for the attainment of moral worth. In the mid-twentieth century, holding Jay, which promoted the ratification of the US Constitution. One of McKeon’s purposes is to compare late eighteenth-century usage of the English ‘responsibility’ and German ‘Verantwort’ with earlier concepts of accountability and imputation or ascription (G. Zurechnung). 4. Richard Peter McKeon, Freedom and History and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 73. 5. McKeon, ‘The Development and the Significance of the Concept of Responsibility’, 26. 6. McKeon, ‘The Development’, 24.

Genealogy of a Concept

49

this tension is rendered more difficult by the additional complexity of increasing awareness of the socially embedded character of moral reasoning, cultural plurality and relativism: ‘responsibility, finally, reflects and depends on a common rationality and on common values revealed in discussion and sought in action’.7 Third, McKeon notes, responsibility as a modern concept takes predominantly secularist form. In pre-modern contexts, what is blameworthy is decided by ‘external devices of accountability’, that is, appeals to the transcendent and the enforcement of civil and criminal law.8 In the modern era, ancient notions of imputation that required mechanisms of accountability external to the relationship between agent and act become expendable as the focus shifts to the individual’s rationality as a member of society. Thus for Wolff, what matters more than any transcendent power is the freedom of the soul and for Kant what matters most is a person’s freedom to exercise the autonomy of the will. Note also, he says, that J.S. Mill’s attempts to break free from metaphysical debates about freedom versus necessity, and intentions versus consequences, by grounding debates about responsibility in social conceptions of utility, were part of this history of transitions from predominantly theological notions of accountability that were also deemed to support particular human authorities such that all actions were subject to moral evaluation not only by individual conscience before God but also by authorities that could be limited and localized.9 McKeon glides quickly over the giants of modern philosophy in order to call attention to how the modern concept of responsibility takes shape amid debates about agency that is free from determination by natural forces and unconstrained by the will of the state or other political powers, yet therefore free to make personal choices about actions. Uses of the concept morph across the decades and subsume older, premodern discussions of accountability before God. Consider, he invites, how J.S. Mill’s grounding of debates about responsibility in social conceptions of utility were part of a history of transitions from predominantly theological notions of accountability that were also deemed to support particular human authorities.10 The concept of responsibility is predominantly a way of focusing moral discourse on an individual’s will. Albeit brief, McKeon’s article serves as a launch pad for our purposes because it alerts us to how ‘responsibility’ was created conceptually as a philosophical and quasi-legal notion, with roots in individualistic anthropologies of freedom in choice 7. McKeon, ‘The Development’, 26. 8. McKeon, ‘The Development’, 6. 9. John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume VIII – A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation (Books IV–VI and Appendices), ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by R.F. McRae (Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 23 August 2017. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/247#lf0223-08_ footnote_nt_975_ref. See also McKeon, ‘The Development and the Significance of the Concept of Responsibility’, 28. 10. McKeon, ‘The Development’, 23.

50

The Limit of Responsibility

and decision. McKeon’s story of the concept of responsibility is fundamentally about relations between agents and their actions, the causal ties between both and the value judgements that are applicable to both.11 He further reminds us that ‘responsibility’ is a term which belongs to an increasingly secularist age. From this launch pad, we move to consider theorists not treated by McKeon but who variously shape modern treatments of responsibility. Like McKeon, our intention is to move forward in a manner informed by looking backward. Like McKeon, we develop a genealogy of the concept of responsibility in order to better understand the relationship between dominant modern framings of the meaning of responsibility and the strain under which the meaning of the concept now labours. The assumption which we share with him is that genealogy entails historical inquiry intended to understand the meaning of the term ‘responsibility’ in changing historical contexts and is a process necessary for the generation of critique, that is, for the purpose of facilitating distinction, analysis, judgement and decision. Our focus is on theorists largely omitted from McKeon’s account.

Capacity Possessed by the Self Our genealogy begins with F.D.E. Schleiermacher who, like Immanuel Kant, does not often use the term ‘responsibility’ (G. Verantwortung) and yet whose influence shaped the discourse in significant ways. We consider especially how Schleiermacher schools Christian ethics and political theology in a mindset with respect to individual subjectivity that supposes the problem of responsibility as mine to address, linked to my ‘care of the soul’, and how, with Schleiermacher, responsibility is set to become a problem addressable by the self who feels, thinks and generates meaning for herself, including the meaning of responsibility. Schleiermacher’s particular challenge was to demonstrate the unity of the self as moral agent.12 Today our challenges are different. Today, different intensities in 11. Since 1957, evolutionists have reawakened debate about how agency, freedom and moral responsibility are influenced by the biological dimension of human nature, and have recast perennial questions about how impersonal and morally blind biological forces bear upon the practice of human responsibility. [Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom and Morality (Oxford: Routledge, 1994); Mary Midgley, The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene (Oxford: Routledge, 2010); Julian Baggini, Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); John Gray, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (London: Allen Lane, 2015); Chris Willmott, Biological Determinism, Free Will and Moral Responsibility: Insights from Genetics and Neuroscience (New York: Springer, 2016); Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).] McKeon would have been interested, perhaps, in how debates between hard determinists and compatibilists with respect to the coexistence of determinism and free will have re-emerged. 12. See Jacqueline Mariña, Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Genealogy of a Concept

51

Christian ethics are required. Our key concepts can no longer be Schleiermacher’s predominant concepts of ‘feeling’ (Gefühl), ‘intuition’ (Anschauung), ‘dependency’ (Abhängigkeit), ‘sentiment’ (Gemüt) and ‘disposition’ (Gesinnung), but must include ‘global consciousness’, ‘global eco-crisis’, ‘all things in Christ and Christ in all things’, ‘global co-dependency and co-responsibility’, ‘global poverty reduction’, ‘cultures of life and death’, ‘the meaning of just peace’, ‘horizons of hope’ and more. The inadequacies of modern, liberal framings of the problem of responsibility must be recognized if more adequate ways ahead are to be forged. Schleiermacher’s pioneering spirit can hardly be overemphasized. At a time of social change brought about by machine production, new agricultural methods and cultural developments, such as increasing awareness of distant parts of the world and their religions and spiritualities, Schleiermacher’s dissatisfaction with Pietist doctrine and lifestyle, his early rejection of Kant, his suspicion of the rationalist Aufklärung, his growing religious tolerance and emphasis upon each person’s relationship with God were groundbreaking. Moreover, any charge of self-reliant individualism in Schleiermacher’s work is unfounded.13 The internal logic and psychological and social make-up of the Pietist common life in which he was raised, and which bore upon him throughout his life, militates against this. Schleiermacher remained convinced of the inherent sociality of the individual: ‘[t]he individual comes into being only in and through the common life … every individual in his development is at the same time a result of the common life’.14 Consider his ‘Toward a Theory of Sociable Conduct’ (1799) that is remarkable in many respects for its anticipation of the study of society as a scientific discipline. Schleiermacher values both the physical and the intellectual aspects of humanity, recognizes that human society is understandable only with reference to natural impulses as well as reasoned imperatives and appreciates that the ethical subject exists within wider patterns of sociability. The self exists in contextualized, dialogic interdependence with others. Society is quickened through the activity of each individual and the interplay of parts with the whole. Every person is endowed with a natural tendency, or innate attraction, towards society, and the idea of society is accessible only through interaction with others. Schleiermacher was not an individualist for whom the goal of enlightenment is for individuals to direct their own lives autonomously in accordance with the requirements of reason. Schleiermacher’s individual self was relational and rooted in community: ‘[O]ne cannot think of an individual without at the same time thinking of him in connection with the general conditions that determine his existence … ’.15 He demanded that any historical account of a life should move 13. I am sympathetic to Mariña’s argument that Schleiermacher understands the self primarily in terms of the self ’s relation to the divine (Transformation, 6) but draw attention, nonetheless, to his focus on immediate self-consciousness as the root of all spontaneity and receptivity. 14. F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, trans. S. Maclean Gilmour and ed. Jack C. Verheyden, Lives of Jesus Series (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 9. 15. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 9.

52

The Limit of Responsibility

continuously between its internal and external dimensions. His ethical interests also ranged widely. Various themes emerge including treatment of the concept of virtue (1819), the concept of duty (1824), the distinction between natural law (Naturgesetz) and moral law (Sittengesetz) (1825), the concept of permission (Erlaubte) (1826) and the highest good (das höchste Gut) (1827 and 1830). Ethics, for Schleiermacher, was always more than the mere attainment of universalizable principles of volition, moral maxims and autonomous responses to the demands of reason.16 His concept of the person was not as isolated but codependent. His indebtedness to Spinoza means that he not only takes from Kant a strong sense of individuality against nature and focus on the moral nature of personhood but also an awareness of gaps in Kant’s moral anthropology with respect to the situatedness of human life in processes of natural causality.17 Schleiermacher wants to do more than repeat Kant’s untenable dualism between the phenomenological and noumenal self. Similarly, sensitivity throughout his life to the historically conditioned particularity of self-consciousness, personhood and his emphasis also on the intuitive openness of the human spirit to the divine allows him to develop the concepts of ‘mind’, ‘soul’ and ‘nature’, and the relationships between them in religion, poetry and philosophy. His treatment of aesthetic sensibility, the unity of the sensuous and spiritual elements in love, the ‘I’ or ‘me’ certain of itself as a representation of humanity, and so much more, all preclude setting up a ‘straw man’ and oversimplifying any account of Schleiermacher’s ethics in relation to selfhood, human relationality, sociopolitical responsibility and so on. Indeed, Schleiermacher supposes an idea of society comprising a form of reciprocity among all members of a group.18 His observation that neither lectures nor a ball constitutes society is based on the supposition that neither instantiate the idea of reciprocity: ‘The true character of a society should be a reciprocal action that is interwoven among all the participants.’19 At a ball where certain types of activity are expected, ‘participants do not fully determine the reciprocal action’.20 Later to be influential in the emergence at Berlin of psychology as a discipline in its own right, Schleiermacher is ahead of his time in these early writings on sociability that are vibrant with observations about how people behave: ‘Those assembled in a theater or who jointly attend a lecture hardly form among themselves a society … rather each is in a constrained sociality since the artist established it only for some special effect.’21 Even in these early years we see hints of later pioneering advances 16. For an overview of Schleiermacher’s ethics, see John S. Park, Theological Ethics of Friedrich Schleiermacher (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2001). Schleiermacher Studies & Translations, passim, esp. 20. 17. This point is made best by Julia Lamm, The Living God: Schleiermacher’s Appropriation of Spinoza (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991). 18. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 24. 19. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 24. 20. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 24. 21. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 24.

Genealogy of a Concept

53

towards the study of society by scientific means; this essay itself sits somewhere between idealism and empirically based science. Written during a period of cultural, political and economic transition, Schleiermacher’s ethics unfold from his early, unpublished essay On Freedom (1790–1792), through his notes on Spinoza (1792–1793), his notes on Leibniz from 1797 to 1798 and the Monologen (1800), to the publication in August 1803 of critical notes on moral philosophy (Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre), the Brouillon zur Ethik (1805) and finally his major theological achievement The Christian Faith (1821–1822 2nd ed.). The constellation of political, intellectual and ethical issues amid which he wrote is vast. The ‘enlightened’ reign of Frederick II brought supposed reforms but disadvantageous policies towards the church and theological education. The works of enlightenment philosophers with whom Schleiermacher came into contact – especially between the spring of 1783 when he entered the Pædagogium at Niesky and 1796 when he moved from Landsberg to Berlin – notably, Kant, Fichte and Spinoza as mediated through Jacobi were causing a stir, along with the increasing awareness of different geographical parts of the world and the religions and spirituality therein. Albeit different from our own, the age in which Schleiermacher lived was fast-changing and challenging. He wrote with courage and foresight to meet the needs of his day. In his more mature years, the Lectures on Philosophical Ethics and especially the final version of the Introduction (probably 1816/17) evince more problematic neoPlatonic traits in his framing of the work of philosophical ethics. Schleiermacher reminds readers of the unity of knowledge and of the interrelatedness of any particular science to all others: ‘all knowledge can only be both complete and perfect if it can be taken as a whole’.22 All individual knowledge is to be related to a higher knowledge. This includes ethics and the moral life, neither of which are independent of anything else but derived also from the highest knowledge, which is assumed.23 Derivation of the concept of ethics assumes the unity of the highest knowledge: ‘The highest image of the highest being … and thus also the most perfect conception of the totality of all definite being, is the complete permeation and unity of nature and reason.’24 This highest unity draws all towards it but can never be experienced as complete by mortals who possess only world-wisdom. The activity of reason, however, produces the unity of reason and nature.25 All ethical knowledge is an expression of this unity, of reason becoming nature, a process that has begun but is never complete: ‘all ethical knowledge is dependent upon this assumption of unity’.26 The doctrine of morals gives shape to this unity in terms of the multiplicity of the virtues and duties; the doctrine of the goods and 22. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Lectures on Philosophical Ethics, ed. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 137. 23. Schleiermacher, Lectures on Philosophical Ethics, 140. 24. Schleiermacher, Lectures on Philosophical Ethics, 147. 25. Schleiermacher, Lectures on Philosophical Ethics, 155. 26. Schleiermacher, Lectures on Philosophical Ethics, 155.

54

The Limit of Responsibility

virtues, and the doctrine of the duties, concerns the life of consciousness within a single act of will: ‘Each individual decision belongs in a particular circle’, and in relation to the whole.27 Like the Dialectic of 1811, Schleiermacher’s Lectures on Philosophical Ethics supposes that the ethical life is awakened in individuals by the imprint of the possibility of gradual unification with others, of nature and reason coexisting in totality.28 Amid finite human existence, ethical truth is located in the unity of reason and knowledge. Schleiermacher’s theology of Christian religious self-consciousness contains admirable aspirations to freedom of the self, self-realization and self-expression, an emphasis on the ministry of the laity in practical theology and so on. Even so, Schleiermacher’s commitment to ethical individuality remains a quintessentially modern expression of the meaning of duty that feeds into later conceptions of morality: ‘[I]ts basic ethos has, to a remarkable degree, become very much a part of who we are.’29 Albeit not talking about responsibility (Verantwortung) per se but rather a doctrine of duty (Plichtlehre) alongside a doctrine of virtue (Tugendlehre) and the doctrine of the good (Güterlehre), Schleiermacher lays the groundwork for modern liberal (theological) thinking in terms of the good as the end of an action, duty in accordance with the norms that govern action, virtue as the power to act upon duty and virtue as the power to act; the meaning of responsibility will have little sense in this tradition outside of these framing concepts. Responsibility will become an integral part of care of the soul, the ‘lifelong inquiry’ possessed by every individual capable of moral reflection: ‘the being which bears within it the source of movement, of deciding its being or nonbeing’.30 The shift from earlier conceptions is subtle but, fundamentally, duty is no longer conceived as a gift of piety bestowed by God, to be returned to God and neighbour on account of God, but an action with its source in the self to be exercised between persons. Jan Patočka makes this point when examining the individualist side of modernity’s ‘broken middle’ in his treatment of responsibility in connection with modern Western appropriations of the ancient Greek bequest regarding care for the soul.31 Patočka describes a period in the intellectual life of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and Prussian Germany as a time of technological advancement, philosophical emphasis on equality and freedom from old hierarchies, discoveries in New England, the alliance of industry and the capitalist order, new political hubs and a social drive towards rational organization 27. Schleiermacher, Lectures on Philosophical Ethics, 222. 28. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Dialectic, Or, The Art of Doing Philosophy: A Study Edition of the 1811 Notes, ed. Terrence N. Tice (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 7. 29. Brent W. Sockness, ‘Schleiermacher and the Ethics of Authenticity’, Journal of Religious Ethics 32, no. 3 (2004): 477–517, at 516. 30. Jan Patočka and James Dodd, eds., Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1999), 82. 31. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 82–84.

Genealogy of a Concept

55

of the public sphere.32 The power and depth of the enlightenment, says Patočka, lay in these outward effects, but also in a focus on the inward life of knowledge, poetry and music, literary excellence, spiritual growth, the moral realm and more. There are parallels between both discourses, that is, the politico-economic and cultural-moral: ‘the idea of spiritual individuality (which will be used for ongoing particularization and national conflict in Europe), [and] the idea of the state as an earthly divinity which brooks no limitation of its sovereignty’ are variously part of the ‘spiritual totality’ that unites modern men. The bourgeois nation state protects not only industrial production but also the literary and otherwise cultural life of its people. Their responsibility is care of their own souls, that is, attention to the unity of these two domains in their own lives, with explicit attention also being paid to moral concerns. ‘Care for the soul means that the truth is something not given once for all, not merely a matter of observing and acknowledging the observed, but rather a lifelong inquiry, a self-controlling, self-unifying intellectual and vital practice.’33 Care for the soul is the practical form taken by attention to the unity of each of these spheres of one’s life, a philosophical ideal with politico-economic import that took expression in discourse about the meaning of responsibility. We are moving in the direction, suggests Patočka, of care for the soul being seen as a ‘philosophical contemplative theoria’, beholden upon every person but capable of freeing them from non-contemplation for the spiritual and moral realm ‘wherein lies the inmost human rooting and calling’.34 This is the highest human calling, and it falls to every enlightened person to develop it for themselves. This is a care for the soul to have, a care for the external world that belongs to each person, a calling that each person possesses and is to develop for themselves. Beware, warns Patočka, or, at least, be aware, that moral science is about possession – ‘the primacy of having over being’.35 Could Schleiermacher see this? Did he anticipate the consequences, namely, that individuals were to become not only masters and owners of nature but of their own morality too? At the least, changes were under way in Schleiermacher’s writings away from traditional Christian understandings of duty conceived as a gift of piety returned to God in worship and towards a locating of the seat of duty in human volition:36 ‘Every action which is in accordance with duty must be constructed by means of a purposive concept. … [t]he perfection of action in accordance with duty consists in internal stimulus coinciding with external demand.’37 Actions in accordance with duty require the self-reflective individual to be aware of their existence in community with others and find the unity of parts to the whole in the act of volition. In this sense, volition in accordance with duty contains within it the whole idea of morality. Duty lies in its reference to volition, as a capacity possessed by the self. 32. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 84–87. 33. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 82. 34. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 83. 35. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 84. 36. E.g., see Thomas Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 121. 37. Schleiermacher, Lectures on Philosophical Ethics, 224–25.

56

The Limit of Responsibility

Despite his brilliance and pioneering spirit, factors in Schleiermacher’s writings yield a problematic legacy even today. The groundwork is laid with Schleiermacher for responsibility as mine to be exercised at will. Our challenge is to recognize the limitations of the concept of responsibility framed in the terms that Schleiermacher represents, and to grasp how deeply modern understandings of responsibility are ingrained in our thinking about virtue, the unity of reason and nature that is sought in dutiful actions and every loci of ethical practice in exchanges between individuals, property, thought and feeling, as they occur in the state, society, school and church. Care for the soul in this Platonic tradition yields a quality of soul possessed by the self: ‘Not a care for the soul, the care to be, but rather the care to have, care for the external world and its conquest, becomes the dominant concern.’38 With Schleiermacher, modern conceptions of responsibility begin to tend towards a notion of responsibility that is mine, or ours, to be exercised at will.

Inherent in Individual Freedom Like Schleiermacher, Hegel does not use the language of Verantwortung, but rather of duty (Pflicht) and a word that is often interpreted as responsibility (Schuld) that more readily means guilt.39 Despite his rarely using the term ‘responsibility’ (Verantwortung), Hegel represents for our purposes a burgeoning modern theory of responsibility that involves a strong focus on the individual’s actualization of will that is inherently social. Responsibility (Schuld) is understood at base by Hegel, says Mark Alznauer, as inherent in individual freedom and as openness to moral evaluation by praise (responsibility for good) and blame (responsibility for evil).40 This is evident in a passage from Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: This is the hallmark of the high and absolute destiny of human beings, that they know what good and evil are, and know that the will itself is either good or evil – in a word, they can have responsibility [er Schuld haben kann], responsibility not only for evil but also for good; responsibility not simply for this or that or for everything that is around them or in them, but also responsibility for the good or evil that are inherent in their individual freedom. Only the animal is truly innocent [wahrhaft unschuldig]. But to prevent or remove all of the misunderstandings to which this claim usually gives rise (for example, the concern that by understanding innocence as complete unconsciousness of evil 38. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 83. 39. See Mark Alznauer’s Hegel’s Theory of Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1. 40. Alznauer, Hegel’s Theory of Responsibility, 4.

Genealogy of a Concept

57

we are thereby debasing or devaluing it) would require an extensive discussion, a discussion no less extensive than a complete treatise on freedom itself.41

Responsibility is integral to the self ’s existence in-itself and for-itself. Schuld, says Hegel, is a defining characteristic of humanity.42 ‘No worse insult could be given to such a hero (a Greek tragic hero) than to say that he has acted without responsibility (unschuldig).’43 Thus, when Hegel claims in Philosophy of Right that one denies a criminal responsibility, his point is that the authorities are not merely imposing a punishment of externalities but denying the prisoner the right and dignity of a human being.44 Having the conditions within which it is possible to exercise responsibility is integral to human freedom. Exercising moral evaluation and being available to the evaluation of others is integral to rational being. A particular kind of rational ought is provided by the concept of freedom whereby it is possible to conceive of an action as having a purpose. As Alznauer observes, Hegel effects a transition from responsibility in conflict with nature – that is, battling against its determinations – and beyond the arbitrariness of individual as the mere expression of the autonomous, singular, monadic self: ‘Hegel himself explicitly describes the transition from the natural and arbitrary will to the rational will as involving the achievement of responsibility.’45 The human being as spiritual loses the innocence of non-activity and accepts responsibility (Schuld) as their work. Natural freedom, and the arbitrariness of desire, is sacrificed within the state where the one who becomes responsible understands their life as a member of the state with responsible agency and operating within the spheres of right that constitute morality and ethical life. Like Schleiermacher, Hegel is clear that there is no morality without a selfconscious ‘I’. For Hegel, as for Kant, the person’s will is the locus of responsibility; the human being has particular capacities with respect to self-questioning and accountability. In his early writings, however, he seems almost postmodern in insisting not only upon the inherently relational character of the moral self but the death of (neo-Kantian) self-conscious awareness of duty as a simple knowing and willing of pure duty: ‘morality that is the active self ’s very own’.46 Hegel accuses his

41. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, Reason in History, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 42. See further Alznauer, Hegel’s Theory of Responsibility, 1. 43. Alznauer, Hegel’s Theory of Responsibility, 65. G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics, Vol. 2, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), §1215; Aesthetik, Vol. 2 (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1965), §566. 44. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 135. 45. Alznauer, Hegel and Responsibility, 59. 46. G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 368.

58

The Limit of Responsibility

predecessors of constraining individual morality within an undifferentiated notion of sameness: ‘Usually, the Subject is first made the basis, as the objective, fixed self.’47 Two hundred years ago, Hegel was proclaiming the death of the morally self-aware ‘I’ who intuits with pure certainty its duty, a self-consciousness which ‘knows duty to be the absolute essence’.48 This ‘I’ is mistakenly certain of itself and its duty. This ‘I’ has a journey to take towards its fulfilment: Now, however, the object is for consciousness itself the certainty of itself, viz. knowledge – just as the certainty of itself as such no longer has ends of its own, is therefore no longer [contained] within a determinateness, but is pure knowledge.49

The subject/predicate framework for thinking about individual identity allows only an external perception of identity and an internally limited account. Hegel undercuts the Cartesian and Kantian limitations of the framing of debate about self-consciousness not least because of the implications for morality and the ethical life.50 Both are defective because they are defined by a false association of identity and sameness: ‘A simple thing of this kind which is through negation which is neither This nor That … we call a universal … ‘This’ shows itself to be a mediated simplicity’.51 Self-identity and morality are compound and complex, inherently relational and open to change.52 So, for instance, regarding duty – the predominant concept in the ‘Spirit That Is Certain of Itself: Morality’ section of the Phenomenology of Spirit – Hegel supposes that every person is endowed with this sense by Nature; he presupposes moral consciousness in the self-conscious self.53 Like others among his contemporaries, he opposes the freedom of self-consciousness against the power of Nature that lacks moral consciousness and underlines the point that morality is a task pertaining to the active self ’s very own life.54 This seeming paradox is merely supposed and not explicated. Significantly, however, he rejects the idea that moral consciousness is ‘the simple knowing and willing of pure duty’ but argues instead that it is something relational that draws the ‘I’ out of itself.55 ‘Duty in general thus falls outside of 47. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 37. Needless to say, interpretations vary …. Copy from Thesis p. 42. 48. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 365. 49. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 364. 50. For debate re: communitarian sittlichkeit versus other interpretations of Hegel; re: morality, see Mark Alznauer, PhD thesis. 51. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 70. 52. See Esther D. Reed, A Theological Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press Ltd, 1996), 36–58. 53. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 366. 54. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 368. 55. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 369–370.

Genealogy of a Concept

59

it into another being, which is consciousness, and the sacred lawgiver of pure duty.’56 The isolated, individual self of his contemporaries is passing away due to a less abstract and more convincing account of the functions of reason. Earlier in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel has talked about how language facilitates relational constructs of consciousness57 and the freedom of self-consciousness more generally.58 In these later sections, he is interested in moral consciousness, how a sense of duty is active in the self and the constituent features of morality. Hegel suggests a pattern of self-consciousness whereby harmony is sought with the Other by mutual determination of moral purpose: ‘And, since the harmony is postulated for the sake of the action … i.e., for the sake of the actual harmony of purpose and actuality, this harmony is postulated as not actual, as a beyond.’59 For Hegel’s contemporaries, self-conscious ‘I’ is unable to address questions of morality and duty of themselves because the harmony that matters is beyond consciousness self-awareness. He posits a more relational construct that relativizes the gap between immediate consciousness, sense-certainty, the certainty of the autonomous will and objective reality, with reference to a transcendent realm. In the ‘Spirit That Is Certain of Itself: Morality’ section of the Phenomenology of Spirit, he calls this validation of the sacredness of duty ‘a gift of Grace’ and postulates the perfect Notion of duty as beyond the reality that we experience day to day.60 The self-conscious ‘I’ is not cut off from its universality but capable of superseding internal divisions within itself, between itself and the other, itself and nature, itself and civil society. Hegel exposes the obsoleteness of the self who ‘knows that it has its truth in the immediate certainty of itself ’61 and provides a fully wrought alternative for his readers. This alternative is expressed in terms peculiar to his time and inclination, notably in the concept of Spirit (Geist) which is reason finding itself not as abstract but as being-for-self in action and ethical life.62 Spirit is ‘God manifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge’; here is Hegel’s a quintessential I-You-I structuring of responsibility.63 As will be shown in Chapter 4, Bonhoeffer denies Hegel’s understanding of responsibility as a certain sort of mutually related state in which each goes beyond themselves in striving for goals, accomplishing the presence of the infinite within themselves (being-in-itself) by virtue of their own efforts, thereby transitioning from substance to relational subject.64 Bonhoeffer’s critique of Hegel is theologically 56. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 371. 57. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 66. 58. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 119–143. 59. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 371. 60. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 371. 61. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 387. 62. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 438. 63. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 671. 64. Robert M. Wallace, Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 83–84.

60

The Limit of Responsibility

learned: ‘God, who was to be thought of solely as the functional correlate of the mental act, has become a reified object’ (DBWE 1:51). Yet Bonhoeffer takes seriously Hegel’s criticism of his Cartesian and neo-Kantian contemporaries as inadequately relational and incapable of actualizing in real life the reflective self ’s social and rational nature. Much in Bonhoeffer’s critique remains valid, and he appreciates Hegel’s framing of morality as inherently interactive: ‘Another limitation of responsible life and action is that other people who are encountered must be regarded as responsible as well’, writes Bonhoeffer (DBWE 6:269). For the moment, we note Hegel’s emphasis on duty as given to every person by nature and responsibility as inherent in individual freedom.

Subsumed within a Totalizing Logic Hegel is not only a philosopher of freedom but of totalizing logic(s) too. It is this aspect of his work that Christian ethicists need to revisit (with caution) today for what it teaches of how the meaning of responsibility becomes subsumed within all-encompassing world views. Against the army of theorists who read Hegel merely for his phenomenology of the emergence of the self,65 along with themes of identity, alienation and community, or who emphasize the critical-revolutionary elements in his work that were taken over by Marx,66 or who concentrate on Hegel’s notion of recognition as a cognitive and pre-linguistic sphere grounding intersubjectivity – thereby preparing the way for his reclamation by new generations of critical theorists67 – I choose not to avoid or overlook his overtly totalizing thinking but suggest instead that there can be no baulking at the textual evidence. For Hegel, knowledge of the Absolute involves some sense of the unity of all historical processes. Even if the language is next to nonsensical today, readers are ill-advised to screen out the totalizing elements of Hegel’s philosophy because his idealism provided a conceptuality and, indeed, a metaphysic that morphed into something akin to the intellectual totalitarianism of capitalism. Of interest for our purposes is the univocal logic within which Hegel discusses duty and responsibility, the all-encompassing reach of his general logic that attempts to subsume everything, including the divine, within its self-replicating dynamic, and how these aspects of Hegel’s philosophy shed light on the totalizing character of global capitalism today. 65. E.g., Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Butler reads Hegel inter alia for insights into human subjection and pre-reflective choice; Jean-Luc Nancy rereads Hegel for his political theory on the building of community. Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 76–80. 66. E.g., Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (London: Routledge, 2000). 67. E.g., Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), passim but esp. chs. 3 and 9, which draw upon Hegel’s insights regarding the need for self-preservation and moral logic of social conflicts.

Genealogy of a Concept

61

There are, of course, many ways in which to read Hegel: As ‘The Old Man of Würtemberg’, that is, using the nickname given by fellow students because of his studious temperament and his devotion from boyhood to the academic reading of important philosophical texts; as the ‘Liberator Moderniæ’ with a particular focus on Hegel’s attempt to break free of Kant’s subject–object model of philosophy; as ‘the last of the Greeks’, that is, a link between Christianity and the philosophical traditions of the Greeks68; as ‘the first post-Christian humanist’ whose attacks on the failure of Lutheran piety to engage with social questions fuelled later Nietzschean ‘God is dead’ atheism; as a ‘social theorist of human bondage’ whose framing of the logic of domination and oppression in early chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit gave impetus to Marx’s revolutionary writings and countless liberationist movements. Gillian Rose attempted to reclaim Hegelian speculative philosophy and his ‘eschatological’ reading of the present as a critical, rational tool for the discussion of social problems.69 Charles Taylor sympathetically reconstructs the social design of Hegel’s philosophy to give fresh voice to his relating of individual subjectivity to life as a social being.70 Allen W. Wood represents a different type of reclaiming of Hegelian ethics by stripping Hegel’s writings of their speculative content back to what they say of a universal, objective standard for assessing social relations: ‘Speculative logic is dead; but Hegel’s thought is not.’71 The movement to (re)-read Hegel after Derrida concentrates on his significance for postmodern and deconstructionist thought.72 Judith Butler’s subject-theory and political theory, with its roots in critical engagement with Hegel’s dialectics of recognition, is yet another indication that Hegel’s thought is alive today, and that any genealogy of the concept of responsibility in the modern era would neglect 68. E.g., note Walter Jaeschke’s emphasis on Hegel’s certainty of oneness with God, which Jaeschke calls the Easter of speculation. See Walter Jaeschke, Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, trans. J. Michael Stewart and Peter Hodgson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 131. 69. Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: The Athlone Press, 1971). 70. Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), esp. 127–130. Hegel, says Taylor, provides essential insight into the development of modern society by examining problems inherent in the individual’s drive for freedom in relation to yet independent of community. Hegel features significantly in Taylor’s later indication of the continuing need for studies in the meaning of identity left to us from philosophical constructs in the post-Reformation period. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. 495–502, where he engages specifically with the Hegelian notion of ‘the spirit’ of human intuition. 71. Allen W. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 4. But on the tendency in Hegel’s vision to smother the individual, see 256–260. 72. Stuart Barnett, ed., Hegel after Derrida (London: Routledge, 1998). See also Simon Skempton, Alienation after Derrida (Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2011), which rearticulates the Hegelian-Marxist theory of alienation in the light of Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence.

62

The Limit of Responsibility

his work at its peril.73 Robert B. Pippin presents Hegel neither as metaphysician nor social theorist but as a critical philosopher whose disagreements with Kant, especially on the issue of intuitions, enrich the idealist arguments against empiricism, realism and naturalism.74 Pippin fights against the established view that Hegel passes beyond Kant into speculative philosophy and argues instead that Hegel follows Kant’s own critical move against that traditional rationalist manner, claiming insight into the fundamental features of reality on the basis of a priori speculation and opting instead for metaphysics as direct inquiry to the concepts we use to think about the world and which are necessary for us to have experience of it as self-conscious subjects. Pippin’s argument is that Hegel’s metaphysics is testable against empirical evidence and with a strongly realist dimension that is grounded always in observation. Others have prioritized the social dimensions of Hegel’s writings. Jürgen Habermas is possibly the best example for our purposes of a social theorist who perceives the need to engage with Hegel’s philosophy because of its massive influence across diverse sectors, but also because of the need to strip his ideas of any residual idealism and recast them in terms of the activity of communication. Society is not a pure idea so social philosophy should concentrate on linguistically mediated communicative action.75 Alexandre Kojève had filtered Hegel’s dialectical method through constructive accounts of language and discourse: ‘By an act of freedom … man [sic] speaks with his adversary, he engages in a dialogue with him: he uses a dialectical method.’76 Jürgen Habermas similarly treats Hegel’s concept of Spirit as the underlying subjectivity of self-consciousness in relation with others: ‘the medium within which, as an absolute mediation, the two mutually form each other into subjects’.77 All of these approaches variously spend much time and effort stripping Hegel of metaphysics. All attempts show that, even if Hegel were a totalizing idealist, his writings can be stripped of any such tendency towards totalization, with the more acceptable elements being retained and made fit for use. 73. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflection in the Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Judith Butler, 2000a. ‘Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism’, in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (London: Verso, 2000). 74. Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 75. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 151–167; Theory of Communicative Action Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalisation of Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992), 273–290. 76. Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, ed. Allan Bloom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 179–180. 77. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Remarks on Hegel’s Jena Philosophy of Mind’, Theory and Practice, trans. J. Viertel (London: Heinemann, 1974), 145.

Genealogy of a Concept

63

The drive towards totality in Hegel’s work is textually unavoidable. So, for instance, Hegel wants to provide for the historical actualization of a rational unity in a post-Christian context. The Christian religion, he says, must be superseded by new speculative logic; this is philosophy in its march towards freedom. The old positivity of Christianity with its claims about revelation is condemned for its impotence: The statues are now only stones from which the living soul has flown, just as the hymns are words from which belief has gone. The tables of the gods provide no spiritual drink, and in his games and festivals man no longer recovers the joyful consciousness of his unity with the divine.78

Active enjoyment of relationship with the divine has become a merely external activity in which there are only dead elements and the imagination is dull. The more virile form of Absolute Knowing, to which Hegel accords a new kind of worship, is grounded not in faith but in knowing, and in a new kind of community. Walter Jaeschke elaborates this point by noting that chapter VIII of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, entitled ‘Absolute Knowing’, draws upon metaphysical aspects of Christianity.79 He dubs the rational content of Christian dogma expounded by Hegel in the part of chapter VII called ‘The Revealed Religion’ as ‘the self-certainty of the community’ and points out how chapter VIII builds upon the ‘relationshipof-consciousness’ between the divine and the human.80 Hegel’s subsumption of the metaphysics of Christianity, and much else too, into a philosophy of Absolute Knowing, also called a philosophy of Spirit (Geist), demands focused attention on Hegel’s commitment to a philosophy of totality, that is, to an account of reason that subsumes everything, including God and world history, within itself. This relates to our topic of responsibility because of lessons to be learned from how Hegel subsumed the meaning of responsibility within the totalizing logic of Absolute Knowing, or Geist. As Hegel’s treatment of duty, morality and responsibility became subsumed within the univocal logic of the progress of Spirit, so too the meaning of responsibility can become absorbed within our own totalizing philosophies. How, for instance, is responsibility to be conceived outside of (as well as within) the totalizing logic of capitalism? For Hegel, nothing escapes the movement of Geist or reason through history. Nature, individual selfconsciousness, one’s own sense of identity, family life, civic society, agriculture, industry, trade, international relations and everything else besides are included within its progression. The state exemplifies this totality: ‘The state is the actuality of the ethical life’81 that, in its truth, subsumes harmoniously within itself the 78. Hegel, Phenomenology, 455. 79. Walter Jaeschke, Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, 186–207. 80. Jaeschke, Reason in Religion, 192. 81. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 155.

64

The Limit of Responsibility

diversity of identities and interests that comprise its existence. Its existence is rational when the particular self-consciousnesses that comprise it attain to consciousness of the universality that they share. Even beyond the state, however, Absolute Knowing or Geist marches on. The particular has meaning only in the universal, and vice versa. Of interest for our purposes is what is to be learned from critical awareness of the totalizing character of Hegel’s philosophy when thinking about globalizing capitalism today. Much effort has been spent on deciding between possible meanings of Absolute Knowing or Geist in Hegel’s corpus: brotherhood or fraternity82; the Holy Spirit83; a ghost or spectral existence; mind or soul84; Volksgeist (i.e. the spirit of a people, or the spirit of a nation)85; team spirit (i.e. something that unites individuals, a sense of shared will)86; the process of realizing human potential; the unifying processes of thought in achieving the reality of reason. I am less concerned at this point to decide between alternative possible meanings than to revisit his idea(s) of Absolute Knowing or Geist in connection with the idea of totality (Totalität).87 But Alexandre Kojève makes the most relevant point well: ‘Only philosophical discourse can achieve Truth, for it alone is related to the concrete Real – that is, to the totality of the reality of Being.’88 Knowledge of both divine and the most mundane are progressing towards unity: ‘The implicitly available unity of consciousness and self-consciousness does not … yet exist for the community, although it is the community’s concept to actualize this unity.’89 Or, in Hegel’s own words, the reconciling power of Spirit rests in the hope of reasoned unity between all that is human and divine, experience and all that can be hoped. This is the power whereby humankind finds its own divinity: ‘superseded individuality … through 82. Robert C. Solomon suggests that Geist is Hegel’s attempt to take seriously the slogan of the French revolution. In the Spirit of Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 39. 83. Robert C. Solomon says Hegel offers us a ‘gutted Christianity’ in which ‘humanity is made absolute’. ‘Hegel may have stuck to the letter of Christianity but in “spirit” he was anything but a Christian.’ From Hegel to Existentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 61. Stephen Houlgate says this completely ignores Hegel’s many public declarations that he was a Christian philosopher. Hegel was a devout Lutheran who claimed to be developing Luther’s ideas about unity with God, the centrality to faith of the incarnation and the (Holy) spirit. 84. It could refer to the spiritual or non-material aspect of human being, that is, in contrast to flesh or body, the intellect of an individual. 85. However, Hegel tended (esp. in early works) to use the term volksgeist to refer to this. 86. For Hegel, this could include the ideals of humanity, solidarity and unity. 87. The word ‘totality’ occurs only ten times in the Phenomenology of Spirit with Gesamtheit, which also means totality, occurring only once and Vollständigkeit occurring eleven times, but ‘the whole’ (das Ganze) ninety-six times. 88. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 178. 89. Jaeschke, Reason in Religion, 206.

Genealogy of a Concept

65

determination, to the universal’.90 ‘The Spirit, that, in its existence, is certain of itself, has for the element of existence nothing else but this knowledge of itself.’91 Capitalism as we know it was not anticipated by Hegel, although scholars have recently begun to examine the value of Hegel’s thought for understanding and assessing capitalism as encountered by him.92 He was ambivalent about the benefits of this new era.93 In 1807, he studied the alienation of factory workers in the industries of England, the most advanced form of capitalist production at the time.94 Mindful, probably, of Adam Smith’s observations on the production of pins, Hegel noted the factory processes involved in the production of needles where ‘an individual on his own might not be able to make twenty, or even one such needle … But as the quantity of the objects produced increases, so the value of the labour decreases accordingly’.95 Hegel comments on the experience of the workers whose labour becomes ‘absolutely deadened’ into something merely mechanical and in which the skills of the individuals are decreased.96 By 1821, in Philosophy of Right, Hegel had accepted that mechanization and industrialization were necessary to civil society. As Avineri summarizes, ‘Thus civil society reaches its apex – and it is here that Hegel integrates the Smithian model of a free market into his philosophical system, by transforming Smith’s “hidden hand” into dialectical reason working in civil society, unbeknownst to its own members.’97 The varied needs of human beings in civil society are met by an infinite variety of means and processes of exchange: ‘their equally infinite and intertwined movements of reciprocal production and exchange converge, by virtue of the universality inherent in their content, and become differentiated into universal masses’.98 The agricultural economy is run increasingly, Hegel observes, like a factory.99 Trade and industry, 90. Hegel, Phenomenology, 480. 91. Hegel, Phenomenology, 482. 92. Andrew Buchwalter, ed., Hegel and Capitalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015). 93. This is noted by Buchwalter, Hegel and Capitalism, 2. 94. Horst Althaus, Hegel: An Intellectual Biography (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2000), 91. See Hegel, Jena Lectures 1803–4, in System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Philosophy of Spirit [Part III of the System of Speculative Philosophy 180314], ed. and trans. H.S. Harris and T.M. Knox (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979), 248. 95. On Hegel’s reading of Smith, see John B. Davis and James P. Henderson ‘Adam Smith’s Influence on Hegel’s Philosophical Writings’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought 3 (1991): 184–204. For Hegel’s wider familiarity with the Scottish Enlightenment, see Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 96. See Althaus, Hegel, 92. 97. Schlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 146–147. 98. Hegel, Elements of Philosophy of Right, 234. 99. Hegel, Elements of Philosophy of Right, 236.

66

The Limit of Responsibility

and the more ‘abstract work of mass production’, conducts the business of exchange through money in order to meet the universal interests of society.100 Hegel has subsumed the ideas of Adam Smith and Smith’s Scottish contemporaries within his own philosophy.101 Hegel’s sympathy for administrative policy-making, its creation of efficiency and elimination of favour remained with him throughout his life.102 Born to a bureaucrat in the Duchy of Wurttemberg, Hegel was sympathetic to the need for a strong state. At a loss to account for Napoleon’s fall between 1813 and 1814, Hegel upheld the principles of the revolution but associated himself with the government reforms in Prussia. The revolution had failed because of its descent into terror and the insufficient attention paid to the nature of freedom under the modern conditions of the state. A public disagreement in 1819 between himself and Schleiermacher over the dismissal of a colleague named de Wette at the University of Berlin, who had spoken in defence of Karl Sand, a political romantic of Jacobin tendency, illustrates Hegel’s leanings.103 Hegel, opposed to Jacobin tendencies, contributed to a collection for de Wette but defended the right of the state over university affairs and the government’s 100. Hegel, Elements of Philosophy of Right, 237. 101. The recent surge of interest in the relationship between Hegel and the writings of Adam Smith is evidenced most clearly in Buchwalter, Hegel and Capitalism, which draws together a range of disciplinary perspectives on the topic. Buchwalter’s preferred focus is on the 1821 Philosophy of Right; he reads Hegel as a theorist of modern market economics. Michalis Skomvoulis’s essay ‘Hegel Discovers Capitalism’ (ch. 1) concentrates on Hegel’s own discovery of theories of modern political economy associated with thinkers like Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and James Steuart. Kohei Saito’s more philosophical approach (ch. 2) compares Hegel’s early philosophy, notably in the 1802/3 System of Ethical Life, with the conditions for human freedom advocated by Johann Fichte, in order to examine why and how Hegel advances an argument for regulative practices within the institutions of civil society. Nicholas Mowad (ch. 4) traverses Hegel’s entire corpus to evidence his beliefs regarding mutual interdependency and individual value as linked to societal norms regarding achievement. Giorgio Cesarale (ch. 5) studies Hegel’s theory of labour. For more on Hegel and labour, see Anders Bartonek, ‘Labour against Capitalism? Hegel’s Concept of Labour in Between Civil Society and the State’, Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 6 (2014): 113–124. Hosted by Linköping University Electronic Press: http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se (accessed 24 August 2017). Bartonek argues that, for Hegel, labour is both economically productive and the activity by which the society and its members can transcend the mere capitalistic dimensions of society. Hegel’s capitalism does not merely reduce labour to an object but regards it as mediating between economy and culture. 102. Althaus, Hegel: An Intellectual Biography, ch. 7. 103. Walter Jaeschke (Hrsg.) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag) in ‘Vorwort des Herausgebers’, p. XII. Allen Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 274.

Genealogy of a Concept

67

right to suspend him. Schleiermacher contributed to the fund but protested vehemently that the matter was internal to the university and that the government had no right to suspend a faculty member. That is, Hegel upheld the right of the government to act. The Philosophy of Right (1820) is largely about how a reformist government might set the conditions necessary not only for education and commerce but also for individuals to live freely within a state through the mediation of institutions that provide for state and market. The old Prussia, defeated by Napoleon at the 1806 Battle of Jena, marked, for Hegel, the passing of an exhausted feudal era and its replacement by new reformist powers. The point is not to read Hegel as prototypical capitalist. Indeed, he is more commonly regarded as a precursor to Karl Marx whose dialectical method mirrored inter alia his notions of alienation and its overcoming.104 But his significance for our purposes can hardly be overstated because the working logic of his idealism maps fairly directly onto the working logic of dominant capitalist theories. As Walter Benjamin observes, radical critique becomes impossible because nothing external to Spirit or Absolute Knowing can be seen.105 Few readers of Hegel today hold anything like his views of the unity of universal self-consciousness as the ultimate object of respect that ‘unites the objective form of Truth and of the knowing Self in an immediate unity’.106 If, however, the drive towards totality in Hegel’s writings presages the totalizing politics of modern capitalism, much might be learned from facing the totalizing elements of Hegel’s philosophy. Any univocal logic outside of which nothing seems to exist is dangerous. Even though his totalizing philosophy per se has long been rejected by mainstream scholarship, with heavy filters being applied in new readings of his social theory, logic and so on, the question is whether we are sufficiently alert to the totalizing tendencies in other univocal logics today, notably globalizing capitalism. Like Hegel’s philosophy of Absolute Spirit, capitalism can become a similarly self-enclosed and all-encompassing world view, within which the meaning of responsibility, morality and duty are subsumed into a way of thinking and acting, outside of which there appears to be nothing.

104. In 1892, Karl Kautsky discussed the objectifying effect of the link between commodities and capital as the workers’ point of ‘transformation into property-less proletarians’. Kautsky, The Class Struggle, trans. W.E. Bohn (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 15. György Lukács’s famous essay ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein (Berlin, 1932). Paul Browne suggested more recently that reification is still the structuring principle of the capitalist mode of production that results in a society riven by antinomies. Paul Browne, ‘Reification, Class and ‘New Social Movements’, Radical Philosophy 55 (Summer 1990): 18–24. 105. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 461; n2, 6. 106. Hegel, Phenomenology, 491.

68

The Limit of Responsibility

Bourgeois Diversion Karl Marx, like Hegel, writes little about responsibility. Indeed, a strong school of thought says that Marx lacks an ethic of responsibility and dismissed the notion as a bourgeois diversion from the material concerns of life. The German sociologist Werner Sombart, who was sympathetic to Marx’s purpose in writing Capital, famously declared Marxism to be devoid of ethics: ‘in the whole of marxism … there is not a grain of ethic’ because this is a purely theoretical movement.107 Philosopher G.A. Cohen writes, ‘Marxists were not preoccupied with, and therefore never examined, principles of equality, or indeed, any other values of principles. Instead, they devoted their intellectual energy to the hard, factual carapace surrounding their values, to bold explanatory theses about history in general and capitalism in particular.’108 Morality, Cohen embellishes, is deemed to be ideological eyewash and nothing to do with the struggle between capitalism and socialism. Simon Critchley refers to ‘the silence or hostility to ethics that one finds in Marx and in many Marxist or post-Marxist thinkers’.109 Others point to the values of solidarity and equality, poverty alleviation and cooperation that pervade his entire corpus, and draw attention to Marx’s critique of the ‘top down’, theoretically abstract, ahistorical ethics of modern philosophy.110 Chad Lavin, however, reads Marx as struggling to articulate a theory of responsibility but not having an adequate vocabulary.111 In particular, he reads Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonapart for its critique of the liberal ideology of individual sovereignty and tries to show that Marx ‘threads a course between voluntarism and structuralism’.112 Much turns, it would appear, upon what is included as a ‘moral’ consideration.113 In the main, my reasons for including Marx in this genealogy are positive. They are, namely, his rootedness in the material and his reminder of the importance 107. Werner Sombart, ‘Besprechung von Julius Wolf, Socialismus und Kapitalistische Gesellschaftsordnung’, Archiv für Soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik, 5 (1892): 487–499, esp. at 498. 108. G.A. Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (Harvard, MA: Harvard University, 2000), 103. 109. Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2007), 93. 110. Paul Blackledge, ‘Marxism and Ethics’, International Socialism: A Quarterly Review of Socialist Theory 120 (Autumn 2008), n.p. See further Paul Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics: Freedom, Desire and Revolution (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012). 111. Chad Lavin, The Politics of Responsibility (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), ch. 2. 112. Lavin, The Politics of Responsibility, 21. 113. For a more general overview, see Nicholas Churchich, Marxism and Morality: A Critical Examination of Marxist Ethics (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co Ltd, 1994).

Genealogy of a Concept

69

and power of the collective. Marx takes us back to the most basic considerations of subsistence and actual material life, to human responses to basic needs as a fundamental life force and to labour as the mediation between the human being and their meeting of basic needs. The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 begin with the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker. Marx’s starting point is the collective struggle of workers against their shared experiences of exploitation. Those with capital in reserve, he observes, are stronger than those without: ‘The capitalist can live longer without the worker than can the worker without the capitalist.’ It is far easier for capitalists to collaborate than for the workers: ‘Combination among the capitalists is customary and effective; workers’ combination is prohibited and painful in its consequences for them.’ In agreement with Eric Fromm, it is important to take seriously Marx’s distinction between fixed and relative motivations, that is, the distinction between drives for life that exist in the human being under most circumstances – those that make the infant cry for food, the refugee flee from persecution or famine and so on – and the relative variants of these desires experienced by human beings whose most basic needs are met. The popular idea of the nature of historical materialism is erroneous if Marx is assumed merely to assert that the strongest psychological motive in man is to gain money and to have more material comfort.114 Christian ethics and political theology need not decry Marx’s materialism on these grounds of materialistic or economic striving as the most fundamental drive in human beings. To denounce Marx’s writings on this basis could risk avoiding his real challenge, which is about meeting basic human needs. The challenge is not to fall foul of Marx’s complaint against ‘the theologian’ who abstracts problems from the every day in a servile yet sophistical manner.115 While Marx, like Schleiermacher and Hegel, says little about responsibility per se, including Marx in this genealogy of responsibility keeps us close to the empirical dimension of the conflict between labour and capital as it pertains to our topic, and also to the role of the collective in giving content to the meaning of responsibility.116 Marx keeps before us questions about the conditions of workers vis-à-vis the power of capital, the relation of revenue and profit to the wages of labour, the power of the collective, and maintains an awareness of questions about how the voices of workers are to be heard. 114. Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1961), ch. 2. 115. Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, https://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf (accessed 24 August 2017), 64. 116. As Laborem Exercens reminds us, the conflict between labour and capital has many dimensions, including the ideological, political and otherwise empirical. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (1981) available at http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/ encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens.html (accessed 10 April 2018), Sect. 11.

70

The Limit of Responsibility

More contentious is the question of necessity when the meeting of such needs is (or might be) frustrated by the sheer power of capital. The basis of capital, says Marx, is private property in the products of other men’s labour: ‘Capital is thus the governing power over labour and its products. The capitalist possesses this power, not on account of his personal or human qualities, but in as much as he is an owner of capital. His power is the purchasing power of his capital, which nothing can withstand.’117 Marx’s solution to the exploitation of workers is the abolition of private property and new basis for society whereon ‘the individual is the social being’. Communal manifestations of life are to be carried out in association with others.118 Here the question of necessity again becomes pressing, however:119 Is conflict between capital and workers necessary? Roman Catholic social teaching since Rerum Novarum (1891) has upheld a strong role for the trades unions in redressing power imbalances and providing a strong voice for workers.120 Roman Catholic social teaching has long been clear about the need to keep questions about power and justice in the workplace central to proclamation of the gospel

117. Laborem Exercens, 11. 118. Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts, 45. 119. On the history of this debate, see Georg Lucács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein (Berlin: Walik Verlag, 1931); Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1941). In 1955, Erich Fromm picked up the socio-psychological sense of Hegel’s notion of alienation and reflected upon why popular readings of Marx’s historical materialism are erroneous – because, he thought, they are insufficiently attentive to the material desires of human beings. See Eric Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Reinhard, 1955): ‘By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself ’ (20). Fromm emphasizes the subjective sense of estrangement as a driving force in human experience. Ernst Kahler wrote in 1957, ‘The history of man could very well be written as a history of the alienation of man.’ His demythologization of Hegel and Marx is far-reaching. See The Tower and the Abyss: An Inquiry into the Transformation of the Individual (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1957). Hannah Arendt updated, but remained closer to Marx’s social critique when emphasizing what she described as a second sense of alienation (Entäußerung) in public spheres of work. Since Hegel and Marx, she wrote, negation and the overcoming of alienation means become a participating member of a public sphere of work. Overcoming alienation consists in ‘the elimination of the gap between the individual and social existence of man’. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 301, 311. 120. Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum – ‘Of New Things’ (1891) states: ‘In any case we clearly see, and on this there is general agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen’s guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers

Genealogy of a Concept

71

of Christ, to affirm that the interests of workers must always take precedent over that of capital, and has done this by ensuring that the voices of workers are heard. This is not the same, however, as assuming the dialectical necessity and historical inevitability of this conflict. Much turns upon the concept of necessity as driving the movement of negation in neo-Marxist scholarship. The debate in the 1970s and 1980s about the role of Marxism in liberation theology thrashed through many of these issues.121 The warning here must be against the diminishment that pertains to the problem of necessity inherent in Marx’s historical materialism, namely, the inevitability of the social revolution that communism would bring; the proletarian revolution will happen in all capitalist countries because real power lies with the people if only they come to consciousness of this and rise up. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit contained a theoretical version of this dynamic in the certainty of reason coming to itself and the idea of practical consciousness (praktische Bewußtein).122 Alienation as estrangement (Entfremdung) refers to the socio-psychological condition of self-consciousness and its contradiction, being the direct result of the dynamic character of the movement of identity and self-conscious awareness. The awakening of workers to the truth of their situation leads to revolution in the face and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labour and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself ’ (Sect. 3). More recently, Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Laborem Excercens – ‘On Human Work’ (1981) – further states: ‘All these rights [to fair remuneration, the personal security of the worker and his or her family, and other basic human rights – EDR’], together with the need for the workers themselves to secure them, give rise to yet another right: the right of association, that is to form associations for the purpose of defending the vital interests of those employed in the various professions. These associations are called labour or trade unions. The vital interests of the workers are to a certain extent common for all of them; at the same time however each type of work, each profession, has its own specific character which should find a particular reflection in these organizations’ (Sect. 20). The Compendium of Social Doctrine of the Church also states that unions are ‘a positive influence for social order and solidarity, and are therefore an indispensable element of social life’. 121. José P. Miranda, Marx and the Bible (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1974); Hugo Assmann, Theology for a Nomad Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1976); Alfredo Fierro, The Militant Gospel: A Critical Introduction to Political Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1977); Enrique Dussel offers a retrospective in ‘Liberation Theology and Marxism’, Rethinking Marxism 5, no. 3 (1992): 50–74; For an overview, see also Marxism and Missions/Missions et Marxisme, special issue of the Journal Social Sciences and Missions, 22/2 (2009). 122. Hegel, Phenomenology, 192.

72

The Limit of Responsibility

of capitalist exploitation: ‘Eventually wages, which have already been reduced to a minimum, must be reduced yet further, to meet the new competition. This then necessarily leads to revolution.’123 Marx’s interest in Hegel’s theory of alienation became a topic of academic interest only from 1931 to 1932 when manuscripts from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 were discovered and published, and the concept of the necessity of revolution was developed: ‘Landed property had to develop in each of these two ways so as to experience in both its necessary downfall, just as industry both in the form of monopoly and in that of competition had to ruin itself so as to learn to believe in man.’124 The revolution necessarily will come, says Marx, because of how private property is the perceptible expression of estranged human life. The second warning must be against writing off the problem of responsibility in Marx’s writings as part of the tendency towards the disappearance of the person in later Marxist thought due to the primacy of the collective over the person.125 It is important still to consider responsibility along with the issues treated by Marx because no treatment of responsibility will be complete without attention to the material dimensions of human existence, including needs for food, shelter, reproduction and so on. Even if, as John Paul II summarizes in Centesimus Annus, Marxism ‘totally reduces man to the sphere of economics and the satisfaction of material needs’, it cannot suffice as a way of life, and this should not result in Christians divorcing questions of responsibility from Marx’s overriding concerns.126 Of course, in a Christian perspective, Marx’s reductionism is linked to his promise to uproot God from the human heart and deny Christ’s lordship over history.127 According to subsequent and strict Marxist theory, what matters most is not the person but the totality of all social relations. Hence the problem of (personal) responsibility diminishes in Marxism because the main locus of answerability before others is political and concerned with providing the conditions necessary within which people may work, assert their dignity and engage in social activity: ‘Marxist theory relating to the revolutionary reconstruction of society, and based on the objective laws of history, is a quasi-scientifically based program for the

123. Marx, e28. First MSS, sect. XXI. 124. John F. Toews describes tensions concerning the idea of the necessity of revolutionary change arising in early receptions of Hegel’s work, especially between 1820 and 1841. The socalled Young Hegelians, or left-leaning intellectuals, notably Bruno Bauer, David F. Strauss, Moses Hess, represented a diversity of pictures of humanistic communism. Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism 1805–41 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 5–8. 125. Karl Marx, The German Ideology (London: Penguin Random House, 1998) 126. John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, sect. 19. See also Stanley William Rothstein, ‘Symbolic Violence: The Disappearance of the Individual in Marxist Thought’, Interchange 22, no. 3 (1991): 28–42. 127. John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, sect. 24.

Genealogy of a Concept

73

workingman’s freedom and the all-round development of the individual.’128 Two pitfalls must be avoided. Personal responsibility should not become swallowed up within the problems of alienation, of freedom, and the processes and conditions necessary for the development of the individual. Nor should the materiality of human life be forgotten. In the ethic of responsibility developed in this book, I do not attempt some kind of middle way political coalition, precisely because the sheer power of capital tends towards the exploitation of, and conflict with, workers. Conversely, I do not advocate Hegel’s supersession of alienation through Absolute Reason or Spirit, Marx’s expectation of ‘the return of man [sic] from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e., social, existence’.129 My point, rather, is that reading Marx keeps us close to the subordinate relation of the worker to the capitalist and to the need for the power of the collective; Marx keeps before Christian ethics and political theology the realities of structural sin.130 Reading Marx keeps before us the material conditions of human life and work. His observations in the Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 remain surprisingly apt with respect to the imbalance of power and influence between workers and those with capital (for our purposes it is specifically meant here multinational mining corporation(s) with backing from the state), and the impact of new industry in a given locality: ‘The raising of wages excites in the worker the capitalist’s mania to get rich, which he, however, can only satisfy by the sacrifice of his mind and body. The raising of wages presupposes and entails the accumulation of capital, and thus sets the product of labour against the worker as something ever more alien to him.’131 It might be difficult for anyone raised in so-called developed countries to understand why local communities close to proposed mine sites simply say ‘no’ to the prospect of the ‘development’ that mining could bring. Why do communities close to mine sites turn down infrastructure, potential extra funding to support schools and health units, small business generation, training for jobs and so on? It makes no apparent sense. What

128. G Simirnov, ‘Karl Marx on the Individual and the Conditions for His Freedom and Development’, The Marxist Volume 3, no. 3–4 (July–December 1985). 129. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-PhilosophicManuscripts-1844.pdf:44, i.e. Third MMS, sect. V. 130. I adopt Daniel K. Finn’s definition of a structural sin as systems of human relations among pre-existing social positions that induce people towards sinful acts. ‘They are ontologically real, emergent “things” that exist at a “higher level” than the individual persons from whose actions they emerge. Structures exert causal impact on persons who take on positions within them by generating restrictions, enablements and incentives that influence the (free) decisions those people make.’ Daniel K. Finn, ‘What Is a Sinful Social Structure?’ Theological Studies 77, no. 1 (March 2016): 136–164; see esp. 162. 131. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, First Mss, ‘Wages of Labour’, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-PhilosophicManuscripts-1844.pdf5.

74

The Limit of Responsibility

could possibly be bad for local communities about sustainable development?132 Marx keeps before us the probability that structural conditions within many modes of globalization are deeply problematic and sin-ridden.133 Adequately sophisticated and robust power analyses must be undertaken when engaging with transnational mining and other companies. Christian ethicists locus imperii bear a responsibility to the collective, that is, to overt political support for trade unions that voice the concerns of workers in the face of capital. There is no escaping the economic and sociopolitical dimensions of responsibility, and Marx’s legacy is to remind readers to expect the accumulative attractions of capital to put at risk the flourishing of workers. If Marx is correct, labour is likely to be commodified because capitalism is the ‘ongoing transformation of the process of production in order to increase output while reducing costs’.134 It matters little that Marx wrote minimally about responsibility per se. Nor are Christian ethicists and political theologians required to accept Marx’s quasi-philosophical and deeply structural notion of dialectical necessity in order to grasp the likely (not necessary) conflict between labour and capital. Responsibility exceeds the individual’s actions and the consequences of those actions. The meaning of responsibility has material and structural socio-economic and political dimensions.

Integral to Instrumental Rationality Max Weber is (in)famous inter alia for his distinction between ‘the ethic of conviction’ (Gesinnungsethik) and ‘the ethic of responsibility’ (Verantwortungsethik), and, according to some, for the trail of devastation that this distinction left in its wake. Karl Löwith describes the distinction as follows: Weber contrasts the ‘ethic of responsibility’ with the ‘ethic of conviction’, which he regards as an ethic of ‘irrational conduct’ because of its indifferences to ‘consequences’; in comparison to purposive-rational action, the ethic of conviction has a ‘value-rational’ orientation. The ethic of responsibility, by contrast, takes account of the prospects and consequences of action on the basis of available means. It is a relative, not an absolute, ethic because it is related to the knowledge, attained through this weighing of means, of the prospects and consequences of pursuing one’s aims. If one opts for the ethic of responsibility one also decided in favour of rationality as means–ends rationality.135 132. ICMM Sustainable Development Principle no. 7. http://www.icmm.com/ publications/pdfs/429.pdf. 133. ‘The church’s wisdom has always pointed to the presence of original sin in social conditions and in the structure of society.’ Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, §34. 134. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The “Rationality” of Capitalism’, in Figures of the Thinkable, trans. Helen Arnold (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 53. 135. Karl Löwith, Max Weber and Karl Marx (London: Routledge, 1993), 68.

Genealogy of a Concept

75

Löwith’s reading of Weber parallels the ‘ethic of conviction’ with a value-rational orientation and the ‘ethic of responsibility’ with purposive or instrumental-rational orientation. A value-rational orientation is informed by a hierarchy of values. Like Martin Luther, who said ‘Here I stand; I can do no other’, a person acting upon an ethic of conviction has a world view within which actions may be assessed and judgements made.136 Bradley E. Starr summarizes as follows. Weber’s ‘Politics as a Vocation’ essay differentiates the ‘ethic of conviction’ into three forms: That which is like the absolute ethic in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount in its disregard for consequences and simple clinging to what matters most; that which includes an element of calculation and assessment of diverse means, thereby introducing a whiff of compromise; and that characterized by the revolutionary willingness to embrace force in order to bring about the desired end. The ‘ethic of responsibility’ has its roots in instrumental-rationality, the need for self-preservation, the flourishing of society, economic motivations and so on. What are we to make of this divide? The project upon which Weber embarked was aimed methodologically at developing sociology as a science that interprets human decision-making and action: Sociology … is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding [bedeutendes Verstehen] of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequence.137

More even than raising the study of human behaviour to the level of a science, Weber wants to interpret human behaviour and find causal explanations for decision-making and action. Hence his comment in the sentence immediately following the now famous citation above: ‘We shall speak of “action” insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behaviour – be it overt or covert, omission or acquiescence. Action is “social” insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behaviour of others and is thereby oriented in its course.’138 Weber returned time and again to the individual, however, and to what causes them to act. Causal explanations of what gives subjective meaning to an individual’s behaviour and their role within a collective matter intensely to him. This necessarily entails interpretation in order to understand what bore most significantly upon a decision or course of action for one individual as compared to another. The sociologist strives to understand what a person is doing when he tries to achieve certain ends ‘by choosing appropriate means on the basis of the facts of 136. Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans., ed. and with an introduction by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 127; Bradley E. Starr, ‘The Structure of Max Weber’s Ethic of Responsibility’, The Journal of Religious Ethics 27, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 407–434, esp. 416–417. 137. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 4. 138. Weber, Economy and Society, 4.

76

The Limit of Responsibility

the situation’.139 Factors in play include rationally purposeful elements possessed by a given action, the choice of means and such like. Complicating factors include mistakes made by the given individual and their confusions, and so on. What matters is the meaning that the action has for the individual, with particular reference being made to the individual’s grasp of its meaning for others too. Weber’s treatment of the concept of responsibility must be understood against the broad methodological backdrop; responsibility is a significant theme within this larger undertaking. As with the larger venture, Weber’s endeavour is about uncovering causal explanations that give meaning to an individual’s actions. His purpose is to understand why an individual acts in what they deem to be a responsible manner. Hence the focus on motivation in the opening chapter of Economy and Society (first published posthumously in 1921) where basic sociological terms are established and explained: ‘A motive is a complex of subjective meaning which seems to the actor himself or to the observer an adequate ground for the conduct in question.’140 What matters is whether, and how, the person in question deems themselves, or others, to have sufficient grounds for a course of action. Any such decision will be informed by multiple factors that include but are not exhausted by the anticipated frequency of likely outcomes, approximated to an average or a pure type. The challenge that Weber sets himself is to arrive at causally adequate interpretations that relate motivation to the action in question, thereby attaining meaning. Statistical uniformities yield only a particular kind of information. More is required: ‘Action in the sense of subjectively understandable orientation of behaviour exists only as the behavior of one or more individual human being.’141 A human being is more than a collection of biochemical reactions, says Weber. Many factors contribute to a decision. Causal factors vary as a person changes over time. But the social scientist can assist by helping individuals and groups to clarify their values, identify habits that bear upon decision-making, increase understanding of the practical import of affections, isolate social pressures and so on. Individuals form collectives and take decisions jointly. Even so, Weber is convinced that persons must be treated as individuals: ‘For the subjective interpretation of action in sociological work … collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons.’142 Of particular interest is Weber’s choice of concepts with which to interpret the subjective meaning of responsibility, motivation and judgement-making, notably the distinction between ‘the ethic of conviction’ (Gesinnungsethik), which is most clearly developed in his ‘Politics as a Vocation’ essay of 1919 (written approximately six years after initial drafts of Economy and Society).143 Given a lack of certainty about 139. Weber, Economy and Society, 4. 140. Weber, Economy and Society, 11. 141. Weber, Economy and Society, 13. 142. Weber, Economy and Society, 13. 143. On the textual integrity and publishing history of Economy and Society, see Charles Camic, Philip S. Gorksi and David M. Trubek, eds., Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), ch. 1, esp. 6.

Genealogy of a Concept

77

the precise timings of the initial drafts of these pieces respectively, scholars have conventionally read these texts together as mutually informing. Thus Eric Voegelin probes, by means of parallels and comparisons, what Weber might have hoped to achieve and concludes that Weber’s approach to the concept of responsibility is injurious: ‘I think here particularly of the disastrous effect that Max Weber’s distinction between Gesinnungsethik [ethics of intention] and Verantwortungsethik [ethics of responsibility]’.144 Weber distinguishes between a person acting with reference to their intentions or conviction and a person who considers carefully the consequences of his actions, and is prepared to accept responsibility for these consequences. The Gesinnungsethiker, says Voegelin, is an ideologue who lacks adequate guidelines for action, ‘who has transformed the conscience into an orderdestroying form of deception’.145 The Verantwortungsethiker can be unprincipled and irresponsible, and lacking value-informed guidelines. Whatever Weber intended, says Voegelin, his distinction and comparison is still used by theorists and persons of note as quasi-ideal types; his legacy is a world view that either yields value relativism or designates some value commitments as seemingly irrational world views. The distinction between these ideal types represents a low point in Weber’s intellectual history, says Voegelin, and, worse, continues to influence detrimentally public debate about fundamental questions of social order. Theorists who continue to use Weber’s types ‘should know better’.146 The relation between these two ethics is disputed, as is the extent to which Weber is deemed to have advocated their integration. An outstanding question is whether Löwith and Voegelin are correct to detect a parallel between the ‘ethic of conviction’ and a value-rational orientation, and between the ‘ethic of responsibility’ and purposive- or instrumental-rational orientation, or whether some more recent scholarship is to be heeded. So, for instance, a sympathetic reading of Weber’s ethic of responsibility is proposed by Bradley E. Starr who asks readers not to correlate value-rationality (Wertrationalität) and instrumental-rationality (Zweckrationalität) with a Gesinnungsethik [ethics of intention] and a Verantwortungsethik [ethics of responsibility], respectively, but, rather, to be more sympathetic to Weber’s confronting of value conflict in society and to his development of an ethic of responsibility that takes account of this. The structure of Weber’s ethic of responsibility, says Starr, arises from his realistic acceptance of value pluralism and his consequent acknowledgement of the centrality that values of some kind have for most people. The point, says Starr, is that rational, socially oriented action pervades both types of ethics. A value-informed ethics of intention or commitment is not necessarily devoid of rationality nor is an ethic of responsibility, with its focus on consequences and outcomes, necessarily without values. 144. Eric Voegelin, ‘Freedom and Responsibility in Economy and Democracy’, in Published Essays, 1953–1965. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. II, ed. Ellis Sandoz (University of Missouri Press, 2000), 78. 145. Voegelin, ‘Freedom and Responsibility’, 79. 146. Voegelin, ‘Freedom and Responsibility’, 79.

78

The Limit of Responsibility

Like the designations of the two dominant approaches to morality within modern Western philosophy as (Kantian) deontological and (post-Benthamite) utilitarian, Weber’s types represent far more than the modes of expression of a lone academic. Analogous to these more general dominant approaches to morality, Weber’s distinction between a Gesinnungsethik [ethics of intention] and a Verantwortungsethik [ethics of responsibility] exemplifies a divide that runs deep between seemingly competing considerations in the lived moral experience. Whether or not we are sympathetic to Starr’s reading and willing to accept that, for Weber, the ethic of responsibility is more holistic than sometimes perceived – that is, that the ethic of responsibility entails no necessary diminishment of a sense of moral obligation, loss of conscience or abandonment of personal and social values, and, conversely, that it is possible for a person with strong personal and social values to factor a calculations of consequences into decision-making – Weber diagnoses a cleavage in the conditions of modernity in the West. Weber readily associates a Gesinnungsethik with religion and thereby with irrationality. This is not our immediate concern, however, but rather the reasons for the harmful divide between aspects of human experience of responsibility that belong together and why he classifies forms of action as he does. A causal explanation for decision-making is sought with respect to Weber’s own classification of forms of responsibility. What are the preconditions that lead to his selection and situations of these ideal types? How does Weber frame his project of understanding the value (i.e. the meaning) that is invested in the concept of responsibility? Here we must reckon with Weber’s methodological individualism whereby understanding of actions and their motivations, and the meaning of responsibility as experienced, begins and ends with the individual: Action in the sense of subjectively understandable orientation of behavior exists only as the behavior of one or more individual human beings.147

The individual can be studied variously – as a collection of cells, a complex of biochemical reactions, psychically, as a subject of rights and duties and so on. For the sociologist, what matters is how far the behaviour of individuals is subjectively understandable, that is, understood in terms of what gives meaningful orientation to a person. No collective, such as a state, business corporation or civil association, can be studied without primary reference to the individual: [F]or the subjective interpretation of action in sociological work these collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action.148 147. Weber, Economy and Society, 13. 148. Weber, Economy and Society, 13.

Genealogy of a Concept

79

More is needed when describing the function of a collective than an account of mechanistic relationships and uniformities. The natural sciences cannot do this because the human being is more complex than members of flocks, herds and such like. Biological analogies might assist the sociologist in describing social phenomena. Fundamentally, however, the sociologist must piece together the fragments of sociological motives in order to arrive at an understanding: Even a socialistic economy would have to be understood sociologically in exactly the same kind of ‘individualistic’ terms; that is, in terms of the action of individuals, the types of officials found in it, as would be the case with a system of free exchange analysed in terms of the theory of marginal utility of a ‘better’, but in this respect similar, theory.149

To this end, the new discipline of sociology employs ideal types in order to give expression to the articulated, or even half-consciously held, views of individuals regarding what gives their lives subjective meaning. Weber’s application of ideal types to subjective processes represents, for our purposes, a kind of individualism that presupposes a self-generating subjectivity whereby typical decisions in the spheres of economy and society are made in terms of causal judgements that are motivated with reference to outcomes and consequences. Here we need to keep in mind a broader intellectual milieu that includes John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), Ludwig von Mises (1881–1975), Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950), et al. Each represents a subtly different form of methodological individualism. This diversity has been nicely mapped by Geoffrey Hodgson who distinguishes especially between von Mises’s and Pareto’s ontological commitment and Joseph Schumpeter’s nonontological but descriptive individualism as a demarcation device that marks extremes on the spectrum between which other variants fall.150 The extent of Weber’s own association with each figure varies. Sandro Segre reconstructs a fascinating account of the intellectual relationship between Weber and Pareto in order to suggest that the latter had hardly any impact whatsoever on Weber’s sociological thought.151 Pareto’s silence over Weber was perhaps due simply to Pareto’s limited ability to read German. Weber’s silence over Pareto could have been due to a frustration over his lack of epistemological consideration of individual subjectivity. ‘Nothing resulted’, says Segre, ‘from Weber’s contact with Pareto as an economist’.152 By contrast, Weber and Schumpeter collaborated on the Grundriss 149. Weber, Economy and Society, 18. 150. Geoffrey M. Hodgson, ‘Meanings of Methodological Individualism’, Journal of Economic Methodology 14, no. 2 (2007): 211–226. 151. Sandro Segre, ‘Pareto and Weber – A Tentative Reconstruction of Their Intellectual Relationship with an Excursus on Pareto and the German Language’, Revue européenne des sciences sociales T. 20, no. 62 (1982): 247–271, esp. 271. 152. Segre, ‘Pareto and Weber’, 268.

80

The Limit of Responsibility

der Sozialokonomik and were fellow editors of the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. According to Walter W. Powell, Schumpeter saw a disjuncture between Weber’s call for an interpretive methodological individualism and his ‘monumental corpus of structural analyses’.153 There is little documentation of the personal relationship between the two scholars,154 but the scholarly consensus is that each was intensely aware of the other and intellectually engaged with their work. Weber is closer to Schumpeter than Pareto regarding the kind of methodological individualism practised, but he still relies heavily on the typical distinction between Gesinnungsethik [ethics of intention] and a Verantwortungsethik [ethics of responsibility] to describe patterns and regularities of motivation and action. Weber’s methodological individualism is less extreme than Pareto’s conception of the human being who functions quasi-mechanically in response only to economic forces and who barely knows either benevolence or malevolence.155 Pareto’s vision of a human person responding with moral indifference to economic forces in the search for prosperity was more mechanistic than the closer attention Weber paid to empirical reality and the concrete social conditions in which people lived. He is concerned, however, to produce testable hypotheses of how people understand themselves to be acting responsibly. Weber’s type of the responsible Christian who ‘does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord’ perpetuates an ethic of ultimate ends in which earthly consequences matter less than utter commitment to the ethical meaning of the gospel.156 This ethic is no joking matter. The same holds for this ethic as has been said of causality in science: it is not a cab, which one can have stopped at one’s pleasure; it is all or nothing.157

This ethic of intention, says Weber, requires the individual to live like Jesus, the apostles, St Francis, et al. – that is, within an ethic of absolute commitment that demands and holds them unconditionally. It must inevitably ‘go to pieces’ when rubbed up alongside any kind of ethic that allows consideration of consequences. In this sense, the ethic of intention is irrational: ‘It is not possible to bring an ethic 153. Walter W. Powell, ‘Weber and Schumpeter, “Turbulent Lives, Ideas Never at Rest”’, Industrial and Corporate Change 1 (September 1996): 917–924, at 922. 154. Riccardo Faucci, ‘Max Weber’s Influence on Schumpeter’, History of Economic Ideas 15, no. 1, Special Issue: New Perspectives on the Schumpeter Frontier (2007): 111–133, at 121. 155. Vilfredo Pareto himself ascribes the expression homo economicus to Vito Volterra. Manuale di Economic Politica (Milano, Italia: Società Editrice Libraria, 1906), 12. See Edward J. O’Boyle, http://www.marketsandmorality.com/index.php/mandm/article/ viewFile/235/225 (accessed 20 August 2017), but it is Pareto’s conception of the human who functions quasi-mechanically in response only to economic forces, and who knows neither benevolence nor malevolence only indifference, that we adopt here. 156. Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, 120. 157. Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, 116.

Genealogy of a Concept

81

of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility under one roof or to decree ethically which end should justify which means.’158 By contrast, an ethic of responsibility is needed by those exercising power backed by violence and who claim to be the bearers of legitimate power. Having contrasted the two approaches by positing that ‘all ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims’, Weber pulls back and accepts that an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements which only in unison constitute a real person with a calling to politics. Hence an ethic of responsibility is not to be equated with unprincipled opportunism. It remains unclear how each aspect of responsibility can be reconciled or synthesized by the individual. Weber’s approach is, however, individualist, in the sense that what is most real for Weber is always the individual.159 Collective action is made intelligible and explained by means of an analysis that breaks decisions down into the quasiatomistic decision-making processes of individuals. Reminiscent of Ludwig von Mises’s methodological individualism, this is an ontological choice that serves also as a descriptive phenomenon: ‘The hangman, not the state, executes a criminal. … For a social collective has no existence and reality outside of the individual members’ actions. The life of a collective is lived in the actions of individuals constituting its body. … There is no substratum of society other than the actions of individuals.’160 Despite Schumpeter and Weber’s remonstrations that their respective individualisms are descriptive and functional, rather than pertaining to the nature of being, each reconstructs collective and societal actions, in terms of interactions between individuals as externally related parts, and conceives of society and various sub-groups as aggregates of individuals. For Weber, the individual cannot stand entirely alone because he or she is invariably an actor within a larger social network. In this respect Weber’s observations about the individual are essentially social. He is, however, opposing Karl Marx’s concept of the supra-individual, the social ‘forces’ that override the individual. Weber disagreed with Marx about the primacy of material conditions in determining human behaviour.161 Supposing with Weber that the person in their context is not merely a confluence of socio-economic forces acting upon and within them, but that it has meaningful epistemic agency – that is, that we take seriously the highlevel forms of subjectivity needful for a sense of responsibility – the question 158. Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, 122. 159. This is observed by Paul Ricoeur in Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (Columbia University Press, 1986), 186. 160. Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1949), 41–43. 161. On this, see Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, Vol. II: Durkheim, Pareto, Weber (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 233, 257–259; Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977).

82

The Limit of Responsibility

remains as to whether responsibility is adequately characterized in terms of an individual reflecting on their own intentional existence. For Weber, responsibility – whether a Gesinnungsethik [ethics of intention] or a Verantwortungsethik [ethics of responsibility] – is, in effect, the individual’s subjective view of their inner experience in relation to others. Responsibility of whichever kind is, for Weber, integral to a person’s being self-aware and building a purposive and intentional conception of living. Responsibility is a capacity of the rational individual whereby it can be said that living in a society and its economy is an undertaking not to be treated lightly. Responsibility is that capacity of a rational individual whereby they view the realities of life and acquire ‘the ability to face such realities and to measure up to them inwardly’.162 It is immensely moving, says Weber, when a person feels the weight of responsibility with their heart and soul and reaches the point where they must, like Luther, say, ‘Here I stand; I can do no other.’ This happens, says Weber, when an individual realizes that an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements. This realization is unique to that person. It is the presence to itself of a conscious being, in reflection, that cannot be observed like other objects in the world. The individual in Weber’s ‘ethic of responsibility’ is master: The individual reflects, decides and judges themselves as responsible or not. The meaning of responsibility can be grasped by the individual as a single judgement in time. As we shall see below, the meaning of responsibility may be expressed as the rational accumulation of wealth.

Having an Affinity with Capitalism Weber is (in)famous also for the suggestion that modern capitalism has an affinity with Protestantism and vice versa. The desire for wealth has existed for millennia, but capitalism, understood as the rationalized pursuit of profit,163 was nurtured peculiarly by the systematic rational ordering of the moral life that Protestantism encouraged: ‘Ascetic conduct meant a rational planning of the whole of one’s life in accordance with God’s will. And this asceticism was no longer an opus supererogationis, but something that could be required of everyone who would be certain of salvation.’164 What God demands is not labour in itself but rather rational labour expressed as a personal calling. The worldly asceticism of Protestantism – whether Calvinist, Pietist, Methodist or Baptist – yielded individuals who were committed to the performance of duty and who embodied the ethos of rationally organized capital and labour necessary to the growth of modern capitalism. The ideals of Puritanism and other Protestant traditions served both the glory of God and the accumulation of profit. Wealth is thus ethically bad in these traditions, says Weber, only insofar as it is a temptation to idleness and to sinful enjoyment 162. Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, 124. 163. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 27. 164. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 79, 100.

Genealogy of a Concept

83

of life, and its acquisition is bad only when it is with the purpose of later living merrily and without care.165 The greater the possessions the heavier, if the ascetic attitude toward life stands the test, the feeling of responsibility for them, for holding them undiminished for the glory of God and increasing them by restless effort.166

Individuals are not chastised for accumulating wealth but are expected to use it in sober simplicity: ‘The religious valuation of restless, continuous, systematic work in a worldly calling, as the highest means to asceticism, and at the same time the surest and most evident proof of rebirth and genuine faith, must have been the most powerful conceivable lever for the expansion of that attitude toward life which we have here called the spirit of capitalism.’167 That Puritan ideals gave way to the temptations of wealth in subsequent generations does not, for Weber, detract from full economic effect of the Protestant ethic on the spirit of capitalism. This much is well known. But note Weber’s association of responsibility with the spirit of capitalism. The moral life of the Protestant, the sense of sin, trust in divine salvation, amendment of life and so on find ritual expression in Catholicism but seek alternative practical expression in Calvinism, Pietism, Methodism and Baptism, all of which are deemed by Weber to be variously amenable to the spirit of capitalism. The accumulation of wealth in morally sanctioned ways is the responsible Protestant life. Responsibility is capitalist. Capitalism is responsibility. Leaving aside questions about the validity of Weber’s interpretations of these faith traditions, and whether evidence supports his readings, the impact of his writings in the sociology of religion, economic history and elsewhere has been huge.168 Weber’s understanding of the affinity between Protestantism and capitalism has been much discussed, with varying foci on ideas and interests, the material and the non-material, the poetically ‘chemical’ informed by Goethe and so on.169 165. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 108. 166. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 115. 167. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 116. 168. Ulrich Blum, Leonard Dudley, ‘Religion and Economic Growth: Was Weber Right?’, Journal of Evolutionary Economics 11, no. 2 (February 2001): 207–230; Sascha O. Becker and Ludger Woessmann, ‘Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 124, no. 2 (May 2009): 531–596; Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 169. For a review of this diversity, see Andrew M. McKinnon, ‘Elective Affinities of the Protestant Ethic: Weber and the Chemistry of Capitalism’, Sociological Theory 28, no. 1 (March 2010): 108–126. See further Ronald Mather, ‘The Protestant Ethic Thesis: Weber’s Missing Psychology’, History of the Human Sciences 18 (2005): 1–16; Gianfranco Poggi, Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983); J.J.R. Thomas, ‘Ideology and Elective Affinity’, Sociology 19

84

The Limit of Responsibility

As Andrew M. McKinnon summarizes, ‘The elective affinity of the capitalist form and the capitalist spirit was sufficient to displace the traditional economic ethos, to sue for divorce from all elements of economic traditionalism.’170 More complex than a simple cause–effect relationship, McKinnon uses the imagery of chemistry to describe interactive change in a given historical period that gave economic expression to religious belief. The elements that formed bonds between Protestantism and capitalism were many, multilayered and emergent. Whether Weber’s description of this chemistry was accurate in every respect is, however, less important than the lasting impact of his observations. Weber’s association of responsibility with the spirit of capitalism sets a tone for generations to come. Philosophical, theological and, indeed, ontological claims are made about the component elements of modern capitalism and free market systems as compatible with, if not conducive to, expressions of the divine will. Walter Benjamin’s Fragment 74, ‘Capitalism as Religion’ (1921), develops Weber’s point by arguing further that there is a religious logic at the heart of capitalism, and, by extension for our purposes, that the meaning of responsibility in religion can be realized through capitalism. ‘One can behold in capitalism a religion.’171 For Benjamin, the anxieties answered by religion overlap with those against which capitalist economies allow individuals to build up resilience. Capitalism has its cultic expressions and is a seven-day week phenomenon. Significantly, it is also a cult that engenders blame: ‘Therein lies the historical enormity of capitalism … God’s transcendence has fallen, but he is not dead. He is drawn into the fate of man.’172 Capitalism is a set of practices without dogma. Blameworthiness is not measured against high moral ideals or a transcendent realm but with respect to ‘the most immediately practical’.173 The Reformation, says Benjamin, did not (1985): 39–51. Adrian Wilding, ‘Max Weber and the “Faustian Universality of Man”’, Journal of Classical Sociology 8 (2007): 67–87. 170. McKinnon, ‘Elective Affinities of the Protestant Ethic’, 123. 171. Walter Benjamin, Fragment 74, ‘Capitalism as Religion’ trans. Chad Kautzer, in The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), ch. 15, 259–262, at 259. Benjamin’s account of religion is similar to that of David Hume’s in its assumption that the origin of religion is in the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of humans. For Hume, the origin of religion lay especially in the fear of death and the unknown. See Hume’s 1757 Natural History of Religion, Section II, ‘Origin of Polytheism’: ‘No passions, therefore, can be supposed to work upon such barbarians, but the ordinary affections of human life; the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries. Agitated by hopes and fears of this nature, especially the latter, men scrutinise, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity.’ 172. Benjamin, ‘Capitalism as Religion’, 260. 173. Benjamin, ‘Capitalism as Religion’, 261.

Genealogy of a Concept

85

merely encourage capitalism and allow its practices to grow but rather changed itself into capitalism. For our purposes, responsibility previously understood in religious terms is now transposed to the economic and political. Capitalism is an essentially responsible phenomenon in the sense that it is oriented towards the meeting of basic needs and allaying the disquiet that arises from uncertainty in this regard. Responsibility has become capitalism with its practices, norms and expectations hammered into the consciousnesses of its adherents and subsuming even God in the guilt that results from neglect.174 If Benjamin is correct, the logic that drove modern capitalism subsumed all in its wake, including the meaning of responsibility. Religion was indispensable to this process. Weber’s distinction between Gesinnungsethik [ethics of intention] and a Verantwortungsethik [ethics of responsibility] yields either the maxim of a particular strand of Christian morality that the Christian acts rightly and leaves the consequences of their action to God or a Christian who accepts that the responsibility for the predictable consequences of the action is to be taken into consideration by themselves. There are secularist versions of these approaches. All radical revolutionary political attitudes, says Weber, have their point of departure in the former, all realpolitik in the latter.175 Whether religious or secularist, both approaches invoke ethical maxims that are in eternal conflict with one another. The morality of responsibility has been incorporated into economic and political theory in ways unknown to classical political economy. The modern concept of responsibility is not only under strain in the ways outlined above but is potentially unusable by Christian ethicists and political theologians who might baulk at its subsumption into capitalist world view(s). Capitalism is the ‘ongoing transformation of the process of production in order to increase output while reducing costs’.176 Modern capitalist societies, says Cornelius Castoriadis, legitimize their system (capitalism) through reason, ‘claiming it makes “logical sense”’.177 Beyond this, we may observe, modern capitalist societies legitimize their system (capitalism) by appropriating responsibility to capitalist ways of thinking and acting. Religion has greased the wheels, so to speak, and made this possible. Weber and Benjamin have a point. In its etymology of ‘responsibility’, the Oxford English Dictionary cites the 1784 decision of Mr Dempster, of the East India Company, that ‘he had no objection … provided the bill was so drawn as to place the responsibility for making such a dividend on the Directors and the Company’.178 There was to be a direct chain of cause and effect if the directors and the company were to be liable, but the directors and the company should be liable if this direct chain of cause and effect could be proven. The context is commercial 174. Benjamin, ‘Capitalism as Religion’, 259. 175. Weber, Economy and Society, 18. 176. Castoriadis, ‘The “Rationality” of Capitalism’, 53. 177. Castoriadis, ‘The “Rationality” of Capitalism’, 75. 178. Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd edition, ‘Responsibility’, citing Narr. Proc. & Deb. East-India Affairs 19 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

86

The Limit of Responsibility

and juridical, and is informed by philosophical assumptions that the causality of human actions is free and that reward and punishment can be associated directly with praiseworthiness and blame: ‘Since action depends on will and intellect, the basis of law and duty is found in human action, and the external accountability imposed by power of judged by pragmatic utility must be judged by an internal law recognized by conscience and reason.’179 The fact that the Oxford English Dictionary cites the affairs of the East India Company as the first recorded instance of the word ‘responsibility’ cannot pass unnoticed. Recent histories of the East India Company have dubbed it the ‘mother of the modern multinational’ and the ‘corporation that changed the world’.180 This company’s legacy for the formation of the British Empire, the disparities in wealth between the global north and global south, and the global economy of the twentyfirst century were significant. The East India Company was a private company that grew to become a towering non-state power, an internationally leading trader in commodities and an engine of economic growth and exploitation. The products and cultural practices of the East India Company and its rivals fuelled the industrial revolution, created a demand for luxury goods among the middle classes and led to three centuries of competition for colonies around the world.181 The East India Company also appears to have been significant in the modern construction of the meaning of responsibility. Their understanding of responsibility as the state or fact of having a duty towards a person or thing turns upon whether one is directly accountable and thereby obliged to accept punishment; the moral agent is understood to have the capacity required to originate and to effect judgement, thereby causing action for which one bears responsibility. This genealogy is limited, but it is enough to show that, as a modern concept, responsibility is tied to liberal notions of the individuals as a unified site of agency, responsibility as mine to be exercised at will and forms of accountability that link back to the individual who is sovereign over decision-making and choice-taking, and to the core precepts of capitalism such that the meaning of responsibility is commercialized.

179. McKeon, ‘The Development and the Significance of the Concept of Responsibility’, 72. 180. Nick Robins, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (London: Pluto Press, 2012). 181. For an excellent history, see Charles River, ed., The East India Company: The History of the British Empire’s Most Famous Mercantile Company (London: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015).

Chapter 3 W H Y B O N HO E F F E R ?

Here we approach the heart of this book, namely, Bonhoeffer’s reversal of Western philosophical ways of thinking about responsibility (agent-act-consequence) and his reframing of an understanding of responsibility that originates in ‘You’, namely, in Christ and neighbour. Subsequent chapters argue with Bonhoeffer that pious attempts to protect one’s own virtue are to be abandoned: ‘responsibility … recognizes the world as loved, judged, and reconciled by God, and acts accordingly within it’ (DBWE 6:267). Truly responsible action cannot arise merely from good intentions (DBWE 6:267); it must seek to understand the entire given reality, origin, essence and goal of all things under the divine Yes and No of judgement. ‘Those who act responsibly place their action into the hands of God and live by God’s grace and judgment’ (DBWE 6:268–9). In this chapter, we see that Bonhoeffer offers more than the standard, modern I-You-I framings of the concept of responsibility. The point established here is that, for Bonhoeffer, the meaning of responsibility is found in Christ. Herein is the reversal of the meaning of responsibility from I-You-I to You-I-You or You-We-You. Bonhoeffer’s sociopolitical context was very different from our own. His challenge, however, is to find a way of talking about responsibility that does not collapse into individualism, which is the problem of the agent incurvatio in se ipsum (curved inward on itself), or become ensconced within a univocal logic that subsumes socio-economic, cultural and religious differences within itself. With Bonhoeffer, the post-liberal ethic of responsibility developing in this book appropriates his reversal of dominant Western philosophical ways of thinking about personhood and relationality, brings his Christological and ecclesiological framing of the meaning of responsibility into dialogue with late modern theorists (Arendt, Levinas) and post-liberal theorists (Ricoeur, Butler, Young, Badiou, Agamben, et al.) who variously address modern philosophical problems with respect to responsibility and offers renewed engagement with responsibility as vicarious representative action (G. Stellvertretung) enacted by believers, with and for other believers (DBWE 1:178–192), and opens into some practical, policyoriented implications for ecclesial life. His reflections on the centre, boundaries and limits of responsibility are potentially helpful to Christian people struggling with an increasingly exhausted concept of responsibility, when linear agent-act-

88

The Limit of Responsibility

consequence connections to distant others and faraway harms are increasingly difficult to trace. There are reasons for caution. When the ethical problem presents itself, says Bonhoeffer, as essentially the question of my own being good and doing good, the decision has already been made that the self and the world, rather than God alone, are the ultimate realities (DBWE 6:48). Those who wish even to focus on the problem of a Christian ethic are faced with an outrageous demand – from the outset they must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the very two questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: ‘How can I be good?’ and ‘How can I do something good?’. (DBWE 6:47)1

So too with the problem of responsibility. When the ethical problem becomes ‘How can I live responsibly’ and ‘How can I take responsible decisions?’ rather than ‘What is the meaning of responsibility learned in Christ, neighbour and land?’, the focus is ourselves rather than God as first and last, the alpha and omega (DBWE 6:49), and we are no longing doing Christian ethics. Bonhoeffer confronts us with a paradoxical need, namely, to become dispossessed of the problem of responsibility whilst struggling to act responsibly, both within the divine commandment to be free;2 the meaning of responsibility is not found in the individual’s will. Nor is responsibility inherent in human freedom, tied to philosophies of historical materialism or ideologies of the true capitalist spirit but only in Christ and, through him, is the meaning of responsibility encountered in neighbour and land. The problem of responsibility is not ‘mine’ to resolve but learned from You and received again as gift. This is the insistently theological direction of this book. Yet, says Bonhoeffer, ethics need also to be concrete, not abstract, or merely a matter of principle. ‘In Jesus Christ the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world’ (DBWE 6:54 emphasis in original). All concepts of reality that ignore Jesus Christ are abstractions because in him the reality of the world is always already borne: ‘To speak of the world without speaking of Christ is pure abstraction (DBWE 6:68). 1. These are the opening words of the new critical edition of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. On the ordering and presentation of Ethics, see Clifford J. Green, ‘The Text of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics’, in New Studies in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, ed. William J. Peck (Lewiston: Queenston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1987), 3–65. 2. Judith Butler also strives to take the concept of responsibility outside the logic of possession that, for her, links so readily to colonialism, land exploitation and other modes of possession that reek with injustice. ‘In the first sense dispossession stands as a heteronomic condition for autonomy, or, perhaps more accurately, as a limit to the autonomous and impermeable self-sufficiency of the liberal subject …. [I]n the second sense, dispossession is a condition painfully imposed by the normative and normalizing violence that determines the terms of subjectivity, survival, and livability.’ Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 2. Both these valences of dispossession are needed, they argue, in rethinking the meaning of responsibility.

Why Bonhoeffer?

89

Conversely, since the appearance of Christ, ethics can be concerned only with partaking in the reality of his fulfillment of the will of God. This is nothing esoteric, cryptic, abstruse and separate from everyday life, however, but encountered in the everyday. Christian ethics must concern itself with everyday matters and with how they impact the realities of people’s day-to-day lives: “The attention of responsible people is directed to concrete neighbours in their concrete reality” (DBWE 6:261). Self-denial is demanded “in accord with reality”’ – it demands careful attention to the specifics of a given situation and a heart for the other person. Bonhoeffer’s challenge is that our attention be directed ‘to concrete neighbours in their concrete reality’ (DBWE 6:261). Hence the focus in Chapter 5 is on the processes and products of mining and the communities and individuals most affected by mining. For the moment, we concentrate on understanding Bonhoeffer’s reversal of modern Western philosophical ways of thinking about responsibility – from agent to act to consequence, to an understanding of responsibility that originates in ‘You’, that is, learned from Christ and neighbour. Unlike dominant Western models of responsibility that move from agent to act to consequence, Bonhoeffer’s dynamic of responsibility moves in the other direction. Because of Jesus Christ, and only because of Jesus Christ, responsibility is defined in terms of the concrete call of the other. Mindful that Bonhoeffer’s focus on the public, outward-facing, temporal meaning of the gospel becomes more emphasized in his later writings, we focus on his dissertation writings and those of the early 1930s because of the insights they give into his theological rationale and the conceptual battles that he was fighting. This chapter broadly follows the structure of Act and Being, albeit presupposing strong lines of other continuity from Bonhoeffer’s early writings, through to the Ethics and Letters and Papers where commentators readily discern that any Christian ethic of responsibility must refuse escapism into the private life of belief and insist instead upon Jesus’s calling of his following into the world rather than away from it: ‘Jesus calls not to a new religion but to life’ (DBWE 8:482). The worldliness of the world belongs to Christ in its entirety; a weakness of liberal theology was to allow the world to assign a place to God within it (DBWE 8:428). Early sections consider responsibility as a problem of act, that is, as a problem of agency and individual freedom. Bonhoeffer’s early critique of ideas of personhood in the philosophy of Kant, Hegel, Husserl et al. has surprising application to the problem of responsibility today. Hence this chapter includes a brief comparison between Bonhoeffer and F.D.E. Schleiermacher with respect to the ethical, followed by an account of Bonhoeffer’s rejection of G.W.F. Hegel’s account of personhood and his associated understanding of responsibility. It further considers responsibility as a problem of ‘being’ and especially how Bonhoeffer’s critique of Heidegger’s concept of existence as ‘always-beingalready-guilty’ speaks to our experience of ‘wicked problems’. Together these comparisons help us begin to see how Bonhoeffer reverses, in effect, the modern agent-centred models of responsibility that are crumbling before our eyes. Subsequent chapters begin thereafter to investigate what happens when thinking about responsibility in a globalizing era today, along with Bonhoeffer’s sociotheological study of the church.

90

The Limit of Responsibility

Responsibility and the Problem of ‘Act’ For Bonhoeffer, the problem of ‘act’ in Act and Being is a problem of how to think about God. It is a problem of how to think about human freedom and agency, and a problem of how the ‘I’ understands itself. Bonhoeffer is heir to a complex heritage of discourses for which the implications of his diagnosis are devastating: whether idealist or existentialist-humanist, none attains to an adequate account of responsibility. Of interest is how Bonhoeffer’s early exposure of the problem of the self-reflective modern subject helps us to trace pathologies in the concept of responsibility that have contributed to its exhaustion. At its most basic, the real problem with all modern philosophies of responsibility is the self-divinizing of humanity: ‘If the world comes to be through the I, then the I and God the creator exchange roles … Thus, for idealism, God “is” only to the extent to which I think, only insofar as in thinking, I end up with myself ’ (DBWE 2:44). This pathology of self-divinization manifests itself in diverse ways. Two features are of particular interest here. The first concerns the locus of the truth of the ethical life. Bonhoeffer’s critique of Schleiermacher is subtle but clear. His complaint in Sanctorum Communio is not that Schleiermacher’s writings are non-relational or developed without reference to the church. To the contrary, Bonhoeffer recognizes that, for Schleiermacher, the social form of the church follows when the Christian revelation is believed (DBWE 1:133). His complaint is not that Schleiermacher’s account of the Christian faith fails to take into account the innate sociality of faith but that his understanding of relationality is sub-Christian because it is based on need. Bonhoeffer cites from Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith, ‘The Christian faith is formed through regenerate individuals coming together for mutual interaction and cooperation in an orderly way’ (DBWE 1:159, fn. 18).3 Once there is religion, he observes from Schleiermacher, it must necessarily be social. This is not enough for Bonhoeffer, however. His complaint is that Schleiermacher’s account of relationality is constructed individualistically and framed in terms of the satisfaction of a need: ‘The reason for the formation of religious community lies in the need of individuals to communicate. The church is the satisfaction of a need; it is constructed individualistically’ (DBWE 1:159). Bonhoeffer evokes a long, Western Platonic tradition in which love and human relationality originate in lack, craving and desire.4 His particular point is that Schleiermacher’s account of sociality is inadequate because it originates in lack and absence: ‘So the church is created anew at every moment through the 3. For Bonhoeffer’s University of Tübingen study of Schleiermacher under Karl Heim, see Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Bibliography, revised Victoria J. Barnett (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 54–55. 4. Indeed, Bonhoeffer makes fundamentally the same complaint against Schleiermacher that Paul Ramsey made against Augustine. Ramsey expressed concern that Augustine was too influenced by the Greeks, for whom love was a manifestation of lack or the absence of something, ‘the desire for some good not yet possessed, aspiration born out of great need’. Paul Ramsey, Basic Christian Ethics (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1993), 105. See also

Why Bonhoeffer?

91

need of the individuals.’ (DBWE 1:159).5 Of interest is how this complaint links to ethical living. Mindful that, like Kant, Schleiermacher does not use the word ‘responsibility’ (G. Antwortung) in any developed or sustained way, we have seen already (in Chapter 2 ) something of the significance of his writings with respect to the self as moral agent. Schleiermacher’s theory of the subject-self is neoPlatonically idealist in its conception of the ethical life as awakened in individuals by the imprint upon them amid their infinite existence of the possibility of gradual unification with others, nature and reason coexisting in totality.6 His residual Platonism demands a search for the universal conditions under which the ‘I’ and others may attain unity before the ethical life becomes possible: The fact that every activity of reason is limited in space and time in the form of individual consciousness … would prevent what is acted upon being there for reason in itself, i.e., for the totality of the ideal principle in the form of cognition, if it were not for the fact that personal consciousness is also endowed with the consciousness of the unity of reason in the totality of the person, and thus the activity of reason would always stand in relation to an absolute community of persons.7

The unity of every activity of reason and, by implication, the unity of the ethical life rest in the unity of the activity of reason and ‘the superseding of personal barriers by means of community’.8 Every activity of reason in time and space is limited. The individual consciousness is limited. But personal consciousness is endowed with consciousness of ‘the unity of reason in the totality of persons’, and thus the activity of reason would always stand in relation to ‘an absolute community of persons’.9 The ethical life presupposes this kind of activity of reason as well as the ‘true and necessary unity of nature’.10 Augustine, On Christian Teaching (Overland Park, KS: Digireads, 2009), 25, and Hannah Arendt’s complaint in her PhD dissertation regarding the concept of love in Augustine was that he operated with an inferior concept of love. For Plato, she says, love is born of poverty and characterized by lack, craving and desire. Where love too is characterized by these things, it will be sub-biblical: ‘Undoubtedly, insofar as Augustine defines love as a kind of desire, he hardly speaks as a Christian. His starting point is not God who revealed himself to mankind, but the experience of the deplorable state of the human condition’ … (Hannah Arendt, Love and St Augustine [London: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 21). 5. For related comments on why Bonhoeffer refuses Schleiermacher’s theory of the genesis of the church, see Christiane Tietz, ‘Friedrich Schleiermacher and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’, in Bonhoeffer’s Intellectual Formation, ed. Peter Frick (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 128. 6. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Dialectic, Or, The Art of Doing Philosophy, trans. Terrence N. Tice (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 7. 7. Schleiermacher, Dialectic, 15–16. 8. Schleiermacher, Dialectic, 194. 9. Schleiermacher, Dialectic, 16. 10. Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘On the Concepts’, in The Political Thought of the German Romantics, 1973–1815, ed. Hans Siegbert Reiss (London: Macmillan, 1955), 193.

92

The Limit of Responsibility

Bonhoeffer, by contrast, wants nothing of idealism and its models of social relation but begins with ‘the person as conscious being … created in the moment of being moved – in the situation of responsibility, passionate ethical struggle, confrontation by an overwhelming claim’ (DBWE 1:49). He resists the idealist spirit that seeks unity between the individual and the collective, self and Other, nature and spirit, in a higher unity that is somehow accessed metaphysically, epistemologically or otherwise philosophically. Personhood, communality, sociality and, indeed, every facet of human existence, for Bonhoeffer, are inseparable from the concrete situation of responsibility which is the creatureliness of every person and in which every person finds themselves. Compare the following texts (Schleiermacher in the left-hand and Bonhoeffer in the right-hand column, each writing about the self in relation to others). Note Schleiermacher’s interest is in how the particularity of the individual finds unity with ‘plenitude of infinity’, that is, with the One who is God and thereby with others. This contrasts with Bonhoeffer framing of the inherent sociality of human anthropology is devoid of this idealism and focused instead on how the concept of person is learned in Christ: For Schleiermacher, the ‘plenitude of infinity’ acts upon the real and vice versa, the real upon this ideal, such that the individual and the collective, self and Other, [I]t has become clear to me that every human being in his or her own way should represent humanity, with a particular mixture of elements, so that it may reveal itself in every way and everything that emerges from its womb may become reality in the plenitude of infinity.11 In the theory of sociable conduct … society as the object of this conduct must be considered in two ways, as existing and as becoming, as the condition of social perfection and as conditioned by it. The original idea of society must be prior, for the laws of conduct can only be conditioned and determined by this idea. Since in praxis, however, conduct must be prior, there must also be rules for the application of these laws.12

The Christian concept of person and its corresponding concept of social basic-relation will now be presented in debate with the four philosophical models of social basic-relation. Our concern first of all is only with the ontic basic-relations of social being, not with the question of some sort of social sphere in human beings (whether based religiously or otherwise), or with empirical communities of will or even with social acts. (DBWE 1:35–36) [W]e must … overcome the idealist concept and replace it with one which preserves the individual, concrete character of the person as absolute and intended by God. … For the present, we shall deal only with the specifically Christian concept of the person in order to clarify how it differs from that of idealism (DBWE 1:45)

11. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Fifteen Sermons of Friedrich Schleiermacher Delivered to Celebrate the Beginning of a New Year, trans. Edwina Lawler (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003). Friedrich Schleiermacher, Monologen: Eine Neujahrsgabe (Berlin: Spencer, 1800). 12. Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘Toward a Theory of Sociable Conduct’, in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Toward a Theory of Sociable Conduct and Essays on Its Intellectual-Cultural Context, ed. Ruth Drucilla Richardson (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press – New Athenaeum/Neues Athenaeum, Vol. 4), 23–24.

Why Bonhoeffer?

93

nature and spirit, find harmony. The fullness of all possible forms of existence lie open before every human being; this is the God-given abundance of our lives that draws a person beyond themselves into infinity. An ideal of sociable conduct is thinkable by individuals; it draws them towards it simultaneously with thrusting them back into the everyday. ‘The original idea of society must be prior’ to the everyday because it is purer and more complete. The aura of Plato is thick. For Schleiermacher, the social perfection towards which we all strive is unobtainable but desirable, and it is available if only in part through lawful conduct and individuals sharing a sense that if each provides their best the sphere of society will be constructed.13 The original idea of ‘society’ is conditioned by the idea of its fullness. Only God is infinite and complete but human conduct must be influenced by this idea and oriented towards its actualization in the rules and laws of society. Contra Schleiermacher, Bonhoeffer denies that human sociality begins in absence, lack or need. The ontic basic-relations of social being are differently conceived. While Bonhoeffer commends Schleiermacher for talking about human relationships in the primal state and for recognizing that this state entailed communion with God and human societal community (DBWE 1:64), his complaint is that Schleiermacher misconceives this sociality. Bonhoeffer’s four philosophical models of social basic-relation are well known: Aristotle’s metaphysical model of the human being as a political animal, for whom the state is the highest form of collectivity; the Stoic concept of the ethical person as ruled by the individual soul; Epicureanism which ‘begins with Democritus’s theory of atoms and extends it to social and ethical life, asserting that human social formation only serves to heighten the pleasure of each individual’ (DBWE 1:38); and the post-Cartesian transformation of the metaphysical question into an epistemological one. ‘This was realized in essence by Kant’s development of the epistemological concept of person: the knowing I becomes the starting point of all philosophy’ (DBWE 1:40). Our particular interest is with the last model and Bonhoeffer’s commitment to overcoming the idealist concept and replacing it with one which preserves the individual, concrete character of the person as absolute and intended by God. For Bonhoeffer, societal existence does not originate in need but in God’s gift of You to me: ‘When the concrete ethical barrier of the other person is acknowledged or, alternatively, when the person is compelled to acknowledge it, we have made a fundamental step that allows us to grasp the social ontic-ethical basic-relations of persons’ (DBWE 1:50). This is critically important to his anthropology and to our related theology of responsibility. Human beings do not exist unmediated qua spirit in and of themselves but only in responsibility vis-à-vis the ‘Other’, that is, the concrete ‘You’ as I am the concrete ‘I’. You stand before me as person. ‘This is a purely ethical transcendence, experienced only by those facing a decision’ (DBWE 1:52). Persons are unique. And here is the point that matters for our purposes. Responsibility, or the meaning of the ethical life, is located not in an ideal but in your address to me, at a particular time and place: ‘At the moment of being addressed, the person enters a state of responsibility or, in other words, of decision’ (DBWE 1:48) … ‘The “moment” is the 13. Schleiermacher, ‘Toward a Theory of Sociable Conduct’, 33.

94

The Limit of Responsibility

time of responsibility, value-related time, or, let us say, time related to God … Concrete time … only when I am responsible am I fully conscious of being bound to time’. Bonhoeffer’s emphasis is on the particularities of existence for every concrete person and their experience of time in relation to God. ‘The Christian person originates only in the absolute duality of God and humanity; only in experiencing the barrier does the awareness of oneself as ethical person arise’ (DBWE 1:49). Similarly, every human being originates in relation to the Other: ‘The more clearly the barrier is perceived, the more deeply the person enters into the situation of responsibility’ (DBWE 1:49). The ethical life (and, by implication, the meaning of responsibility) is not found ultimately in an ideal or the ‘plenitude of infinity’ that acts upon our lives to draw us into the fullness of existence and relationality. Rather, ‘The I comes into being only in relation to You; only in response to a demand does responsibility arise’ (DBWE 1:54).

Self and Other Consider further Bonhoeffer’s rejection of G.W.F. Hegel’s account of personhood and his associated understanding of responsibility. Bonhoeffer is not entirely critical of Hegel. He appreciates Hegel’s move beyond Kant and his predecessors towards an inherently relational understanding of the human being. Bonhoeffer also appreciates Hegel’s awareness that the self cannot be free alone because the ‘I’ becomes a person in relation to others and, for both Bonhoeffer and Hegel, relationality and responsibility are constitutive of personhood.14 More fundamentally, Bonhoeffer rejects Hegel’s framing of the relationship between self and other, and the phenomenological method in which the existence of human beings carries within itself the potentiality for relationality but never escapes the sinfulness of the cor curvum in se: ‘Idealist individualism’s notion of spirit as being-for-itself [Für-sichsein] is unchristian, as it involves attributing to the human spirit absolute value that can only be ascribed to the divine spirit’ (DBWE 1:49). For Bonhoeffer, Hegel fails to escape Kant’s human being as ‘end in itself ’ (Selbstzweckhaftigkeit) for whom the will is the locus of responsibility. Hegel’s God and the ‘Other’, says Bonhoeffer, are discovered in the I coming to itself and being subsumed therein. This is a form of idolatry: ‘I become aware of myself. I find myself – that is, I find God’ (DBWE 2:50). ‘All who countenance that they need only to come to themselves, in order to be God, are doomed to hideous disillusion in the experiences of being-, persisting-, and ending-up-turned-in-upon-themselves utterly – the experience of utmost loneliness’ (DBWE 2:42). The nub of the matter is whether the I can understand itself ‘out of itself ’ (DBWE 2:46), that is, whether the I can become self-generating of its own existence. For Hegel, the ‘I’, ‘self ’ or ‘self-consciousness’ (selbstbewusstein) can do this because 14. Oswald Bayer’s 1985 article ‘Christus als Mitte: Bonhoeffers Ethik im Banne der Religionsphilosophie Hegel’ recognized the impact of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit especially on Bonhoeffer’s dissertations. Oswald Bayer, ‘Christus als Mitte. Bonhoeffers Ethik im Banne der Religionsphilosophie Hegel’, Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 2 (1985):

Why Bonhoeffer?

95

self-consciousness is essentially self-reflexive. The I bends back on itself to view itself while requiring the mediation of another to do this; it sees itself through the eyes of the Other. Self-consciousness is in-and-for itself [an und für sich] although it must be mediated through relation with an ‘Other’. Self-consciousness is lifted from the isolation of immediacy into mediated self-consciousness through the Other. The unmediated, non-relational self is a non-self. Bonhoeffer has a nuanced appreciation of Hegel’s awareness that the self cannot be free alone because the ‘I’ becomes a person in relation to others. More fundamentally, however, Bonhoeffer rejects utterly Hegel’s attempt to ‘raise substance to the subject’ (DBWE 2:42:48). Bonhoeffer deconstructs in its entirety Hegel’s phenomenology of self-consciousness in which the true individual subject is a free subject who realizes that they cannot be free alone but needs to be in relationship with others. Consider the following texts in which the differences between Hegel and Bonhoeffer with respect to the development of the ‘I’ as knowing consciousness become apparent: The citations from Hegel below are from his parable of the Lord and Bondsman. With the exception, perhaps, of Nietzsche’s parable of the madman,15 no parable Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and only by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged. … The twofold significance of the distinct moments has in the nature of self-consciousness to be infinite, or directly the opposite of the determinateness in which it is posited. The detailed exposition of the Notion of this spiritual unity in its duplication will present us with the process of Recognition. (§178) Self-consciousness is faced by another selfconsciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a twofold significance: first; it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in so doing it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self. (§179) It must supersede this otherness of itself. … it must proceed to supersede the other independent being in order thereby to become certain of itself as the essential being; secondly, in so doing it proceeds to superseded its own self, for this other is itself. (§180)

Common to both [Kant and Hegel – EDR] is the attempt to ‘raise substance to subject’, … Here, being becomes the knowing consciousness. … In his phenomenology Hegel described step by step how the I becomes a real person, a goal which is in the last resort attainable only by philosophizing. … The person is cradled in freedom. In freedom comes knowledge; in freedom alone can the existence of human beings apprehend itself and change. Thus, the essence of the person is freedom, autonomy, coming-toitself or being-with-itself. … ‘[like is known only through like’ If God is to come to human beings, they essentially must already be like God. That such assertions are theologically intolerable becomes apparent …. The negative judgment – that this ‘is’ not, or that this is only through me – remains in every instance an ontological judgment that … that represents … a violation of limits with most grave consequences. (DBWE 2:48, 53–54)

259–276; Jacob Holm, ‘G. W. F. Hegel’s Impact on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Early Theology’, Studia Theologica – Nordic Journal of Theology 56, no. 1 (2002), pp. 64–75. 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181–182.

96

The Limit of Responsibility

from nineteenth-century philosophy has had a greater impact on modern social theory than this account of I-You relations.16 Its telling analysis of human selfhood and relationality, in which fear and risk are the key to self-advancement, still penetrates through the inconsequential to painful truths about how humans often (or necessarily?) relate to one other. For Hegel, the fear of death – not merely at the end of life but in manifold forms throughout life – is the problem par excellence of selfhood. The self attains to maturity only through the negative significance of fear and recognition in the eyes of others or what he calls ‘the lord’s consciousness’. Corruption and violence are not only external realities but internal realities; beingfor-self to the exclusion of the well-being of others; reducing others to objects that can be used for one’s own advancement; self-fulfilment through the domination of others.17 While Hegel’s inherently relational account of human development might be a penetrating account of the individual’s growth into self-consciousness ‘in Adam’, it has grave consequences for what it means to human. Contra Hegel, Bonhoeffer condemns Hegel’s definition of both self and Other in terms of how each is seen by the Other, and the attainment of community via an exercise of will: ‘Community is a community of wills, built upon the separateness and difference of persons, constituted by reciprocal acts of will, finding its unity in what is willed … ’ (DBWE 1:92). For Bonhoeffer, Hegel fails ultimately to escape Kant’s focus on the human being as ‘end in itself ’ (Selbstzweckhaftigkeit), even though his focus on relationality represents a modified advance.18 Modern idealism’s conception of the self remains a self-enclosed circle, ‘an unworkable abstraction’ (DBWE 2:120). The community of faith is ‘from God to God’ (DBWE 1:101). Bonhoeffer’s Critique of Hegel For Bonhoeffer, Hegel’s account of relationality and community exemplifies the problem of sin:

16. For an account of this impact, see R.H. Roberts, ‘The Reception of Hegel’s Parable of the Lord and Bondsman’, New Comparison: A Journal of Comparative and Literary Studies 5 (1988): 23–39. 17. H. Adelman describes the issue in his article ‘Of Human Bondage’ where he asks if Hegel’s parable expresses contingent forms of fearful and conflict-oriented consciousness or forms that are permanent in human experience. H. Adelman, ‘Of Human Bondage’, in Hegel’s Social and Political Thought. Papers Delivered at the 1976 Meeting of The Hegel Society of America, Georgetown University, ed. D.P. Verene (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1980), 119–134. 18. To my mind, the best treatment of Bonhoeffer’s reading of Hegel’s philosophy of the self in relation with the Other remains Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr., Theology and the Dialectics of Otherness: On Reading Bonhoeffer and Adorno (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988). Especially useful is Floyd’s account of Kant’s legacy as inherited by Hegel, and how, for Hegel, the constitution of the self takes shape through ‘a becoming-other’, that is, via selfconscious awareness of the limits of selfhood as negativity or the non-self (pp. 25–30 esp.).

Why Bonhoeffer?

97

The world of sin is the world of ‘Adam’, the old humanity. But the world of Adam is the world Christ reconciled and made into a new humanity, Christ’s church. However, it is not as if Adam were completely overcome; rather, the humanity of Adam lives on in the humanity of Christ. This is why the discussion of the problem of sin is indispensable for understanding the sanctorum communion. (DBWE 1:107)

For Hegel, says Bonhoeffer, God and the ‘other’ are discovered in my coming to myself: ‘I become aware of myself. I find myself – that is, I find God’ (DBWE 2:50). This is a form of idolatry: consciousness is constitutive of relationship with the divine. God ‘is’ in the self ’s acknowledging that they are not God and that ‘God is not’ an object like any other. Bonhoeffer, in effect, reverses modern, agent-centred, juridical models of responsibility to prompt a relearning of responsibility from the Other enabled by a Christology of divine presence amid sin. Faith learns differently how to be human: ‘Existence is in the truth only in the act of being encountered by God’ (DBWE 2:96). ‘For human beings, to exist means to stand, act, and decide under God’s claim’ (DBWE 2:97). Here we learn the meaning of responsibility. To live responsibly means to stand, act and decide, under the gaze of the other. Responsibility is learned from the other to the self, not from self to the other. Contra Hegel, for whom a residual Kantian heritage manifests itself as responsibility, in a general sense, as the possibility of a self-conscious agent imputing to themselves deeds so that they are held to account, and whose account of personhood strives to attain relationality but remains enclosed within the self curved in on itself (incurvatio in se ipsum), Bonhoeffer’s structuring of responsibility goes from the other to the self, not from self to the other.19 For Bonhoeffer, neither Kant nor Hegel attains to knowledge of the self or an adequate account of responsibility because the self never really understands itself properly in relation to others and because each, variously, conceives of reason as unlimited. For both, there are essentially no boundaries for the self other than itself. As Bonhoeffer summarizes, ‘the I cannot move beyond itself ’ (DBWE 2:45). Hegel’s brilliance was to perceive that Kant’s conception of the self ‘comes to naught’ (DBWE 2:49) and to construct an alternatively relational theory. His error was to deny the transcendence of God and, instead, to enclose the divine within the individual’s self-activity, within selfhood. He failed to recognize that there is a boundary to the human being in its entirety: ‘and this boundary is called Christ’ (DBWE 2:45). Hegel’s related failure was supposing that I can understand the meaning of responsibility from itself or with reference only to itself. ‘The eye does not see itself ’ (DBWE 2:46). Despite Hegel’s best efforts to account for human relationality and responsibility as connecting the self and the other(s) reciprocally through processes of mutual recognition, Bonhoeffer condemns his philosophy of self-consciousness as turning both God and neighbour into objects 19. Bonhoeffer clearly wished to avoid ‘the idealist argument’ of ‘the homogeneity and unity of persons’. Floyd, Theology and the Dialectics of Otherness, 138. In other words, Bonhoeffer is acutely aware of this philosophical heritage.

98

The Limit of Responsibility

of consciousness (DBWE 2:51): ‘God is completely locked into consciousness’ (DBWE2:53). The theological danger is of identifying God and the I (DBWE 2:57).20 Responsibility as Corollary of the Problem of Selfhood The problem of responsibility is a corollary of these theological concerns. It is not clear whether insight into the true nature of responsibility is available only to faith: ‘It is a Christian insight that the person as conscious being is created in the moment of being moved – in the situation of responsibility, passionate ethical struggle, confrontation by an overwhelming claim’ (DBWE 1:49). All ‘human beings are directed into their reality only from outside’. But, says Bonhoeffer, ‘natural human beings do not perceive this “from the outside” in the claim of their neighbours. … Godless thought – even when it is ethical – remains self-enclosed’ (DBWE 2:89). On the other hand, Bonhoeffer affirms that the truth of Christ is the truth of all humanity. Not all persons confess Jesus Christ as Lord but all can heed the dynamic of responsibility revealed in him. ‘Only what comes from “outside” can direct people to their reality, their existence. In “taking on” the “claim of the other”, I exist in reality, I act ethically’ (DBWE 2:87). The dynamic of responsibility revealed in Christ is true for everyone. ‘It is not that I make some sort of universally valid decisions by being in full possession of a rational mind. Rather I enter the reality of time by relating my concrete person in time and all its particularities to this imperative – by making myself ethically responsible’ (DBWE 1:48).21 A problem of modern idealism, says Bonhoeffer, is its failure to comprehend the dynamic of responsibility that ‘comes from outside’. Every non-Christian philosophy of value is at danger of detracting from the value of the person as a creature of God, thereby closing itself off from the possibility of understanding the truth of personal-social basic-relations (DBWE 1:50). Yet this truth is true for all: ‘When the concrete barrier of the other person is acknowledged … we have made a fundamental step that allows us to grasp the social ontic-ethical basic-relations of persons’ (DBWE 1:50). The meaning of responsibility is learned only vis-à-vis an ‘Other’. Bonhoeffer does not make psychological or epistemological claims but only theological claims and claims about the nature of responsibility. In these respects, however, he is crystal clear: ‘The I comes into being only in relation to the You; only in response to a demand does responsibility arise’ (DBWE 1:54). Regardless of personality and expressions of will, the sheer concrete reality of You constitutes a demand upon me. This does not mean that You create me as an ethical being. That would be intolerable because I exist already as a creature of God. One person does 20. On ‘Christ as the Mediation of the Other’, see Charles Marsh, Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Promise of His Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 81–82. 21. There are implications here for debate about the extent to which Bonhoeffer’s writings contain a nascent common ethic, that is, an ethic with universal application because of the resurrection.

Why Bonhoeffer?

99

not create the Other in any regard. ‘God or the Holy Spirit joins the concrete You; only through God’s active working does the other become a You to me from whom my I arises’ (DBWE 1:54–55 emphasis in original). It is God in you and me that constitutes us mutually in ethical relation. God has willed each into existence as unique and singular. Each becomes Christ for the Other. ‘The claim of the other rests in God alone; for this very reason, it remains the claim of the other’ (DBWE 1:55 emphasis in original). Here, then, we have the basics of Bonhoeffer’s theology of personhood and of responsibility. Not a yearning for unity of self with both oneself and others that, à la Plato, lies beyond oneself. Not a tending to the soul. Not a severing of ties to the body. Not a function of knowledge. Not primarily an act of the will but, rather, a movement from God to God. Every person’s constitution as a subjective spirit is from exposure to the gaze of another. Hegel understood, says Bonhoeffer, ‘that the principle of spirit is something objective, extending beyond everything individual’ (DBWE 1:74). Responsibility does not originate only from within the self. But Hegel did not perceive God’s gift of love: ‘The tragedy of all idealist philosophy was that it never ultimately broke through to personal spirit’ (DBWE 1:74). Hegel grasped something of the spirit of sociality because he knew that the self ’s existence rests on its relation to an Other. But he perceived of this relation ultimately as a relation of the self to itself, a relation that the self could choose to take upon itself or to ignore. By contrast, Bonhoeffer’s phenomenology of sociality begins from a differently constructed basic ontology of the self as already in relation to the Other because already in relation to God. ‘The person comes into being only when embedded in sociality’ (DBWE 1:78). Reality is experienced only now, in this moment, in relation with Others. So too responsibility. ‘Reality is “experienced” in the contingent fact of the claim of the “others”’ (DBWE 2:87). Ethics is not located in an ideal or theory of any kind but is ‘of the “present”’ (DBWE 2:87). Responsibility in Freedom Bonhoeffer does not address an ethic of responsibility in any direct or sustained way in his early dissertation writings. But we can piece together the kind of answer that he might have offered by means of analogy with what he says about knowledge of revelation (DBWE 2:91–95), the person of decision (DBWE 2:96–103) and his negotiation of the tension between revelation (responsibility) as something objective or subjective. If responsibility is something that can be calculated or prescribed, its meaning is controllable by me and contained within my consciousness – which would, of course, undermine everything hitherto argued for by reducing responsibility to an object of consciousness defined and kept in view by myself. Knowledge of responsibility cannot be attained by me as an object to be sought. Responsibility does not originate in and cannot be contained by my consciousness. Instead, ‘my knowledge of God depends in each instance on whether God has known me in Christ (1 Cor. 13.12; Gal. 4.9), on whether God is effecting faith in Christ in me’ (DBWE 2:92). There is no method for the

100

The Limit of Responsibility

knowledge of either God or the true meaning of responsibility. I cannot place myself into a position of truth from which to judge the meaning of responsibility because this would become just another instance of the cor curvum in se. My thinking ‘will remain self-enclosed outside the truth’ (DBWE 2:92). The meaning of responsibility is not to be found within my self-consciousness. Nor can I objectify responsibility as if an object to be discovered. Responsibility is not an objective entity available to be perceived as an object of cognition. True responsibility only ‘is’, or has meaning, in the heart, in faith and in relationship. Like an act of faith, the meaning of responsibility is the subject of believing, experienced in daily existence and inspired by encounters of many kinds. Whether I do or do not regard myself as being responsible cannot ultimately be determined by anyone else. It is equally impossible for me to know whether I truly regard myself as responsible and in what ways. It is a matter of faith. Nor is it enough to believe in my own faith that I hold myself to be responsible: ‘Only in faith in Christ do I know that I believe’ (DBWE 2:94). Only in Christ do I both know that I do not understand the meaning of responsibility and know the meaning of responsibility. Responsibility is thus non-objective – not a calculation for the greatest good or principle or ideal. It is God who discloses the meaning of responsibility to me, for me: ‘Its knowledge is part of the question of existence’ (DBWE 2:95). Like a spiritual discipline, the essence of this way of living is not to ask but to know and to remain open to new truth. This existential character of responsibility means, of course, that the person striving to live responsibly faces ‘falling into untruth at every turn’ (DBWE 2:96). The person cannot place themselves into a position of responsible living since this decision is God’s alone: ‘it “is” only in the instance of God’s decision for it’ (DBWE 2:96) which simultaneously requires a decision on my part for God; this is the only decision required for responsible living. And it is enabled by God’s enabling us to talk of ourselves and ask the question of responsibility. It is God who discloses my existence to me, my calling to responsibility, and ‘truth for me’ (DBWE 2:96). God alone can provide the answer to my question of responsibility. My task is to live the question: ‘this question which we are is not our fate but our deed’ (DBWE 2:96). In this sense, I am the author of my life in response to God’s claim on it. ‘For human beings, to exist means to stand, act, and decide under God’s claim’ (DBWE 2:97). The meaning of responsibility for my life cannot be derived apart from revelation. It lies in how Christ touches upon my existence. The meaning of responsibility is not constituted by my conscious act of decision or my wanting to live responsibly because I find myself already in guilt (DBWE 2:101). This is the problem of everydayness. Here again, however, the meaning of responsibility is disclosed every day because ‘being in Christ’ means knowing oneself to be a member of the faith community directed towards its Lord. The meaning of responsibility is new every day. The You who sets the limit(s) of my responsibility is simultaneously Christ Jesus, my neighbour and the community of faith. The risk is arbitrariness. Remember Bonhoeffer’s Barcelona essay ‘Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic’ (1929) where his argument is that, for the Christian, there is no other law than the law of freedom, as the New Testament paradoxically puts it (DBWE 10:366). There is no universal law or categorical imperative that defines responsibility. Instead, Christians draw the forms of their ethical activity ‘out of eternity’ (DBWE 10:366). ‘Christians

Why Bonhoeffer?

101

create their own standards for good and evil; only Christians themselves provide the justification for their acts, just as they alone bear responsibility for them’ (DBWE 10:366). Citing Nietzsche’s description of the features of the free Christian as creating new tables of the law for themselves, new decalogues, Bonhoeffer agrees that Christian living is beyond the business of deriving general principles or moral norms from biblical teaching. There are no laws other than the law of freedom: ‘Christians act according to how God’s will seems to direct them, without looking sideways at others, that is, without considering what is usually called morals’ (DBWE 10:367). And the most shocking of his assertions: ‘There are no acts that are bad in and of themselves; even murder can be sanctified’ (DBWE 10:367).22 Only God judges ultimately whether a person has acted well or badly. No one can do more than submit every decision to the will of God, in the sure and certain hope that the Holy Spirit will inform their decision-making. The letter kills, the Spirit gives new life. Responsibility is thus fraught with danger. The You who sets the limit(s) of my responsibility harbours the possibility of the worst irresponsibility. A central claim in this book is that Bonhoeffer yields at least some of the constructive theological rethinking needed for a Christian ethic of responsibility today, and here are some of the planks needed to build what we need. The various pathologies of modern idealism must be eschewed, including both the atomism of the ‘I’ inherently unrelated to others and the ‘I’ as destined to selfhood only via conflict with ‘You’. In Christ, says Bonhoeffer, the relation between ‘I’ and ‘You’ changes. A Christian ethic of personhood and responsibility differs from any idealist concept that is based on the common nature and equal value of individuals (DBWE 1:197). Only love provides the power to establish God’s rule (DBWE 1:169) and this love is manifest in unrestricted surrendering of one to the other (DBWE 1:173). In my reading, Bonhoeffer’s ethic of responsibility is not a sectarian ethic with implications only for the church-community because the rest of the world remains ‘in Adam’: ‘The structure of Adam’s humanity should not be conceived in terms of theories of psychological-historical interpretation; no, I myself am Adam – am I and humanity in one’ (DBWE 2:146). While a Christologically informed ethic of responsibility can be understood only from the context of the church-community of which the disciple is a member, and this community is constituted by the Word of God, it does not follow that there are no implications for a Christian anthropology or ethic of responsibility 22. For Bonhoeffer’s early writings on not following principles, but hearing God immediately in the moment, as the powerful gift of freedom that Jesus brings, see Heinz Eduard Tödt, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Decisions in the Crisis Years 1929–33’, Studies in Christian Ethics 18, no. 3 (2005): 107–123, at 112 esp. For a review of the scholarship on Bonhoeffer and the tension between the evangelical imperative regarding peacemaking and the possibility of committing murder, see Trey Palmisano, ‘Bonhoeffer and the Question of Murder’, in Peace and Violence in the Ethics of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: An Analysis of Method (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2016), ch. 4. Palmisano establishes Bonhoeffer’s critical attitude towards normative ethics, that is, ethics conducted solely with reference to principles that determine whether an action is right or wrong. Palmisano’s own emphasis is on how Bonhoeffer urges believers to bring their entire lives into relationship with Christ.

102

The Limit of Responsibility

that speaks to non-believer as well as believer. Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being provide a direction of travel for our thinking about responsibility – in particular, Bonhoeffer’s rejection of the foundational modern concept of the autonomous ‘I’.

Responsibility and the Problem of ‘Being’ The problem of ‘being’ is also a problem of existence apart from revelation. Bonhoeffer’s treatment of the problem of ‘being’ in Act and Being is less developed than his exposition of the problem of ‘act’ but centres around his reading of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Bonhoeffer is indeed critical of Heidegger’s project, but he is also appreciative of what Heidegger achieved in his destruction of modern idealist philosophies of subjectivity. As Charles Marsh reminded us some years ago, Bonhoeffer adopts the language of ‘Dasein’ when referring to the righteousness of God as bestowed without regard to merit: ‘Because it is “in Christ”, Dasein is “in reference to” Christ’ (DBWE 2:134). Bonhoeffer warms to Heidegger’s recognition of Dasein as ‘being with others’ (DBWE 2:69). He welcomes Heidegger’s account of how we find ourselves already in the world rather than creating its reality, treating Dasein as ‘care’ [‘Sorge’] and asking the question of authenticity amid the complexes of concerns in which people live. The enthusiasm of Bonhoeffer’s appreciation of Heidegger’s destruction of modern idealist philosophies of subjectivity is striking. Act and Being is nonetheless, however, a devastating critical engagement with Heidegger’s account of being. At the end of the day, Heidegger’s Being and Time offers no solution for Bonhoeffer to the problem of ‘act’: ‘Heidegger in the end betrays his own attempt to conceive the priority of being over thought, and thus short-circuits the promise … of being … “open” to itself ’.23 For Bonhoeffer, Heidegger’s account of Dasein never escapes its own finitude as something ‘closed in’ (DBWE 2:72). Heidegger’s ‘self ’ never escapes itself as guilty ‘in its fallenness to the world’ (DBWE 2:69). ‘Dasein itself, which I myself am, and which, as a potentiality-for-Being (Seinkönnen), I can be authentically only by anticipation’.24 Heidegger’s (atheistic) Dasein always finds itself already in guilt and remains confined within its existential possibilities. Heidegger’s ‘Mitsein’, ‘being-with’, never attains to authentic existence because Dasein’s summons by the Other is only apparent: ‘Dasein always finds itself already “fallen into captivity” to the “anonymous”’ (DBWE 2:69). While Heidegger has broken apart the hegemony of the self-reflexive subject, he has no ultimate answer for the cor curvum in se. With respect to responsibility, Heidegger leaves us in a double bind. We face the inevitability and yet impossibility of responsibility. ‘In conscience, the powers of this world, law and death, fall upon human beings and make them anxious …. Yet there is in this anxiety an inability to break free of oneself, a final perseverance of the I in itself ’ (DBWE 2:148). Like Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as being-possible or 23. Charles Marsh, ‘Bonhoeffer on Heidegger and Togetherness’, Modern Theology 8, no. 3 (July 1992): 263–283, at 264. 24. Heidegger, Being and Time, §265.

Why Bonhoeffer?

103

potentiality-for-being, the reality of responsibility never wholly, truly or fully arrives, unless and until encountered in death.25 Dasein’s self has potentiality-for-being, exists as being-toward-this-possibility and can open itself up to the unconditionality of the call of the Other. But this being-with is made possible only in anticipation.26 Hence Bonhoeffer’s point that responsibility cannot be thought of beyond the definition of Dasein as potentiality, which is its orientation towards death.27 Once again, the concept of responsibility disappears. Compare the following in which Bonhoeffer interprets aspects of Heidegger’s ontology in the theological language of sin and yet prepares for a more fundamental rejection of Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being: We shall trace conscience back to its existential foundations and structures and make it visible as a phenomenon of Dasein. … (§268)28 Conscience discloses, and thus belongs within the range of those existential phenomena which constitute the Being of the “there” as disclosedness. (§270) Conscience summons Dasein’s Self from its lostness in the “they”. (§274) The call points forward to Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being …. (§280) “Being-guilty” also has the signification of “being responsible for” [“schuld sein an”] – that is, being the cause or author of something, or even “being the occasion” for something. (§282) In any case, “Being-guilty” … the breach of a “moral requirement” is a kind of Being which belongs to Dasein. (§282)

Because human beings are alone, the world is ‘their’ world, and other human beings have sunk into the world of things (cf Heidegger’s ‘Mitsein’, ‘being-with’). God has become a religious object, and human beings themselves have become their own creator and lord, belonging to themselves. … Ontologically this means that sin is the violation of Dasein (created being) by its concrete being-how-itis [Wie-sein]. It means that in the face of the concept of sin, this ontological distinction between human existence and the form in which one actually exists [Da- und Wiesein] becomes meaningless, because the I is its own master now and has itself taken possession of its Dasein. Furthermore, this knowledge is not possible within the state of sin, because here Dasein is still in the power of how-it-is [Wiesein] as sinner …. Therefore, the ontological designation of human beings as sinner, as existing in sin ‘in reference to’ God, remains correct. (DBWE 2:138)

The phenomenon of guilt, which is not necessarily related to “having debts” and law-breaking, can be clarified only if we first inquire in principle into Dasein’s Being-guilty — in other words, if we conceive the idea of ‘Guilty!’ in terms of Dasein’s kind of Being. (§283)

25. Heidegger, Being and Time, §263. 26. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), §264. 27. ‘Dasein thus always finds itself already determined in some way … The being of existence is construed as being in possibility and dissipates’. In Heidegger’s words, ‘Dasein is primarily being-possible. … It recognizes itself as having been thrown into this world of care. … In its captivity to the world, … however, Dasein disintegrates; it does not come to its own wholeness, … Dasein is oriented toward death’ (DBWE 10: 394–395). 28. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Section numbers given in main text above.

104

The Limit of Responsibility

The citations above begin to explain why, for Bonhoeffer, Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein never escapes its own finitude as something ‘closed in’ (DBWE 2:72) or experiences of itself as guilty ‘in its fallenness to the world’ (DBWE 2:69). Heidegger has succeeded, says Bonhoeffer, in forcing ‘act’ and ‘being’ together in the concept of Dasein (DBWE 2:71), but Dasein is made possible only by the ‘ownmost potentiality for being’ that is ‘being toward death’ (DBWE 2:148). Nor have theologians always done much better. Bultmann, says Bonhoeffer, talks about how God’s word of forgiveness directs human beings into historicity, but his attempt to interpret the insecurity of Dasein in the sense of ‘always-beingalready-guilty’, on the basis of its historicity, relies ultimately on the concept of potentiality not revelation (DBWE 2:97). R. Seeberg takes us further in his concept of the direction of the will: ‘The new I is the new will which has been turned by God into the direction that points to God. … The problem of everydayness seems to be satisfactorily resolved by the concept of direction. Being in Christ means to have the new direction of will’ (DBWE 2:101–102). Fundamentally, however, ‘only in faith does the unity, the “being”, of the person disclose itself ’ (DBWE 2:103) – and, of course, Heidegger’s concept of Dasein is of no use for the elucidation of ‘being’ in faith. By implication, there is no answer for a common ethic of responsibility facing ‘wicked’ problems except in the openness of being-topotentiality and the promise of responsibility as if it were possible.29 Remember our ‘wicked problems’ for which there is no single solution, though many small actions might nudge us towards a better state. Little more can be hoped. Jackson Pollock rather than Hieronymous Bosch captures the meaning of the term. ‘Wicked problems’ are a new problem of ‘being’. We are thrown into a world of ‘wicked problems’. And, like Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as being-possible (Seinkönnen), ‘one’s ownmost potentiality of being’ (das eigenste Seinkönnen), the reality of responsibility never fully arrives. Responsibility never truly has meaning until encountered in death.30 Like the humorous pub sign: ‘Free beer here. Tomorrow only’. We have the potential to live responsibly. But not now. The meaning of responsibility is empty. But is it enough that responsibility never arrives? Is it part of the meaning of responsibility that it never occurs? Does an ethic of responsibility have meaning only in the lived-experience-of-notreaching-meaning? Bonhoeffer is not satisfied with Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein and its associated phenomenology of guilt. Diagnostically accurate for a world ‘in Adam’, perhaps, Heidegger’s account of the self ’s ‘potentiality for being’ fails to give hope. Bonhoeffer’s own socio-ontology of personhood and responsibility are radically different because their truth is learned in the incarnation and resurrection: ‘The structure of responsible life is determined in a twofold manner, namely, by life’s bond to human beings and to God, and by the freedom of one’s own life’ (DBWE 29. For our earlier discussion of ‘wicked problems’ as having no identifiable boundaries or solution but comprising multiple elements that resist control, see Chapter 1. 30. Heidegger, Being and Time, §263.

Why Bonhoeffer?

105

6:257). Reality is experienced in the contingent fact of the claim of the ‘others’. Only what comes from ‘outside’ can direct people to their reality, their existence (DBWE 2:87). The problem of sin is that natural human beings do not perceive this ‘from outside’ in the claim of their neighbours (DBWE 2:89); this truth is learned in faith as ‘a believing way of knowing’ (DBWE 2:126). The pattern of responsibility revealed in Christ is true for all and yields a critique that exposes pathologies in alternative accounts of personhood and responsibility.

Responsibility Reversed Bonhoeffer has thus rejected with aplomb these predominant modern philosophies of personhood and their accompanying notions of responsibility. When pausing in Act and Being to review progress in Parts A and B, he is clear: ‘It was shown that the existence of human beings can be encountered only from outside, and that it understands itself only in being thus encountered’ (DBWE 2:109). In this sense, he has already reversed fundamental conceptions in modern philosophies of personhood and responsibility. There is no reference to Martin Buber in Act and Being but similarities with respect to their fundamental structuring of selfOther relations are noteworthy. So too are similarities with the other-originating philosophies of selfhood and responsibility developed by Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler et al. ‘All that has been said thus far’, says Bonhoeffer, at the opening of ‘History and Good’ [1] in Ethics implies that we have abandoned the abstract notion, largely dominant in ethical thought, of an isolated individual who has available an absolute criterion by which to choose continually and exclusively between a clearly recognized good and a clearly recognized evil. Such an isolated individual does not exist; nor do we have good and evil present themselves to us in their pure form. (DBWE 6:219)

As for Butler et al., the self-generating ‘I’, or isolated individual, is a fiction. Postulated concepts of ethical principle or value are simply that – namely, assumed beliefs that might enable an argument to proceed but that have been invented for their expediency and can flatline when conditions vary.31 Neither ethics nor the concept of responsibility can be reduced to such bogus constructs: What this amounts to is individuals pulling back from the living responsibility of their historical existence into a private realization of ethical ideals by which they see their own personal goodness guaranteed. (DBWE 6:220)

Beyond noting that Bonhoeffer’s words are almost indistinguishable at the surface level from Judith Butler’s, the question is how Bonhoeffer constructs his 31. See Chapter 1.

106

The Limit of Responsibility

understanding of responsibility differently from the tradition that he rejects and what exactly, for him, constitutes irresponsibility. Bonhoeffer’s two key moves in Act and Being Part B concern revelation and the church. Only revelation accomplishes the truth with respect to the meaning of responsibility. Only in Christ is the meaning of responsibility not bound by human knowledge and speculation or by the limits of how the self can conceive of relationship with others. Only in Christ are the self and accompanying notions of responsibility placed into truth and experienced in the contingent, everyday claims of others (DBWE 6:84–87). Here is the nub of Bonhoeffer’s reversal of modern philosophical notions of responsibility: Only what comes from ‘outside’ can direct people to their reality, their existence. In ‘taking on’ the ‘claim of the other’, I exist in reality, I act ethically. … People can never have disposition over the absolute, that is, bear it within themselves, and for that reason they never arrive at the system. (DBWE 2:87)

Modern liberal notions of ethics and responsibility that start from the self, the responsible subject, are jettisoned. Bonhoeffer eschews notions of responsibility rooted in the autonomous and coherent subject who is capable of choice and of the knowledge of good and evil. Instead, he refigures responsibility as coming from outside, directed towards the truth from outside and as received through revelation in faith. Responsibility is not a possession or capability but a component of relationship with the Other. This much was recognized, says Bonhoeffer, by E. Grisebach, Friedrich Gogarten, H. Knittermeyer et al. (DBWE 2:89). ‘Theological thought goes from God to reality, not from reality to God’ (DBWE 2:89). Other ways of thinking and living are torn about in faith that often comes about through preaching; ‘human beings must be placed by God into reality’ (DBWE 2:90). Responsibility is understood from this account of our very being, our status before God, our participation in Christ and our faith-infused existential condition. The faulty starting points and conclusions of idealism are overthrown; all depends on whether God has known me in Christ (DBWE 2:92, citing 1 Cor. 13.12; Gal. 4.9). There is no philosophical or theological method for attaining a true or correct understanding of responsibility. The human being cannot locate themselves in the place from which it is possible to speak truly or attain insight into what responsibility really entails: ‘God is not the God of our consciousness’ (DBWE 2:92). God ‘is’ only in faith as effected by God (DBWE 2:93). The meaning of responsibility is for the believer only disclosed and experienced in faith; ‘[i]ts knowledge is part of the question of existence’ (DBWE 2:95) in a mode of existence that is in truth only as it is open to being encountered by God while mindful that it might fall at every turn. ‘The person of decision’, that is, for Bonhoeffer, the person called upon to exercise responsibility, exists as sinner, pardoned, yet afraid to take the decision for life, continuously deciding and not deciding, deciding for one’s ‘own unique possibility’ (DBWE 2:97) rather than deciding for obedience to God’s will, mistaking faith for a human ability

Why Bonhoeffer?

107

(DBWE 2:98) and recognizing the Other as ‘not-I’ in a relationship of mutual negation (DBWE 2:100). ‘Being in Christ’, by contrast, ‘means to have the new direction of will’ (DBWE 2:102). Responsibility learned ‘in Christ’ means that it opens the way to different kinds of encounters with other people as revealed in Christ. Christian tradition variously problematizes such an understanding. Lutherans tend to get lost, he suggests, in psychological accounts of how selfcomprehension eludes a person, how motives are always hidden even to the most inward self and how every person’s action are open to any number of arbitrary interpretations (DBWE 2:102). Conversely, Bonhoeffer condemns in certain Roman Catholic interpretations of revelation a conception of the church not capable of encountering the existence of human beings qua sinful existence because the institution subsumes personhood (DBWE 2:105). At issue for both is the truth of human existence encountered from ‘outside’ (DBWE 2:105) in real encounter with another person, preeminently Christ Jesus himself.

Christ the Limit The task that Bonhoeffer sets himself is clear: to develop new thinking about personhood and responsibility that avoids the isolationist, monadic logic which pervades dominant modern Western philosophy and that escapes the idealism that seeks the unity of subject and object, self and Other, in a transcendent horizon beyond the confines of self-consciousness. What is called for is not a new philosophy, says Bonhoeffer, for such an invention would parasitically repeat the pretensions to knowledge and instrumentality that merely underline humanity’s opposition to God’s word, and it would be a repetition of the bootstrapping attempts of human beings to deify themselves. Hence the need to rethink the limits of responsibility: these limits lie not in knowledge or lack of knowledge, human capacity or incapacity, nor in the possession of a causal power of a self-reflexive agent to initiate action and assess consequences, but in how to let oneself be called into being by the Other. The question of responsibility begins in the question of the relationship of every human being with the New Adam and thereby to one’s neighbour and the natural order (AB, 157). For Bonhoeffer, the problem of responsibility is the problem of sin: human beings choose to emphasize their existence as free and responsible agents and to determine their own development through acts of the will made without reference to God is self-divinization: ‘If the world comes to be through the I, then the I and God the creator exchange roles … Thus, for idealism, God “is” only to the extent to which I think, only insofar as in thinking, I end up with myself ’ (DBWE 2:44). Transcendental thinking can never say ‘God is’, for that would be objectifying, finitizing, ‘dogmatizing’ (DBWE 2:44). ‘We should not conceal how close God and the I come together here’ (DBWE 2:45). The ‘I’ understood from out of itself is a limit to itself. No! ‘There is a boundary only for a concrete human being in its entirety, and this boundary is called Christ’ (DBWE 2:45). Hegel attempted to deal with some of these issues, only to result

108

The Limit of Responsibility

in a notion of God reborn in the self-consciousness of the ‘I’. To deal with this problem, subsequent theologians who said ‘God is’ also simultaneously had to say ‘God is not’: ‘Here, as in the whole of idealism, the inmost identity of I and God, which underlies everything, is merely an expression of the proposition that like is known through like’ (DBWE 2:53). Human beings who have not turned to God in faith exist in a circle (DBWE 3:26) and mistakenly take this circle to be infinite (DBWE 3:27): For where thinking looks to itself as the beginning, it posits itself as an object, as an entity over against itself, and so again and again withdraws behind this object – or rather, finds itself in every instance before the object it is positing. (DBWE 3:27)

Humankind no longer knows its true beginning and end in God (DBWE 3:28), its origin and completion in divine freedom, and has thereby lost its true orientation. Its only answer is to enthrone itself, and especially its rational function, in the place of God (DBWE 3:27). Bonhoeffer frames his discussion of responsibility ontologically within an arche-teleological account of creation and eschatology; only herein can his deconstruction of the modern subject begin. In Act and Being, his telling of the exhaustion of modern philosophy’s idealism and falsity opens into a new account of revelation and the church, which is supplemented in Creation and Fall (originally his 1932–1933 lectures at the University of Berlin) with a retelling of the story of creation and redemption. Act and Being Part B gets even closer to the heart of Bonhoeffer’s thinking though a discussion of finitude and truth: ‘human beings cannot place themselves into the truth … ’ (DBWE 2:81). His charge against the philosophy that he has considered earlier might be characterized as an exposure of false finitude: ‘the untruth of human self-understanding is made clear only from within revelation’ (DBWE 2:81). The truth that is the human being’s recognition of their finitude is not something to be ignored but an injunction that comes with thinking itself – truth something that revelation accomplishes from outside of finitude, outside the limits of human knowledge and self-awareness. The term ‘limit’ does not feature significantly in Act and Being but is axiomatic in Creation and Fall. The concept also features in Bonhoeffer’s later accounts of responsibility (DBWE 6:177–178, 182, 200, 224). Brief reference at this point to the concept of ‘limit’ in Creation and Fall and later works will help to make sense of Bonhoeffer’s move in Act and Being to revelation and the church, and to understand these moves as vital in his theologico-ethic of responsibility. The naiveté of Bonhoeffer’s critically lite reading of the Genesis texts is relatively insignificant for our purposes because his primary concern is with how the church encounters the text today. Bonhoeffer’s account of human origins and the great rupture caused by sin allow us to explicate what’s been lost as compared to Adam and Eve’s existence beyond good and evil, and how living in the unity of the knowledge of God as the centre and boundary of human life rendered as redundant the kind of ethic of responsibility that we need today.

Why Bonhoeffer?

109

Prior to the fall, Adam and Eve know only responsivity in unbroken obedience to God’s word. This responsivity, we may posit, incorporates their relationship one with another: The likeness, the analogia, of humankind to God is not analogia entis but analogia relationis. What this means … is, firstly, that the relation too is not a human potential or possibility or a structure of human existence; instead it is a given relation, a relation in which human beings are set, a justia passive. And it is in this relation in which they are set that freedom is given. (DBWE 3:65)

Responsivity is the relation that God has established, and it is not analogia in the sense of being a true representation of divine relationship in freedom. Responsivity in this sense is not responsibility as exercised either by God or by postlapsarian human beings. Human language cannot contain God; ‘for what kind of analogies can there be between the finite and the Infinite’?32 Yet this responsivity is a relation established by God and consists of the freedom that comes from God (DBWE 3:66). Bonhoeffer employs analogical reasoning not in a manner that compromises the utter transcendence of the divine but in the practically oriented seeking of correspondences between realities that are otherwise different. He recognizes the need to make use of concepts like analogy, correspondence, parable, image, likeness, mystery, and such like, if anything constructive is to be said about humankind imago Dei and about relationships of responsivity exercised in humankind’s created likeness to God. When God confronts Adam and Eve (everyman and everywoman) with their limit [Grenze], their true limit or boundedness – that is, ‘the human being’s creatureliness’ (DBWE 3:85) – Adam and Eve experience the limit of creatureliness as a prohibition against their becoming divine: The human being’s limit is at the centre of human existence, not on the margin: the limit or constraint that people look for on the margin of humankind is the limit of the human condition, the limit of human technology, the limit of what is possible for humanity. The boundary that is at the centre is the limit of human reality, of human existence as such. Knowledge of the limit of constraint on the margin is always accompanied by the possibility of failing to know any internal limit. Knowledge of the boundary at the centre means knowing that the whole of existence, human existence in every possible way that it may comport itself, has its limit. (DBWE 3:86)

The forbidden tree at the centre of the garden denotes the knowledge of good and evil, and represents the creaturely status of humankind that is our true limit. Only Satan expects humankind to be a judge of God’s word. Only when Adam and Eve choose to go behind God’s word do they experience their creaturely status as a limit in the sense of a curtailment, restriction or termination point, rather than the sheer fact of their creatureliness and existence through grace and love. 32. Leszek Kolakowski, Is God Happy (London: Penguin), 299.

110

The Limit of Responsibility

Following the fall into sinfulness, believers’ concern with the meaning of responsibility is learned from biblical texts as they present themselves to the church of Christ today. Having eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve have been driven out of the garden of Eden and its gates, which are guarded with the flaming sword of the cherubim to prevent their return. Adam and Eve have a son, Cain, and with him, says Bonhoeffer, begins the story of death (DBWE 3:145) and of technology as the power with which humankind seizes the earth and becomes estranged from it (DBWE 3:67). The limit of human existence, which had been freedom and grace, is now restriction, division (not least knowledge of the division between good and evil), struggle and lust for what is no longer enjoyed. The tree of knowledge is now known as the tree of death. The tree of life, also at the centre of the garden, is now endangered by the fruits of the tree of death (DBWE 3:89). Both trees remain at the centre of human existence. Both variously constitute its boundary. The fruit of the tree of knowledge is the very real limit of death. The tree of life denotes humankind’s true limit of creatureliness and also Jesus’s cross of wood: The trunk of the cross becomes the wood of life, and now in the midst of the world, on the accursed ground itself, life is raised up anew. In the centre of the world, from the wood of the cross, the fountain of life springs up. (DBWE 3:146)

The limit of death has been transformed by the resurrection into the centre of life. The triune God, the origin and limit of human creatureliness, defines creatureliness as responsive. The tree at Golgotha has opened once again to humankind the gates of paradise, wherein the tree of life is at the centre. Hence the possibility of truth only from within revelation, that is, in Christ (DBWE 2:81), and our observation that it is not possible to understand Bonhoeffer’s framing of the concept of responsibility without reference to his theology of ‘Christ the limit’. The ‘limit’ that matters most when talking about responsibility is not the limit of what can be known with respect to the agentact-consequence line of traceability, although this is not to be dismissed as unimportant, but the limits of creaturely existence as given at creation and regiven in the resurrection: There is no more potential engagement … existence has or has not been truly touched as a concrete, spiritual-embodied whole at that ‘boundary’ that is no longer located in or can be established by human beings, but which is Christ himself. (DBWE 2:82)

Because of the incarnation and resurrection, the very boundary of human existence is found in Christ himself. Christ himself is the beginning and end of all creaturely being and meaning. Never is this limit at the disposal of human beings because God remains ultimate and utterly free and unconditioned, although this does not mean that theologians should reduce divine freedom to a quasi-mathematical notion of

Why Bonhoeffer?

111

infinity.33 In Act and Being, Bonhoeffer’s complaint is that Barth interprets divine revelation purely in terms of act (DBWE 2:83), that is, Barth’s Kantian-influenced concept of divine transcendence and revelation bears primarily upon cognition and not ‘being’, notably the being of the church. Revelation occurs as the pure, free act of divine will. While Barth’s conception of revelation resonates positively with Bonhoeffer’s own emphasis on the truth of humanity being known only from outside, Bonhoeffer’s concern is that empirical human activity remains largely unaffected: ‘This endeavor is bound to fail because, according to Barth, no historical moment is capax infiniti’ (DBWE 2:84 [transl: ‘capable of bearing the infinite’]). The meaning of revelation recedes into the known and unknowable; ‘God is always the God who “comes” and never the God who “is there”’ (DBWE 2: 85). With Barth, Bonhoeffer holds that the possibility of truth is known only from within revelation. He also, however, conceives of revelation as yielding both an epistemology of its own (DBWE 2: 31) and onto-sociological categories. Revelation has, by divine grace and mercy, become knowable in Christ. How is this to be understood? Not only in consciousness where God is only the act of my believing. Bonhoeffer agrees with Barth that God is not the God of human consciousness, or the subject of cognition: ‘[f]aith is something essentially different from religion’ (DBWE 2:93). In faith, wholly new situations arise that are not at the disposal of the I. ‘Existence is in the truth only in the act of being encountered by God’ (DBWE 2:96). Like the very core of what it is to exist as a human being, Bonhoeffer understands and structures the concept of responsibility with reference to its limits. This becomes more evident in Ethics where he affirms that responsibility is defined with reference to Jesus Christ: This life, lived in answer to the life of Jesus Christ (as the Yes and No to our life), we call ‘responsibility’ [Verantwortung]. This concept of responsibility denotes the complete wholeness and unity of the answer to the reality that is given to us in Jesus Christ, as opposed to the partial answers that we might be able to give, for example, from considerations of usefulness, or with reference to certain principles. (DBWE 6:254)

The world is ‘the domain of concrete responsibility given to us in and through Jesus Christ’ (DBWE 6:267) in a manner limited by our creatureliness: ‘our responsibility is not infinite but limited’ (DBWE 6:267) and limited with reference to Christ. The limits of creatureliness are not only a delimitation of responsible action (DBWE 6:269) but are derived, in our sinfulness, from the responsibility of Jesus Christ who frees us from ourselves (DBWE 6:270), keeps open the possibility of true responsibility in the face of human restrictions, which can include social norms and laws (DBWE 6:273–274), and allows the human 33. The Bonhoeffer–Barth debate on revelation as a divine act that can be known in faith continued throughout Bonhoeffer’s career. John D. Godsey’s The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1960) remains one of the most insightful

112

The Limit of Responsibility

being to focus always on the person of Jesus who accepted to become guilty in his acting responsibly (DBWE 6:275). Christ himself is the limit of responsibility: ‘responsible action is limited both by surrendering our action to God’s grace and judgment’ (DBWE 6:269) and in awareness that other people must be regarded as being called to responsibility too. The responsibility of the neighbour is another limiting factor to the structure of responsibility learned in Christ: ‘responsibility is always a mutual relation between persons, derived from the responsibility of Jesus Christ for human beings’ (DBWE 6:269–270). ‘Dasein is “in reference to” Christ’ (DBWE 2:134). Christ himself has broken through the solitude and isolation of human existence to re-form human beings to himself (DBWE 2:141). ‘One finds oneself in Christ, because already one is in Christ, in what one seeks oneself there in Christ’ (DBWE 2:150). The personal being of God is revealed and manifest as Lord, and takes societal form in Christian community, and this is freedom. Practically, everything said by Bonhoeffer about ‘Christ the limit’ has to do with freedom. God created the world out of nothing. Creation has no being of its own but stands in the hand of God; its proper attitude towards God is one of praise. Humans are free because God is our limit and allows us to be free for him, and because, being in the image of God, humans are free to be in relation one with another (DBWE 3:64–65). That Jesus Christ is the material bearer of value is yet clearer in the ‘Lectures on Christology’ (1933) where the central claim of Christology, he says, is to be the centre of the sphere of knowledge (DBWE 12:301): ‘Christology is the invisible, unrecognized, hidden center of scholarship, of the universitas litterarum’ (DBWE 12:301). ‘He is the Logos. He is the counter Word. We are now talking about “Being”’! (DBWE 12:302). These student notes lack references to major texts within Christian tradition; it is not possible to discern whether or upon which influences Bonhoeffer is drawing from the patristic era, and beyond. The only explicit reference is to Luther’s focus on the ‘who?’ rather than ‘how?’ question when confronting the mystery of the incarnation (DBWE 12:303). Bonhoeffer’s point is that Jesus Christ is the central question of all knowledge, not only knowledge in the church: Only on the basis of having been judged by this Logos can the old logos learn anew to comprehend the relative rights to which it is entitled. Only from the accounts of the Bonhoeffer–Barth debate, although it should be noted that Barth supervised the PhD from which this book grew. While stating clearly Bonhoeffer’s complaint against Barth’s overly formal – that is, philosophically influenced – presuppositions with respect to divine transcendence, Godsey quickly observes that Bonhoeffer’s criticisms were based largely on a reading of Barth’s Christliche Dogmatik (1927) and his lectures on ‘Fate and Ideas in Theology’ (1929) – works that Barth himself did not consider to be entirely successful attempts in this regard. For more on Bonhoeffer’s attack against Barth’s ‘positivism’ and ‘negativism’ of revelation, see Edward Van’t Slot, Negativism of Revelation? Bonhoeffer and Barth on Faith and Actualism (Berlin: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 12–15. See Bonhoeffer–Barth correspondence DBWE 14: 252–253.

Why Bonhoeffer?

113

question of transcendence does the human logos receive the rights peculiar to it, its necessity and also its limits. In this way, Christology as logology becomes that which makes all knowledge possible. (DBWE 12:304–305)

Human beings typically fight against God’s word and strive to go beyond the limits of creatureliness; they attempt to kill the Logos that stands against them. Strictly speaking, no one can answer the ‘who question’ outside the context of faith: ‘As long as the christological question is one asked by our logos, it always remains within the ambiguity of the “how question”’ (DBWE 12:307). That Christ is the Logos, however, means that Christ is there for the sake of humankind: ‘The truth of the human logos therefore originates in the Word …. This clarity and consonance is the reason why it is universally valid’ (DBWE 12:316). Christ is the universal validity of the structure and substance of the meaning of responsibility; all humanity finds its truth in him. Christ, who is the true meaning of responsibility, is encountered by the world as a stumbling block or foolishness (DBWE 12:320). The true meaning of revelation is not found outside of revelation as some kind of quasi-mystical ubiquitous presence outside of the Word of God. It is the nature of Christ’s presence in the world, however, to be for all humankind; being-there for humankind, history and nature (DBWE 12:324). Hence, ‘The human being’s limit is at the center of human existence, not on the margin …. The limit is grace’ (DBWE 6:86–7). ‘The boundary has not shifted: it is where it always was, at the tree of life in the centre … ’ (DBWE 6:144). The limit of responsibility for the believer is found in Christ.

The Concrete Church and the Problem of Guilt What, then, follows for the concrete church and, in particular, with respect to the problem of guilt? This question persists throughout this book. For the moment, we note how Bonhoeffer’s response to the problem of guilt is different from Heidegger’s account of Dasein that finds itself always already in guilt. The nub of the matter turns on receiving forgiveness from the Other. But this is a difficult reality to live. At issue is what it means to live this truth of the gospel both singularly and uniquely as a believer and corporately in the global community of faith; too rarely does the sanctorum communio live fully its theology of vicarious representative action. For the moment, we concentrate on Bonhoeffer’s framing of the debate. Bonhoeffer does not talk specifically about responsibility in Act and Being Parts B and C, but says much about sin, solitude, conscience, accusation, guilt and the freedom to act, all of which are integral to an ethic of responsibility. The remainder of this section is an explication of how Act and Being Parts B and C provide the theological grounding for the account of responsibility that Bonhoeffer develops in Ethics, with particular attention being paid not only to how he cuts through the isolationism of modern notions of the self by refusing to allow sin to disintegrate into individual acts and arbitrary interpretations (DBWE 2:102), but also to how he does this without allowing individual conscience to sink under the monstrosity of the burden of guilt.

114

The Limit of Responsibility

In insisting that the meaning of revelation and, as we shall discuss below, the meaning of responsibility can be encountered by human beings only from outside, Bonhoeffer is not making a point about creation or being general (DBWE 2:105): ‘Only in revelation is there a genuine “from outside”’ (DBWE 2:109). A genuine ontology knows that God being ‘stands over against’ the ‘I’ (DBWE 2:107) but this reality is given only in revelation. Yes, Bonhoeffer says, the limit of selfhood may be further redefined sociologically through encounter with the Other in ways that are true for all people; the person ‘is’ only in the act of encounter and selfgiving (DBWE 2:128). Bonhoeffer’s point, however, is that Adam’s existence in sin is not able truly to encounter the existence of Others, ‘not even the “You”, the “claim of the neighbour”, unless God takes hold of human beings and turns them around’ (DBWE 2:106). Bonhoeffer allows for the possibility of a common ethic by accepting that created being remains, in principle, open to demonstration of the truth: ‘The decisive problem of critical ontology is, therefore, to show how the being that is being spoken of here is to be thought of in distinction from what exists’ (DBWE 2:106). In a genuine ontology, made known in revelation, the object of knowledge stands over against the I and is known from outside. Christological truth is preached in the church and lived in the church, thereby becoming something that exists, an object of knowledge available in its being lived. The church is the unity of act and being (DBWE 2:109), the place where Dasein is understood and experienced as a mode of being of the revelation of God. Here, then, is Bonhoeffer’s inseparable link between the church and his ethic of responsibility. To understand this inseparability it will be helpful to briefly read backwards from Ethics where Bonhoeffer is much clearer about the links between church and the meaning of responsibility. In Ethics Bonhoeffer comments more fully on the church as the place where Jesus Christ is proclaimed (DBWE 6:62, 131–132), where the relation of the world to Christ becomes concrete in the mandates of work, marriage, government and the church itself (DBWE 6:68– 75), where the meaning of responsibility as vicarious representative action is explicated (DBWE 6:83), where guilt is acknowledged (DBWE 6:134) and where the guilt of the whole world falls upon the church (DBWE 6:136) and the particular sins of the church are acknowledged (DBWE 6:138). The church is the place where believers live consciously under divine judgement (DBWE 6:142) and in hope for the nations and the processes of healing (DBWE 6:143). The church is the place where Christ, who is responsibility, takes form in concrete ways (DBWE 6:97) that arise from situations that lie before us (DBWE 6:100). The church is the place where responsibility is learned as the incorporation of the lives of others into oneself, and vice versa (DBWE 6:219), in encounter and freedom (DBWE 6:220–221): ‘Those who act responsibly take the given situation or context into account in their acting, not merely as raw material to be shaped by their ideas, but as contributing to forming the act itself. … [t]he action of the responsible person is most profoundly in accord with reality’ (DBWE 6:222) because God became human (DBWE 6:223). ‘[T]o act responsibly means to include in the formation of human action reality as it has been taken on by God in Christ’ (DBWE 6:224).

Why Bonhoeffer?

115

The church is the place where revelation occurs and where responsibility may be relearned. Mindful of Bonhoeffer’s fuller explications in Ethics about the nature and meaning of responsibility, Act and Being is where he lays the theological groundwork regarding the church as constituted (in its life of responsibility) by the proclamation of Christ’s death and resurrection in the contingencies of the everyday – contingencies determined by the future (DBWE 2:111). The oncefor-all occurrence of the cross is for the church still something of the future. Significantly, however, it is precisely this future orientation of human life in Christ that demands attention to the here and now, and, more specifically, to the sociology of the church. The church is not a human community like other societies because it is created by and founded upon Christ (DBWE 2:112); divine freedom is woven into this community of faith (which, as becomes explicit in the Ethics, is the condition for the learning of the meaning of responsibility). Hence, to learn the meaning of responsibility in Christian ethics presupposes and requires a specific Christian sociology (DBWE 2:113) to be realized in the church because this is where God binds Godself especially to human beings and offers his forgiveness. Bonhoeffer has, in effect, prepared in Act and Being for his later treatment of responsibility as a problem of Christian community: ‘“Christ existing as community,” has to be thought of in this concreteness’ (DBWE 2:115, emphasis added). The Christian community is visible and concrete, a sociological entity that exists in much the same way as any other community exists, that is, in its being comprised of people, with institutional and organizational aspects and everything else that comprises the ordinariness of human existence. This emphasis on a concrete rather than abstract ethic runs throughout the Ethics (DBWE 6:73, 78, 98, 99, 102, 164, 221, 224 … ) and is underlined with respect to how the mandates become meaning (DBWE 6:68–70), why Christian ethics is different from disembodied principles or values (DBWE 6:76–77), how service to others demands attention to context (DBWE 6:100–102), how repentance becomes real in lived situations (DBWE 6:138; 165), how the unity between God and the world is lived in the concrete activity of the church (DBWE 6:253) and more. Influenced by Karl Barth but critical of Barth’s ‘positivism of revelation’ (DBWE 8:364), Bonhoeffer attempts to rebalance Barth’s insistence on the transcendence of revelation and its overwhelming of history.34 Bonhoeffer’s complaint appears to be that while Barth held that revelation occurred in history and that the history of God’s salvation is the form taken in worldly affairs by revelation, the truth of revelation has been determined antecedently in eternity.35 History is the form that revelation assumes. A problem in Bonhoeffer’s eyes is that Barth so emphasizes 34. This is the first time that Bonhoeffer uses this reproaching phrase against Barth although the complaint had been building since his first reading of Barth’s collection of lectures Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie (1924). 35. For an excellent PhD thesis on this topic, see Kuo-An Wu, ‘The Concept of History in the Theology of Karl Barth’ (PhD diss. University of Edinburgh, 2011), 7.

116

The Limit of Responsibility

the qualitative difference between creator and creature, time and eternity, that he denies the historical nature of revelation, not least in the church. ‘Barth, who is the only one to have begun thinking along these lines, nevertheless did not pursue these thoughts all the way, did not link them through, but ended up with a positivism of revelation, which in the end essentially remained a restoration’ (DBWE 8:364). Barth’s pioneering insights and strong commitment to the efficacious Word of God, from which Bonhoeffer derived inspiration, did not provide what Bonhoeffer needed to prepare the church for existence in a religionless world. Too much like a mathematical point that lacks extenuation, Bonhoeffer alludes to the insufficiently historical character of Barth’s theology of revelation and prepares instead for a fuller account of the concretely existing churchcommunity as where the ‘being’ of revelation occurs (DBWE 2:117).36 ‘[O]nly in faith do human beings know the being of revelation, their own being in the church of Christ, to be independent of faith’ (DBWE 2:118). Barth’s dialectic of time and eternity is supplemented by Bonhoeffer with a dialectical tension between faith and the church. What Barth, and Kierkegaard before him, had emphasized as the infinite qualitative distinction between eternity and time is maintained by Bonhoeffer but augmented with an account of the being of the church. Significant Reformed theologians, says Bonhoeffer, have misjudged the central significance of the church (DBWE 2:119), with insufficient attention being paid to the form of what exists. Of interest to Bonhoeffer is what it means in history for persons newly created by Christ in baptism to have their being in Christ in the community of faith. His central point is that bearing the new humanity of Christ is to be drawn into relationship with others, to be ‘directed into humanity’ (DBWE 2:120) and, significantly, that this sociality is lived in history. ‘Let it be understood that it is precisely as historical that the I is a member of the new humanity’ (DBWE 2:121). Faith is lived in reference to Dasein which, for Bonhoeffer, means membership of the community of faith. ‘Thus, act comes from being … ’ (DBWE 2:122). Freedom is known in being. An account of revelation (and responsibility) needs these transcendental, ontological, epistemological and sociological dimensions. The meaning of responsibility is not found in isolated individuals but in and through a community of persons: ‘they are drawn into it and discover that they already have been placed into the truth of their old and new existence’ (DBWE 2:114).37 The meaning of responsibility as derived not from principles, statements of values, transcendental notions of pure reason or ideals of goodness, truth and beauty, but from ecclesial participation in the life of Christ, from ‘the being of the community of persons that is constituted and

36. See also Simon Fisher, ‘Revelatory Positivism?: Barth’s Earliest Theology and the Marburg School’, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 37. ‘Here the problem of act and being emerges in the form of the dialectic of faith and the church ….’ (DBWE 2:114).

Why Bonhoeffer?

117

formed by the person of Christ and in which individuals already find themselves in their new existence’ (DBWE 2:113). Implications follow with respect to the question of guilt, to the problem of guilt and the problem of always-being-already-in-guilt (DBWE 2:98), when referred to as ‘the being of the community of persons that is constituted and formed by the person of Christ’ (DBWE 2:113). This section notes some initial moves made by Bonhoeffer in Act and Being and Sanctorum Communio with respect to guilt and the guilty conscience. Chapter 4 will look at Bonhoeffer’s corpus more widely with respect to these same themes because this is such a difficult issue for Christian people and others locus imperii who have benefited for centuries from sinful social structures. We cannot live without the word of forgiveness. Yet asking forgiveness from others is difficult because it means renouncing the privilege of being the one to forgive and to shoulder the burden of guilt, and can become just another theoretical posture in a covert game of self-delusion and yet more exploitation.38 The gospel of forgiveness is that existence in Christ ‘is’ as both sinful and pardoned (DBWE 2:116). Faith clings to God’s grace but further knows that forgiveness is independent of faith: ‘only in faith do human beings know the being of revelation, their own being in the church of Christ, to be independent of faith’ (DBWE 2:118). The act of faith is suspended in their being in Christ, two in one: ‘individual person and humanity’ (DBWE 2:120). Old humanity pulls every person continually into sin and guilt, yet the gospel of forgiveness is that the community of faith bears every person’s sin and death with them for good as, in Christ, the death caused by sin is no longer death because sin has been defeated. Conscience need not, therefore, keep a person under the powers of this world, notably of law and death. Conscience, which is the person in their desperation and solitude becoming conscious of themselves in sin, is very close to the cor curvum in se from which the person in Christ is free. The anxiety and burden of guilt caused by conscience leave a person still in death (DBWE 2:148). ‘Guilt, death, and the world press in upon human beings and make the world too “narrow” (narrowness [Enge], anxiety [Angst] and uneasy [Bange] have a common root). …. [E]verything now speaks to them, becomes their accuser, and yet they nonetheless remain alone and without defence’ (DBWE 2:149). Conscience is something defined by the old Adam. ‘Conscience is not God’s but the human being’s own voice’ (DBWE 2:155). Herein is the problem of conscience for the believer. Conscience turns a person to themselves not to Christ. 38. Witness Terry Eagleton’s complaint against post-colonialism as a way of being politically radical without necessarily being anti-capitalist and so ‘a peculiarly hospitable form of leftism for a “post-political” world’. Terry Eagleton, in ‘The Gaudy Supermarket. A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present’, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, London Review of Books 21, no. 10 (13 May 1999): 3–6. Available online: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n10/terry-eagleton/in-the-gaudy-supermarket (accessed 27 June 2016).

118

The Limit of Responsibility

Conscience is the look of sin without Christ and outside of the community of faith (DBWE 2:156). Conscience is different from repentance because repentance is finding oneself in Christ. Repentance can be a last grasp of the self towards itself but true repentance is the loss of oneself to the self and living in Him: ‘Because Christ died, and because we, too, died that death with Christ in baptism (Romans 6), death is concealed in faith; for that reason the faithful must daily die that death’ (DBWE 2:157). The power of the past is defeated because baptism is resurrection to new life determined by Christ’s future. Hence Bonhoeffer’s subordination of every other kind of truth to theological truth: the community of faith is not first-and-foremost an ethical possibility but God’s will and purpose for humanity, implemented in history (DBWE 1:141), ‘not an ethical possibility or standard, but solely the reality of the divine love for the church-community; it is not an ethical, but a theological concept’ (DBWE 1:156). Regardless of any other reality, the call to every believer is to lay my sin on Christ himself – which means that ‘“Christ existing as church-community” is bearing it now’ (DBWE 1:191). A word of caution must be sounded. As Christine Schliesser notes, Bonhoeffer is surprisingly vague regarding a definition of guilt. This problem is compounded by the manifold English translations of Bonhoeffer’s German Schuld variously as culpability, fault, debt and guilt.39 Moreover, Schliesser further suggests, Bonhoeffer lacked biblical support for actively incurring guilt by means of violating divine law.40 There are points at which, says Schliesser, Bonhoeffer’s conception of accepting guilt loses precision and clarity. This is potentially of concern for our reading of Bonhoeffer because talk about globalization is already rife with vagueness. The problem is that talking about solidarity in sin, about how the sin of every individual is indivisible from the sin of every other individual, can tend to play to the familiar human tendency to evade blame and reprehension. Bonhoeffer was aware of this. Accepting guilt can be little more than melting ‘into the fate of the many’ (DBWE 1:119) if, in effect, it leads to a breakdown of resolve and a failure to repent. The vagueness that besets Bonhoeffer’s own writings might also be due in part to his own peculiar situation. Theorists still debate whether he reneged on his earlier pacifist position, or whether he was involved in Abwehr conspiracy to kill Hitler.41 It remains unclear whether, or to what extent, he did more than use his position in German military intelligence and his connections with the German resistance movement to pass information to allies outside Germany; he did enough to be hanged by the Nazis in 1945. Hence some vagueness in the distinction between guilt actively and non-actively 39. I am grateful to Schliesser (Everyone Who Acts Responsibly Becomes Guilty: Bonhoeffer’s Concept of Accepting Guilt (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 191) for this point. 40. Schliesser, Everyone Who Acts, 184. 41. Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony Siegrist and Daniel Umbel, Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth (Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Group, 2013). They argue that it is highly unlikely that Bonhoeffer was involved in any assassination attempts, see p. 13.

Why Bonhoeffer?

119

incurred is to be reckoned with in his particular situation. Beyond this brutal necessity, Bonhoeffer draws a further distinction: ‘the corporate culpability of a community is something different from the culpability found in social interactions within the community’ (DBWE 1:119). For our purposes also, more than the distinction between guilt actively and non-actively incurred by a single individual is needed. Understanding human solidarity in sin has a social, corporate dimension. Schliesser supposes Bonhoeffer’s personal involvement in the conspiracy and asks how far he was convinced of his own guilt before God for actions taken under his own free, responsible decision.42 She makes plain the centrality to Bonhoeffer’s writings of accepting the interconnectedness of humans in guilt, and vicarious representative action (G. Stellvertretung), or being guilty of the other person’s guilt, as integral to discipleship: ‘our new humanity consists in “bearing the troubles and sins [Schuld] of all others”’.43 Schliesser reviews a wealth of scholarship on Bonhoeffer’s theology of guilt that, broadly speaking, locates him firmly within Western, Protestant tradition(s). Schliesser’s particular interest is with Bonhoeffer’s accepting of guilt and she compares Bonhoeffer’s Christologically informed casting of obligation in terms of Stellvertretung with classic Greek tragedies fuelled by the inevitability of fate, before venturing a reconstruction that emphasizes the believer’s renunciation of innocence by incurring guilt for the sake of another as entailed in participation in the life of Christ. The concept of accepting guilt, she shows, is integral to the Christian life of vicarious representative action but emerges from core biblical Christological convictions. The disciple is to be like Christ in all things. Accepting guilt as Jesus Christ accepted our guilt presupposes the (Augustinian) mass of damnation into which every human is born.44 Bonhoeffer’s shockingly counterintuitive challenge remains, however, that believers abandon an ethical position of responsibility for themselves, a position that counts for nothing before God, ‘thereby demonstrating precisely the necessity for vicarious representative action’ (DBWE 1:156). Like the kind of ethical suspension that Kierkegaard bequeaths, like Abraham at the point of sacrificing Isaac, a person’s claim to responsibility is abjured for the sake of God’s command45 (DBWE 4:97). Against every sense of duty and obligation, against

42. Schliesser, Everyone Who Acts, 192. 43. Schliesser, Everyone Who Acts, 165, citing DBWE 4:285. 44. Schliesser, Everyone Who Acts, 170. 45. For an excellent study that heals any false divide between Bonhoeffer’s understanding of divine command and ‘virtue ethics’, that is, an ethic associated with formation [Gestaltung] but also informed by Bonhoeffer’s own comments on Thomas Aquinas, other Roman Catholic sources, classical literature, and more, pertaining to virtues, see Jennifer Moberly, The Virtue of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics: A Study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics in Relation to Virtue Ethics (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013), esp. ch. 6.

120

The Limit of Responsibility

pleas from beloved faces or religious imperatives, the believer must abandon even the possibility of their own responsibility as nothing other than an expression of sinfulness and finitude. Only the responsibility encountered in Jesus Christ is perfect and unlimited. No other act of responsibility is adequate. To acknowledge Jesus Christ as the very embodiment of the person whose ‘entire life, action, and suffering is vicarious representative action’ (DBWE 6:38), and who is able to live in such a manner because he is ‘concerned exclusively with God’s love for human beings’ (DBWE 6:39), is to suspend one’s own obligation to responsibility – responsibility that turns to infinite guilt anyhow in the double bind of conscience facing the impossibility of acting or being responsible. This is a kind of death: ‘In the knowledge of my being-a-sinner as an individual … yet never as an exoneration … only in the judgment in which I must die as “Adam”’ (DBWE 2:147–148). This death includes death to guilt and the burden of a guilty conscience.

Chapter 4 R E SP O N SI B I L I T Y: M I T E I NA N DE R , F Ü R E I NA N DE R , ST E L LV E RT R ET U N G

Bonhoeffer knew little of the breaking apart of the meaning of responsibility in the face of transnational capital flows, speed-of-light transfers of vast amounts of money, overloads of information, conflicting data or huge fluxes in market pricing, all of which contribute to so-called butterfly effects in business whereby a small change at one point in a non-linear system can result in differences in unpredictable places elsewhere, and so on. He offers relatively little explicit guidance on how to be church globally across unacceptably extreme global inequalities, and lived and witnessed in a context different from our own. Nonetheless, he provides the basics of the kind of Christian ethic of responsibility that we need today. Seventy-five years in advance of Judith Butler and diverse post-liberal critiques of the modern concept of philosophy, Bonhoeffer was challenging individualist concepts of agency, exposing the autonomy of the ‘liberal subject’ as a myth to be debunked and preparing the ground for looking more closely at the complexities of causal factors underlying individual decision-making.1 While not overtly about responsibility, Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being are, according to our reading, manifestos for a new philosophy of selfhood and responsibility. As we have seen, Bonhoeffer provides theological equipment to cut through questions about the limits of responsibility understood in modern philosophical terms as the limits of knowledge, the limits of selfhood and, more generally, ‘the problem of act’, and how it further exposes the ‘problem of being’ as the (un)limits (or infinity) of potentiality and guilt. He exposes the self-generating ‘I’ or isolated individual as a fiction, thereby preparing the way for an unmasking the illusion of responsibility as something belonging exclusively to the individual subject. Responsibility as a fully controllable, free choice of the knowledgeable, self-motivating and free-acting ‘I’ is an illusion. Instead, Bonhoeffer in effect reverses the meaning of responsibility from I-You-I to You-I-You. Responsibility originates in Christ and is found also in You, that is, my neighbour near and far. 1. See Chapter 3 for Bonhoeffer’s critique of modern, liberal, I-centred and otherwise hegemonic notions of selfhood, and the theological undergirding of his reversal of the structure of responsibility from I-You-I to You-I-You.

122

The Limit of Responsibility

With these conceptual building blocks in place, the challenge in this chapter is to give more substance to the lived meaning of responsibility. Hence this chapter takes the three modes of selfhood introduced by Bonhoeffer as restructuring for us the concept responsibility. The challenge is to think what each of these modes of responsibility might mean given Bonhoeffer’s reversal of the meaning of responsibility from I-You-I to You-I-You, that is, from a problem that is fictitiously ‘mine’ to manage to a relationship with You that is given in Christ and learned responsively: 1. Church members are structurally ‘with-each-other’ [miteinander] as appointed by God. 2. Church members are structurally ‘being-for-each-other’ [füreinander]. 3. The principle of vicarious representative action [Stellvertretung] becomes the lived meaning of responsibility (DBWE 1:178). The bulk of this chapter is structured with reference to these three points. Reformation of the church into the divine image takes place when church members are structurally ‘with-each-other’ [miteinander] as appointed by God, ‘being-for-each-other’ [füreinander] and called to vicarious representative action [Stellvertretung] as the lived meaning of responsibility. Somewhat loosely, the structure of this book overall is given by a journey through Sanctorum Communio. So far, we have concentrated on Sanctorum Communio chapters 1–3 that yield the theology of selfhood and responsibility that we have been discussing. This chapter and the next are, in many respects, a creative reading of Sanctorum Communio chapters 4–5. Chapter 4 is about Sin and Broken Community: ‘The world of sin is the world of “Adam”, the old humanity’, and chapter 5 is about baptism and the empirical form of the community. This chapter intermingles readings of Bonhoeffer’s texts, chapters 4 and 5 of Sanctorum Communio especially, although not exclusively, with applied interpretations regarding what a revised and restated understanding of responsibility might mean for a re-forming church in a globalizing era. The challenge is to explicate these modes of personhood as three facets of responsible living.

Being miteinander in Sin Bonhoeffer begins Sanctorum Communio chapter 4 with the problem of sin. We cannot develop an ethic of responsibility for today without renewed attention to our being miteinander in sin. The world of sin is the world of ‘Adam’, the old humanity. But the world of Adam is the world Christ reconciled and made into a new humanity, Christ’s church. However, it is not as if Adam were completely overcome; rather, the humanity of Adam lives on in the humanity of Christ. This is why the discussion of the problem of sin is indispensable for understanding the sanctorum communion. (DBWE 1:107)

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

123

In the section entitled ‘Sin and Broken Community’, he explicates the basic relation(s) between I and You inherent in the concept of sin, details how sin breaks immediate community with God and neighbour and effects ‘ethical atomism’ (DBWE 1:108). Sin isolates one person from another as each recognizes their own sinfulness and, simultaneously, throws a person into the misery of sin caused collectively by all. Sin has a significance that is not only individual but also supra-individual. It is simultaneously ‘the deed of the human race and of the individual’ (DBWE 1:108). Utter solitude and the deepest, broadest sense of shared sinfulness define our fallen nature. Human beings are bound together in a state of corruption. The individual culpable act and the universality of sin are inseparable (DBWE 1:110). ‘The human being, by virtue of being an individual, is also the human race’ (DBWE 1:115). The whole of humanity is found in my individual sinful act. The human race falls away from its vocation with every sin that I commit. The universality in sin is posited with, and in, every individual sin. I stand alone, utterly singular, in my sin but I am associated in my guiltiness with all people. The sin of every individual is indivisible from the sin of every other individual. Together every human person constitutes the peccatorum communion [community of sinners] that is the human race. Bonhoeffer’s focus is on human solidarity in sin as both personal and relevant to the entire human species: One falls away not only from one’s personal vocation but also from one’s generic vocation as a member of the human race. Thus all humanity falls with each sin, and not one of us is in principle different from Adam; that is, every-one is also the ‘first’ sinner. (DBWE 1:115)

Bonhoeffer’s handling of human solidarity in sin is pastorally gentle but strong. He holds together a focus on the individual and the human race. Significantly, he does this with a simultaneously strong focus on membership of an empirical community: ‘The meaning and the reality of such a call can be grasped only by one who has experienced it within an empirical community. … The call comes not to the individual, but to the collective person’ – at which point Bonhoeffer alludes to the empirical community of Israel who experienced the history of their calling together, were chastised and comforted as a people (DBWE 1:118). This emphasis in Sanctorum Communio on the social character of the Christian calling precludes any individualist conception of the church wherein persons decide for themselves on a whim the meaning of good and evil, and simultaneously renders meaningless any theory of sin as ‘universal’ without reference to its social articulation.2 It is widely accepted that Bonhoeffer assumed and accepted Luther’s teaching on original sin: ‘Bonhoeffer underscores Luther’s teaching that sin is the state 2. For useful background, see Christiane Tietz, ‘Bonhoeffer on the Uses and Limits of Philosophy’, in Bonhoeffer and Continental Thought: Cruciform Philosophy, ed. Brian Gregor and Jens Zimmermann (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), ch. 1.

124

The Limit of Responsibility

of the whole human being. Sin is the sin of a person’s personhood and thus characterizes the “collective act” of all humanity in Adam.’3 Thus Wolf Krötke cites DBWE 1:108–118 as evidence that Bonhoeffer was not concerned to revise Luther’s teaching on sin or his emphasis on the indispensability of revealing sin. He assumes ‘the universal contamination of all human action by original sin’ to mean the entanglement of the act of a single person in the deeds of Adam (DBWE 6:235).4 Constructive work is required, however, to think about what living better as members of the one, holy, universal, Christian church, miteinanderin-sin, means today. This section attempts to think with Bonhoeffer about being miteinander-in-sin in our globalizing era when a one-third-world theology of sanctorum communio globally is too often the reflection of a neo-colonial past. In Sanctorum Communio chapter 4, Bonhoeffer moves to consider ethically collective persons with reference to biblical conceptions of the people of God. It is not individuals but the people, he says, that fell into sin. ‘Thus it is the people who must be comforted’ (Is. 40.1) (DBWE 1:119). God works with entire peoples as well as with individuals: ‘There is a will of God with a people just as with individuals’ (DBWE 1:119). God is concerned with every community, however small, and with the nations. And here is the nub of the matter as it concerns culpability: The corporate culpability of a community is something different from the culpability found in social interactions within the community. If the ‘people’ must repent, it does not matter how many repent, and in actuality it will never be the whole people, the whole church; but God can regard the ‘whole’ ‘as if ’ all had repented. ‘For the sake of ten I will not destroy them’ (Gen. 18.32). (DBWE 1:19–20)

God sees the whole people in a few. God alone sees all of humanity in the story of Jesus Christ, which makes a difference to the question of responsibility understood 3. Wolf Krötke, ‘Bonhoeffer and Luther’, in Bonhoeffer’s Intellectual Formation: Theology and Philosophy in His Thought, ed. Peter Frick (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 53–55, here at 69. 4. See further Michael P. DeJonge, Bonhoeffer’s Reception of Luther (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), esp. chapter 4, ‘The Twofold Form of Christ: Bonhoeffer’s TwoKingdoms Thinking’, in which DeJonge considers Bonhoeffer’s sensitivity to the church’s diverse relationship with culture and different ways for the church community to carry out its responsibility towards the world (pp. 119–121 esp.). I presuppose his conclusion that Luther’s theology of sin and justification provides one of the most important hermeneutical keys for understanding Bonhoeffer’s account of Christ’s interpersonal presence in the world. Also the very fine collection Klaus Grünwald, Christiane Tietz, Udo Hahn, Hg, Bonhoeffer und Luther: Zentrale Themen ihrer Theologie (Hanover: Velkd, 2007), esp. Tomi Karttunen, ‘Die Luther-Lektüre Bonhoeffers’, 9–31, which investigates Luther’s influence on Bonhoeffer’s rejection of modern individualism, his reading of Luther’s theology of guilt and scope for personal interpretation of the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

125

with reference to human solidarity in sin (DBWE 1:121). ‘The call comes not to the individual, but to the collective person’ (DBWE 1:118). The people of God does not comprise isolated individuals who are called to do penance but the people as a whole. Not all will repent, but God sees the whole in a few – which is important for what Bonhoeffer says later about vicarious representative action, that is, the meaning of Stellvertretung. His argument is fundamentally Christological; only because humanity is either in Adam or in Christ is he able to develop this line of thought. For this reason also, sin is approached by Bonhoeffer as an ecclesial question. He holds the tension between individual and collective responsibility with reference to the local, ecclesial community. This is the ‘proven center of activity’ that, for Bonhoeffer, is to be considered always in ways that are locally, concretely and empirically grounded (DBWE 1:118). This ecclesial framing of the question of solidarity in sin (and responsibility) becomes more apparent in Sanctorum Communio chapter 5: The whole theological reflection thus far not only leads to the discussion of the sanctorum communion, but is possible and meaningful only from the perspectives of the sanctorum communion. (DBWE 1:122–123)

This treatment of solidarity in sin as an ecclesial question runs counter to modern individualistic sensibilities. He has yet more to say, however, about how the church is not exempt from the seriousness of sin and its effects. The reality of sin and the communion peccatorum remain in the church even despite its being in Christ: ‘Adam has really been replaced by Christ only eschatologically, ἐπ’ ἐλπίδι (in spe) [in hope]’ (DBWE 1:124). As long as sin remains in the world, the church shares the sinful existence of humanity. The church must take this seriously with respect to its own behaviour and decision-making. Moreover, it must pay attention to the extent to which the church participates in the communio peccatorum and how its life in Christ bears upon its ethos and, for our purposes, how it understands the calling to responsibility. The ontic-ethical base-relations in the state of sin not only are fundamental for all personal social relations, but also condition even their empirical formation. When they are modified, or re-created, in the concept of the church, this concrete form of the community must change as well; indeed this provides the possibility and necessity of developing a unique empirical form of the community. (DBWE 1:125)

The church is simultaneously a participant in the sin of Adam and a new community established by God. The challenge is to discern what responsible living looks like given these realities: ‘It will … be necessary to delineate the new social basic-relations, which are established by the fact of Christ, as constitutive in the deepest sense for a social body like the church’ (DBWE 1:126). Here is the nub of the challenge. Mindful that the church is simultaneously a participant in the sin of Adam and a new community established by God, what

126

The Limit of Responsibility

sense are we to make of Bonhoeffer’s reversal of the meaning of responsibility from I-You-I to You-I-You across vast distances, cultural diversity, socioeconomic inequality and more? Given all that Bonhoeffer teaches about human solidarity in sin, and given that for some Christian people ecclesial investment in transnational corporations and mining companies in particular is tantamount to the sin of colonialization, our question is the meaning of responsibility. Global capitalism, says Botswanean postcolonial, feminist New Testament scholar Musa Dube, is ‘the grandson of colonization’.5 The colonizing effect manifests itself in many ways, including tensions between traditional barter versus cash economies, the slow erosion of local traditions because young people are employed by the mine rather than in agriculture, mine-supervised centres for trading in wool and milk – where weighing scales are regulated and better prices paid – replace local markets and nomadic traders – ‘Taking away people’s self-sufficiency. This is what colonialism did!’, say many.6 Development, at least for most tribal peoples, isn’t really about lifting people out of poverty; it is about masking the takeover of their territories. The deception works because the conviction ‘we know best’ is more deeply ingrained even than it was a generation ago; Victorian-era levels of narrow-mindedness are returning. As a Botswana Bushman told me, ‘First they make us destitute by taking away our land, our hunting and our way of life. Then they say we are nothing because we are destitute.’7

5. Musa Dube, ‘Villagizing, Globalizing, and Biblical Studies’, in Reading the Bible in the Global Village: Cape Town. Global Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship, ed. Justin S. Ukpong (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002), 46. Drawing upon Dube’s work, North American theologian Rebecca Todd Peters thinks about globalization and its moral challenges from a ‘first-world’ perspective where questions such as ‘Why are the products at Walmart so cheap?’ have immediate resonance and calls her fellow Christians to live into justice. (Rebecca Todd Peters, In Search of the Good Life: The Ethics of Globalization (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004)). Her typology of globalization identifies four distinct theories of globalization (neoliberal, developmental, earthiest and postcolonial, the last of which is a ‘resistance’ theory) and investigates each for its answer to questions about moral agency, humanity’s purpose and what constitutes humanity’s flourishing. Todd Peters does not provide enough economic and cultural history to set recent processes of globalization against a backdrop prior to these processes but calls for a more robust engagement with the features of transnational corporations, human rights and transnational law, taxation regimes and more. (Rebecca Todd Peters, ‘Decolonizing Our Minds: Postcolonial Perspectives on the Church’, in Women’s Voices and Visions of the Church: Reflections of Orthodox Women (Geneva: WCC, 2005), 93–110). 6. Steven Corry, ‘Indigenous Survival: What Is “Development” Good For?’ http:// anthrojustpeace.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/indigenous-survival-what-is-development.html (accessed 25 August 2017). 7. Corry, ‘Indigenous Survival’.

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

127

Postcolonial Readings of Bonhoeffer Postcolonial readings of Bonhoeffer are critically important in opening minds to the difficulties of grappling with the meaning of Stellvertretung in Christian ethics and, more specifically, are integral to a Bonhoeffer-informed theological understanding of responsibility. Ulrike Auga reads Bonhoeffer alongside Indian literary theorist and feminist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in order to approach questions of marginalization and resistance in a manner that is theologically informed and yet able to think critically and politically too.8 Paul S. Chung uses Bonhoeffer’s insight into reconciliation and how to think about the Other in ways that undergird public theology in postcolonial relief.9 Chung’s particular focus is a dialogue with Confucian ethics and how to bring Bonhoeffer’s commitment to God in relation with humanity into a fruitful interaction with Confucian humanism, notions of ben or benevolence and emphasis on the mysteries of the cosmos. He notes Ghandi’s importance for Bonhoeffer and his comment in a letter of 22 May 1934 that more Christianity exists in the world of the ‘heathens’ than in the whole state church of Germany.10 David S. Robinson reads Bonhoeffer in ways that look forward to a global ecclesiology, with particular reference to Bonhoeffer’s engagement with questions of race and how churches can unmask and confront segregation.11 Postcolonial theorist and theologian Luis Rivera Pagán has reflected on the need to reclaim from Bonhoeffer those aspects of his writings that explicate the need for theology to acquire ‘the view from below’: The essential imperative might be to remember and radicalize the prophetic words written by the imprisoned Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a note surreptitiously preserved by his friend Eberhard Bethge: ‘ We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled – in short, from the perspective of those who suffer’.12

Robinson’s words were picked up and noted by Carmelo Santos, an interim editor of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics, when developing a strategy for the future of the 8. Ulrike Auga, ‘Decolonizing Public Space: A Challenge of Bonhoeffer’s and Spivak’s Concepts of Resistance, “Religion” and “Gender”’, Feminist Theology 24, no. 1 (2015): 49–68. 9. Paul S. Chung, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer’, in Postcolonial Public Theology: Faith, Scientific Rationality, and Prophetic Dialogue (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), 47. See further Clifford Green and Thomas Teng, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sino-Theology (Chung Yuan: Chung Yuan Christian University Press, 2008). 10. Chung, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer’, 53. 11. David S. Robinson, ‘Confessing Race: Toward a Global Ecclesiology after Bonhoeffer and Du Bois’, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 36, no. 2 (2016): 121–139. 12. Luis Rivera Pagán, ‘Listening and Engaging the Voices from the Margins: Postcolonial Observations from the Caribbean’, in Luis Rivera Pagán, Essays from the Margins (Eugene: Cascade, 2014), 47.

128

The Limit of Responsibility

journal.13 Bonhoeffer has been read alongside the writings of Martin Luther King in order to identify their shared insights and interpret their various legacies in ways that might spark new dialogue.14 John de Gruchy wrote in the 1980s about the relevance of Bonhoeffer’s writings for the South African church and has subsequently suggested that a new generation of theologians continues to explicate Bonhoeffer’s legacy to good effect in that country.15 Revisiting Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Work Bonhoeffer is not routinely read for guidance regarding global church community or for church members structurally ‘with-each-other’ ‘[miteinander] as appointed by God even while living variously amid economic and political structures that perpetuate inequality, poverty, exploitation, pollution, vulnerability to climate change and more. A development of Bonhoeffer’s ecclesial, and especially ecumenical, witness is required. One way to move forward is with reference to Bonhoeffer’s theology and practice of ecumenism. Keith Clements has written most clearly on Bonhoeffer’s ecumenism and claims to show that ecumenical considerations were central to Bonhoeffer’s life and work from the early 1930s: ‘[h]is commitment to and active involvement in the ecumenical movement … form the most continuous thread of his life and activity, and links all his various engagements’.16 From his involvement with the 1931 conference in Cambridge, England, with the World Alliance for Friendship and his appointment as an honorary Youth Secretary for Europe,17 through ecumenical camaraderie with congregations in London (1933–34) and meetings with the bishop of Chichester, George Bell, to the ecumenical conference in Fanø (1934) that threw its weight behind the Confessing Church and agreement

13. Carmelo Santos, ‘From Monologues to Conversations: Reflections on the Future of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics’, Currents in Theology and Mission 43, no. 1 (2016): 18. 14. Willis Jenkins and Jennifer M. McBride, eds., Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought (Nashville, TN: Fortress Press, 2010). See also J. Deotis Roberts, Bonhoeffer and King: Speaking Truth to Power (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004). 15. John De Gruchy, Bonhoeffer and South Africa: Theology in Dialogue (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmanns, 1984); John W. DeGruchy, ‘Bonhoeffer’s Legacy: A New Generation’, The Christian Century (2 April 1997): 343–345. 16. Keith Clements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest (Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications, 2015), ix. 17. The main purpose of the World Alliance, as its name implies, was to work for peace, and it was this that was the prime attraction of the organization for Bonhoeffer. For him ecumenism and peace were two sides of the same coin. (See K. Clements, ‘Ecumenical Witness for Peace’, in Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. J.W. de Gruchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 154–172.)

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

129

of the constitution for the World Council of Churches (1938), to his conducting of services for prisoners of multiple nationalities while in jail, Bonhoeffer’s career was shaped in large part through ecumenical encounter. His lament in 1932 was that theological reflection lagged behind ecumenical developments: ‘There is still no theology of the ecumenical movement’, but his last recorded words in a message to George Bell, bishop of Chichester, were ‘Tell him … With him I believe in the principle of our universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests, and that our victory is certain.’18 This victory, says Clements, was not of one nationality or grouping, or even of the Allies closing in on Berlin, but of the community of Jesus Christ in existence across the world. Even if not developed fully, Bonhoeffer’s hunch was that the ecumenical witness of diverse Christian communities throughout the world to their one Lord Jesus Christ was an inspiration still to be claimed and a service still to be performed.19 The organized ecumenical movement in the 1930s and 1940s, the work of the World Alliance, its associated youth secretariat, the International Missionary Council, the 1927 Lausanne Faith and Order Conference, ecumenical support for the Confessing Church, the birth of the World Council of Churches and more all belonged to their time. Even so, Bonhoeffer was clear that the World Alliance was church, that is, more than a society with a common purpose, because it was founded utterly and only on obedient listening to and preaching of the Word of God (DBWE 13:304). The work of the World Alliance exceeds the work of local Christian communities but is God’s work nonetheless, for peace among the nations: ‘Its aim is the end of war and the victory over war’ (DBWE 13:305). In his ‘Theses Paper for the Fanø Conference’ (1934), Bonhoeffer denounces war as the enemy of peace and critiques secular answers from pacifism before developing overt answers in response to the divine commandment not to kill: ‘To the objection: the State must be maintained: the Church answers: Thou shalt not kill …. Have you dared to entrust God, in full faith, with your protection in obedience to His commandment? …. Believe in God and be obedient’ (DBWE 13:305–306). Neither war nor fatalism but prayer and faith in Christ’s coming reign overcome evil. In his address to the Fanø Conference, entitled ‘The Church and the Peoples of the World’, Bonhoeffer similarly cuts across the twin crags of nationalism and internationalism (or what today might be called partialism and impartialism) with a call to hear and heed the Word of God. Peace is not ‘a problem’ but a commandment from God (DBWE 13:307). Some reasons for caution must be heeded. Bonhoeffer’s optimism with respect to the ecumenical movement has been noted and criticized by some. Jesuit theologian John Wilcken thought that Bonhoeffer asked too few questions about the ecumenical church: There can be no doubt that Bonhoeffer was too optimistic in his attitude to the ecumenical movement. He was eager that something should be achieved, and 18. Recounted by Clements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest, 2. 19. Clements uses the phrase ‘an inspiration still to be claimed’. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest, 8.

130

The Limit of Responsibility

achieved quickly. After all, it was clear that the world was in a dangerous state, and, in particular, Bonhoeffer was deeply aware of the desperate state of affairs in Germany at the time. It was his hope that the Ecumenical Church, by speaking the authoritative Word of God to the world, would provide the solution to the world’s problems. Clearly he was expecting too much.20

Wilcken’s concern is that the pain in Bonhoeffer’s heart with respect to the crisis in Germany and the approaching peril biased him towards the welcome, positive and supportive aspects of the ecumenical movement with insufficient attention being paid to where and how it might fall into sin. Bonhoeffer’s own pleas was for Christian people to pause and take stock of the simple fact that Christian people and churches from throughout the world reach out towards each other, come together and pray for the promised unity of the church. This is reason enough, says Bonhoeffer, at least to ask whether God wants to bestow blessing on such activity (DBWE 14:408). ‘Is not this witness of all Christian churches at the very least something that must prompt a moment’s pause and reflection?’ (DBWE 14:408). For Bonhoeffer, only a truly bad theology would forbid taking these things seriously (DBWE 14:409). Similarly, for today, only a truly bad theology would omit to ask what it might mean to live miteinenander-in-sin and füreinander across multiple differences, global inequality and radically diverse experiences. Bonhoeffer demands boldness and a willingness to think imaginatively and positively about what church life beyond the local community can become. Learning in Silence Bonhoeffer wrote in Sanctorum Communio, chapter 5, that silence is sometimes required: ‘If the church, however, is unable to speak authoritatively, then it still may have recourse to a qualified silence that is fundamentally different from an unqualified disregard and inattention’ (DBWE 1:251). He also opened his 1933 ‘Lectures on Christology’ with thoughts about silence: ‘The silence of the church is silence before the Word. … To speak of Christ is to be silent, and to be silent about Christ is to speak’ (DBWE 12:300). Learning why, when and how to be silent is our starting point also for a theological rethinking of the meaning of Stellvertretung too.21 This need to learn when to be silent came home to me recently during a visit to South Africa. In June 2017, I was fortunate enough to visit Richards Bay Minerals, 20. John Wilcken SJ, ‘Bonhoeffer: Church and Ecumenism’, The Heythrop Journal 10, no. 1 (1969): 5–23, at 23. 21. See especially Rachel Muers, Keeping God’s Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). While approaching the topic as a Quaker, and reading diverse theorists from Kierkegaard to Nelle Morton, Meister Eckhart to George Steiner, Wittengstein to Eberhard Jüngel and more, Muers draws especially upon Bonhoeffer’s Christologically focused theological ethics of communication centred on

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

131

a subsidiary of Rio Tinto in South Africa, and the first mine site chaplaincy to result from the Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative (MFRI).22 Situated on a 30 square kilometre lagoon of the Mhlathuze River, which gives it one of the country’s largest harbours, Richards Bay is a vibrant town on the north coast of KwaZulu-Natal. As South Africa’s largest harbour, Richards Bay is home not only to magnificent wetland scenery, papyrus swamps, open freshwater lakes, mangroves, dune forests and mudflats, sandbanks and thornveld habitats but to a vast paper mill, one of the largest coal export terminals in the world (which at the time of writing has a capacity of 91 million tonnes per annum), metals beneficiation plants, information and communications technology hubs, engineering zones, plans for new agroprocessing plants and much more. The Richards Bay Minerals company is an industrial minerals supplier. As the company itself describes, artificial freshwater ponds are created in the dunes several kilometres from the shoreline: On each pond floats one or more dredgers and a concentrator plant. The dredger burrows into the face of a dune, advancing at a rate of a few metres a day. The sand face collapses into the pond and is sucked up and pumped into the concentrator plant. There the heavy minerals (about 3 per cent of the dunes) are separated from the sand through a series of sieves and sluices. The sand is pumped out behind the plant to reform the dune for rehabilitation, and the valuable heavy mineral concentrate is deposited next to each pond for transportation to the mineral separation plant.23

silence. God’s silence is a ‘hearing to speech’. The silencing of women in the church has not been a God-like ‘hearing to speech’; new practices of silence, hearing and communication are possible, and such practices will be increasingly important for present-day debates about a right to privacy and what it means to tell the truth. In particular, Muers discusses Bonhoeffer’s ideas about ethics as ‘conformation to Christ’ in a chapter entitled ‘Resurrection Silence’. Muers reading of Bonhoeffer’s Christology develops the notion of ‘resurrection silence’ as a kind of encounter with God that can both change and renew. Using Ricoeur’s distinction between the silence of unknowability and the silence that corresponds to the questions ‘Who is heard?’ and ‘Who hears?’, she writes about both ‘the silence of Christ’ and the resurrection as God’s decisive and irreversible breaking of silence. The ‘futurity’ of the resurrection, that is, it’s meaning not yet knowable, is presented as another dimension of its silence. Bonhoeffer’s ‘world come of age’, or godless world, is presented in terms of God’s silence – a mystery of unknowability but also of God’s patience. 22. At the time of writing, Rio Tinto’s shareholding in Richards Bay Minerals (RBM) is 74 per cent. RBM was certified as a ‘Top Employer’ for 2017 through a global process administered by the Top Employers Institute, an independent organization headquartered in the Netherlands that has certified excellence in the conditions that employers create for their people since 1991. 23. ‘There’s Beach Sand in Your Toothpaste’, http://www.riotinto.com/ourcommitment/ spotlight-18130_19406.aspx (accessed 29 August 2017).

132

The Limit of Responsibility

Three individual minerals – ilmenite, zircon and rutile – are separated using their various magnetic and electrical properties. These minerals are then further refined on the mine, resulting in the following end products: titanium dioxide, high-purity pig iron, rutile and zircon.24 Given that Richards Bay Minerals produces approximately 2 million tonnes of product annually, comprising 25 per cent of the world’s titania slag and rutile, and a third of the world’s zircon, it is likely that most readers of this book will today have used or consumed something that contains minerals extracted from the dune sands in this beautiful part of world, where Zulu people are indigenous. The history of the Zulu as a single people or nation dates from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when isolated families and nomadic groups joined together to acquire a more organized political identity. The Anglo-Zulu Wars (1879–1896) are a period of shame in British history that I must acknowledge and lament.25 At the height of their colonial power, representatives of the British Empire sought control over Zululand in order to lend political support to Boer land claims and to acquire labour for the diamond mines. Richards Bay was named after Rear Admiral Sir Frederick William Richards, appointed British Commander for the West Coast of Africa in 1878.26 During one of his visits to the Cape he learned of

24. As RBM explains (http://www.riotinto.com/ourcommitment/spotlight-18130_19406. aspx) (accessed 29 August 2017), titanium dioxide is used to create a pure white, highly refractive, ultraviolet-light-absorbing pigment. The pigment is non-toxic and biologically inert, and so it is used safely in products such as foods, toothpaste, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, as well as in paint, plastics, textiles and inks. High-purity pig iron is used as a raw material in foundries for the production of ductile iron castings. Ductile iron is used extensively throughout the world for the production of safety-critical automotive parts, such as brake calipers and steering knuckles in cars and trucks. Rutile is a common component in welding rod fluxes and can be processed into a titanium metal form. It is used extensively in the aerospace and aviation industries because of its lightness, strength and resistance to corrosion and heat. These properties also make it ideal for use in artificial hip joints and pacemakers; zircon is used in the production of ceramic tiles and sanitary wares. Refined to zirconia, it is used in a wide range of advanced ceramics, jewellery and electronic applications, including television screens and computer monitors. 25. See George McCall Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795. Volume 1, The Cape Colony from 1795 to 1828, the Zulu Wars of Devastation, and the Formation of New Bantu Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908). 26. George MacCall Theal, History of South Africa from 1873 to 1883. Vols 10–11. Twelve eventful years, with continuation of the history Galekaland, Tembuland, Pondoland, Bathshuanaland until the annexation of those territories of Cape Colony, and the Zululand until its annexation of Natal (London, Allen, 1919); T. Kepe and L. Ntsebeza, eds., Rural Resistance in South Africa: The Mpondo Revolts after Fifty Years (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Timothy J. Stapleton, Faku: Rulership and Colonialism in the Mpondo Kingdom c. 1780– 1867 (Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001).

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

133

British defeat at the hands of the Zulu forces in January 1879, before travelling to the region to seek revenge. Richards named the Mhlathuze lagoon after himself, that is, Richards Bay, in 1879. Christian missionaries had been operative in the region since the 1830s when Faku, the ruler of the Mpondo Kingdom from 1818 to 1867, allowed Wesleyan missionaries to establish a mission station within his kingdom as part of his protection plan against the Zulus. Christianity is thus implicated in the perpetuation of tension between the tribal communities of the region; all the familiar problems of moral self-righteousness and misguided notions of pompous superiority played into and worsened local conflicts. My heart was heavy with this history while visiting Richards Bay even though the welcome that I was given was warm and the purpose of the trip – namely, to attend preparatory meetings for the first mine site chaplaincy to result from the MFRI – was positive.27 The chaplaincy initiative at Richards Bay Minerals is exciting because inter alia it has been strongly multi-faith from the outset, characterized by an extraordinary sense of energy, prayerfulness and collaboration. It is supported by the local tribal councils, open to conversations with anyone interested, forward looking and is supported by a Courageous Conversations Theological Task Team, that is, a powerful local spin-off from the MFRI international endeavour. There are prospects for take-up elsewhere if successful. While rooted in their locality, the wider and more long-term vision is a network such that no pastor working with communities affected by mining anywhere in the world need feel isolated and illequipped for their leadership role – a network of well-informed, well-connected and well-resourced pastors in local communities at mine sites. While the core work 27. Chaplaincy is a widely recognized mode of faith group engagement with the world – an expression of the missional vocation of the church to take God’s Word to people wherever they are, to be incarnationally present in all walks of life, cultures, societal groupings, etc., and to serve Christ Jesus in the world. It is relatively unusual, however, for mine sites to be served by chaplains and chaplaincy teams. The exception is Australia where the National Mine Chaplaincy Network has functioned effectively for some years. Witness the February 2011 report entitled ‘A Sustainable Framework for Mining Chaplaincy’, which analysed the results of a survey on existing chaplaincies at mine sites. Interviews were conducted with thirty-three mine employees, representing different states and different minerals. Results suggested that only 13 per cent of mine sites had chaplaincies as compared to 87 per cent with functioning employee assistance programmes (EAPs). Sixty per cent of respondents were ‘very positive’ and 40 per cent ‘positive’ about the chaplaincy at their site. Of those interviewees who did not have a chaplain onsite, 9 per cent were ‘very positive’, 73 per cent ‘positive’ and 18 per cent were ‘cautious’ about the possibility of a chaplaincy being established. While the authors of the report, Richard Fortune and Kara Martin, acknowledged that thirty-three interviews was a relatively small sample, they welcomed the idea of testing their results with further investigation. See Richard Fortune and Kara Martin, ‘A Sustainable Framework for Mining Chaplaincy’, Report, February 2011. Available online: http://www.outofthepit.org/Resources/Documents/National%20Mine%20Chaplaincy%20 Network%20Report%20Final.pdf (accessed 28 August 2017).

134

The Limit of Responsibility

is local and based at one particular workplace with roots into the diverse cultures and ethnicities represented in that workplace and its surrounding environs, there is a strong sense of belonging to something larger because, in Christ, this local initiative is part of the church universal whose Saviour died for all.28 Even in the silence, however, which of us locus imperii knows how to live with the guilt that hangs heavy in the air? Which of us does not tremble at the prospect of knowing if our pension fund is benefiting from harms done to others long ago? Which of us knows how to bear the silence that condemns? Living the realities of miteinander-in-sin and füreinander globally is hampered by one-third-world inabilities to deal with the problem of guilt. Bonhoeffer’s challenge remains, however, to live as church. It is this simple and this difficult. Stellvertretung is never individualistic or isolated nor merely an ideal. Nor can the church or Christian people locus imperii decide for themselves what it means to be live responsibly. Instead, as personal responsibility is possible only as a member of Christ’s body, so ecclesial responsibility locus imperii is possible only in communion with the church globally: ‘Love is … not an actualization of the metaphysical social-relation [metaphysischen Sozialbeziehungen], but rather of the ethical social-affiliation’ (DBWE 1:165). In this sense, responsibility is not experienced as potentiality but as God’s gift to be received from the hands of others (DBWE 2:117).

Being füreinander across Global Inequality My proposal in this section is relatively simple: to extend what Bonhoeffer says about the relation between church and state nationally to the relation between the ecumenical church globally and the inter- or transnation al state system. At issue is the meaning of live füreinander across vast distances, cultural diversity, socio-

28. As a visitor to this exciting initiative, I was keen to glean learnings for possible chaplaincy initiatives elsewhere. Conversations are ongoing in the MFRI about extending the initiative so that many more mine sites might have a chaplaincy onsite that is multi-faith in structure and available to everyone, whether or not they have a faith. The hope is that many more chaplains will become available to support everyone at the mine site, including every shift worker, driver, office-based worker, manager, cleaner and more. The hope is that chaplains will be in touch with local communities and effective in establishing healthy relationships with the mine site, able to supply a safe space for conversation and honest interlocutors when disputes arise, capable of hosting courageous conversations, not least in the face of strife and disagreement, determined to keep in view the interests of future generations, as well as everyone affected by mining today, mindful of duties to the natural environment and more. Many issues are likely to be contentious, including the funding chaplaincies at mine sites. Who should pay and why? Bespoke solutions will be needed for every chaplaincy. Increasingly, however, the momentum in support of chaplaincies at mine sites means that more and more people are having this conversation as weeks go by.

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

135

economic inequality and more. The functions of the state are cast by Bonhoeffer, at least in part, in terms of law and order. ‘As long as the state acts in such a way as to create law and order – even if it means new laws and a new order – the church of the Creator, Reconciler, Redeemer cannot oppose it through direct political action’ (DBWE 12:364). As church, the church vis-à-vis the state, it will only ask whether or not the state is creating law and order. In doing so the church will see the state as limited in two ways. Either it creates too little law and order, whenever, for instance, a group of people is deprived of its rights. Or it creates too much law and order, notably when the state develops its use of force to such a degree as to rob the Christian faith of its right to proclaim its message, thereby compelling the church to speak (DBWE 12:365). Our question is whether, in a globalizing era, a Bonhoefferian ethic will include careful attention to international and transnational law, such that the church’s obligation regarding law and order becomes meaningful inter- and transnationally.29 As a child of the Reformation, Bonhoeffer did not urge the church to engage directly in politics. ‘The church of the Reformation’, he says, ‘is not encouraged to get involved directly in specific political actions of the state. Instead, it has to affirm the state as God’s order of preservation [Erhaltungsordnung] in this godless world’ (DBWE 12:362). ‘It should recognize and understand the state’s creation of order – whether good or bad from a humanitarian perspective – as grounded in God’s desire for preservation in the midst of the world’s chaotic godlessness’ (DBWE 12:362–3). Bonhoeffer distinguishes between gospel and law and holds that the actions of the state should remain free from interference by the church: ‘It remains for the humanitarian associations and individual Christian men who see themselves called to do so, to make the state aware of the moral aspect of the measures it takes in this regard, that is, should the occasion arise, to accuse the state of offenses against morality’ (DBWE 12:363). Individual Christians have this calling, not the church per se. The church cannot primarily take direct political action, since it does not presume to know how things should go historically. Even on the Jewish question today, the church cannot contradict the state directly and demand that it take any particular course of action. (DBWE 12:363)

‘As church, it will only ask whether or not the state is creating law and order’ (DBWE 12:364). While it is from the Christian proclamation and faith that the state receives its own rights, Bonhoeffer’s default position is that Christians are to remain subject to authority (DBWE 12:365).30 Opposition to the state should 29. International law commonly refers to customs and rules that are generally regarded and accepted as binding in relations between states and between nations. Transnational law is law that applies to all persons, businesses and governments that perform or have influence across state borders. 30. See also DBWE 4:244.

136

The Limit of Responsibility

occur when certain limits are reached, and these limits are ecclesial. ‘The limits are reached wherever there is a clash between the space the body of Christ claims and occupies for this world for worship, offices, and the civic life of its members, and the world’s own claim for space’ (DBWE 4:245–6). When the very being of the church is challenged, however, there are three possibilities for action that the church can take vis-à-vis the state: 1. Questioning the state as to the legitimate state character of its actions, that is, making the state responsible for what it does. 2. Service to the victims of the state’s actions. The church has an unconditional obligation toward the victims of any societal order, even if they do not belong to the Christian community (Let us work for the good of all – Gal. 6.10). 3. ‘Not just to bind up the wound of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself ’, when the matter is of the status confessionis (DBWE 12:365). The commandment of Jesus Christ does not establish the rule of the church over government in any immediate, practical sense. Yet, says Bonhoeffer, ‘the commandment of Jesus Christ rules church, family, culture, and government by setting each of these orders free to exercise their respective functions’ (DBWE 6:402). Of interest for our purposes is what happens to Bonhoeffer’s statements when amended, as below, to apply to the inter- or transnational state system rather than to the state system per se. 1. Questioning the state system as to the legitimate inter- or transnational character of its actions, that is, making the state system responsible for what it does. 2. Service to the victims of the state system actions. The church has an unconditional obligation toward the victims of any societal order, even if they do not belong to the Christian community (Let us work for the good of all – Gal. 6.10). 3. ‘Not just to bind up the wound of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself ’ (DBWE 12:365) when what is at stake is a matter status confessionis. This reading of Bonhoeffer potentially opens one way, albeit one among many, of thinking theologically about how to move from being miteinander-in-sin across global inequality to being füreinander. The following sections point to some areas in which Christian people might together press for change. Tax Of the many practical ways in which being miteinander-in-sin and yet führeinander might take shape today, tax and taxation demand special mention:

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

137

Billions of dollars are also lost through legal tax avoidance by multinational companies and wealthy investors, also enabled to a large extent by the world’s tax havens. … This not only deprives developing countries of public revenues needed to fight poverty, but may also be hindering those countries’ domestic businesses from flourishing.31

Most people react to reports like this with the intuition that something is wrong. But what is the wrong, and who is responsible for it? Laws might not have been broken. Few individuals will have interacted directly with others to harm them. Company directors have maximized shareholder value as they are obligated – often legally – to do. Yet something has gone badly wrong if profits are being declared and taxes avoided, thereby depriving citizens of those countries in which products are sold and profits of monies required by governments and regional municipalities to meet public needs. Many things – not one single thing – might have gone wrong. Governments might be rife with corruption or beset by structural weaknesses that make it difficult to collect tax. Developing countries might not have the information or capacity to collect the taxes owed to them. Anonymous ‘shell companies’ might be used to shift profits between countries or might be disguising who really owns those profits. International processes to share information about company ownership and the reporting of taxes are not in place or adequately regulated. Mechanisms whereby companies not paying their fair share can be tracked and exposed are not yet in place.32 And there are complexities surrounding where value is created if production processes happen in one country but the goods are completed and packaged elsewhere. Citizens in developed countries are slow to protest because consumer goods are cheaper when companies avoid tax. Public opinion ebbs and flows but rarely becomes electorally significant. Political leaders in developed countries are hampered by perceptions of hypocrisy.33 G20 finance ministers and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are clear that: In an increasingly interconnected world, national tax laws have not kept pace with global corporations, fluid capital, and the digital economy, leaving gaps that 31. Action Aid, ‘How Tax Havens Plunder the Poor’ (2013). Available online: http:// www.actionaid.org.uk/news-and-views/almost-half-of-all-investment-into-developingcountries-goes-through-tax-havens (accessed 5 August 2014). 32. ‘G8 Loch Erne Declaration’. Available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/207543/180613_LOUGH_ERNE_ DECLARATION.pdf (accessed 12 March 2014). 33. Financial Times Editorial, ‘The World Needs Global Tax Reform’. Available online: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a10bcaba-d4ec-11e2-b4d7-00144feab7de.html#axzz2v15ISp6U (accessed 12 March 2014).

138

The Limit of Responsibility

can be exploited by companies who avoid taxation in their home countries by pushing activities abroad to low or no tax jurisdictions.34

In July 2013 the OECD launched an Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS), identifying fifteen specific actions needed in order to equip governments with the domestic and international instruments to address this challenge.35 The BEPS plan recognizes the importance of addressing the borderless digital economy and will develop a new set of standards to prevent double non-taxation, the need for closer international cooperation, greater transparency and data and reporting requirements. This Action Plan was fully endorsed by the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors at their July 2013 meeting in Moscow as well as by the G20 Heads of State at their meeting in Saint-Petersburg in September 2013. The OECD reports, for the first time ever in tax matters, that non-OECD/G20 countries are involved on an equal footing.36 Yet the problem remains of the gradual destruction of the ‘base’, or that on which everything else rests, of trade in a given country. Exploiting gaps and mismatches in tax rules to make profits ‘disappear’ for tax purposes distorts competition and may lead to inefficient allocation of resources by ‘distorting investment decisions towards activities that have lower pre-tax rates of return, but higher after-tax returns’ and is an issue of fairness: ‘when taxpayers (including ordinary individuals) see multinational corporations legally avoiding income tax, it undermines voluntary compliance by all taxpayers’.37 The OECD is committed to implementing effective anti-avoidance measures including rules to improve transparency, restrict how profits are allocated within a given company or group and more.38 But something has gone wrong. Moreover, like national tax laws,

34. See http://www.oecd.org/tax/beps-about.htm (accessed 28 August 2017). 35. These actions include: 1. Recommendations regarding the design of domestic rules to strengthen controlled foreign companies (CFC) rules. 2. Recommendations regarding the design of domestic rules to limit base erosion via interest deductions and other financial payments. 3. Strategy to expand participation to non-OECD members to counter harmful tax practices more effectively. 4. Recommendations regarding data on BEPS to be collected and methodologies to analyse them. 5. Recommendations regarding the design of domestic rules to require taxpayers to disclose their aggressive tax planning arrangements. 36. http://www.oecd.org/tax/beps-about.htm (accessed 28 August 2017). 37. http://www.oecd.org/ctp/beps-frequentlyaskedquestions.htm (accessed 28 August 2017). 38. Meeting of the OECD Council at Ministerial Level, Paris, 29–30 May 2013. Available online: http://www.oecd.org/tax/C-MIN(2013)22-FINAL-ENG.pdf (accessed 28 August 2017).

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

139

Christian ethics has not really kept pace with the global realities of tax avoidance such that multinational corporations can avoid tax to the extent that the OECD, the G8 and the G20 are concerned to act urgently. Globalization is changing the way we think about tax and the related questions of justice. Within the national public sphere, legal requirements give expression to what society holds that citizens owe one another. Individuals and politicians might disagree about the extent to which the state must engage in redistributive taxation in order to ensure a fair distribution of wealth and income in the society it governs. But the boundaries of justice have been relatively clear. The territorial nation state has for many years provided the limits within which to debate the kind of societal infrastructure that will allow for the flourishing of all and how to pay for it. A tax has been understood traditionally to be a compulsory payment imposed by a government on its citizens to meet public needs.39 Today, globalizing processes in trade and other financial transactions mean that the dividing line between ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ justice is often blurred. Decisions taken in one nation state affect the lives of people elsewhere but the reference points against which to ask first-order questions of justice are shifting and blurred. When legal and moral obligation is no longer framed by the concept of the sovereign state and democratic pressures, it becomes unclear who should be included among those entitled to make even minimal justice claims on one another. Familiar debates within nation states about the levels of taxation payable on income, property, sales, imports, estates and gifts do not provide a template for the actions of transnational corporations. While many argue about what constitutes a just taxation policy, and the appropriate ordering of social relations within the society of a nation state, the bounds of the debate have been relatively clear. Taxes are paid for the sake of order and an infrastructure that puts out fires, keeps the streets safe, ensures legal safeguards for businesses and employees, makes sure that our food and water are safe, educates our children and more. A nation state is a kind of community with a sense of being ‘we’, belonging together, sharing resources and responsibilities, entailing diverse modes of neighbourliness, some of which are exercised locally at the community level and some through national political institutions including the tax-office. At the international level, it is less easy to make sense of the concept of common good in terms of the dynamics of community life, or what’s required for a business enterprise in a given location, or political deliberation and so on. The international community does not share a sense of membership, proximity, customs and culture, loyalty to political offices such as ‘president’ or a monarchy, ideals or commitments or polity closely analogous to the nation state. Hence moral vagueness around who (whether an individual or corporate agent) is (or is not) obliged to recognize extra-legal duties towards others across the borders of potentially many nation 39. See Black’s Law Dictionary 1496 (8th edition, 2004). See further Susan Pace Hamill, ‘The Potential of Applying Judeo-Christian Ethics to Tax Policy in Foreign Countries’, Journal of Education Finance 34, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 139–155, at 140.

140

The Limit of Responsibility

states contributes to the ease with which we can satisfy ourselves that minimal moral duties have been met. Hence the wariness among some Christian people to talk about international law because it has no ‘place’ analogous to state law. The challenge is how to frame the debate about moral obligation, tax and tax avoidance given that our (at least partially) post-Westphalian political context is no longer delimited by the concept of the sovereign state. It is increasingly unclear who should be included among those entitled to make justice claims on one another, or what kinds of international trading law and global authorities are required to ensure the conditions for a sustainable and healthy global free market, including trade agreements between unequal partners.40 Bonhoeffer does not help us immediately in his writings; he says little about tax or taxation in the context of globalization. Yet his development of the Christological question in the 1933 ‘Lectures on Christology’ speaks to centrally important in finding a way forward: as the ‘who?’ question is the quintessential theological question, rather than ‘how?’, so too the ‘who?’ question is the quintessential ethical question in matters of taxation and more besides. Christologically, the ‘who?’ question recognizes the otherness of God and the boundaries of human existence (DBWE 12:303). Ethically, the ‘who?’ question recognizes the otherness of the other person, their status as neighbour before me and calls me out from the cor curvum in se of the fallen condition. Or, at least, this is the proper Christian calling. In reality, we fall short: ‘When we ask Who are you, we are speaking the language of the obedient Adam, but we are thinking the “how?” of the fallen Adam’ (DBWE 12:303). The challenge for Christian ethics is to ask the ‘who?’ question better. In the church, where Christ has revealed himself as the Word of God, the human logos asks the question: Who are you, Jesus Christ? Logos of God! The answer is given. The church receives it every day anew. I tis up to the human logos to understand the question as it is given, and to reflect upon and analyze it as it exists. But it remains always the question, ‘Who’. (DBWE 12:304)

40. On the post-lapsarian need for territorial, see Esther D. Reed, ‘Refugee Rights and State Sovereignty: Theological Perspectives on the Ethics of Territorial Borders’, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 30, no. 2 (2010): 59–78. I argue inter alia that Christian ethics should mimic neither secularist ‘partialist’ or ‘impartialist’ agenda but accept and work with the permissibility of territorial borders within divine providence. Like private property, territorial borders fall short of the kingdom of God but remain necessary in the penultimate age, until Christ’s kingdom comes. The essay includes attention to national and international welfare considerations. The debate about responsibility expressed as care for the poor across borders is picked up usefully by Iris Young who argues with respect to matters of justice nationally and internationally that justice requires serious attention to social inequality. Whether or not a person is born into, and lives in, a position of disadvantage does bear upon the question of responsibility. ‘Responsibility across Borders’ in Responsibility for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 5.

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

141

Even in the context of questions about tax and taxation, the challenge is learning to ask the ‘who?’ question better. To my mind, however, it is centrally important alongside the ‘how?’ and ‘what?’ questions of tax justice. The precise ‘how?’ and ‘what?’ of tax justice will vary from place to place. There is no single global ‘who?’ or answer to the ‘what?’ of global justice. Curiously, however, keeping the ‘who?’ question of tax justice close to the ‘what?’ and ‘how?’ questions of tax justice yields a direction of travel. Consider Sister Modesta who works as a hospital in the Nambuma district of Malawi.41 Malawi is widely recognized as one of the poorest countries in the world.42 People in Malawi live to an average age of fifty-five, and there are high rates of AIDS/HIV infection. As Action Aid Malawi Country Director Martha Khonje says, ‘Our health service is threadbare, with a great shortage of nurses and doctors, and our schools need teachers. The country desperately requires investment in public services, including health and education programmes.’43 The solution is for the government to raise more revenue in taxation and to invest in the health and education infrastructure of the country. This is not happening. ‘Action Aid recently released a new report – called An Extractive Affair – revealing that the Malawian government lost out on more than $43 million (£27 million) in potential tax revenues from a single Australian uranium mining company in six years. That is enough money to pay the salaries of 39,000 teachers or 8,500 doctors for a year.’44 One problem is that what has happened is not illegal. Rather, a combination of tax breaks offered by the government and tax planning by mining companies has resulted in this relatively tax light burden being exacted. The ‘how?’ question of tax justice yields the answer: ‘this is not illegal’. The government in Malawi did not demand more,

41. Martha Khonje in Malawi, ‘Corporate Tax Deals Are Robbing Poor Countries of Teachers and Nurses’, The Guardian, Thursday 2 July (2015). Available online: https:// www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/jul/02/corporatetax-deals-are-robbing-poor-countries-of-teachers-and-nurses (accessed 28 August 2017). Martha Khonje is the Action Aid Malawi Country Director. 42. See the World Bank Databank Worldwide Governance Data (http://data.worldbank. org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD) for comparative data, and also internal country specific information about the health and education infrastructure at http://data.worldbank.org/ country/malawi (accessed 4 September 2017). 43. Khonje, ‘Corporate Tax Deals’, ‘EXPOSED: the US$43 million lost in Malawi’, http:// www.actionaid.org/australia/news/taxpowermalawi (accessed 5 May, 2018). 44. ‘Corporate Tax Deals Are Robbing Poor Countries of Teachers and Nurses’, https:// www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/jul/02/corporatetax-deals-are-robbing-poor-countries-of-teachers-and-nurses. For the full Action Aid report, see Action Aid, ‘An Extractive Affair: How One Australian Mining Company’s Tax Dealings Are Costing the World’s Poorest Country Millions’, June 2015. Available online at http://www.actionaid.org/publications/extractive-affair-how-one-australian-miningcompanys-tax-dealings-are-costing-worlds-po (accessed 28 August 2017).

142

The Limit of Responsibility

and tax was eventually paid by some companies (not all) in subsidiary companies set up elsewhere in the world where a very low rate of tax was required.45 The ‘how?’ and the ‘what?’ questions of global tax injustice cry out for urgent attention. As William I. Robinson concludes in Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, new theories of imperialism are required, as are new ways of policing global capitalism.46 Bonhoeffer directs our attention, however, to the ‘who?’ question. This question brings us back to Sister Modesta, who pays a 30 per cent income tax rate on her salary. When well administered, this money finds its way to the citizens of Malawi who need better healthcare and education systems. At issue is why national and global tax systems do not function better to ensure that appropriate taxation is levied from transnational corporations.47 Who is Sister Modesta in this debate? A voiceless government employee? An advocate for her patients? A tax dodger? A tax payer? Asking the ‘who?’ question of tax justice keeps us close to the faces and lives of all affected by tax avoidance. This is because, for the believer, asking ‘Who is Jesus Christ today?’ is answered in the face of the poor. Robinson concludes with scholar-activist Susan George that academics who want to be relevant should study the rich and powerful, not the poor and powerless.48 Who is taking the decision to exploit legal loopholes in order to avoid reasonable tax payments? Who is putting pressure on the company management to ensure that this happens? Who, if anyone, is taking or giving a bribe? Who is justifying tax evasive practices to shareholders or withholding information from shareholders? Secularist theorists disagree about the ‘who?’ of global justice and about whether the task begins with the modern state or the individual global citizen.49 45. For a balanced and insightful study of these issues, see William I. Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 46. Robinson, Global Capitalism. 47. See https://tradingeconomics.com/malawi/personal-income-tax-rate (accessed 28 August 2017). 48. Robinson, Global Capitalism, 215. 49. For instance, Charles Beitz wants to extend Rawls’s ‘justice as fairness’ model to the global realm urging governments to seek interdependence rather than independence upon the world stage. Rawls himself outlined a political conception of right and justice that applies to the principles and norms of international law and practice but that does not reproduce the famous contractualist procedure associated with the first ‘Original Position’ thought experiment where participants debate with reference to familiar principles of domestic justice. Instead, he suggests a ‘Second Original Position’ where the political representatives of peoples – who are assumed to want to serve the interests of their own society – choose principles of international justice to facilitate loose confederations and the workings of international organizations and such like. Charles Beitz, ‘Rawls’s Law of Peoples’, Ethics, 110 (July 2000): 681, commenting on John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 40. By contrast, standing in the tradition of preference utilitarian Peter Singer, philosopher Paul Gomberg wants to widen the range

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

143

Christian people probably divide between these approaches to mirror secularist disagreement. Nor is it the work of Christian ethics to mend the ‘broken middle’ of modernity that splits individual liberty and the ‘who?’ question apart from an emphasis on the universalizable principles of maximal utility and a vague sense of global humanity. What direction, then, does Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on the ‘who?’ question yield for our purposes? Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on the ‘who?’ question as applied to tax justice does not yield a quasi-magic fix to all the theoretical debates alluded to above. Asking the ‘who?’ question, however, keeps us close to the people affected by tax avoidance and to the people taking the decisions to pursue tax avoidance tactics. It is easier sometimes to see Sister Modesta and her patients as an object of charity rather than as people to whom political representation is due. It is sometimes easier to denounce transnational corporations as faceless beasts of capitalism rather than businesses populated by decision-making people, and sometimes easier to refer to shareholders anonymously without pausing to discover whether pension and savings funds held in our own names are pressurizing companies to perform to short-term targets. And perhaps Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on the ‘who?’ question yields a further observation. Recall how Paul writes: Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honour to whom honour is owed. (Rom. 13.7)

Mindful that elsewhere Paul places the corrupt Roman imperial order under the judgement of God in ways that attracted opposition and imprisonment (Acts 17.7; of moral considerations from immediate emergency and the general value of reducing suffering to longer term causes of, and remedies for, poverty and argues that established models of neo-cosmopolitanism that focus on reduction in global poverty fail adequately to address the causes of poverty. Paul Gomberg, ‘The Fallacy of Philanthropy’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 32, no. 1 (March 2002): 44. Much more research is required, he says, to expand the discourse into why capitalism produces both so much food and so much hunger. By contrast yet again, Onora O’Neill argues that a Kantian approach to the morality of business is not satisfied by conformity to the law and restraint from coercion or deception, especially in those situations where people live close to the margins of existence: ‘[M]ere “noninterfering” conformity to ordinary standards of commercial honesty and political bargaining is not enough for justice toward the destitute. If the demands of the powerful constitute “offers that cannot be refused” by the government or by the citizens of a poor country, or if the concessions required for investment by a transnational corporation of a development project reflect the desperation of recipients rather than an appropriate contribution to the project, then (however benevolent the motives of some parties) the weaker party to such agreements is used by the stronger.’ Onora O’Neill, ‘Ending World Hunger’, in Matters of Life and Death, 3rd edition, ed. Tom Regan (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993).

144

The Limit of Responsibility

I Cor. 2.6–8; 6.1–4; 15.24; Phil. 1.7, 2.17; I Thess. 1.10; 2.2; 2.12; 5.23), Romans 13.7 appears to echo Jesus’s teaching in Mark 12.13–17 that tax is to be paid to whom it is due. But note what else it says. Respect (Gr. phobon) is to be paid to whom respect is due and honour (timen) to whom it is due. Paul’s context is different from our own but invites the question of to whom respect and honour are due and what this might mean. What is due to Sister Modesta not as an object of pity but as a worker, nurse, and citizen of Malawi and the world community? How are we to recognize Sister Modesta as someone to whom this respect is due? What is needed for Sister Modesta to have a say in the decision to allow mining companies to pay such low rates of tax in her country? Western modes of democratic practice are not redolent somehow of the gospel and so to be exported as the answer to all the world’s problems. The point here instead is that questions about tax avoidance are inherently political: ‘What is at issue here is inclusion in, or exclusion from, the community of those entitled to make justice claims on one another.’50 We cannot think adequately about social justice without recognition of the political as well as personal, cultural, historical and many other dimensions of the matter. ‘[G]lobalization is politicizing the question of the frame.’51 Hence a new motto for our age, perhaps: ‘No tax avoidance without representation!’ The respect due to Sister Modesta includes giving her a voice to participate, if she chooses, in the civic and otherwise political life of her country. Otherwise, with Immanuel Kant, we must be concerned that she is reduced to a mere means to someone else’s gain.52 50. Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 17. 51. Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice, 21. 52. Insightful in this respect is Onora O’Neill’s essay ‘Ending World Hunger’, in which she corrects this selective reading of Kant by drawing attention to the centrality in his work of The Formula of the End in Itself: ‘Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means but always at the same time as an end’ [Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans H.J. Paton (New York and London: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 4: 333]. The primary focus for Kant, O’Neill says, is action rather than results or the entitlements of individuals. Working out whether an action may or should be permitted, however, is never separable from this maxim that prohibits using others as mere means. This precludes maxims that entail the deception, coercion, manipulation or alternate injury of others because such actions cannot in principle have their consent. For O’Neill, however, Kant’s Formula of the End in Itself requires more than this prohibition in situations of hunger and great poverty where powerlessness undercuts the possibility of autonomous action: ‘the requirement of treating others as ends in themselves demands that Kantians standardly act to support the possibility of autonomous action where it is most vulnerable’. More specifically, Kantians are required to do what they can to avert, reduce and remedy hunger (Onora O’Neill, ‘Ending World Hunger’, in Matters of Life and Death, ed. Tom Regan). The central point of O’Neill’s interpretation of Kant is that acting autonomously (whether individually or as

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

145

Holding Corporations to Account Campaigning for reforms to inter- and transnational mechanisms for effecting tax justice is an important way of living füreinander in a globalizing era. Much more is needed to hold corporations to account, however. More is needed of Christian ethics as a discipline regarding how to meet the intellectual challenge of what holding corporations to account might entail, not least collaboration with relevant professionals, in order to resource church communities for decision-making around consumer and investment choices, employment and career choices, and more. More is needed to understand what a corporation is.53 Mindful of Bonhoeffer’s caution against rash radicalism, I do not proceed at this point from an a priori anti-capitalist or anti-transnational corporations position per se. This is because the value systems, mores and presuppositions of capitalism are so much part of my middle-class world view that it is difficult to know what being anti-capitalist might really mean. It would be hypocritical in the extreme to adopt an anti-transnational corporations stance per se while benefiting from computers, trains, buses, solar power panels, toothpaste, and so much more, provided by the mining sector and others besides. Locus imperii, it is difficult to

a transnational corporation) does not preclude the autonomous action of others. Nor, she implies, does Kant allow anyone to fail to promote the conditions wherein people currently enduring severe poverty can establish indigenous capacities and trading practices that will, we may suppose, lead eventually to their payment of tax too. 53. Not all corporations are the same. Legally speaking, a given company or corporation is the result of the laws within the country where it is registered. Different countries have different corporate laws and even within one country, the corporate law of that country might provide for different types of company. Corporations are created by laws and, at its simplest, are mechanisms or devices that enable certain property, assets and resources to be identified as belonging together as a collective and distinct set of property, assets and resources. As such, there are essentially three elements of a corporation. Firstly, there must be one or more person who contribute, in accordance with the relevant rules of law, property, assets, resources, etc., to a collective and distinct set of property, assets and resources that are considered as belonging together. Secondly, there must be provisions within the relevant rules of law that recognize and acknowledge the collective and distinct set of property, assets and resources as belonging together and setting out what type of transactions, arrangements, events, etc., are appropriate. Thirdly, there must be human beings who, ultimately, have the power and authority to deal with the property, assets and resources that are included within the collective and distinct set of property, assets and resources. Such human beings are commonly referred to as directors of a company. Neither the directors nor the investors own the property, assets and resources of the corporation but act on its behalf. I acknowledge with gratitude the assistance of Dr Gregory Morris http://business-school.exeter.ac.uk/research/centres/tarcdev/people/centremembers/greg_ morris/. I have learned much from him about how a particular company or corporation is a creation of a particular law of a particular state, and more. All errors remain my own.

146

The Limit of Responsibility

know what hypocrisy-free opposition to capitalism means – at least when defined in broad terms as an economic system in which processes of capital circulation and accumulation are largely privately owned and operated for profit. As Orthodox scholar Paul Evdokimov advises, it is not ‘globalization’ or any form of ‘-ism’ (capitalism or socialism, Marxism or fascism, liberalism or environmentalism, patriotism or internationalism, Islamism, Catholicism or Anglicanism etc.) that is guilty of inhumanity but people who tolerate political, economic, cultural and social exploitation. The problem is that, in the so-called West, ‘Christians have done just about everything to sterilize the Gospel. … Everything … that transcends and turns things upside down, has … become inoffensive … flat, shrewd and above all, reasonable, and remains simply to be vomited out.’54 It is too easy merely to condemn the (late modern) capitalist trading arrangements that facilitate the growth of massively powerful corporations as if each of us were not somehow complicit because we all benefit from their services and products. Definitions of (late modern) capitalism abound. Is it an economic system in which processes of capital circulation and accumulation are largely privately owned and operated for profit and in which the human right to private property is respected? Is it an economic system polemically opposed to the public ownership of goods and services? Is it the ‘animalization of the human beast, who no longer lives except in terms of its interests and what it deems to be its due’ with this animalization being extremely dangerous because devoid of values and laws?55 Such definitions are stirring and set us on a path of inevitable and therefore uncritical conflict.56 Neither the rash radicalism of uncritical condemnation nor

54. Paul Evdokimov and Michael Plekon, In the World, of the Church: A Paul Evdokimov Reader (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 49. 55. Alain Badiou, Philosophy and the Event (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 35; Alain Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner, Controversies: Politics and Philosophy in Our Time (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014). 56. Note a recent debate between Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank. The latter remarks critically of Žižek: ‘For if negativity is the driving force of reality, then a process of formally inevitable unfolding must also prevail – this being the factor that Žižek tends to play down.’ [Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2011), 246.] The ‘process of formally inevitable unfolding’ is at stake. If driven by a dialectic of some kind rather than experienced as paradox (i.e. the coincidence of opposites or seemingly absurd conjunction of divine and human in one person and Christ’s body the church) then history is somehow an Hegelian-type process of unfolding. Žižek replies with a revised version of necessity: ‘this necessity is retroactive, it arises as the (contingent) self-sublation of contingency’ (p. 246). Personal agency is emphasized but the tension, contradiction and agonism that lie between actual real-life situations and a better life remains, in Žižek’s account, the motor of dialectics that ‘triggers the thing’s development’. Paradox tends towards stasis. Milbank, says Žižek, offers a vision of substantial, immediate harmony of being; ‘there is no place in it for the outburst of radical negativity’ (p. 249). Žižek

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

147

the comfortable, amoral turning of a blind eye to the (albeit judicially untraceable) consequences of our lifestyles will suffice. The tightrope that we are walking is between some kind of historical necessity outside of Christ and lazy, self-protective renderings of theological truth in ways that dilute the realities of power struggles. Bonhoeffer’s caution against ‘compromise’ does not allow an uncritically pro-capitalist or pro-industry-scale mining position that omits to attempt to hold corporations to account or to think through what this might entail. His three possibilities for action that the church can take vis-à-vis the state must be rethought in a context where the turnover of transnational corporations can exceed the GDP of nation states; these are the realities of day. The challenge is to work with his distinction between, on the one hand, overly easy compromise solutions to the world’s problems that leave the ‘penultimate’ untouched by the ‘ultimate’ and allow compromise to become the norm, and, on the other, some ‘radical’ solutions that consign too much to the fires of judgement (DBWE 6:154). Compromise solutions tend either to fear the powers of this world or grant them ultimacy of a kind. By contrast, the rashly radical solution might fail to reckon adequately with why and how world orders, principalities and powers exist only within the permission of divine providence and under judgement (Luke 12.49; Mt. 3.10–12; Mt. 25.40–43; Rev. 20.11–12). Mindful of Bonhoeffer’s twin warnings, my approach in what follows is a hermeneutic strategy derived from a reading of Jesus’s seeming self-contradiction in these two statements: For the one who is not against us is for us Whoever is not with me is against me

— Mark 9.40 — Matthew 12.30a

The former (Mark 9.40) is from a text that recounts Jesus’s rebuttal of his disciples’ demand that he stop someone healing in his name without proper authorization. ‘For the one who is not against us is for us.’ The latter (Matthew 12.30a) is extracted from an account of Jesus’s confounding of the Pharisees’ attack on his ministry. demythologizes Hegel’s Absolute Knowing and embraces Marx’s empiricism, that is, his focus is on what’s real for people here and now. From this reality history produces contingent negations of the present moment, many of which are violent. ‘Get real’! is Žižek’s message. The necessity of negation is empirically, if not speculatively, true. Contra Žižek but rather with Milbank, my position is that all historical necessity is overcome in the glorious paradox of Christ’s God-humanity, replies Milbank. Christ alone is ‘the full reality of the impossible and contradictory’ (p. 198). While not opting with Milbank’s position a few years ago regarding the Red Tory, that is, Toryism blended with a non-statist associationism and distributism (i.e. with ‘socialism’ in a certain sense), or its oppositive ‘blue Labour’, that is, a non-statist Socialism with a Tory tinge, I resist in this section any kind of historical necessity outside of Christ.

148

The Limit of Responsibility

‘Whoever is not with me is against me’ is the punchline, so to speak, of Jesus’s defence against the charge that he had cast out demons by Beelzebub, Prince of Demons. Both verses must be read in their respective contexts because their meaning is coloured by what’s going on in narratives surrounding these particular verses. Passages surrounding Mt. 12.30a are further pericopes about Jesus’s lordship, notably his authority over the Sabbath and his fulfilment of Isaiah 42.1–3 which foretold the servant upon whom God’s Spirit would rest. Mt. 12.30a is Jesus’s response to the particular perversity of the Pharisees in attributing the works of God to the evil one thereby failing to join the battle against the demonic powers. This perversity is named as a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit that will not be forgiven and merely exposes their foolishness.57 ‘How can someone enter a strong man’s house and plunder his good, unless he first binds the strong man? Then, indeed, he may plunder his house’ (Mt. 12.29). The narrative context is Jesus’s lordship under direct attack. His response is to expose this: ‘Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.’ Mark 9.40, ‘For the one who is not against us is for us’ – which appears to say something with precisely the opposite meaning to Mt. 12.29 – acquires a different content when read in its context; Mark 9 recounts the transfiguration followed by Jesus’s healing of a boy with ‘an unclean spirit’ after failed attempts by the disciples to effect the healing themselves. The verse in question is Jesus’s reply to the disciple, John, who is angry that someone other than a disciple had been casting out demons in Jesus’s name. Jesus chastises the disciples for supposing that someone ‘not in’ with them and mimicking Jesus’s healing was reason enough to prevent their healings. ‘Do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. For the one who is not against us is for us’ (Mark 9.39–40). The narrative context of this saying is not the sanctimonious obduracy of the Pharisees but rather the petty competitiveness of his own disciples. Following an established thread in New Testament scholarship from Norman Gottwald to Gerd Theissen, Ched Myers and beyond, I understand this language of exorcism and deliverance as a symbolic accentuation of the negative experiences of earthly rule.58 Jesus’s words connect exorcisms with the arrival of the kingdom of God and might reflect Jesus’s sense of his own mission as ‘a struggle against Satan in order to advance the coming of the Kingdom of God’.59 While the Pharisees and other authorities regarded Jesus’s activities as a threat to the order and stability of 57. N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 1 (London: SPCK, 1996), 454. 58. Gert Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (Fortress Press, 1978). Ched Meyers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (MaryKnoll: Orbis, 2008), 165. 59. Santiago Guijjaro, ‘The Politics of Exorcism’, in The Social Setting of Jesus and the Gospels, ed. Wolfgang Stegemann, Bruce J. Malina and Gerd Theissen (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2002), 162.

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

149

society, Jesus’s exorcisms are integral to the restoration of Israel’s true spiritual and political identity and in-breaking of God’s reign.60 The semantic field of these verses is apocalyptic and hence political as well as cultic and personal, and thus about power – the exercise of power, its purpose, conquest and limits. ‘The mythological events here reflect political ones.’61 Mindful of the need to understand the New Testament, where appropriate, in its apocalyptic Jewish context with its symbolic visions of political powers, witness to the coming judgement of God, new creation and more, our hermeneutic strategy is informed by this tradition’s explications of how New Testament symbolization of evil condemns us to neither irrationality nor political impotence.62 Such a symbolic association with the negative experiences of earthly rule does not translate itself immediately to a generalized association of ‘global capitalism’ with evil or an identification of transnational corporations or global capitalism with ‘the strong man’. Yes! New Testament commentators are broadly agreed that ‘the strong man’ in Mt. 12.29 (cf. Mark 3.27; Luke 11.21–22) is Satan. Jesus’s exorcisms are an attack upon Satan that resonates with Jewish eschatological hope and evidence his greater authority.63 This much is clear but we must look yet closer at the texts. Matthew 12.30a concerns demonic powers opposed to the reign of God that can readily be named as ‘good’ by those wanting to advance interests of their own. Mark 9.40 is different. The rogue disciple’s inadequate and imperfect mimicking of the signs of the kingdom produced effects that Jesus deemed close enough to his own ministry to go ahead without rebuke. Because the man was doing good, Jesus was prepared to risk it: ‘Do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. … For truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose his reward’ (Mark 9.39–41). The matter turns 60. Márta Cserháti, ‘Binding the Strong Man: Demon Possession and Liberation in the Gospel of Luke’ in Evil and the Devil, ed. Erkki Kiskenniemi and Ida Fröhlich (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), ch. 7, 112. 61. Theissen, Sociology, 76. Meyers, Binding, 165. 62. On why using the symbolism of evil does not commit one to irrationality, see Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Symbolical Function of Myths’ in The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), part II, pp. 161–70; Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Bible and the Imagination’ in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and the Imagination, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 144–165. I broadly suppose Ricoeur’s position with respect to both the imaginative use of symbolism to assist rational reflection and his insistence on the inevitably hermeneutic character of every engagement with the Bible: ‘The task of hermeneutics … is twofold: to reconstruct the internal dynamic of the text, and to restore the work to its ability to project itself outside itself in the representation of a world that I could inhabit.’ Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 18. 63. Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8: A New Translation, with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 283. C.C. Caragounis, ‘Kingdom of God, Son of Man and Jesus’ Self-Understanding’, Tyndale Bulletin 40 [1989] 2–23; 223–38 [230–231].

150

The Limit of Responsibility

on what criteria are to be employed in deciding ‘for us, or against us’. A blanket, pre-prepared, pre-judged answer is not enough because what really matters is the compatibility of the actions undertaken with the gospel of Jesus. New Testament symbolization of evil condemns us to neither irrationality nor political impotence. The demons or servants of Satan that advance Satanic interests in the world are to be condemned. But rogue or unexpected disciples need not be stopped if their actions are helpful to others. It is not enough to wash our hands because of the sheer size and complexity of these organizations, and because of the many and emerging phenomena of global capitalism. Nor is it enough to condemn transnational corporations as necessarily and inevitably Satanic or identifiable with ‘the strong man’ of the gospels. Good Christian ethics and political theology is not as simple as identifying transnational corporations with ‘the power of the evil one’ (1 John 5.19). More rigorous processes of discernment and testing are required. Matthew 12.30a concerns demonic powers opposed to the reign of God that can readily be named as ‘good’ by those wanting to advance interests of their own. Are the practices of transnational corporations typically ‘against’ the ministry of Jesus and even demonic because of a corruption of Judaic Christian teaching with respect to the accumulation of wealth (Lk. 18.24–27; see also Mk 10.25, Mt. 19.24)? Is the adoption of CSR agendas by transnational corporations evidence of sinful powers being expedient, pragmatic and deceitful as regards the achievement of their real aims? Are CSR narratives now a power increasingly propagated by capitalist predators in the pursuit of profit – a palliative that blunts political resistance or jurisprudential protections for the most vulnerable? What are the ‘demons’ that militate against the lordship of Jesus and run contrary to the kingdom? Mark 9.40 requires additional questions to be asked. The question for our purposes is what entailed in holding corporations to account and, more specifically, what criteria are to be employed in deciding ‘for us, or against us?’ To the extent that transnational corporations effect good, there may be no reason for opposition because of resonance with signs of God’s kingdom. It is important, at the least, to remain open to this as a possibility. A Mark 9.40-informed response is likely to be complex and perhaps unpalatable. If, however, we do not start from the identification of transnational corporations with ‘the strong man’, that is, with evil, then the debate can be focused on the criteria to be employed in deciding ‘for us, or against us’. The challenge becomes what is needed to bind the strong man, Satan, and when it might be appropriate to accept, and even welcome, signs of the kingdom wrought by non-disciples. So, for instance, the radical solution in this context might be an unequivocally anti-capitalist stance that is ideologically against any and every transnational corporation. According to this world view, the only ethically acceptable way forward is via conflict. The rhetoric employed in anti-globalization and anticapitalist movements is often filled with allusions to the empires and colonies of yore:

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

151

Once upon a time, national entities and cultures aspired to build empires. … Empire strategy: destroy, rebuild, occupy and exploit. … In the ruins of World War II emerged the two winning empires, the United States and the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). To the winners belong the spoils of war, and in 1945 the world was de facto split in two. … Almost 70 years after the end of World War II … the US military has troops stationed in almost 150 countries. Imperialism has long been a collective disease for humanity. In its current perverse capitalist incarnation, imperialism’s methods have become even more brutal and ruthless. If the physical destruction of a country’s infrastructure is still in the foreground, this is used in conjunction with the creation or revival of civil wars, ethnic or bloody sectarian conflicts in previously stable national entities. Corporate imperialism aims to break the national spirit. Global corporate imperialism does not only aim to dismantle the few sovereign nations left, but also to cripple regions and towns. A microcosm of this is Detroit, Michigan. The Motor City is in ruins, a failed town, and a symbol of what corporatism can do. The United Nations is a failed institution at best, but it could be worse if it should ever become the United Corporations.64

In this example, the strategy of corporate imperialism is said to have the same dreams of mastery as the old nation-based imperialism but now variously controls the culture, infrastructure and political policy of nation states. The ‘radical’ attitude with respect to industrial-scale mining would be perhaps to align oneself with every protester who says ‘No’ to mining, regardless of whether they reflect the majority opinion among the local community. The radical solution, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, might be to draw persistent attention to the horrors of mining, of which there are indeed many, without any attempt to recount when local communities have welcomed mining in their area because of the training opportunities and such like that a well-run mine brings.65 The compromise solution would be to take at face value every publicity document and statement produced by a mining company without digging beneath the surface.

64. Gilbert Mercier, ‘The Strategy of Global Corporate Imperialism’, in Counterpunch, 28  February  2014.  Available  online:  http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/28/thestrategy-of-global-corporate-imperialism/ (accessed 31 August 2015). 65. During my visit to Richards Bay Minerals and the local communities in 2017, I visited one traditional council in an area where the mine was due soon to being operations. There was a strong sense of welcome in the council for the mine. I asked the question directly of council members and the reply was clear.

152

The Limit of Responsibility

Why Human Rights Agendas Matter I have written elsewhere about Bonhoeffer’s Christological arguments for positive employment of human rights agendas.66 Ecce Homo! ‘Behold the man!’ (Jn 19:5) is his starting point for his discussion of natural rights (DBWE 6:82). Christ is the mediator through whom, and in whom, Christians believe they meet their neighbour (DBWE 4:95). It is for Christ’s sake, and the sake of his coming kingdom, that the rights of every person are to be recognized and respected; for his sake Christians affirm the human body has a claim to food and shelter. The human body has a claim to joy because God created and wills it for joy (DBWE 6:186–7). The claim to joy, or to food and shelter, is not grounded in mutual obligation but in God’s will and purpose. The challenge here is, as we build upon the hermeneutic strategy developed above, from Jesus’s apparent self-contradiction in these two statements: ‘For the one who is not against us is for us’ (Mk 9.40) and ‘Whoever is not with me is against me’ (Mt. 12:30a), the challenge becomes how to discern those working practices that include behaviours compatible with the signs of God’s reign and the need for constraints, internationally and nationally, that can delimit the demonic. To the extent that human rights agendas still have contingent, contestable and provisional theologico-ethical warrant, the question becomes how to employ these agendas well. In the context of industrial-scale mining, and in addition to the industry’s own professional standards, a serious option for holding transnational corporations to account is found in recent developments at the UN with respect to corporations and human rights including the ‘Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect and Remedy Framework”’ (or so-called Ruggie Principles). Are such developments to be embraced or rejected as constituting further evidence of the powerlessness of human rights in the struggle against capitalist exploitation and political domination, if not worse?67 Can contemporary human rights instruments bind evil effectively by creating new frameworks and understandings of corporate behaviour that recognize the obligation upon fellow humans to respect the life of each, help those in poverty and voice the common outcry when the bodily integrity of another is compromised, or whether the energy of Christian people should be directed elsewhere? The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights states: International human rights standards have traditionally been the responsibility of governments, aimed at regulating relations between the State and individuals and groups. But with the increased role of corporate actors, nationally and

66. Esther D. Reed, The Ethics of Human Rights: Contested Doctrinal and Moral Issues (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), ch. 3. 67. Costas Douzinas. The End of Human Rights? (Hart Publishing, 2000).

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

153

internationally, the issue of business’ impact on the enjoyment of human rights has been placed on the agenda of the United Nations.68

Human rights laws and regulations deriving from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) apply to states and constrain the relationship between a state and the human beings over which it has power. States are the signatories to the UDHR just as it is states that are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). A problem in many areas of the world, of course, is that states are often dysfunctional and either unable or unwilling to protect rights. Corporations find themselves playing at least part of the role of the state by providing roads, schools, medical clinics and more. Companies look and feel like the state to local residents when it is companies they approach for new a school, clinic, road infrastructure or such like. Historically, the obligations upon companies in such situations have been unclear. ‘What do human rights have to do with us?’ has been the reaction of many in previous decades. We are merely the supplier of telecoms, designers and manufacturers of clothing, suppliers of oilfield services or such like! During the 1980s and 1990s, few politicians or company directors would have expected company business to have human rights considerations at its core. Even today, the Human Rights Act 1988 (HRA) does not appear, at face value, to impose obligations on companies listed in the UK because companies are not signatories to it. While it is true that if the UK government acted through a company (as, for instance, with privately run prisons) the relevant company as agent of the state would acquire obligations existing under the HRA, it is usually accepted more generally that the UDHR, ECHR and, in the UK, the HRA do not in any direct manner impose obligations on corporations in respect of human rights. In the UK, the HRA applies to the UK government and related bodies – under which framework individuals and certain other types of entities, including, it should be noted, corporations, have rights and the government has obligations. During this period, however, several high-profile atrocities involving multinational corporations raised civil society activity to such a high level that a variety of international, multi-stakeholder initiatives were launched. These atrocities included Royal Dutch Shell’s close relationship with the Nigerian military regime in the 1990s, the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa, accusations against Chiquita Brands International Inc. of mistreating workers on its Central American plantations and polluting the environment, the Bhopal chemical disaster and many more. Born from this destruction, Kofi Annan’s 2000 Global Compact initiative asked companies to embrace universal principles and partner with the United Nations in creating sustainable business models for the future.69 This notable step 68. ‘Business and Human Rights’, Office of the High Commissioner, United Nations Human Rights. Available online: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Business/Pages/ BusinessIndex.aspx (accessed 29 August 2017). 69. ‘Creating the Sustainable Business Models of the Future’, United Nations Global Compact. Available online: https://www.unglobalcompact.org (accessed 28 August 2017).

154

The Limit of Responsibility

was followed in rapid succession by the United Nations Centre for Transnational Corporations, the establishment of national contact points between the UN and companies, including the development of OECD Guidelines and a number of sector-specific guidelines. In mining, one of the most significant was The Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights (2000) that encourage adherence to a set of principles around the identification of security risks, potential for violence, respect for human rights, rule of law and more.70 The idea gaining ground at the turn of the millennium was that power equates to responsibility, that is, to duties or obligations. The responsibility of transnational corporations is different to that of governments because inter alia of the lack of political mandate. Significantly, however, the groundswell of international opinion was growing that human rights obligations bear directly upon companies. Hence the relatively widespread welcome for the 16 June 2011 UN Human Rights Council endorsement of ‘Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework’ that provided, for the first time, a global standard for preventing and addressing the risk of adverse impacts on human rights linked to business activity.71 Proposed by UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights John Ruggie, the ‘Guiding Principles’ address the human rights responsibilities of businesses, clarify that the corporate responsibility to respect human rights exists independently of states’ ability or willingness to fulfil their duty to protect human rights and demand that access to remedying principles apply not only to states but companies too. The counterclaim is that contemporary international human rights discourse is inseparable from the ‘gradual build-up of a tacit international capitalist policy’.72 But are the pathologies of modern and contemporary human rights discourses such as to warrant a ‘for the one who is not against us is for us’ or ‘whoever is not with me is against me’ response?73 Is the contemporary human rights narrative and behaviour becoming demonically part of the ‘strong man’s’ arsenal of weapons? Is it possible that human rights regimes can be used to generate behaviour sufficiently compatible with signs of God’s reign for present-day disciples to echo Jesus’s acceptance in Mark 9.40? Those arguing for a ‘for the one who is not against us is for us’ response are likely to draw attention to how the ‘Guiding Principles’ are essentially voluntary; there is no national or supra-national mechanism 70. The Voluntary Principles website contains relevant information on the principles and how they might assist governments, NGOs and companies in the management of security risks at mine sites. www.voluntaryprinciples.org (accessed 4 September 2017). 71. At http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/GuidingPrinciplesBusinessHR_ EN.pdf (accessed 17 September 2017). 72. John Milbank, ‘Against Human Rights; Liberty in the Western Tradition’, in The Meaning of Rights: The Philosophy and Social Theory of Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 70. 73. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 120.

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

155

to impose the ‘Guiding Principles’ on corporations and thereby constrain their actions. Those arguing for a ‘for the one who is not against us is for us’ might point to the reality that, in many instances, the determining reason for adopting the ‘Guiding Principles’ will be reputation protection and thereby the maximization of profits. Hence the critique that in affirming the ‘Guiding Principles’ transnational corporations are not relinquishing strength or becoming bound by normative standards but rather are using their power indirectly to achieve business aims; the human rights narrative associated with the ‘Guiding Principles’ is being seized upon by corporations and being captured and appropriated for financial ends. The challenge – that Bonhoeffer lived daily – is simultaneously to inhabit the world of New Testament texts while allowing ourselves and our sociopolitical context(s) to be (re)-interpreted by the texts’ moves between exegesis and sociopolitical interpretation in the present day.74 The challenge is to identify those aspects of human rights regimes that delimit the demonic aspects of corporate power while nurturing those that accord, albeit inadequately and imperfectly, with the signs of the kingdom. Significantly, the issue is not whether a human rights lens enables or disables Christian ethics and political theology from discerning what accords with the kingdom of God, but whether the application of human rights regimes to transnational corporations produces results that might warrant Jesus’s words ‘do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me’ (Mk. 9.39). Political pressure and judicial action are needed to ensure that corporate law becomes more overtly subject to human rights constraints, and more besides.

Stellvertretung as the Lived Meaning of Responsibility With Bonhoeffer, we are clear about the centrality of the principle of vicarious representative action to a Christian ethic of responsibility: ‘[V]icariously representative action and suffering, which is carried out by the members of the body of Christ, is itself the very life of Christ who seeks to take shape in his members’ (DBWE 6:222). The structure of responsible action within the local community of faith involves willingness to become guilty one for another, as does the structure of responsible action for the community of faith on behalf of wider society: ‘Those who act responsibly take on guilt – which is inescapable for any responsible person – place this guilt on themselves, not on someone else’ (DBWE 4:282). Less clear is how to affirm truths to which Bonhoeffer bears witness across such large inequalities of income and wealth between (and within) countries, without papering over differences that should bear upon the meaning of responsibility. What is to prevent even the concept of responsibility in the (global) church from becoming yet another hegemonic construction? What does

74. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 88.

156

The Limit of Responsibility

Stellvertretung, or being vicariously guilty of the other person’s guilt, entail for the global church today? Stellvertretung Learned from the Land A step in the direction towards (re-)learning the meaning of Stellvertretung is, perhaps, to include the land as a dialogue partner in this dynamic of responsibility, which means giving the land a voice and listening to its witness. The land bears the consequences of human actions that pollute and wreak devastation. How can human beings learn better from the land and thereby think more about the costs entailed in bearing one another’s sin. Consider how the land has a relationship with YHWH that predates that of Israel and is variously active, capable of executing divine judgement, resting and praising God (Lev. 18.28; Lk 19.40). Biotic (relating to living organisms) and abiotic (physical rather than biological) creation alike were created by God. Biblical texts attribute agency to the land. All creation praises God. When some of the Pharisees told Jesus to rebuke his disciples for shouting with a loud voice as he entered Jerusalem, he replied, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out’ (Lk. 19.40). Jonathan Morgan’s Land, Rest & Sacrifice: Ecological Reflections on the Book of Leviticus is a notable example of biblical scholarship that draws attention to the land as an active character capable of vomiting, resting and maintaining a ritualistically demanding relationship with God.75 Read together with New Testament texts that confess Christ’s lordship over the cosmos, thereby imbuing matter with spiritual significance, the ethic of responsibility developed in this book asks methodologically what is entailed in learning from the earth something of the ways of God.76 75. Jonathan Morgan, ‘Land, Rest & Sacrifice: Ecological Reflections on the Book of Leviticus’ (PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2012). Available online: https://ore.exeter. ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10036/119945/MorganJ_fm.pdf?sequence=2 (accessed 31 August 2015). Morgan draws attention to several texts in Leviticus in which the land not only appears to have a relationship with YHWH but a relationship that predates Israel’s relationship with her God and that serves to execute judgement upon Israel. ‘When the people sin, they risk not only the retreat of YHWH’s presence from the sanctuary, but also the land ejecting them in order that it might fulfill its ritual obligations.’ Morgan, ‘Rest & Sacrifice’, 2. 76. Christ’s resurrection yields the possibility of human responsibility because of the healing that it brings to the earth. The resurrection of Jesus, Son of the Earth (the New Adamah Heb. ‫)אדם בן‬, brings healing not only to the creatures of God but to the physical environment too; it recalls the centrality of the land in the covenantal histories of the Old Testament and places all humanity’s dependence on our relationship to the land at the centre of an ethic of law. Some explications of the environmental implications of hailing Jesus as the Son of the Earth might be overstated. If Larry Hurtado is correct that the phrase ‘Son of Man’ is not a Christological title and was used primarily in the gospels merely to

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

157

Nor is it novel to think with Bonhoeffer in the context of environmental and ecological issues. The first scholar to draw a connection between Bonhoeffer’s theology and environmental ethics was Hans Dirk van Hoogstraten. So writes Steven C. van den Heuvel in Bonhoeffer’s Christocentric Theology and Fundamental Debates in Environmental Ethics.77 Hoogstraten’s argument was Christologically shaped and argued that all creation is oriented towards its fulfilment in Christ who is all-in-all. Steven C. van den Heuvel’s own project is to correlate a number of familiar themes in Bonhoeffer’s writings with major debates in environmental ethics: care for the natural in the light of Christ-Reality, nature in relation to Christ, human beings as a distinctive part of nature, human beings as masters and lords, responsibility and the social dimension of environmental ethics. He further traces the scholarship that has employed Bonhoeffer in recent environmental ethics. Of particular note are Larry L. Rassmussen’s Earth Community, Earth Ethics that developed Bonhoeffer’s theology of love to include love of the earth, Peter Manley Scott’s essay ‘Postnatural Humanity? Bonhoeffer. Creaturely Freedom, and the Mystery of Reconciliation in Creation’ in which he took steps to correct Bonhoeffer’s anthropocentrism and Jim Martin-Schramm, ‘Lutheran Theology and the Environment. Bonhoeffer, the Church, and the Climate Question’ which applied Bonhoeffer’s theology of resistance to the complex problem of climate change.78 In other words, drawing upon Bonhoeffer in the context of environmental ethics is a growing sub-discipline.

refer to Jesus, rather than to characterize his ministry, Christian ethicists must be wary of ascribing meaning where there is none. Understood minimally, however, ὁ ὑιός τοῦ ἀνθρώπου functioned to express Jesus’s sense of being chosen for a special purpose before God and was used by Septuagint writers to translate ‫( אדם בן‬Heb. ben ‘adam, Son of Adam / the earth) and (elcitra eht htiw .e.i) ‫ ינב םדאה‬Larry W. Hurtado, ‘Summary and Concluding Observations’ in Who Is This Son of Man?: The Latest Scholarship on a Puzzling Expression of the Historical Jesus, ed. Larry W. Hurtado and Paul L. Owen (London: T & T Clark International, 2012), 166. 77. Steven C. van den Heuvel, Bonhoeffer’s Christocentric Theology and Fundamental Debates in Environmental Ethics (Oregon: Pickwick Publications. Princeton Theological Monograph Series, 2017), 4, citing H.D. van Hoogstraten, ‘Fundamenten voor een theologische milieu-ethiek: Bonhoeffer’s “ethische theologie” sociaal ethisch bezien’, in: Tijdschrift voor Theologie 31 (1991), 42–64. 78. Larry L. Rassmussen, Earth Community, Earth Ethics (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Press, 1997); Peter Manley Scott, ‘Postnatural Humanity? Bonhoeffer, Creaturely Freedom, and the Mystery of Reconciliation in Creation’, in Mysteries in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Copenhagen Bonhoeffer Symposium, ed. Kirsten Busch, Ulrik Nielsen, Christiane Tietz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, GmbH & Co., 2007); Jim Martin-Schramm, ‘Lutheran Theology and the Environment. Bonhoeffer, the Church, and the Climate Question’, in Eco-Lutheranism: Lutheran Perspectives on Ecology, ed. Karla G. Bohmbach and Shauna K. Hannan (Minneapolis, MN: Lutheran University Press, 2013).

158

The Limit of Responsibility

Bonhoeffer’s reversal of the meaning of responsibility from I-You-I to You-IYou, wherein he treats responsibility as the mode of living to which every human being is called, allows us further to argue that the churches’ experiencing of itself ‘from the outside’ properly includes learning from the land. A working assumption has been that responsibility should not be conceived as a self-originating, selfreflexive state of awareness of the self in relation to others, not as a duty to deal with something, not only as a state or fact of being accountable or to blame for something and not as a contractual obligation or mode of consciousness. Responsibility, rather, is a relationship with others (which, for the believer, is mediated through Christ) in and through which we respond to each Other taking into account each other’s needs, interests, struggles and hopes, especially as these might have been affected by agricultural or industrial processes that sustain the lifestyles of relatively developed parts of the world. The constructive move in this section is to develop a Christian understanding of responsibility as structurally open, awakened to life by the Other and including responsiveness to the earth. Giving the Land a Voice A recurring problem is that attempts to give the land a voice often become embroiled in existing struggles for power and influence. Consider the following case study from Espinar, one of thirteen provinces in the Cusco Region in the southern highlands of Peru, where lack of trust between local communities and the mine management manifested itself in distrust of scientific procedures and test results. I take some time to unpack this case study in part because the sheer density of the tangle of social, political, economic, national and international issues illustrates how complicated situations can become. As rapidly becomes apparent, attempts to give the land a voice can easily become subordinated to agendas such that the truth becomes hard to discern. The history of this particular mine is, like many such histories, complicated by the transfer of operations from one company to another. As reported by the current owner, Glencore, the Tintaya copper mine located in the Peruvian province of Espinar commenced operations in 1985 as a state-owned company. Following a decision by the Peruvian government to privatize the operation, Magma Copper Co. acquired the mine in 1994 via an international public auction. In 1996, Magma Copper was acquired by Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP) that, in turn, merged with Billiton in 2001 to form BHP Billiton. Xstrata acquired Tintaya from BHP Billiton in May 2006. In May 2013, Glencore acquired Xstrata and is, at the time of writing, the current operator of the Tintaya-Antapaccay asset.79 The case study concerns events surrounding the Tintaya-Antapaccay copper mine, community protests in 2012 and subsequent concerns regarding water pollution. 79. Glencore’s response to the ‘Corporate Conquistadors’ report, published by The Democracy Centre, TNI and CEO (Baar, 19 January 2015). Available online: http:// www.glencore.com/assets/public-positions/doc/Glencores-response-to-the-CorporateConquistadors-report.pdf (accessed 31 August 2017).

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

159

Almost five hours drive from Cusco, and situated 4100 metres above sea level, the Tintaya-Antapaccay open pit mine produces something like 160 ktpa copper in concentrate and provides employment for 3,250 employees and contractors. Over $100 million in the last five years has been distributed to the community for a variety of projects. Most, though not all, of this money went via the Convenio Marco arrangement whereby the company that owns the mine returns 3 per cent of profits to the community for local expenditure and investment. In May 2012, the then Mayor of Espinar called for 30 per cent of mining profits to be distributed to the community. At the time of writing, the governing body of the Convenio Marco comprises eight members representing the Provincial Municipality of Espinar, district municipalities, civil society organizations, communities and also one representative from the Antapaccay mine site. Ownership of the mine site changed in 2013. The new mine owner told the mayor that it was unable to accede to his request but made clear to the local community that it was open to discussing enhancements to the Framework Agreement, such as increasing commitments to hiring local people at its operations and improving local procurement of goods and services. However, an indefinite strike was called at the mine on 21 May 2012 and the protest went ahead with violent results. Three fatalities occurred and many people were injured, many of whom were Peruvian National Police.80 The government declared a thirty-day state of emergency in the Espinar Province and called for a dialogue process to seek a solution. A Dialogue Table was organized, and focused conversations between the mine site and the local communities got under way. Analysis of the events varies widely. Through the eyes of some, the mayor called for such a large increase in the payment in order to bolster a sagging electoral campaign; the current 3 per cent payment had been poorly managed by the local community, with additional tax returns from government to the region being squandered on vanity projects. The Espinar Province had not shown itself capable of administering the taxation returned to the region by the so-called Canon Minero provision, that is, the taxation revenue returned by central government to the regions.81 In 2011, said the government, this region received more than 156 million soles but had been unable to spend at least 45 per cent of that amount.82 The main 80. Environmental Defender Law Center, ‘Tintaya Mine Protestors Tortured in Peru’, https://www.edlc.org/cases/fighting-human-rights-abuses/tintaya-mine-protestorstortured-in-peru/ (accessed 9 November 2017); Leigh Day, ‘Hearing in London High Court in Claim by Peruvians against Mining Firm’, https://www.leighday.co.uk/News/News2016/February-2016/Hearing-in-London-High-Court-in-claim-by-Peruvians (accessed 9 November 2017). 81. Espinar Province, Ministry Resolution No. 266–2002-EF/15 of 1 May 2002. 82. Peru,Ministerio del Ambiente, ‘Los motivos del conflicto’, http://www.minam.gob. pe/espinar/los-motivos-del-conflicto/ (accessed 9 November 2017). For full report on related environmental issues, see ‘Acta Final de la Secretaría Ténacia de la Mesa de Diálogo de Espinar’, http://www.minam.gob.pe/espinar/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2014/02/ INF_ESPINAR_FINAL_03-09-13.pdf (accessed 9 November 2017).

160

The Limit of Responsibility

demand from the protestors for a 27 per cent rise in its profit-sharing contribution to the area was not supported by the government which considered that the company ‘met the requirements of social and environmental responsibility, and that the increase would affect the profitability of the mining’.83 To others, notably the Espinar Defence Front, the 30 per cent payment demand was reasonable because it was only a few per cent more than the 26 per cent Black Economic Empowerment initiative in South Africa at the time; it represented the right level of profit that should be returned to local communities. The Espinar Defence Front was instrumental in the workers’ sustaining of the strike and also alleged that the mine had contaminated the environment. They voiced the concerns of many local people that the mine site was the source of contamination flowing into the Cañipía and Salado rivers. According to the Peruvian government’s own report of this protest also, local people were concerned at the death of animals including cattle.84 Environmental issues were close to the heart of the protest. This beautiful region of Peru boasts 107 lakes that comprise a water mirror area of 82.2 square kilometres. The major water basins of the region are the Apurimac, Salado and Colca. The vast majority of the region is devoted to the grazing of alpacas, lamas, cattle and sheep, horses and other animals. Approximately 10 per cent of the region is cultivated, with 6 per cent given over to other uses. In addition to grass, the grazing lands yield flora used in herbal medicine and raw materials for use in basketry and other crafts. Unpredictable rainfall means that livestock need access to freshwater all year round. The pollution of local rivers quickly became part of the protest against the mining company, with farmers alleging that the mine had contaminated local water with heavy metals, including aluminium, arsenic, copper, iron, lithium and manganese.85 The fact that heavy metals are mined in the area means that relatively high levels are present in the water naturally. ‘It should be noted’, says the Peruvian government website, ‘that the results of the monitoring carried out subsequently established that the death of animals was due to natural factors’.86 The issues rapidly became which tests to trust, why test 83. ‘La principal exigencia era que la empresa minera eleve de 3 a 30% su aporte voluntario por utilidades anuales, situación rechazada por Xstrata y el Estado, pues se consideró que la empresa cumplía con los requisitos de responsabilidad social y ambiental, y porque el aumento afectaría la rentabilidad de la minera.’ Ibid. 84. Peru, Ministerio del Ambiente, ‘Los motivos del conflicto’, http://www.minam.gob. pe/espinar/los-motivos-del-conflicto/. 85. See Facing Finance, ‘Glencore Xstrata: Environmental Pollution, Tintaya Copper Mine, Peru’, http://www.facing-finance.org/en/database/cases/glencore-xstrataenvironmental-pollution-at-tintaya-copper-mine-peru/ (accessed 9 November 2017). Facing Finance is a campaigning organization that investigates companies worldwide that profit from breaching international norms and standards related to human- and labour rights, environmental protection, controversial weapons and corruption. 86. ‘Cabe señalar que los resultados de los monitoreos realizados posteriormente establecieron que la muerte de animales se debió a factores naturales.’ Translation by EDR.

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

161

results had been contradictory, which contamination issues were historic, how legacy issues were being handled, whether the transition from the Tintaya mine to the neighbouring Antapaccay mine was being held accountable to the highest international standards and whether the current owner of the mine was engaging truthfully and accountably with local communities. The role of the national government was significant. Condemned by some as uncritically pro-mining because mining typically represents approximately 30 per cent of government revenues and 60 per cent of exports, the Peruvian government was unsupportive of local opposition to the mine and of the local politicians who sought the 27 per cent rise in the profit-sharing contribution of the mine to the area.87 The Peruvian government also subsequently published an environmental research and monitoring results in Acta Final de la Secretaría Tecnica de la Mesa de Diálogo de Espinar 2012–13 that found high levels of heavy minerals in local water supplies to be broadly naturally occuring.88 Compare this finding, however, with a report prepared by Stuart M. Levit at The Centre for Science in Public Participation, Bozeman, MT (CSP2), for Oxfam America (July 2013).89 This report entitled Glencore Xstrata’s Espinar Province Mines: Cumulative Impacts to Human Health and the Environment. I cite from Levit’s report at some length because of its relatively nuanced assessment of the Peruvian Ministry of Environment Participatory Health and Environmental Monitoring (PHEM) Report: The PHEM Report determined that there is pollution in the Espinar Province that appears to be the result of mining and there is pollution in the Espinar Province that appears to be from ‘natural’ sources. These contaminants include metals contamination in surface waters and sediments of the Camacmayo, Tintaya and Collpamayo waterways. Over half of all sites monitored were contaminated with at least one sample exceeding regulatory standards and heavy Peru, Ministerio del Ambiente, ‘Los motivos del conflicto’, http://www.minam.gob.pe/ espinar/los-motivos-del-conflicto/. 87. E.g., a Streetwise Report ‘Finally, Good News for Mining in Peru: Ricardo Carrión and Alberto Arispe’ a dialogue between Ricardo Carrión and Alberto Arispe of Perubased Kallpa Securities, https://www.streetwisereports.com/pub/na/finally-good-newsfor-mining-in-peru-ricardo-carri-n-and-alberto-arispe. Streetwise reports aim to inform investors about promising investment ideas in a changing world; they are funded by subscription (accessed 9 November 2017). 88. ‘Acta Final de la Secretaría Ténacia de la Mesa de Diálogo de Espinar’, http:// www.minam.gob.pe/espinar/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2014/02/INF_ESPINAR_ FINAL_03-09-13.pdf (accessed 9 November 2017). 89. Stuart M. Levit, ‘Glencore Xstrata’s Espinar Province Mines: Cumulative Impacts to Human Health and the Environment’, Centre for Science in Public Participation. Prepared for Oxfam America, July 2013. Available online: http://www.csp2.org/files/reports/ Cumulative%20Impacts%20of%20Espinar%20Province%20Mines%20-%20Levit%20 CSP2%203Jul13.pdf (accessed 31 August 2017).

162

The Limit of Responsibility

metal contamination (mercury, arsenic, cadmium and lead) was discovered at sixty-four sites that correspond to water used for human consumption. Surface and ground water in some sites close to Xstrata’s mining activities have physical and chemical contamination exceeding standards and suggesting potential impacts by mining. A related finding was that people living in the communities directly affected by Tintaya are exposed to arsenic, thallium and lead.

Levit’s report accepts the main PHEM findings that most pollution in the Espinar Province appears to be from ‘natural’ sources but underlines the possibility that some is from the mine site (one river in the region is called the Rio Salado which means ‘salty river’). The main complaint against the company was the lack of transparency and serious intention to identify the scope of any contamination for which the mine site is responsible. Yet the PHEM Report had helped to highlight that Peru’s regulatory framework is inadequate in terms of demanding sufficient pre-mine assessment and disclosure of pre-mine assessment data to the government and public. If Xstrata had been correct that most of the contamination discovered by the PHEM Report is natural/background, then there appear to be problems with the accuracy and precision of Xstrata’s monitoring programmes: it is either the case that Xstrata should have known about the contamination but did not or simply that it did not disclose them. Something is clearly wrong if this contamination was just discovered and disclosed – in spite of years of company and participatory (community and company) monitoring.90 In response to the PHEM Report, Glencore Xstrata concluded that the contamination that measured above environmental standards was discovered in only a few samples and that most of those samples were from outside of the ‘mine’s area of influence’ – asserting that the contamination measured was the result of natural, or ‘background’, metal contamination and not from current or Xstrata mining activities. Further, following the PHEM Report, in May 2015 the relatively unknown European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), an independent, non-profit non-governmental organization focusing on legal issues – together with affected persons and the organizations Multiwatch (from Switzerland) and Derechos Humanos sin Fronteras and CooperAcción from Peru 91 – submitted complaints to the UN Special Rapporteur for the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation.92 The ECCHR called upon the UN Working Group on transnational corporations to require that Switzerland open a criminal or administrative investigation to determine the company’s responsibility 90. Levit, ‘Glencore Xstrata’s Espinar Province Mines’, ii. 91. The ECCHR was founded in 2007 by a small group of human rights lawyers and should not be confused with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). 92. ‘Mining in the Andes: Complaint and Lawsuit Filed against Swiss Firm Glencore, Switzerland, and Peru’, European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Berlin, May 2015. Available online: https://www.ecchr.eu/en/our_work/business-and-human-rights/ glencore.html (accessed 31 August 2017).

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

163

for the water contamination and to ensure that the victims of the contamination in Espinar have access to justice in Switzerland in order to determine Glencore’s liability. Their executive summary report ‘Water pollution in the influence area of Glencore in Espinar (Cusco, Peru)’ further called upon the Peruvian government to implement measures to reduce the established and future water contamination in the influence zone of the company, to establish the extent of the company’s responsibility for the water contamination and invite an independent expert to determine the origin of the contamination, and to evaluate the exposition to heavy metals of all inhabitants living close to the mine and inform them of the risks of drinking contaminated water. Shortly after the publication of its report, the L’Assemblée fédérale, Le Parlement Suisse, replied to a parliamentary question to the effect that the Swiss government would be ready to participate with the Peruvian government in ensuring water quality monitoring by internationally recognized and independent organizations that employ scientific methodologies accepted by all concerned.93 When I visited the then Glencore-owned mine site at Tintaya-Antapaccay as part of the MFRI engagement process, my expectations were mixed. Reputational issues regarding water pollution caused by the Tintaya site were uppermost in my mind. I was familiar with a range of NGO reports on this and other Glencore mine sites from both more and less reputable sources. As I learned at the site, the mine management did indeed take water care seriously and was obligated to do so for a range of reasons. This has subsequently been evidenced by publication by the company of the following list of organizations external to the company that are involved in the monitoring of water quality in Espinar in 2013: 1. General Environmental Health Bureau (DIGESA) 2. Regional Health Bureau of Cusco (DIRESA CUSCO)

93. ‘Depuis les incidents survenus dans la région en mai 2012, plusieurs études ont été réalisées concernant la qualité de l’eau à Espinar, notamment une mandatée par l’Etat péruvien dans le cadre des dialogues mis en place pour essayer de résoudre le conflit social en cours depuis des années autour de la mine de Tintaya. Celui-ci a ses origines dans l’interprétation contradictoire des études effectuées, la pollution de l’eau étant attribuée soit à la mine soit à des causes naturelles. Le Conseil fédéral est d’avis qu’en principe des informations fiables, obtenues indépendamment, sont importantes pour évaluer ce contexte et d’autres similaires. Si une vérification et un monitoring de la qualité de l’eau par une organisation indépendante internationalement reconnue et disposant d’une méthodologie scientifique sont acceptés par toutes les parties concernées (entreprise, gouvernement péruvien, communautés, société civile), le Conseil fédéral soutient une telle approche. La Suisse n’interviendra toutefois qu’à cette condition, en accord avec le gouvernement concerné. Dans ce cas, la Suisse serait également prête à participer aux travaux correspondants.’ https://www.parlament.ch/fr/ ratsbetrieb/suche-curia-vista/geschaeft?AffairId=20155250….

164

The Limit of Responsibility

3. National Centre of Occupational Health and Environmental Protection for Health (CENSOPAS) 4. National Animal Health Centre (SENASA) 5. Geological Mining and Metallurgical Institute (INGEMMET) 6. Provincial Municipality of Espinar Professional Partnership (MPE).94 The company further reports: Water: During the monitoring project, sampling took place in the basins of the Cañipía, Salado, Apurímac, Condoroma and Huichima rivers, with the majority of points in the Cañipía and Salado basins. The critical parameters for surface water were heavy metals, dissolved oxygen, pH and conductivity levels. Of the 12,000+ measurements taken, only 2.2% (266) exceeded limits set by Peru’s national environmental quality standards (ECA). ANA, OEFA and INGEMMET tested surface and underground water and determined that the presence of metals in water was due to the natural mineral content of the soil geochemistry around the Cañipía and Salado river basins, and not a result of mining activity. The Salado river in particular is characterised by the presence of metals, due to its origin in the thermal waters of Chaquella. Toxin Tests on Animals: SENASA conducted toxicological tests on livestock samples (sheep, cattle and alpaca) provided by farmers in the province, to evaluate metal concentrations in their vital organs. Results confirmed that cause of death in all cases to be diseases related to consanguinity, malnutrition and parasites (liver fluke, hydatid disease), rather than the presence of metals. The levels of metals found were within the limits determined by the Codex Alimentarius or ‘Food Code’ standards (set by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Health Organization) and European regulations on food safety.

Glencore was accepted as a member of the International Council on Metals and Minerals (ICMM) in 2014. Members are required to publicly commit to improve their sustainability performance and to report on progress. Glencore is also a declared supporter of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and states that it is committed to upholding the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.95

94. Glencore Case Study, ‘Environmental Monitoring in Espinar Province’. Available online: http://www.glencore.com/sustainability/case-studies/p/environmental-monitoringin-espinar-province (accessed 31 August 2017). 95. See the Glenore Sustainability Strategy, http://www.glencore.com/sustainability/oursustainability-strategy/ (accessed 11 November 2017); and further The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, https://eiti.org (accessed 11 November 2017); ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, http://www.ilo.org/declaration/lang–en/ index.htm (accessed 11 November 2017).

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

165

Originally a commodities trader and perhaps slow in ‘getting up to speed’ with respect to all that is required of the best mining companies, relations with local communities more recently seem to have been improving. The old Tintaya mine which operated from 1985 to 2013 has now been lagged and is used as a depositary for Antapaccay tailings. The government interinstitutional technical committee, the regional government and representatives of civil society and the Espinar Provincial Municipality held a meeting on 5 and 6 June 2013, where they finished reviewing recent study observations and produced an integrated environmental report which was then signed and accepted by all participating parties. The report is now available through the Peruvian Ministry of Environment.96 Antapaccay continued to produce 167,000 tonnes of copper in 2014, representing 12 per cent of Peru’s copper output. Antapaccay has had no fatalities since it began operations in 2012, and in 2014 had no lost time injuries. My understanding is that the mine recycles 72 per cent of the water it uses, with the majority of the remaining being taken from a nearby river that contains non-potable water, although some is taken from wells. According to a company presentation to the MFRI delegation, water management at Antapaccay now operates on a closed-circuit water system, with zero discharges to the environment. Antapaccay has built and implemented a system for replenishing water for the Cañipía basin, according to a commitment made in the EIA Antapaccay. The construction of this system has been brought forward in time in order to ensure commitment to replenishing water channels of the basin. As this case study illustrates, giving the land a voice rapidly becomes embroiled in pre-existing struggles for power, influence and profit, especially in regions of the world where water shortages are increasingly common – which is true, of course, in most countries of the world where mining occurs. Ignorance and misinformation contribute further to the failure to listen well to the land. Christian ethicists and, indeed, citizens of the world more generally are often illequipped to make informed distinctions between better and worse companies, better and worse NGOs. The claim, however, is that, like the human You who is the neighbour far away, the land is a You who holds the meaning of responsibility for me. Bonhoeffer’s reversal of the structure of responsibility from I-You-I to YouI-You is hereby expanded to include the You that is the land from which minerals and metals are mined. Truthing What’s needed continuously is a process of truthing whereby the effects of mining are measured and reported. By reverting to the Late Middle English noun form ‘truthing’, which means the action or process of speaking in accordance with 96. Perú Ministerio del Ambiente, http://www.minam.gob.pe/index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id=2532 (accessed 11 November 2017).

166

The Limit of Responsibility

the truth, and attaching to this word the sense of proactivity and investigative energy required in order to do this, my intention is to draw attention to the labour required to find and speak truth. Remembering that the 2016 Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year was post-truth, an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief ’, we turn to Bonhoeffer’s twofold guidance regarding human calling to truth.97 On the one hand, he is sceptical of human attempts to arrive at the truth of a situation: ‘Christian truth is the only truth that can enter into the individual, and even that happens by means of the church. All other truth is never “possessed” absolutely, but only in arguing with others’ (DBWE 1: 84–5). On the other, Bonhoeffer recognizes the call to fully human living as a calling to love and truth: The formal and general concept of person should be thought of as fulfilled by positive Christian content, i.e., established by God and oriented toward God. Willing and thinking come from God and go toward God; that is to say, community with God is completed in love and truth. (DBWE 1: 63)

The direction of travel is to expand the central significance in Christian ethics of the question ‘who?’ to include other questions too. ‘Who?’ was not the only question asked by Jesus. As Ched Myers points out, more than three-quarters of the episodes in Mark’s gospel are composed around questions to, by or about Jesus.98 (Something similar may be observed of the other gospels.) Jesus’s challenge is less that of memory than of truth. The politics of the gospel is the transformation effected by dedication to the truth, who is the person of Jesus.99 ‘Who do you say that I am?’ (Matt. 16:13). ‘Which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?’ (Lk. 12.25). ‘For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?’ (Mt. 16.26). ‘What do you think?’ (Mt. 18.12). ‘What do you want?’ (Mt. 20.21). ‘What do you think about the Christ?’ (Mt. 22.42). ‘Why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?’ (Mt. 15.3). Such questions in the gospels are utterly contingent, everyday occurrences that – because asked by Jesus or of Jesus – become truth events that exceed the immediate terms of the conversations taking place, expose the delusions and untruths that were sustaining the status quo and begin to effect transformation. Jesus’s questioning effects not so much the prizing of information from interlocutors but transformation of the situation as its truth appears.

97. English Oxford Living Dictionaries, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-theyear/word-of-the-year-2016 (accessed 11 November 2017). 98. Ched Myers, Who Will Roll Away the Stone? Discipleship Queries for First World Christians (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1994), 26. 99. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics (London: Verso, 2005. French edition, 1998), xiv.

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

167

I was fortunate at the Antapaccay mine site to attempt in some small way the process of truthing by meeting with people from communities close to the mine sites, some of whom had family members employed on site. MFRI representatives visited a dairy plant and a wool and fibre plant funded through the Convenio Marco, the company and community agreement to provide 3 per cent of before tax profit to community projects. The plant had the capacity to receive 15,000 litres of milk per day much of which was processed into cheese or yoghurt. The project began with an initial investment of $3.2 million and was run on a non-profit, cooperative basis by employees drawn from the local area. The plant took milk from local producers: employees collected milk from farmers as far as two hours’ drive from the plant itself. This cut out intermediaries while allowing farmers to sell their milk for a competitive price. Farmers benefited not only from a relatively high price for the milk, as compared to other market prices obtainable, but also from advice on animal health and membership of this local cooperative. Consumers benefited from quality controlled, high-quality products. One of the cheeses has recently won a regional award and was to be sold nationally as well as regionally. Looking ahead, it is hoped that ownership of the plant will transition eventually to the local community in some form. The life of the mine site is currently expected to exceed thirty years but the project is being run in a manner that could be taken over by the local community. The wool and fibre plant was run similarly as a non-profit enterprise. Employees collect wool and fibre from farmers, weigh and then price the material. One employee spoke of farmers getting their wool weighed at the plant before trying to sell it themselves at local markets where traders typically estimated the weight to their advantage. Many farmers returned to the plant for the better prices paid there, due to which they could run another llama or perhaps a couple more sheep. How close did we get to the truth? The question must remain open. Do these evidenced benefits to farmers constitute morally problematic interference in the local economy prior to the arrival of the mine site and its development of these plants or instances of good sustainable development? To my eye, these projects were contextsensitive and had a wide reach to many families. The local mayor spoke warmly of their benefit to many and the potential for long-term survival subject to competent management by local people from the relevant communities. Other projects associated with this particular mine site included training and expertise to improve the infrastructure in rural schools, a technical training centre for young people that focused not only on skills required for employment at the mine but machine knitting, cookery, computer skills, business skills and more, and a health centre and human capacity development project. A complementary educational facility did not provide basic education that remained a matter for regional and national government but ran pre-school classes and training for parents, and supplementary classes in science, computing, music, cultural history and more. The success of this complementary educational facility was reflected in the number of students from locality now winning national awards to continue their studies at one of the big urban centres. I was not alone in witnessing well run and useful projects. The following are extracts from write-ups by participants in the 2014–2015 Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative:

168

The Limit of Responsibility

Initial expectations My impression is that at the beginning the members of the Faith Group were hesitant on the ‘intentions’ of mining firms in their invitation: ‘Do they just want us to tell them how well they perform? Are they attempting to pay our religious conformity?’ But as the visit progressed, friendship and trust increased with the representatives of the firms. I have had very sincere and fruitful exchanges with these representatives, with ‘zero censorship’ from my part: high level of trust with all members of the delegation. Framing questions about the relationship with local, regional and national government To what extent was it the company’s or the government’s responsibility to ensure that damage did not happen, to see that mining acted as a catalyst for long-term economic development that would live on beyond any mining activity? Was the ‘Emerge’ programme, that sought to provide small loans to entrepreneurs to act as an economic catalyst, stepping on the toes of the government or suggestive that the company did not trust them to use tax revenues wisely? I consider there is room for improvement in the coordination between firm initiatives and local/regional public policies (education, health, etc.). This is central in the progress towards higher levels of social justice and environmental sustainability. In my opinion, in areas like health and education, the firm should not be (or appear to be in the eyes of the population) the protagonist; but rather an actor that supports, encourages and enlightens (but doesn’t replace) the Administration in the provision of social rights. I came with the question: Why has mining improved Las Bambas and its communities and not the mining communities in Ghana? In Ghana the majority of resource-rich communities have not benefited from those resources in their communities. However, I returned with the question: Who has been responsible for this impoverishment? Is it the mining companies or the Government who receives millions of dollars in royalties? My meeting with different people from both the mining companies, communities and faith-based institutions has given me the impetus to work together for the common and greater good. In other words there should be a global solidarity movement to care for God’s creation of which we are only custodians, and not owners. Trust-building I came away convinced that the trust of local communities sought by mining companies could only result from giving communities power to decide whether and on what terms they would accept mining activity, and wondered if this could be the key to a new mode of operation by the industry. Interactions with local community leaders of civil society and government was weak and could be enhanced.

Responsibility: Miteinander, Füreinander, Stellvertretung

169

The mining companies involve the local communities in their developmental programmes but some promises are sometimes not fulfilled which breeds mistrust. I was surprised how much the [recent] conflict was of a human-relationshipstype. …. Mistrust is hard to overcome. … But, what I found most inspiring was the company’s humility to face up to what was wrong (arrogance seemed to be a big issue) and to repair the damage. Reputation The company is better than its reputation in terms of what’s happening in the communities around this mine site.

MFRI representative visits were, of necessity, short term and selective. For some Christian people, getting serious about asking questions of the land and the people who live close to mine sites will be a professional vocation that demands years of legal or scientific training and a lifetime of dedication. For most of us, the challenge is to remain interested for long enough to realize that one-third-world consumers are implicated in harms to land that we might never see, touch or smell. The simplicity of other of Jesus’s questions beyond the ‘who?’ questions is startling. ‘What do you think?’ (Mt. 18.12). ‘What do you want?’ (Mt. 20.21). ‘What do you think about the Christ?’ (Mt. 22.42). ‘Why do you break the commandment of God?’ (Mt. 15.3). Do we want to remain in ignorance of harms done to the land and its peoples far away? Do we want governments to distinguish between better and worse mining companies, such that licences are granted only to those companies operating in accordance with the highest international standards? Do we want churches invested in stock markets to be proactive on our behalf in researching the environmental standards to which companies hold themselves, how they deal with governments in developing countries especially, their policies on paying tax and more? Are we interested enough to care?

Chapter 5 C O N F R O N T I N G T H E V IC E S O F H U B R I S

In particular our church will have to confront the vices of hubris, the worship of power, envy and illusionism as the roots of all evil. It will have to speak of moderation, authenticity, trust, faithfulness, steadfastness, patience, discipline, humility, modesty, contentment. It will have to see that it does not underestimate the significance of the human ‘example’ (which has its origin in the humanity of Jesus and is so important in Paul’s writings!); the church’s word gains weight and power not through concepts but by example. … I am eager to attempt for once to express certain things simply and clearly that we otherwise like to avoid dealing with … I hope that in doing so I can be of some service for the future of the church. (DBWE 8:504)

A central thrust of this book is to dispel any notion of Christian moral purity with respect to daily living. Church members in the one-third world are consumers of the products of mining and possible indirect investors, via pensions and savings plans, in industry-scale mining. This means that Christian ethics must do more than denounce as demonic every transnational corporation (TNC) as if these organizations are somehow separable from my relatively privileged day-to-day life. It is not enough to say that I bear no responsibility for mining disasters such as a tailings dam collapse while boiling a couple of eggs for lunch in a stainless steel saucepan with copper-clad bottom and on a cooker whose history and origin would make a fascinating story if only it could be traced back through its packaging and construction, its cutting from slabs of molten and rolled steel, the processing in oxygen and blast furnaces, its being smashed into every finer-grained iron ore and having been extracted from the rock containing the ore by magnetic rollers and so on. Anyone who consumes the products of mining is implicated in the effects of mining. At the least, we can – and should – do better in asking ‘What’s going on?’ ‘What’s going on?’ in some areas of church life is investment in transnational corporations operating in the mining sector. Some churches, not all, hold funds that support pension funds for retired clergy, mission and ministry opportunities and such like. So, for instance, some churches hold investments in major transnational

172

The Limit of Responsibility

corporations including the mining sector.1 Some charity fund managers act for churches, including the Church of England, the Central Finance Board of the Methodist Church of Great Britain, the Church Commissioners for England and the Church of England Pensions Board, alongside many non-religious investors.2 Consider also Wespath Benefits and Investments in the United States. This is a not-for-profit administrative agency of the United Methodist Church. It supervises and administers retirement plans, investment funds and health and welfare benefit plans. Its participants are active and retired clergy and lay employees of the church. Its declared mission is to care for those who serve by providing investment and benefit services that honour the mission and principles of the United Methodist Church.3 Of interest in this chapter is the witness of the church as institution, that is, a witness that is more than the aggregate of the witness of individual believers with respect to the exercise of responsibility. Where the church as institution holds investments in major companies, stocks and shares, and so on, the character of that witness must be considered. 1. The Ethical Investment Advisory Group (EIAG) and the National Investing Bodies (NIBs) of the Church of England have recently been prioritizing policy development in the extractives sector. See the Church of England, Ethical Investment Advisory Group Annual Review 2016/17 and Report of the National Investing Bodies’ Engagement (London: Church House Publishing, 2017), https://www.churchofengland.org/media/4031957/ar_20170913. pdf (accessed 21 September 2017). At the time of writing, the Church of England’s policy on the extractives sector has not yet been published. 2. E.g., CCLA which manages investments for charities, religious organizations and the public sector, https://www.ccla.co.uk (accessed 31 August 2017). 3. The Wespath logo includes the United Methodist Church (UMC) Cross and Flame; how it does business claims to be stamped by the doctrinal witness of the church. The Wespath name invokes the name of John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, and their stated intention is to follow a path to financial success that accords with these values. See http://www.wespath.org/about/ (accessed 21 September 2017). ‘Wes’, that is, the first part of their name, acknowledges Wesley as a strong advocate for social justice; ‘path’ refers to the organization’s goal of providing participants and institutional clients with a path to follow in achieving retirement, and health and investment objectives. Wespath’s claim is ‘to invest in a sustainable and responsible manner, creating long-term value for our participants and clients’ while aspiring to uphold the values of the UMC. An internal framework of Avoid– Engage–Invest guides its activities: Wespath avoids investing in certain companies because their core business relates to one of its six ethical exclusions or because of the financial risks they face from specific sustainability-related issues; it engages by leveraging its ‘seat at the table’ with global companies, involving with them in order to create positive financial, environmental and social change; it aims to invest wisely by evaluating the competencies of our external managers in integrating these policies into investment decision-making, and by making investments dedicated to seeking market-rate returns and demonstrable social and environmental impact. A strong set of principles guides investment and disinvestment in the face of climate change.

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

173

‘Sell all that you have’? In Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer appears to call the church to sweeping disinvestment: ‘The church is church only when it is there for others. As a first step it must give away all its property to those in need’ (DBWE 8:503). In the final months of his life, Bonhoeffer seems to plead with the church to take radical steps to remove any monies from worldly investments and distribute proceeds to the poor. His words are reminiscent of New Testament teaching: ‘When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me”’ (Lk. 18.24–27; see also Mk. 10.25; Mt. 19.24). Does this mean that responsibility for the church equates to blanket disinvestment in mining stocks? In the ancient church only a small number of ascetics applied Jesus’s instruction to the rich ruler to themselves: ‘Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor.’ So Peter Brown observed recently in his magnum opus Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome and the Making of Christianity in the West. Relatively few took Jesus’s teaching literally, while most lived humdrum lives serving God amid earning a living, running a business, trading honourably and honestly, giving alms to the poor and such like: ‘To treat the renouncers of wealth as the heroes and heroines of a “true” Christianity and to view all other forms of religious giving as somehow a betrayal of the essential radicalism of the Christian movement is to merely echo the high-minded language of the ascetic movement.’4 Other New Testament passages suggest that Jesus did not disallow private property. Jesus told the parable of the talents to chastise laziness and lack of due diligence with respect to God-given resources (Matt. 25:14–30), ate with rich as well as poor (Mark 15:43; Luke 19:1–10), did not exclude anyone from the kingdom of God solely on the grounds of wealth but required all to be faithful stewards of the gifts God has given. Like early church believers, present-day readers might distinguish at this point between ‘literal’ and ‘direct’ interpretations of the text and suggest that while Jesus’s words apply to all disciples ‘directly’, they might not apply ‘literally’.5 Such a reading would be convenient but runs the obvious risk of blunting the challenge of the passage to seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness. Yet the choice in Luke’s gospel for the rich man addressed by Jesus, and Bonhoeffer’s challenge, is stark. The young man may either enter the kingdom of God or keep his wealth; this question of whether the renunciation of wealth, in the sense of giving it all away, is the only route for the disciple of Christ who hopes to enter the kingdom of God echoes down the centuries. With Bonhoeffer, it is important to be clear that the aim of the visible churchcommunity is not to instantiate a human ideal but to be available to the Holy Spirit for God’s purposes as part of the church universal: ‘a life together under 4. Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome and the Making of Christianity in the West (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015), xxv. 5. Augustine made this distinction in On Christian Doctrine, Bk III, ch. 5.

174

The Limit of Responsibility

the Word will stay healthy only when it … understands itself as being part of the one, holy, universal, Christian church, sharing through its deeds and sufferings in the hardships and struggles and promise of the whole church’ (DBWE 5:45). The central task of the church is not to find solutions to the world’s problems (DBWE 6:352–353) or to suggest that there are Christian solutions to worldly problems.6 Yet the empirical form of the revelational reality acquires significance ‘within concrete time’ (DBWE 1:155). ‘The church is God’s new will and purpose for humanity. God’s will is always directed toward the concrete, historical human being’ (DBWE 1:141).7 Significantly, however, the freedom in Christ experienced by disciples individually is given to the church corporate too. As individuals, Christians are called to live out God-given vocations. See the relatively long excursus on vocation in ‘The Place of Responsibility’ (DBWE 6:289–298). Doctrinally, the central point concerns freedom in Christ, and why and how this means that a person’s responsibility equates to their vocation: ‘Vocation is responsibility, and responsibility is the whole response of the whole person to reality as a whole’ (DBWE 6:293). Responsibility for the believer, according to Bonhoeffer in these passages, equates to following the call of Christ alone. While we might not agree with Joseph Fletcher’s situationist construal of Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on responsibility exercised in freedom, there is a sense throughout Bonhoeffer’s writings of the immediacy of a person’s freedom before God.8

6. Jesus only occasionally solved worldly problems, notes Bonhoeffer (DBWE 6:355). The point for our purpose is that Jesus did not run poverty alleviation projects, a leprosy hospital, skills-training centres for young people who might otherwise fall into prostitution or such like. The church is called to serve but is not an alternative social service. Indeed, some human problems are so persistent that they can never be fully solved until Christ comes again. 7. See Jennifer McBride, The Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 87–118. 8. Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on ‘the freedom of our own life’ has been claimed by some, notably Joseph Fletcher in Situation Ethics, to be a version of Christian relativism. Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1966), passim. Fletcher warmed to Bonhoeffer’s work because of its apparent agreement with his own conviction that there are no fixed or absolute moral principles. Fletcher believed that every actual situation of moral choice is almost completely unique and that is the context of action – the ‘situation’ – that must guide the individual towards an appropriate or ‘right’ action. What is good in one situation might be bad in another. Fletcher engages with Bonhoeffer most fully when talking about truth-telling and lies and claims that Bonhoeffer’s essay, ‘What Is Meant by “Telling the Truth?”’, is ‘as radical a version of the situational method as any Christian relativist could call for’ [149]. Others, however, have castigated Fletcher for serious misrepresentation. Hauerwas writes, ‘Fletcher’s description of Bonhoeffer’s position is so far off the mark I am tempted to call Fletcher a liar. He surely must have known better

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

175

This freedom is to be exercised by the church corporate too. A question in the final section of Sanctorum Communio, ‘Church and Eschatology’, is about judgement and eternal life both for persons individually and for collective persons [Kollektivpersonen]: ‘The question is, how do we conceive of human community as undergoing judgment?’ (DBWE 1:284). The individual person is judged not only in isolation but as a member of their nation, family, marriage and so on. Bonhoeffer acknowledges the difficulties entailed in holding to this belief: ‘It remains unclear how we are to imagine in detail a collective person being rejected or accepted, while the individual belonging to it may be treated according to a different verdict’ (DBWE 1:284). Biblical witness supports the position, however, that divine judgement will be exercised against the collective as well as the person. Thus Bonhoeffer cites Matthew 11.21ff, where Jesus bears witness to judgement against Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum, as biblical evidence of divine judgement on the collective. He further points to the address to the churches in Revelation chapters 2 and 3 (DBWE 1:284). The public and political witness of the church, as well as the lives of believers individually, will be held to account. Mindful of this collective ecclesial calling, my position in what follows is that a radical disinvestment policy for the church could easily become another manifestation of the hypocrisy whereby one-third-world Christians fail to confront the reality that we are all heavy consumers of the products of mining. Sin is more than simply personal. ‘[T]he consequences of my sin mingle with the consequences of others’ sin and the whole combines to form a kind of deafening cacophony.’9 Amid the screeching, jarring, stridency of humanity’s fallen condition, the witness of Christian discipleship is more than personal. For the church as institution, living miteinander-in-sin and giving meaning to Stellvertretung might entail radical either disinvestment or selective (dis)investment in certain stocks, and the choice to engage through continuing investment and lobbying for change. This is broadly the stance of the church investment bodies associated with the Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative (MFRI) with which I have been involved since January 2013 (see below). The remainder of this chapter tries to think with Bonhoeffer, and beyond, about the public and political witness of the church in the face of such questions. At issue is whether, why and how a You-I-You structuring of responsibility can inform this debate.

or, at least, be a better reader than his description of Bonhoeffer’s position seems to suggest. However, given the mis-characterizations of positions so prominent in Fletcher’s work it may be a mistake to attribute to Fletcher the intentional deception Bonhoeffer thinks often characteristic of the liar; which is but a reminder that it is as least as difficult to describe lying as it is to learn to speak truthfully’ [Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Reflections: Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Truth and Politics’. Available online: http://livedtheology.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/ hauerwas.pdf (accessed 29 August 2017). 9. Andrew Louth, Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology (London: SPCK, 2013), 72.

176

The Limit of Responsibility

The Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative Imagine the following scenario. CEO-level mining industry representatives approach church leaders to ask for conversation with a view to partnering in sustainable development among communities affected by mining.10 How should the church leaders respond? Are they being ‘played’? Will they, in effect, sell their souls to a corporate devil when eating at their table and discussing their agenda? One can imagine some possible responses: No! It makes little sense to talk about sustainable development in the context of mining. Use of the term ‘sustainable’ with respect to non-renewable resources is contradictory in the most obvious respect. Our planet is finite. Minerals and metals are not capable of being replenished and exist in finite amounts. Some fossil fuel stocks, and perhaps other non-renewable

10. The meaning of ‘sustainable development’ is contested. Since the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), and the Earth Summit in Rio, the paradigm of ‘sustainable development’ has been dominant in relevant literature issuing from the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum and more. Principle 1 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development stated, ‘Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.’ United Nations General Assembly, ‘Report of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development’ (Rio de Janeiro, 3–14 June, 1992) A/CONF.151/26 (Vol. I). Available online: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/ content/documents/1709riodeclarationeng.pdf (accessed 31 August 2015). Subsequent principles call upon states to ensure that ‘the right to development must be fulfilled so as to equitably meet developmental and environmental needs of present and future generations’ (Principle 3) and to achieve ‘sustainable development and a higher quality of life for all people’ (Principle 8). The language is aspirational but found a home in the World Charter for Nature (1982), the World Summit on Environment and Development (1992), the World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002), in so-called grey literature in the mining industry too and in engagement by industry in the framing of UN Sustainable Development Goals. I take as my guide Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ which describes the ‘urgent challenge to protect our common home’, the earth, by seeking together ‘a sustainable and integral development’. Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common Home, §13 http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/ encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html (accessed 31 August 2017). ‘Sustainable development’ means inter alia resolving the tragic effects of environmental degradation on the lives of the world’s poorest and a concentrated effort to redress the damage caused by human abuse of God’s creation (§14). It is not enough, says Pope Francis, to balance the protection of nature with financial gain or to set modern notions of progress against preservation of the environment; rather, we must redefine progress in ways that take seriously the protection of the environment and the most vulnerable members of our societies (§52).

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

177

resources, simply have to stay in the ground for our mutual well-being.11 Don’t get sucked into in inevitably compromising debate. This scenario is not imaginary but actually happened. Church leaders took the decision to engage. In September 2013, the original Day of Reflection was convened by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace at the Vatican. The Day of Reflection included nineteen industry representatives (many of them CEOs), fifteen high-level individuals representing church groups and one NGO (Oxfam America). Ahead of the meeting, Pope Francis expressed his desire for the meeting to lead to ‘a process guided by moral principles which seeks the good of all parties involved in the sector’ and which can provide answers ‘to the many challenges which confront the mining executives in their decision-making’. Cardinal Turkson opened the meeting on behalf of Pope Francis, recognizing that discussions would address the ‘ethical problems’ arising from mining activities, particularly in Africa and other developing countries. Sam Walsh (CEO of Rio Tinto at the time) noted the goal of discussions as being ‘to open a dialogue where mining interfaces with the community … to hear other views with the promise of all of us making a difference’. The 2013 conversations acknowledged mining’s potential role in poverty alleviation in poor countries, but church leaders felt that the industry exploits resources and local communities and fails to contribute to the ‘common good’. Commitments from the initial Day of Reflection included continuing the discussion, broadening participation of the faith groups and holding discussions at a local/regional level. In October 2014, a second Day of Reflection was convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the president of the Methodist Conference. It included a broader range of mining companies, high-level church groups, academics and NGOs. The Reverend Kenneth Howcroft, president of the Methodist Conference of Great Britain, challenged participants, saying, ‘We are looking for new insights, and a new vision, and something that we can take into the future.’ The Most Reverend Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, raised the difficulties of understanding why ‘the natural resources curse undermines even responsible companies’ best efforts, even in highly developed countries’, and why the ‘large majority of resource-rich regions have not benefited from those resources in the long term’. Mark Cutifani, Anglo American’s chief executive, said, ‘The mining industry is about people and relationships. This second Day of Reflection in mining has been a time for introspection and sharing ideas in which we deliberated what we as an industry contribute, and what we could contribute if real partnerships were created. If we do not reach out and collaborate our industry is not sustainable.’ In November 2015, a Mining and Ecumenical Reflections meeting took place with a forward-looking focus. At that meeting, it was agreed 11. Damian Carrington, ‘Desmond Tutu Intervenes over King’s College London’s Refusal to Divest’, The Guardian, 31 March (2015). Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2015/mar/31/desmond-tutu-intervenes-over-kings-college-londons-refusalto-divest (accessed 31 August 2015).

178

The Limit of Responsibility

that ‘there was sufficient confidence to build something together that was more formal, planned and long term’. Key actions included establishing a common vision, setting more defined outcomes, combining dialogue at the global level with action at a local level and developing a more formal structure. In 2014, in-country visits began where faith leaders from around the world were hosted at companies’ mine sites. These visits gave representatives a highlevel overview of operations including mining, processing and supporting infrastructure, and the management of health, safety and environmental aspects. They also provided: 1. An overview of stakeholder engagement activities including community consultation, complaints/grievance management, community development and actions taken to minimize the mining operation’s environmental impacts 2. An opportunity to have open and frank conversations about key challenges from a social and environmental perspective and the various efforts under way to address these issues 3. An opportunity to understand local community characteristics and civil society 4. Organizations’ and community and local government leader perspectives regarding the positive and negative impacts of mining in the community/ region/country more broadly. Site visits continued in 2015. In addition to the global conversations, regional dialogues are taking place in some countries (several of these sparked by the site visits). The most progressed dialogue is taking place in South Africa where, in line with the global model, a secretariat for the faith engagement work has been established. Eight companies and a range of faith groups are involved in the dialogue in the region. The two main areas of work consist of a healing process being led by the Archbishop of Cape Town as part of ‘courageous conversations’. The purpose of the dialogue is to engage on how the country can build a more sustainable mining industry. There is also a church-driven process to develop a new economic model for more joined up work around social and economic development. This work is based on a recognition that mining companies operating in the same area, NGOs and government could do more to coordinate their efforts to achieve better outcomes. In 2016, MFRI participants recognized that a new model for site visits was needed in order to more systematically identify countries for future visits, ensure that the visits resulted in more strategic engagement in regions, clearly define a purpose for the visits, better capture outcomes and assign roles/responsibilities to keep momentum going following visits. The focus in 2016 was on formalizing activities at the global level. To that end, the following was achieved: 1. The global dialogue is now formally known as the Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative. 2. An independent secretariat comprising a manager and coordinator now lead activities with funding support from five companies and input from a

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

179

steering committee (comprised of mining companies, church groups and academics). 3. A vision, and a set of objectives and values was developed and agreed upon. 4. Formal criteria were developed for the selection of sites for future visits. The MFRI itself approved this summary of its activities for public consumption in November 2016. Further, more reflective comments were ventured: 1. The initial Day of Reflection in 2013 helped many of the CEOs better understand the level of dissatisfaction with the industry and commit to transformation. 2. The high-level participation of industry and faith leaders alike illustrates the importance placed on this dialogue. 3. The process has encouraged greater openness in the industry by challenging participants to consider the nature of their existing stakeholder engagement activities. 4. In some remote areas of the world, the church and mining companies may be the sole actors in otherwise isolated communities. The potential for harmonious community relations is enhanced if both groups are in dialogue with each other and can commit to working towards common objectives. 5. The process has helped enable conversations about mining and development with participants with contrasting perspectives who may not otherwise have a forum through which to engage in this way. 6. Participants involved in the initiative recognize that mining activity should be of better and wider benefit to society and the environment. 7. Industry leaders involved in the initiative are also interested in repositioning the mining sector as one that can be a partner for long-term sustainable development with host communities and governments. 8. Participants share a vision for mining to serve the common good better, by enabling those engaged with and affected by mining to lead lives that are fulfilled, just and that reflect human dignity and respect. This is further elaborated with a set of objectives and values in Annex I. 9. The Pontifical Council describes the ‘“common good” as the sum total of social conditions which allow people … to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily’.12 10. Site visits to company operations have been an important component of the overall engagement and valuable in terms of education, trust and relationship building. 11. The visits contribute directly to the agenda and dialogue during the global Days of Reflection. The in-country experiences have also informed theological 12. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), para 164, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/ pontifical_councils/justpeace/documents/rc_pc_justpeace_doc_20060526_compendiodott-soc_en.html (accessed 31 August 2017).

180

The Limit of Responsibility

and related academic research and have helped to build relationships between the industry and faith group participants. 12. This dialogue has evolved since 2013 from informal conversations to a more structured dialogue overseen by a secretariat. 13. Change takes time. While significant trust has been built between participants, there is still more to do at a practical in-country level. Ultimately, progress at that level will define the level/extent of the initiative’s success. A statement of MFRI shared objectives was formulated as follows: 1. The Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative begins with an acknowledgement of our common humanity. The churches have heard the calls from communities around the world for mining companies to work for the common good. The churches have also heard from some mining companies that mining activity should be of better and wider benefit to society and the environment. 2. Those involved in the initiative share a vision for mining to serve the common good better, by enabling those engaged and affected by its activities to lead lives that are fulfilled, just and reflect human dignity and respect. They do so with regard for both current and future generations. The Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative further aims to: 1. Enable and support a dialogue and relationship between the churches and mining companies. 2. Be a catalyst for meaningful conversations in ways that encourage openness, honesty and the sharing of different perspectives on mining. 3. Encourage genuine and sustainable change in mining and its contribution to outcomes, building on successful work and noting that mining needs to keep pace with social and environmental challenges. 4. Incorporate perspectives from church leaders, church organizations and church investors, mining executives and companies, industry associations, and communities and development NGOs 5. Encourage an increased knowledge of mining and its impacts and contributions to the common good through global dialogues and local site visits. 6. Act as a catalyst to bring together local faith and mine leaders. Three values underpin the work of the Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative as these objectives are pursued: 1. Accountability: towards each other and our constituents, at the international and national level. 2. Respect: for the roles, independence and perspectives of participants. 3. Openness: when considering different perspectives.

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

181

At the time of writing, the Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative has included site visits to mines in six countries (Australia, Ghana, South Africa, Chile, Peru, Brazil) by a range of representatives from the churches, universities, NGOs, ethical investment groups and such like (twenty-nine representatives in 2014 and thirtytwo in 2015, with approximately eight of these people – including myself – having participated in both years). Site visits typically included meetings with local churches and, where appropriate, tribal or other faith leaders, local government representatives and trades union leaders. Participants typically asked that all representatives from mining companies leave the room during meetings with local community leaders and were at liberty to request meetings not otherwise planned. Practical realities necessitated that the hosting companies issued most invitations and organized the meetings, but opportunities were available to participants to check with local leaders that the requisite people had been invited. A further Day of Reflection is planned for November 2017. Regional conversations in a number of countries around the world are gaining pace and depth.

Partners in Sustainable Development? Readers will decide for themselves what to make of a collaborative venture between the churches and mining industry. Some might be shocked that the churches could contemplate the question of partnership in sustainability or posit even the possibility that large businesses and corporations can serve the common good.13 The mining industry in particular has a long legacy of horrendous pollution that

13. In 2013, thirty-seven of the world’s 100 largest economies were corporations. When the GDP of a nation state is measured against the revenue of corporations, some corporations are bigger than nations. https://makewealthhistory.org/2014/02/03/thecorporations-bigger-than-nations/ Citing Forbes May 2013 International Monetary Fund, April 2013, CIA World Factbook. See www.tni.org/stateofpower2014 (accessed 12 November 2017). Most were banks or oil companies. Eighty-five per cent of transnational companies are based in the industrialized world. (NI, State of Power 2014: Exposing the Davos Class https://www.tni.org/files/download/state_of_power-6feb14.pdf.) In 2016, the Forbes Global 2000, a comprehensive ranking of the world’s largest public companies, placed the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), the China Construction Bank and the Agricultural Bank of China as the leading companies. Energy companies and the mining sector tend to vary from year to year according to the price of oil and commodities. In 2015, the top ten mining companies by revenue were BHP Billiton (US/ Australia listed), Rio Tinto (US/Australia), China Shenhua Energy (China/Hong Kong), Coal India (India), Norsilsk Nickel (Russia), Glencore (UK/Australia), Grupo Mexico (Mexico), Vale S.A. (Brazil), Potash Corp. or Saskatchewan (Canada), Sauria Arabian Mining Company, Maaden (Saudi Arabia). http://www.mining.com/these-are-the-worlds40-biggest-mining-companies/.

182

The Limit of Responsibility

means many thousands of people live today with the results of historical mining activity as well as with current disreputable, illegal and informal mining that further devastates the environment. As I write, the news is breaking of a deadly mining accident in Brazil when a damn at an iron ore mine collapsed leaving two dead, dozens missing and nearby villages devastated.14 The dam was holding mining waste products or ‘tailings’. Jac Nasser, BHP Billiton’s chairman, is reported as saying, ‘Words cannot describe the impact of this tragedy on the employees and contractors of Samarco, their families and the community. Our thoughts are with the people of Samarco, the affected community and with the people of Brazil.’ Widely cited as the country’s ‘worst environmental disaster’ that killed at least seventeen people,15 the dam had been reported prior to its collapse as showing no sign of structural impairment and it met all legal and regulatory requirements.16 Many other disasters could be cited. I pause to reflect on a few more in order to spotlight the horrific consequences for some people of mining in their localities. Hundreds and hundreds of such case studies could be cited that recount how mining has caused severe damage to the land and natural resources of an area. Mining has taken valuable minerals or other materials from the earth, but it has in too many instances extracted much more from local communities. Consider, for instance, an older case study on the impacts of mining and dams on the environment and indigenous peoples in Benguet, Cordillera and the Philippines. This case study was presented by the Cordillera Peoples Alliance to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Social Policy and Development.17 The Cordillera region in Northern Luzon, Philippines, is homeland to more than one million indigenous peoples belonging to at least eight distinct ethnic groups collectively known as Igorots. The province of Benguet has fertile land along rivers but also gold ore in the mountains. Corporate mining in Benguet started during the Spanish colonial period when Spanish businessmen 14. Anthony Boadle, ‘Dam Burst at Vale, BHP Mine Devastates Brazilian Town’, Industries 6 November (2015): 1. Available online: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/06/valesa-bhp-billiton-dam-idUSL1N1303CA20151106#2YfAM4dI4XvRiGMx.97 (accessed 6 November 2015). 15. Samantha Pearson in São Paulo and James Wilson in London, ‘Vale and BHP Billiton Rocked by $44bn Brazil Dam Lawsuit’, Financial Times, 4 May 2016, 6:46 pm. http://www. ft.com/cms/s/0/55287308-120d-11e6-bb40-c30e3bfcf63b.html#axzz4HC5cLqHg (accessed 31 August 2017). 16. Paul Kiernan, ‘Mining Dams Grow to Colossal Heights, and So Do the Risks’, The Wall Street Journal, updated 5 April (2016), 2:01 a.m. ET. Available online: http://www.wsj. com/articles/brazils-samarco-disaster-mining-dams-grow-to-colossal-heights-and-so-dothe-risks-1459782411 (accessed 31 August 2017). 17. See United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, International Expert Group Meeting on Indigenous Peoples and Protection of the Environment Paper by Cordillera Peoples Alliance, 2007. www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/workshop_IPPE_cpp. doc (accessed 31 August 2017).

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

183

secured a mining concession from the Igorots in Mancayan and, in 1856, launched the operations of the Sociedad Minero-Metalurgica Cantabro-Filipina de Mancayan. In the 1990s, the government of the Philippines encouraged foreign investment. Accompanying mining operations is the construction of tailings dams needed to contain the mine wastes. These tailings dams were built across the river beds in various parts of Benguet. However, most tailings dams are not leak proof and have not been strong enough to withstand torrential currents during the typhoon season or the major earthquake that rocked Northern Luzon in 1990. Through the years, tailings dams in Benguet have proved incapable of containing the volume of tailings that came from the mills. Time and again, these tailings have breached their dams. Benguet Corporation constructed five tailings dams. Lepanto has five tailings dams, two of which collapsed. Philex has three tailings dams, two of which collapsed (in 1992 and 1994). In 2001, tailings breached another Philex dam. Itogon-Suyoc has one tailings dam that collapsed in 1994. Burst, broken, weak and leaking tailings dams dot the major river systems of the province – the Abra River, Agno River, Antamok River and Bued River. Open-pit and underground bulk mining by Philex in Tuba and Lepanto in Mankayan generate ore and tailings at a rate of up to 2,500 metric tons per mine per day.18 Toxic mine tailings are usually impounded in tailings dams. However, when pressure in the tailings dams builds up, especially during times of heavy rainfall, the mining companies drain their tailings dams of water or face the risk of having the dams burst or collapse. In either case, the tailings eventually find their way out, polluting the water and silting up the rivers and adjacent lands. People of Mankayan remember the Abra River before the mine. It was deep and narrow, just five metres wide, full of fish and surrounded by verdant rice paddies. Now there is a wide gorge of barren land on either side of the polluted river. Fruit trees and animals have died from the poisoned water and rice crops are stunted.19 In the case of the Philex, a tailings dam collapsed in 1992, releasing some eighty million tons of tailings and causing heavy siltation in the irrigation system downstream. The company paid Php5 million to the affected farmers. Again, during a typhoon in 2001, another tailings dam of Philex collapsed. Ricefields in San Manuel and Binalonan, Pangasinan, were buried in toxic silt a metre deep. This time, Philex refused to admit responsibility for the disaster putting the blame on nature. Contamination of water, soil and air contributes to increased toxic buildup in people’s bodies. Asthma and other respiratory problems often affect local communities as well as mine workers. When people’s health deteriorates, their 18. Robalyn V. Olea, ‘Benguet IPs to Philex: Stop Mining’ (15–21 July 2007) Bulatlat: Journalism for the People. http://bulatlat.com/ (accessed 31 August 2017). 19. Northern Dispatch, ‘Groups renew commitment to save Abra River basin’ (1 September 2011) Bulatlat: Journalism for the People. http://bulatlat.com/ (accessed 31 August 2017).

184

The Limit of Responsibility

ability to work and earn money is reduced even further. The old and the young are particularly vulnerable. In 1985, a copper ore dryer was installed by Lepanto. The copper dryer affected the three barangays of Paco, Colalo and Cabiten in Mankayan. Local residents complained of abnormal withering of crops, sickness and death of domestic animals and a high incidence of respiratory ailments. The most common symptoms felt by residents of Mankayan who have inhaled chemical fumes emanating from the mine are headache, dizziness, cough, chest pain, nasal and eye irritation. Other symptoms reported are itching of the skin, rashes and diarrhoea. The company was forced to close down the dryer in the face of people’s opposition. Many other case studies could be cited. A short but powerful book entitled An Introductory Overview and Case Studies from Peru, Angola and Nigeria, produced by Catholic Relief Services in 2011, studies the environmental and health impacts of a smelter in the La Oroya region of Peru. It concludes, ‘the environmental problems caused by the smelter disproportionately affect the poor’.20 A case study of the Umuechem community in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria reveals detrimental impacts on intra-communal violence and communal governance and a community vulnerable to a deterioration of public health and livelihoods.21 Improvements in company practices introduced in a second phase of operations brought reduced conflict and strengthened cohesion among the ethnic groups so that they began to speak with one voice. But the lessons were learned late and only after demonstrations, blockages of roads and other protests that were met with violence by the state and private security forces. And there are more. In what sense, therefore, might it make any sense to ask about the suitability of the mining industry as a partner in sustainable development? Should radical disinvestment in all mining stocks be the only response for those churches whose financial lives include these kinds of decisions? So far, we have recognized that typical household consumption of the products of mining in one-thirdworld countries is high; we all use roads, trains, buses, buildings and so on, and otherwise benefit from the mining and processing of non-renewable resources extracted from the earth. My further point here is that it is enough to pile blame and opprobrium onto the mining industry regarding the pollution of rivers, a poor safety record, accidents and chemical spills on roads, complacency regarding the local procurement of items needed by the mine, minimal training opportunities for local people, and more, without examining our own lives. While this examination

20. Barbara Frazer, ‘Environmental Health as an Equity Issue: The Case of La Oroya’, in Extractives and Equity: An Introductory Overview and Case Studies from Peru, Angola and Nigeria, ed. Tom Bamat, Aaron Chassy and Rees Warne (Baltimore, MD: Catholic Relief Services, 2011), 50–51. 21. Aderoju Oyefusi, ‘Oil-dependence and Civil Conflict in Nigeria’, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford, CSAE WPS/2007–09, June 2007. https://www. csae.ox.ac.uk/workingpapers/pdfs/2007-09text.pdf (accessed 31 August 2017).

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

185

might result in our more careful and sparing use of the products of mining, it might also demand more careful scrutiny of differences between companies in how they mine. Few of us have any moral high ground from which to lob stones at industries that facilitate our lifestyle needs.22 If some companies are approaching the churches with questions about how to engage better with local communities and contribute to sustainable development, perhaps the onus rests on the churches to engage, albeit critically.23 Readers might have a sense of shock that we can even ask this question of whether the churches and mining industry might partner in sustainable development for the two reasons that mining extracts non-renewable resources from the earth, and the industry’s long legacy of pollution means that many thousands of people live 22. As Pope Francis teaches, the meaning of ‘sustainable development’ must be differentiated, that is, we must be ready for sustainable development to mean different things in different parts of the world. ‘The poorest areas and countries are less capable of adopting new models for reducing environmental impact because they lack the wherewithal to develop the necessary processes and to cover their costs.’ Sustainable development will be geared to the common good, with particular bias given to the poor and the protection of nature. ‘For new models of progress to arise, there is a need to change “models of global development”; this will entail a responsible reflection on “the meaning of the economy and its goals with an eye to correcting its malfunctions and misapplications”’. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §194. 23. The issues rapidly become complex. Consider mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Should the churches lobby for disinvestment in companies that mine in that troubled country or press for socially, economically and environmentally responsible mining that can contribute to the stability and prosperity of the country? Church ethical investment committees and funds managed on behalf of church investments face such questions. So too do participating members of collaborations such as the MFRI. This conflict-torn country has had its many problems compounded by the illegal exploitation of natural resources. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which is a 50+ year old organization that seeks to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world, with agenda skewed heavily towards promoting confidence in markets and the institutions that make them function, has due diligence guidance for responsible supply chains of minerals from conflict-affected and high-risk areas. The UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) recognizes that conflict minerals, mined in conditions of armed conflict and human rights abuses, sold or traded by armed groups, have been a particular problem for some years in the DRC. [For the UK government’s guidance on these topics, see https://www.gov.uk/ guidance/conflict-minerals.] Yet the DRC’s mineral wealth is enormous: ‘It is estimated that the country contains between 65–80% of the world’s columbite-tantalite (coltan) reserves, 49% of its cobalt reserves, and 3% of its copper reserves. Gold and diamond deposits remain under explored. Industrial Diamond reserves are estimated at 25% of world reserves.’ This mineral wealth should, says the FCO, be a legitimate source of revenue for the state and the local population.

186

The Limit of Responsibility

today with the results of historical mining activity as well as current disreputable, illegal and informal mining that devastates the environment. For the record, upon receiving the initial invitation from Lambeth Palace in January 2014 to join the Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative, I drafted an email to decline – for fear of damage to my reputation due to contact with transnational corporations, international commodity trading, legacy issues respecting pollution, the many problematic realities at mine sites and more. What prevented my pressing ‘send’ was the recognition that the computer with which I was writing the email was packed with the products of mining, as was the electricity infrastructure required to send it and the building in which I was sitting. There was also the possibility that my work pension was invested partially in the industry. I decided to fear compromise less than hypocrisy and to accept the invitation, and committed myself, as far as was possible, to letting the land and local people speak about the realities of mining as they impact on miners, their families and other local people, tribal and other local traditions, livestock, flora and fauna, other native species and so on, as well as to standing in solidarity with local people who decide that they must resist large-scale mining in their area.24 Something important that I learned is that all companies are not the same. Many companies remain unconvinced by the aim of partnering with local communities, NGOs, churches and others in sustainable development, yet there has been a groundswell of support for the idea of the mining industry partnering with diverse bodies that share these same goals. Participants in the Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative testify to many examples of such 24. My hesitancy to get involved with this conversation process was felt by other participants too. We all reported comments at the conclusion of the various mine site visits. One participant wrote, ‘Before going I was challenged by a number of people whether traveling as a guest of Anglo American left me compromised – how would I be sure that the issues that were being raised with us were the ones local people would want to raise? Would we simply be shown the best – the most impressive …’ [And after …] ‘There is a great deal of good taking place and that the lives of significant numbers of people are being positively affected …’. Another stated, ‘My impression is that at the beginning the members of the Faith Group were hesitant on the “intentions” of mining firms in their invitation: “Do they just want us to tell them how well they perform? Are they attempting to pay for our religious conformity?” But as the visit progressed, friendship and trust increased with the representatives of the firms. I have had very sincere and fruitful exchanges with these representatives, with “zero censorship” from my part: high level of trust with all members of the delegation.’ For the record, and to the best of my knowledge, no participant received a fee for time or work undertaken in association with these site visits but did claim expenses to cover travel and other associated costs. Participants included church leaders from a range of denominations, representatives from church investment bodies and related advisory committees on ethical investment, academic theologians and economists, seminary teachers, NGO and United Nations Development Programme workers in the extractives sector and more.

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

187

partnering in practice.25 The KIN Catalyst ‘Mining Company of the Future Development Partner Framework 2014’ is a notable example that talks of the potential for mining ‘if properly managed by both companies and governments, to be a significant catalyst for the socioeconomic development of the countries and communities in which mines are developed and operated’.26 The International Institute for Environment and Development in its ‘Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development’ report makes a similar though less ambitious point: The mining and minerals industry has come under tremendous pressure to improve its social, developmental and environmental performance. Like other parts of the corporate world, companies are more routinely expected to perform to ever-higher standards of behaviour, going well beyond achieving the best rate of return for shareholders. They are also increasingly being asked to be more transparent and subject to third-party audit or review.27

The International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), an international industry association comprising twenty-two of the largest mining and metals companies and thirty-three national and regional mining associations and global commodity associations, advocates a Sustainable Development Framework with ten principles benchmarked against leading international standards that include commitments to: 1. Principle 02: Integrate sustainable development considerations within the corporate decision-making process. 2. Principle 06: Seek continual improvement of our environmental performance. 3. Principle 09: Contribute to the social, economic and institutional development of the communities in which we operate. 4. Principle 10: Implement effective and transparent engagement, communication and independently verified reporting arrangements with our stakeholders.28

25. To be cited anonymously in conformity with University of Exeter Ethics Committee Approval. 26. KIN Catalyst, ‘Mining Company of the Future Development Partner Framework 2014’, 8. Available online: http://www.kinglobal.org/mining-catalyst.html (accessed: 31 August 2017). 27. International Institute for Environment and Development, ‘Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development (MMSD)’, http://www.iied.org/mining-minerals-sustainabledevelopment-mmsd (accessed 31 August 2015). 28. International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), ten principles available at: http://www.icmm.com/our-work/sustainable-development-framework/10-principles (accessed 31 August 2015).

188

The Limit of Responsibility

ICMM principle 09 further requires members of this leading industry association to contribute to the social, economic and institutional development of the communities in which we operate by commitment to: 1. Engage at the earliest practical stage with likely affected parties to discuss and respond to issues and conflicts concerning the management of social impacts. 2. Ensure that appropriate systems are in place for ongoing interaction with affected parties, making sure that minorities and other marginalized groups have equitable and culturally appropriate means of engagement. 3. Contribute to community development from project development through closure in collaboration with host communities and their representatives. 4. Encourage partnerships with governments and non-governmental organizations to ensure that programmes (such as community health, education, local business, development) are well designed and effectively delivered. 5. Enhance social and economic development by seeking opportunities to address poverty. Mindful of the high standards of the ICMM, the language of ‘partnership’ with respect to sustainable development is too industry-friendly for some, in that it does not take enough account of power imbalances between companies and local communities. The language of partnership is increasingly familiar in mining industry literature. But not all companies are equally committed to these higher expectations of mining companies. Not all companies want the kind of significant change that prioritizes long-term local development, demands a clean environment for people affected by the mine, involves local people in decision-making, regards communication and collaboration with local people as key to the success of the mine, seeks out participation from leaders in industry, academia, not-for-profit organizations, government, environmental and energy, social, political and safety sciences, to ensure transparency and accountability. Not all companies willingly heed and exceed international regulatory standards. The best do.

Overcoming the Resource Curse? The phrase ‘resource curse’ is familiar in debates about how natural resources like metals, minerals and oil are sourced by relatively developed countries in ways that leave a trail of devastation in their wake. As the phrase indicates, it cannot be assumed that countries with large mineral deposits should consider themselves blessed: Mining activity within a country does not always result in local sustainable businesses, education and health infrastructure, and other forms of investment that contribute to a nation’s well-being.29 The phrase has been associated with a 29. Di Boscio, 2010: passim, esp. 18.

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

189

failure to turn a country’s natural mineral, metal or oil wealth into benefits for local communities and the country as a whole ever since Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner’s 1995 article, which showed that economies with a high ratio of natural resource exports to GDP in 1971 (the base year) tended to have low growth rates during the subsequent period 1971–89.30 In a study that included ninety-seven developing countries, Sachs and Warner observed a negative relationship between rich resource endowments and the economic growth: ‘The oddity of resourcepoor economies outperforming resource-rich economies has been a constant motif of economic history.’31 This remained true in the 1970s and 1980s, Sachs and Warner claimed, even after controlling for variables found to be important for economic growth, such as initial per capita income, trade policy, government efficiency, investment rates and other variables.32 Reasons for the resource curse are deemed to be various, complex and interrelated, including a decline in the manufacturing sector due, inter alia, to better wages in the mining sector and the consequent drain of higher skilled labour into those jobs, with less incentive on 30. Jeffrey D. Sachs and Andrew M. Warner, ‘The Big Rush, Natural Resource Booms and Growth’, Journal of Development Economics 59, no. 1 (1999): 43–76. Previous notable studies in the area include A. Gelb and associates, Oil Windfalls: Blessing or Curse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 31. Sachs and Warner, ‘The Big Rush’, 44. 32. This study by Sachs and Warner was an empirical analysis of the association between resource abundance and economic growth, using World Bank data for a number of indicators. Subsequent studies have supported their conclusions, and Sachs and Warner have persisted with the question of whether the discovery of natural resources proves detrimental to a country’s development, and broadly supported the Sachs and Warner position. See C. Leite and J. Weidmann ‘Does Mother Nature Corrupt? Natural Resources, Corruption, and Economic Growth’, IMF Working Paper WP/99/85 (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 1999); M. Sarraf and M. Jiwanji, ‘Beating the Resource Curse: The Case of Botswana’, World Bank Environment Department Papers, Environmental Economics Series (Washington, DC: World Bank, October 2001); I. Bannon and P. Collier, ‘Natural Resources and Conflict: What We Can Do’, in Natural Resources and Violent Conflict: Options and Actions, ed. I. Bannon and P. Collier (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003): 1–17; X. Sala-i-Martin and A. Subramanian, ‘Addressing the Natural Resource Curse: An Illustration from Nigeria’, in Fiscal Policy Formulation and Implementation in Oil-Producing Countries, ed. J.M. Davis, R. Ossowski and A. Fedelino (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2003); B. Eifert, A. Gelb and N. Tallroth, ‘The Political Economy of Fiscal Policy and Economic Management in Oil Exporting Countries’, in Fiscal Policy Formulation and Implementation in Oil-Producing Countries, ed. J.M. Davis, R. Ossowski and A. Fedelino (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2003): 82– 122; E. Papyrakis and R. Gerlagh, ‘The Resource Curse Hypothesis and Its Transmissions Channels’, Journal of Comparative Economics 32 (2004): 181–193; L.P. Béland and R. Tiagi, ‘Economic Freedom and the “Resource Curse”: An Empirical Analysis’, in Studies in Mining Policy, ed. F. McMahon (Fraser Institute, 2009): 507–528.

190

The Limit of Responsibility

the general population to hold politicians to account and develop mechanisms of accountability when tax revenues from mining are steady and significant.33 Others have challenged the conclusion that mineral resource wealth is an economic curse for developing nations in particular, where growth and reduction of poverty are urgently needed. Daniel Lederman and William F. Maloney’s (eds) 2007 volume Natural Resources: Neither Curse nor Destiny accepted that wealth can be wasted, and that it can lead to destructive behaviours, but that some countries had become rich and technologically developed precisely through a judicious use of their natural resource wealth.34 It remains true, they state, that the richest present-day countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia and the Scandinavian countries were leaders among this latter group, but were concerned to dispel ‘the myth’ that developing countries necessarily experience the curse: ‘When natural resource–rich societies take appropriate complementary policies, they indeed become very rich and grow fast; when they don’t, they can certainly waste the great development opportunities that nature holds out for them.’35 Gary McMahon and Susana Moreira concluded in 2014 that many lowand middle-income mineral-rich countries have experienced strong growth for a decade or longer, propelled by a rapid expansion of their mineral exports and a rise in prices of these commodities, that is, they point out that many (indeed most) of the world’s fastest-growing countries since 2000 have been resource-rich.36 Benefits do not appear solely due to market forces.37 Public-private cooperation is required to kick-start the process, and strong and non-corrupt government is essential. Moreover, corporate social responsibility (CSR) type local community development programmes can have important local poverty-alleviation benefits and will make local development more sustainable in the long run. They should not be viewed in isolation, however: ‘… they do not substitute for sector-oriented policies and programs to enhance the long-run benefits on a macro scale’.38 33. For a more detailed review of this literature, see Andrew Rosser, ‘The Political Economy of the Resource Curse: A Literature Survey Institute of Development Studies’, Working Paper 268 (Brighton: University of Sussex, April 2006), and Louis-Philippe Bél and Raaj Tiagi, ‘Economic Freedom and the “Resource Curse”: An Empirical Analysis’, Studies in Mining Policy (The Fraser Institute, 2009): 8–13. 34. Daniel Lederman and William F. Maloney, eds., Natural Resources: Neither Curse nor Destiny, A Co-publication of Stanford Economics and Finance (Stanford University Press and the World Bank, 2007). 35. Lederman and Maloney, Natural Resources, xiv. 36. Gary McMahon and Susana Moreira, ‘The Contribution of the Mining Sector to Socioeconomic and Human Development’, The World Bank Working Paper 87298; Extractive industries for development series, no. 30, http://documents.worldbank. org/curated/en/713161468184136844/The-contribution-of-the-mining-sector-tosocioeconomic-and-human-development (accessed 22 August 2017). 37. McMahon and Moreira, ‘The Contribution of the Mining Sector’, 43. 38. McMahon and Moreira, ‘The Contribution of the Mining Sector’, 44.

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

191

‘The natural resource curse’ is how the Archbishop of Canterbury referred to this paradox during a Day of Reflection on Mining with the industry and church leaders.39 When years of mining produce nothing for local communities in the long term, the blessings of the earth’s natural resources do not sow the seeds for future development, but rather bring harm and misery. ‘[T]here has to be a change’, he said ‘in the endless cycle in a country where the first discovery of minerals or hydro-carbons leads to inflation, followed by deferred hope and impatience, and then by corruption and division and, finally, by disappointment and failure.’40 Archbishop Justin’s position was clear that reasons for the natural resource curse are structural, sociological and economic but that, at its heart, it derives from what Christians call ‘the fallen nature of humanity’. Issues such as these can only be tackled when we have a proper understanding of what is technically referred to as theological anthropology, or – translated into plain language – ‘what we are like as people’.41 The challenge for the industry and for wider society is to challenge the familiar human temptation to seek short-term benefits at the expense of longerterm goods. Equally, it is not enough for critics to scapegoat the mining industry, because most, if not all, citizens of relatively developed countries benefit from the products of mining. Churches, pension funds and many other investment bodies also have money in mining and are thereby implicated in the actions of the companies in which they are invested.42 The Methodist Church Joint Advisory Committee on the Ethics of Investment Annual Report 2016 paid specific attention to the extractive industries and welcomed the roll-out in 2015 of a single, unified voting template and policy for Church Investors Group (CIG) members; for the first time, the Church of England, Methodist Church of GB and other CIG members will vote at company meetings with one voice, so as to maximize influence.43 While the ‘natural resource curse’ might feel like a distant problem for people who are far away, even the churches bear some direct, traceable (in both directions) responsibility because of their investment in mining and other named companies. Anyone with a pension fund that they do not manage themselves in 39. Lambeth Palace Report 2014: 4. Available from Lambeth Palace. 40. Ecumenical Day of Reflection on Mining, 7 October 2014: 7. 41. Lambeth Palace Report 2014: 5. 42. The Ethical Investment Advisory Group (EIAG), which supports the Church of England’s National Investing Bodies with respect to ethical investment (notably the Church Commissioners, the Church of England Pensions Board and the Church of England funds managed by CCLA. https://www.ccla.co.uk), is available at https://www.churchofengland. org/about-us/structure/eiag.aspx. The Church Commissioners manage an investment fund of £7 billion and want to be ‘at the forefront of responsible investment practice’. Edward Mason, Investing in the Church’s Growth. The Church Commissioners Annual Report 2015, 28. https://www.churchofengland.org/media/2492846/churchcommissionersar2015.pdf (accessed 22 August 2017). 43. Revd. John Howard, Committee Chair, http://www.cfbmethodistchurch.org.uk/ downloads/jacei-annual-report-2016-web.pdf (accessed 22 August 2017).

192

The Limit of Responsibility

its entirety (i.e. by selecting the particular companies in which to invest) is likely to be implicated too. Every country is different. Some governments are highly dependent upon mining. Nearly 45 per cent of government revenues in Botswana and 25 per cent in the Democratic Republic of Congo come from mining.44 The ICMM maintains that mining investments can catalyse economic growth and reduce poverty in low- and middle-income countries, although benefits do not automatically flow down to the local level.45 Their second edition of The Role of Mining in National Economies, produced in conjunction with an independent research-based development consultancy as well as an industry-financed research unit, recognizes that the relationship between commercial mining and the economic and social development of host countries is always complex, and often contentious, but maintains that global mining companies have the potential to generate significant economic benefits for regional and national economies.46 Their summary data indicates that mining’s contribution to host economies is as follows: 50–65 per cent as capital investment and operating expenditure 10–20 per cent in salaries and wages 15–20 per cent as taxes, and other government payments such as royalties 15–20 per cent as returns to local shareholders and financing costs 0.5–1 per cent in local community capacity building. Only 15–20 per cent of what the economic activity of mining contributes to a national economy is revenue paid directly to government. Over 50 per cent is capital investment and operating expenditure that might contribute only indirectly, if at all, to benefits experienced by the population. Non-government expenditure via wages and returns to local shareholders is significant, along with the small percentage of direct spend on local community capacity buildings.47 44. ICMM, The Role of Mining in National Economies, 3rd edition (London, ICMM, 2017), https://www.icmm.com/website/publications/pdfs/society-and-the-economy/161026_ icmm_romine_3rd-edition.pdf p.3 (accessed 22 August 2017). 45. ICMM, ‘Economic Development’. See http://www.icmm.com/en-gb/society-andthe-economy/economic-development (accessed 22 August 2017). 46. ICMM, The Role of Mining in National Economies: 36. 47. The ICMM and partners are working to develop a reliable Mining Contribution Index (MCI) to capture important aspects of the contribution from mining to national economies, to stimulate debate about the challenges in measuring these contributions, how to measure the impact of short- and longer-term price variations on a country and to assess variations in direct effects (e.g., direct employment, taxes and other payments, capital and operating expenditure), indirect effects (e.g., related employment, skills development, local procurement of supplies and technical support, community programmes and joint infrastructure) and induced effects (e.g., knock-on jobs and skills development, improved productivity in local business, improved incomes and living standards). Critically important to the ICMM agenda is redirecting the focus of the industry and wider public towards the contribution of mining to sustainable development and very direct benefits to local communities.

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

193

All this suggests the growing need for the United Nations to work with corporations and the private sector on matters previously reserved to nation states.48 The work of the United Nations includes the promotion of economic and social development alongside the enhancement of regional and international security. The role of transnational corporations in both spheres has been growing significantly since the 1970s.49 Touted as the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative, the Global Compact was a call to companies to align their strategies and operations with universal principles on human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption and to take actions that advance UN-recognized societal goals. Areas of focus include environmental risks and recognition that the fate of business is tied to the planet; social impacts and opportunities affecting employees, workers in the value chain, customers and local communities; governance that supports the economic development of the societies in which corporations operate; sustainable development to ensure a better future for all; management of risk in financial markets; the extension of principled practices throughout the entire network of a corporations’ activities. The Global Compact is a voluntary compact that embraces ten principles of good international corporate practice, covering human rights, labour standards, the environment and anti-corruption.50 Without regulatory power, the Global Compact works by exercising influence without coercion. Its goals are widely recognized as being deliberately vague and open in order to encourage rather than close down dialogue and build broad-based support. So what? We have established that no one with an insurance policy, pension fund or savings pot that attracts interest accrued from stock market investments can wash their hands of this debate. No one who benefits from the products of mining is exempt from moral involvement in how companies mine, what kind of relationships are forged with local communities, whether these communities are weakened or strengthened in the long term by the presence of the mine and so on. While it seems preposterous in some respects to suggest that good-natured and kindly people who might never have heard of these tragedies, and with no known investments in BHP Billiton or Vale,51 whose dam failed at Samarco, should 48. This story has been told recently by Tagi Sagafi-Nejad in collaboration with John H. Dunning, in The UN and Transnational Corporations: From Code of Conduct to Global Compact (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), passim but esp. ch. 1. 49. In 1973, the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) appointed a group to study the impact of TNCs on economic development and international relations, and to advise the UN on this issue. This resulted in the establishment of a permanent commission and a centre on TNCs to advise the UN especially in relation to developing countries. In 1999, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan launched a UN partnership mission called the Global Compact. 50. United Nations Global Compact. For details of its aims, governance, participating countries and companies, and so on, see https://www.unglobalcompact.org (accessed 31 August 2017). 51. Vale is a Brazilian multinational corporation with a 50 per cent interest in Samarco Mineração S.A.

194

The Limit of Responsibility

be deemed responsible in some way for this failure, it is too easy to lambast the mining industry as if citizens of the one-third world bear no moral guilt with respect to the natural resource curse. Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones. For the churches to take a further step towards partnering with the mining industry in sustainable development, however, raises many questions.

Responsibility Lived as Church Compromise takes many forms.52 Readers will vary in the kind of compromise that they associate with the Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative. Have participants in the MFRI seen and heard only what the big companies want to be seen and heard? Have they been sucked into ‘churchwashing’ or providing a religious gloss while companies construct a misleading impression of corporate responsibility? My personal answer is no, those engaged in this process are genuinely seeking better ways forward, but time will tell. And, of course, difficult tensions remain. Risks to the purity of Christian witness in the eyes of some are many. On the other hand, failure to engage might constitute a failure to (re-)learn the meaning of responsibility from You close to mine sites, a failure to grapple with the realities of living miteinander-in-sin and to live what’s entailed practically in vicarious representative action. Environmentally and socially destructive production and consumption of the products of mining cannot somehow be made responsible by the occasional community relations project that benefits a few hundred people. ‘Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen’ (‘wrong life cannot be rightly lived’).53 Equally, while we might all try to reduce consumption, recycle more and travel less, one-third world demand for the products of mining is not likely to dry up anytime soon. Development in the two-third world is increasing demand too. How companies mine matters deeply to local communities. Merely to retort that Milton Friedman was right all along, that is, that the cloak of social responsibility is a hypocritical window dressing which that harms the market foundations of a free society, is too simplistic.54 When accepted uncritically and taken to the extreme, Friedman’s 52. Etymologically from the Latin com- ‘together’ and promittere (from promissum meaning ‘something promised’), compromise means co-promising or reaching an agreement despite differing motivations or objectives. More pejoratively, to be compromised is to accept standards that are lower than is desirable, thereby weakening or harming something else. 53. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (Verso, 2005), 39. Highlighted for comment by Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 193. 54. ‘ … there is one and only one [] responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud’. Milton Friedman, ‘The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits’, The New York Times

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

195

assumption results in the obscene excesses of a lightly regulated capitalist economy. At the other end of the spectrum, ill-informed condemnation of businesses ignores that profit-making might not be the only motivation driving owners and employees to work hard. Business has the ability to do tremendous good.55 One of my abiding MFRI personal memories from a visit to a mine site in South Africa is the conviction, energy and indeed joy in the faces of employees when describing their work with local communities. One junior manager visibly shone as he recounted accompanying miners to local hospitals on Mandela Day to spend sixty-seven minutes with patients distributing goods collected over several weeks – an optional ‘outside work’ activity. For him, it was a throwaway comment at the end of a much longer conversation about minimizing negative environmental, health and social impacts from the mine, building trust with the workers and creating constructive relationships with host communities. For me, it spoke volumes about good relationships between junior management and miners, and about a company ethos that looked for genuine commitment to local communities and employees for whom ‘doing the right thing’ did not conflict with how they earned a salary. Elsewhere, I have visited an organic vegetable farm set up by the mining company but has now been handed over to a local cooperative. The reservoir dug by the company provides crystal clear water for the farmers. I have seen fixed and mobile health centres part-run by the mining company and run by local government. I have met a small group of women who borrowed from the mining company’s low-interest loan scheme to grow saplings from roots, suckers, nuts and so on that they sell when viable and other groups of women who make leather and fabric goods, sell street food, run nail bars – and more – on the same basis. Financial and other business advice is available from the mining company upon request. Reflections from other participants include the following: Magazine, 13 September 1970. Available online: http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/ libertarians/issues/friedman-soc-resp-business.html (accessed 29 August 2017). 55. This is one of the underlying beliefs of the Blueprint for Better Business initiative that encourages the behaviours necessary for people to make business decisions informed by a purpose to deliver long-term sustainable performance with honesty and fairness, and as guardians for future generations. The Blueprint movement came into being in 2012 as a result of a number of UK business leaders approaching the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. ‘One concern was that the current focus in business was business competence rather than the development of character to make the right judgments. It was felt that the concept of a “divided life” – leaving the best of the personal values and morals formed outside the workplace at the door when at work – was both a symptom of this and an asset that should be brought to bear.’ Since 2012, the Blueprint for Better Business initiative has run workshops, seminars and more, to invite the leaders of businesses of all sizes to think about having a corporate purpose that serves society as well as delivering a financial return. See http://www.blueprintforbusiness.org/explore_principles/

196

The Limit of Responsibility

The value of metals It made me realize how little society, including myself, valued this material and how essential it is for our daily lives – this operation, ‘moving a mountain’, was the pay-off for the standard of living that we expect. I needed to place a higher value on ‘metals’ moving forwards. Minerals are necessary for our everyday life. We cannot have them without mining. I have a new appreciation for all who labour to make these everyday conditions possible and will continue to reflect on the theological and ethical significance of the things we take for granted, forgetting that they do not just appear but are produced by the toil of others. Higher safety standards than in public perception I had expected to be visiting a dangerous facility and, by doing so, to be putting myself at risk (this was certainly the view of my wife!). However, instead of a ‘Victorian’ perception of mining the order of the operation was inherently reassuring. Despite being an inherently dangerous activity it felt that all risks were in control; there was no need to worry. I was struck by the unique work environment of an isolated mine in the middle of the bush, by the very strong culture of safety and risk awareness … The technical level, including security and environmental issues, is very high in both mines. Engagement with Communities The need for communication: There are opportunities for [the company – EDR] to communicate more with communities regarding what they do and how they are addressing the challenges in the area. A number of delegates raised the issue that the mine doesn’t communicate well on things that they are doing, or on SLP commitments, and improvements here would potentially help. … A regular refrain in the community meetings was that the company should do more – a recognition from the delegates that this may speak to a lack of communication. … [T]here should be an awareness of all the stakeholders who should be involved in discussions and that this should include the churches. The need for mining companies and local communities to communicate person to person: Despite being presented with scientific data to the contrary, communities remained inherently concerned that the dam would not survive a significant earthquake and lives would be lost. Science did not successfully provide the reassurance that the community needed, the message was not delivered in a way that it could be understood. Was this symptomatic of a wider disjunction between a rational and highly scientific industry and people (which, irrespective of their location or culture, are inherently emotional and irrational)? Could a scientific industry really communicate effectively to emotional humanity and

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

197

was this the root of the wider problems that it was facing? How can a company communicate as a person to people? I was pleased to see evidence of a respect for people (employees and others affected by the operation over a considerable area) demonstrated in the care taken with safety issues and in the consideration given to re-use of resources (especially water, in a hot agricultural area) and to pollution control. The reality of the Business Center at RBA (Supplier Development activities and incorporation of local businesses to the value chain) is a remarkable step towards a connection between firm and community that is not limited to ‘help the community’. It is a real invitation to the community to participate in the production process (in the ‘core business’) of the firm. And this is what CSR is about, in my opinion. [I]t was a joyful experience to see the community’s pride in their trout farm, the entrepreneurial spirit in many activities they promote such as agro-tourism (better than Switzerland!), wood factory and agriculture. Relationships with local churches Churches already working on issues of poverty alleviation: Numerous social problems have accompanied the mass migration of people from rural areas to the Copperbelt. The Church has to deal with some of these social problems created by the need of people leaving the rural areas in search of employment. It was a sadness to see the poor state of relationships between the company and the local churches. Especially in South America, the churches are a huge force for good. As the churches have a much longer life expectancy than a mining project, the company would do well to work at building mutual understanding with the churches. Monetary support is particularly important to churches that believe that God’s blessing is expressed in increased wealth (‘prosperity gospel’) – a corruption of Christian teaching that is attractive to poorer communities. The final day with the local clergy was a difficult but necessary session. They met us with suspicions and raised important questions. What I found most hopeful was the willingness on all sides to engage in a rational exchange about economics, politics and faith, which is not something easy to do, but certainly worth our time and effort. An example of good news – perceptions are changing: The Bishop we met shared his view of the mine development. He had his own reservations in the beginning of the mine development in the area because of his previous experience. The reservations changed as the dialogue started between the mine and the community. The openness of the mine provided hope to the Bishop that the community will receive a better deal unlike in the other mines where the community got a raw deal. He further went on to say the advent of the mines

198

The Limit of Responsibility

reduced criminal activities in the community because most people were able to get an income either through working at the mine or through the businesses they established. The woman we met testified how her life was transformed from poverty to a relatively well-off business lady. She mentioned that she was not the only one but many others who were in her state have changed. Importance of knowledge and education As a Church we represent and speak for people without voices who are mainly the powerless in society. One thing that I have learnt which will help me is to have more facts about the mines before undertaking advocacy. This will help to deal with different mine investors in different ways as opposed to having a blanket view and lumping all mines as being the same. Significance of exports of natural resources for some countries I had not realized the high dependence of Western Australia, and indeed Australia as a whole, on mining exports. Legacy issues I was saddened to hear of the still desperate plight of Aboriginal communities continuing to suffer from the long-term effects of displacement, discrimination and destruction of their culture. Mining companies, including [company name], have some valuable initiatives that attempt to enable communities to benefit from mining activity, but it is clear that in a situation of such social, economic and political disadvantage, indigenous people here struggle to be able to engage with mining activity in an advantageous way. Framing the social and economic development question In contrast to the floatation plant, and the mine itself, I found the ‘tailings lake’ to be a draining experience. I found myself thinking about legacy; Was the lake a metaphor for the social impact of mining? Was there going to be a ‘human and economic tailings lake’ with the industry having taken the ‘valuable materials’ and left behind what it did not need? Framing some investment questions As a ‘responsible investment professional’ it is my job to help our investment managers, and investee companies, take longer-term decisions. However, it became quite obvious that, given a mine is a ‘hundred-year project’, this is exceptionally pertinent for the extractives industries. As industry-wide practices affect company reputation and the reputation of [the company] therefore depends on much more than its own operations and community relations … this [Faith Group Engagement Process] is investing significantly in creating field-level change. It is raising the bar, not only on what

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

199

they do but now also in how they communicate with stakeholders such as the shareholders. Looking forward Easy criticism of mining companies can be hypocritical. Perhaps for the future, it would be good to come up with a social campaign that lets consumers know about these efforts so they can also affirm with their purchases from those companies that are socially responsible and environmentally sustainable. Your welcome of our Faith Group proves that you are open to grow in trust with your stakeholders. What can best be done by different stakeholders to raise the standards of all operators to the standards of the best? What contribution can the Churches, locally or globally, make to that evidently desirable outcome? As far as a non-expert could tell [the company] appeared to take very seriously not just legal but moral responsibilities to make a net positive impact on the communities around their operations. I hope that the companies will continue to engage faith-based investors and stakeholders in the hopes that we can bring to the table our unique perspectives: we see our presence and purpose on the earth as being stewards for the next generations; we see the use of land and water as a sacred trust; and we see our collective impacts on the environment as well as the people as creating or destroying the health of the planet we all share. Both these mining companies have benefited from forward-looking leadership making decisions to be more transparent and accountable. Placing information about risk and material issues, emphasizing sustainability and community development in the public view is a good start. I have the strong feeling that I am more empowered to include in my ministry a new way of engaging the world of business based on solid principles of social good and environmental stewardship. I intend to start community dialogue at local level with mining companies, the Church and other faith groups. The focus will be on moral principles and seeking the good for all peoples and parties in any situation. I will also seek the commitment of the local mining industry to a serious examination of activities and of conscience as we look for sustainable human development. Religious investor groups are in a unique position to help improve respect for human rights in the mining sector. We need to promote a dialogue between firms and NGOs and Faith Groups – where each side should be sure that the other side is intelligent and well intentioned, so that differences in opinion cannot be interpreted in terms of ‘They are ill intentioned’ or ‘They don’t know what they are talking about.’

200

The Limit of Responsibility

Please, explore new methods and spaces to grow in trust with the local communities (including your employees) so that you may progress in the common effort towards social justice and environmental sustainability. The creation of Global Mining Chaplaincy can perhaps be served by local chaplains attached to particular sites or a network of sites; an aspect of chaplaincy work can be a development of spirituality of mining. What about chaplaincy to include the provision of pastoral care and support for the labourers who are mostly men, away from their families?

Responsibility lived as church will look different from one locality to another. I urge a case-by-case response along with hope is for reinvigorated debate about the church working alongside other organizations for whom the motivation to act responsibly is not found in Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer leans us, I suggest, towards an expansive interpretation of freedom in Jesus Christ to follow where he leads.56 While God’s paradoxical commandment to be free makes little sense for the individual in abstract terms, Bonhoeffer refuses to deal with the topic in abstract terms. The commandment of God ‘is always a concrete speaking to someone, and never an abstract speaking about something or someone. It always addresses and claims … ’ (DBWE 6:381). Like Moses’s encounter at the burning bush, God’s command is unmistakable, unequivocal and personal (DBWE 4:84). The question of compromise is subsumed within the commandment to be free. Bonhoeffer’s reminder is that Christian people may not retreat to a sect-like mode of existence; they may not abandon the world but must live incarnately in the world for Christ’s sake. The visible church-community must occupy a space on earth, its physical living space (Lebensraum), in and from which witness is made to the God of order and peace: Christians are to remain in the world, not because of the God-given goodness of the world, nor even because of their responsibility for the course the world takes. They are to remain in the world solely for the sake of the body of the Christ who became incarnate – for the sake of the church-community. They are to remain in the world in order to engage the world in a frontal assault. Let them ‘live out their vocation in this world’ in order that their ‘unworldliness’ might become fully visible. … The world must be contradicted within the world. That is why

56. The problem of obedience that beset Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is said by Bonhoeffer, in the 1929 Barcelona essay, to dissolve in a direct and free relationship with God where what matters is simply that each action of every individual is confirmed and endorsed by eternity (DBWE 10:363). Later writings connect the immediacy and provisionality of a person’s freedom before God to the ultimacy of divine command: ‘Just as specifically as God spoke to Abraham and Jacob and Moses, and just as specifically as God spoke in Jesus Christ to the disciples, and to the congregations through the apostles, so God speaks just as specifically to us, or God does not speak at all’ (DBWE 6:379).

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

201

Christ became a human being and died in the midst of his enemies. It is for this reason – and this reason alone! – that slaves are to remain slaves, and Christians are to remain subject to authority. (DBWE 4:244)

No church-community is morally pure or relieved of the specifics of its situation. It lives across difference: ‘a community in which Jew remains Jew, Greek, worker, and capitalist, and where all are nevertheless the body of Christ’ (DBWE 1:246). There is no pure, transcendent form of the church apart from daily practicalities. Furthermore, the concrete church has political import, and this is often overlooked among the Bonhoeffer scholarship. Thus Bonhoeffer references Luther’s struggle against Rome and other situations in which authority and freedom clashed in the empirical church (SC, 250) and is clear that the burden of the word laid upon the church is its being forced to assume responsibility not only for preaching but also for speaking authoritatively in public settings: ‘the church ought to speak authoritatively about its position on current events and the world at large; but of course only after these theological issues have been addressed clearly and unequivocally, for otherwise everything else would be without a foundation’ (DBWE 1:251). Few, if any, knee-jerk reactions to the question of compromise are adequate to meet the challenge of responsibility in a globalizing era. Dispossession of the moral high ground, as if the church-community was somehow morally superior or more reputable than any business that has profit-making as at least one of its objectives, is integral to the church-community’s sharing the everydayness of human being’s in Adam’s guilt (DBWE 2:147). This dispossession does not compromise the clear distinction between ‘being in Adam’ and ‘being in Christ’ (DBWE 2:136). This is knowledge from revelation, which can never be had apart from it, that is, precisely in Adam. For ‘in Adam’ means to be in untruth, in culpable perversion of the will, that is, of human essence. (DBWE 2:137)

‘Sola fide credendum est nos esse peccatores’ (DBWE 2:136).57 ‘In Adam’, human beings begin and end with themselves in knowing; this is the problem that we have seen at the pathological heart of the modern problem of responsibility. Rather, the question of compromise is relearned in Christ and dispossesses the churchcommunity of any self-righteousness. ‘By turning our focus back to the origin of all responsibility, we come to understand what willingness to become guilty means’ (DBWE 6:275).

Learning from Advocacy Agents The average consumer is unlikely to have the expertise necessary to adjudicate between the various companies and to apply lobbying pressure. Church institutions, however, are sometimes better equipped to exercise this role. Ethical 57. ‘By faith alone we know that we are sinners.’

202

The Limit of Responsibility

investment advisory groups such as those mentioned above are tasked with precisely this function. Advocacy agents (NGOs, groups and networks) that work alongside people closest to the effects of mining are also invaluable guides to ‘what’s going on?’.58 One of the longest-standing advocacy agents in the mining sector is the Ignatian Solidarity Network that works amid issues raised by natural and mineral resources.59 This is a social justice network inspired by the spirituality of St Ignatius of Loyola working with Jesuit universities, parishes and many other Catholic institutions and social justice partners. Their calling is to a ‘see, judge and act’ methodology enacted in ways that reflect the gospel of Christ in its fullness.60 The Ignatian Solidarity Network has been committed to this methodology in order to ensure a balance between reflection and action, and in order to stay close to people’s experiences. The task of seeing requires careful attention to these questions: Why is this happening? Who gains from this situation? Who loses out? Why does this situation continue? The task of judging requires interpretation of what is seen in the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ, by reflecting on Scripture and listening for the Word of God particularly through the eyes of the poor and marginalized. The task of acting requires attention to the questions: What needs to be done to resolve the situation? What can I/we do? How will my/our action change those involved? How can I/we tell if it is successful?61

58. Advocacy agents vary considerably in the foci, modalities, doctrinal motivations and methodologies of their work but typically offer well-established and wide-ranging access to the perspectives of communities affected by mining. Their work variously covers a wide span of advocacy strategies, from radical confrontation (a priori ‘No’ to mining) to collaboration with companies to improve their contribution to the welfare of communities. Five main dimensions in advocacy strategies are distinguishable: accompanying the life of communities affected by mining; serving particular needs of such communities; studying the complex situation of firm–community interactions; raising awareness in communities, and also at national and international levels, about the challenges of firm–community relationships; advocating the rights of communities vis-à-vis companies and political bodies. 59. Ignatian Solidarity Network mining blog https://ignatiansolidarity.net/blog/tag/ mining/ (accessed 31 August 2017). 60. This method demands attentiveness to all the relevant data and experiences not just what we want or choose to ‘see’. Pope John XIII affirmed the importance of this method in Mater et Magistra (1961): ‘There are three stages that should normally be followed in the reduction of social principles into practice. First, one reviews the concrete situation; secondly, one forms a judgment on it in the light of these same principles; thirdly, one decides what in the circumstances can and should be done to implement these principles. These are the three stages that are usually expressed in the three terms: observe, judge, act.’ Mater et Magistra, Encyclical of Pope John XXIII on Christianity and Social Progress, 15 May 1961, §236. 61. Integrity of Creation Working Group, JPIC Commission of the Union of Superior Generals and the International Union of Superior Generals (USG/UISG), ‘The Earth is, the

Confronting the Vices of Hubris

203

The Ignatian Solidarity Network, for instance, urges proactive engagement by anyone capable of pressing for change. Every reader of ‘The Earth is, the Lord’s, and all that is in it’ (Ps. 24.1). It urges a ‘see, judge, act’ methodology on the impacts of mining and calls upon activists to write to lobby decision-makers, elected officials and corporations, in order to support transparency and action in support of those affected by mining. They list points to be considered, including:   1. Ask what assurances are in place to preserve and conserve our water and soil from any adverse effects from gas/oil exploration and mining.   2. Express concern about possible contamination due to the mining process.   3. Express concern that the water being used in mining takes away from the availability of water for farming purposes.   4. Address the possible contamination of soil from chemicals used in mining.   5. Express concern that good farming land is being disrupted by having oil wells on the farm land.   6. Recognize the disruption to farming because of the extra roads, oil wells, traffic and pipelines.   7. Acknowledge the difficulty of farmers finding agricultural workers when the companies can pay high wages.   8. Address the division being caused in country towns due to the promise of prosperity from the mining industry and the possible loss of livelihood for farming families.   9. Express concern about what to do with the contaminated water that is brought to the surface in the mining process. 10.  Support the ability of governments to manage mining revenues in ways that reduce corruption and promote human development in areas such as education and health. 11.  Familiarize yourself with, and work to strengthen, the implementation of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) which enlists governments and companies, voluntarily, to agree to follow established standards and guidelines and to ‘publish what they pay’ so that the huge financial flows involved are more open and transparent. 12.  Promote and facilitate dialogue among the stakeholders. To protect the lives and dignity of poor people and to assure that potential benefits of natural resource extraction are realized, all parties involved in the mining industry sector – producers and consumers – need to adjust their practices and work together. 13.  Promote and facilitate free, prior and informed consent and roundtable discussions. In particular, indigenous peoples have a traditional, spiritual connection to land which can make the impact of mining projects particularly devastating to their culture and way of life, in addition to the Lord’s, and all that is in it (Ps. 24.1): A See, Judge, Act Reflection on the Impacts of Mining’ (Rome, 2014), 6.

204

The Limit of Responsibility

violation of other rights (environmental, health and well-being). Often this holistic understanding of indigenous communities is neither understood nor respected by companies undertaking mining projects, which presents particular challenges in dealing with their potential or actual negative impacts.62 Learning from advocacy agents can help Christian people confront the vices of hubris, the worship of power, envy and illusionism as the roots of all evil in connection with the mining sector. Like mining companies, not all advocacy agents are the same. Some opt for the radical response that all mining damages the natural environment by definition. To my mind, this response is not warranted. While far more fossil fuel stocks and other non-renewable resources than we might have thought a few decades ago may simply have to stay in the ground for our mutual well-being, and while recycled supplies of metals are increasingly important, it is pointlessly idealistic merely to observe that all mining by definition damages the natural environment such that all mining should cease.63 The more difficult and important challenge is to identify where the line of compromise falls, how it is moving and where it must be held fast in order to prevent environmental harm and damage to local communities.

62. Integrity of Creation Working Group, ‘The Earth is, the Lord’s’, 48–49. 63. ‘Desmond Tutu Intervenes over King’s College London’s Refusal to Divest’.

Chapter 6 R E SP O N SI B I L I T Y A S P O L I T IC A L EV E N T

This book has argued for a You-I-You rather than an I-You-I structuring of responsibility learned in Christ and neighbour. The focus on industry-scale mining has been intended to help present-day thinking about responsibility, initially as a question of accountability, in the light of Christian teaching about ancestral, transpersonal, transgenerational and transnational sin, with particular attention being paid to the non-traceability of harms. This focus has helped us to see that no person can answer the question of responsibility alone. None of us can answer in isolation that an action is or is not responsible. In a globalizing era, and in the kinds of contexts that we have been discussing, judgement about whether an action is or is not responsible is not mine to make alone; the dynamic of responsibility is inherently relational. You hold the meaning of responsibility for me. The challenge for the discipline of Christian ethics is to get serious about what this means. So far, we have thought with Bonhoeffer about the meaning locus imperii of human existence miteinander-in-sin, what it means to live ‘for-each-other’ [füreinander] and to be called to vicarious representative action [Stellvertretung] as the lived meaning of responsibility. Bonhoeffer has helped us to see the importance of treating the culpability of the individual and the universality of sin together (DBWE 1:110) while further demanding practical, empirically informed responses from the church-community which knows for doctrinal reasons that Adam has been replaced by Christ eschatologically (DBWE 1:124). We have seen that the ongoing labour of Christian ethics is to develop a theologically informed theory of responsibility capable of grappling adequately with the new features of the problem of responsibility that: 1. exceed agent-causality-consequence definitions that presuppose tight causal links between the agent’s actions and their effects; 2. face the temptation to relinquish the question of responsibility because, amid the realities of globalization, the consequences of one’s own actions appear vanishingly small; 3. reckon with the unintended or unknown negative effects of actions on phenomena elsewhere;

206

The Limit of Responsibility

4. make space for the additional concepts needed for the exercise of responsibility today: uncertainty, risk, solidarity, institutions, the future; 5. reverse the agent-act-consequence sequence to an understanding of responsibility that originates, and has its limit, in You. The nub of this chapter is that Bonhoeffer prepares the way not only for an inherently relational You-I-You structuring of responsibility but also for explication of the public and political dimensions of Pentecostal living. The question thus becomes how the church is to witness to the meaning of responsibility given in Christ. Again, Bonhoeffer points us in the right direction. Prior to Pentecost, he says, Jesus’s disciples represented him as followers and those sent out to preach the kingdom of God and heal the sick (Matt. 10:1–24; Lk 9:1–6). In Jesus’s absence, they were timid and afraid. After Pentecost, the disciples are endowed with his Spirit; his presence is theirs all the time. The community of disciples no longer merely represents Christ but shares in his very life: Formerly the disciple-community ‘represented’ Christ; now it possesses him as revelation, as Spirit. Thus the day of the founding of the actualized church remains Pentecost. Since human community was formed only when it became a community of will and spirit, and since human spirit is operative only in sociality, the church originates with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and so too the Holy Spirit is the spirit of the church-community of Christ. (DBWE 1:152)

The difference between representing Christ and possessing his life is encountered at Pentecost. In this chapter, we revisit the Chalcedonian doctrinal considerations that undergird Bonhoeffer’s all-too-brief comments on Pentecost in order to think more with Bonhoeffer about the demands upon a reforming church in a globalizing era. This includes reaffirming the importance of, and some implications of, Bonhoeffer’s focus on the local, empirical church. It requires moving in a direction of travel set by Bonhoeffer, to consider the politics of Pentecost – where ‘political’ is understood as the universalizing claim of the gospel, the openness of the church to God’s future and as creating the social space within which truth is sought.

Focused on the Empirical Church Throughout his entire corpus, Bonhoeffer stays focused on the empirical church. This is because inter alia something happens in the sacraments: ‘In substance Christ’s presence means community with God through Christ and realization of the church-community as bearer of the individuals’ (SC, 243).1 Bonhoeffer never 1. The classic work on this topic is Clifford J. Green, Bonhoeffer: A Theology of Sociality (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999).

Responsibility as Political Event

207

loses sight of the theological truth that, in the sacraments, a twofold, Chalcedonian dynamic is under way. The individual is drawn into the body of the church and the world is drawn close to God: ‘[H]umanity is drawn into community with God’ (DBWE 1:146). ‘The New humanity is seen synoptically in one point, in Christ’ (DBWE 1:157). The heart of the ethic here is worship, from which corporate action he derives the three modes of the church-community’s existence: plurality of spirit, community of spirit and unity of spirit (DBWE 1:237), and also the imperative that every local community or assembly must ‘in some way seek to express its confession of faith’ (DBWE 1:237). These convictions contain profound implications, he says, for social philosophy (SC, 156). What matters for our purposes especially is that the church comes into being only in the concrete social-historical contexts within which human beings are placed (SC, 249). No church-community exists apart from these publicly available, multiple, diverse and perhaps contradictory descriptors. There is no pure, transcendent form of the church apart from daily practicalities. This focus on the empirical church requires that two points are held in tension. The first is Bonhoeffer’s conviction that the church is created in empirical form by the Holy Spirit (DBWE 2:152). The doctrinal challenge is therefore to take seriously the socio-historical existence of the church: ‘it would be good for once if a presentation of doctrinal theology were to start not with the doctrine of God but with the doctrine of the church’ (DBWE 1:134).2 The truth of the empirical church is pre-volitional. The ontic-ethical existence of the church in Christ is deeper than volitional social acts, personal social relations, existing communal relations and so on. The essence of the church is constituted by divine, not human, act, hence the primacy of theological moves to define responsibility in terms of ecclesial living because of the incarnation and resurrection, and because Christ Jesus is the material bearer of value (DBWE 1:129). ‘[T]he “political ethics” of the church-community is grounded solely in its sanctification, the goal of which is that the world be world and community be community, and that, nevertheless, God’s word goes out from the church-community to all the world, as the proclamation that the earth and all it contains is the Lord’s’ (DBWE 4:261–262). ‘That Christ is the centre of our existence says that he is the judgment and the justification’ (DBWE 12:325). The very life of the church community is rooted here, as too is the expectation that ecclesial living will entail some enactment of Stellvertretung for the world (DBWE 4:67). 2. Remember, says Bonhoeffer, ‘the historically positive revelation of the holy in Christ, the “material bearer of value”’ (DBWE 1:129). Jesus Christ is the incarnate and risen concrete revelation – not merely a set of symbols – who gives to the Christian community today a sense of the ‘“historical” reality of the holy’ (DBWE 1:129). While some theologians have attempted to reckon seriously with this truth, writes Bonhoeffer, most have either failed to take adequate account of the empirical church community (DBWE 1:130) or drifted into a vague concept of religion that, similarly, has no intrinsic social implication (DBWE 1:133). By contrast, ‘Only the concept of revelation can lead to the Christian concept of the church…. In doctrinal theology, necessity can be deduced only from reality’ (DBWE 1:134. Emphasis in original).

208

The Limit of Responsibility

The second is that the empirical church fails and disappoints. Thinking today about responsibility and the exercise of power demands the work of mourning: ‘as for the “melancholy” in question, this interminable, irreducible “half-failure” …. It mourns – sometimes without tears, and without knowing it, but often in tears and blood – over the corpse of the political itself ’.3 Melancholy besets our remembrance and ‘the panic fear of spectrality’ – that is, the fear that we might suffer the same fate – haunts our troubled efforts to meet the needs of the day. Like Jacques Derrida’s association of Karl Marx with the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father, Christian ethics, political and moral theology, is haunted by spectres of apathy, expediency, contrivance, ploy, debasement and the many other sins of weakness, along with sins of commission including corruption, fraud and theft.4 The church community is, and has always been, a community of sinners [peccatorum communio] actually present in history while existing simultaneously as Christ’s presence in history (DBWE 1:211–212). ‘The Adamic humanity is still present in actuality even though it has already been overcome in reality. Those who are justified have trouble already with even the very first steps of the new life’ (DBWE 1:213). In me, humanity falls. As I am Adam, so is every individual – but in all individuals the one person of humanity, Adam, is active’ (DBWE 2:146). Yet we must lament failing adequately enough in order to face the complicity of the one-third-world church with its generations of exploitation, imbalanced benefitsharing, betrayal and pollution. Bonhoeffer’s frustration and disappointment with the empirical church of his day is evidenced clearly in Letters and Papers from Prison, written during May to July 1944. After all his earlier pioneering work on socio-theology, these pages are more or less devoid of mention of the church-community. This is the period during which Bonhoeffer wrote his most poignant verse, including ‘Who Am I’?’ and ‘Night Voices’. Still, in a letter to Eberhard Bethge, dated 18 July 1944, he seems unable to speak of the church-community as fulfilling the call to share in God’s suffering at the hands of a godless world (DBWE 8:480). ‘Our lives must be “worldly”’, he writes, so that we can share in God’s suffering. Moreover, it is stories about individuals in the New Testament to which he is drawn – Zacchaeus, the woman who was a sinner, the centurion at Capernaum, the rich young man loved by Jesus, Nathanael, Joseph of Arimathea (DBWE 8:481–482). These stories resonate with the realities of the every day, and not the religiosity that kills: ‘There is nothing about a religious method; the “religious act” is always something partial, whereas “faith” is something whole and involves one’s whole 3. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Spirit of the Revolution’, in For What Tomorrow…, ed. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roundinesco, trans. Jeff Fort (California: Stanford University Press, 2004), 79. 4. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (Oxford: Routledge, 1994), 1–3. Mourning, says Derrida, can effect change. ‘The work of mourning is not one work among others. All work involves this transformation … this internalization that characterizes “mourning”’. Derrida, ‘The Spirit of the Revolution’, 78.

Responsibility as Political Event

209

life. Jesus calls not to a new religion but to life’ (DBWE 8:482). Christ is our hope, he affirms, ‘the strength of our life’ (DBWE 8:488). The call is for Christianity to dissociate itself from religion, to re-encounter Jesus the human being (DBWE 8:490) and to understand afresh that the blessing of the Lord’s Supper is a restoration of people’s health, such that they lack nothing (DBWE 8:492). So, for instance, the church’s focus on sexuality and inwardness must be transformed: ‘The essential thing about chastity is not a renunciation of pleasure but an allencompassing orientation of life toward a goal’ (DBWE 8:495). The church must get out of its stagnation and risk stirring up discussion of the important issues in life (DBWE 8:498). Bonhoeffer’s frustration becomes yet more apparent as Letters and Papers from Prison unfold. In his thoughts on the baptism day of baby Dietrich Bethge, these comments are set against the backdrop of the horror of Nazi atrocities occurring at that time. The calling to the church such that it will be ready to meet the challenges of the future are significant: ‘It is not for us to predict the day – but the day will come – when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed’ (DBWE 8:390). The language in which the church might need to speak will be nonreligious but liberating and redeeming, like Jesus’s modes of communication (DBWE 8:390). How do we speak (or perhaps we can no longer even ‘speak’ the way we used to) in a ‘worldly’ way about ‘God’? How do we go about being ‘religionlessworldly’ Christians, how can we be ἐκ-κλησία, those who are called out, without understanding ourselves religiously as privileged, but instead seeing ourselves as belonging wholly to the world? Christ would then no longer be the object of religion, but something else entirely, truly lord of the world. But what does this mean? In a religionless situation, what do ritual [Kultus] and prayer mean? (DBWE 8:364)

Ritual and prayer are about more, Bonhoeffer implies, than the intimate areas of life, from prayer to sexuality (DBWE 8:455). The secrets of a person’s heart are easier fodder or ‘hunting ground’ for modern pastors who cannot cope adequately with the societal, financial and political realms of life. Yet the Bible knows no distinction between the inward and outward life. ‘How could it, actually? It is always concerned with the ἄνθρωπος τέλειος, the whole human being’ (DBWE 8:456). Ecclesial living is about more than religious piety practised inwardly and in the conscience (DBWE 8:362) because the church is the place where the reality of the world is recognized ontologically in Christ. In its physical gathering and corporate celebration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the church is ‘being there for others’ (DBWE 8:501). But its witness is weak and forgetful of the call to serve: ‘A church celebrating the Lord’s Supper is the empirical church and nothing else; it is not the sanctorum communio in its pure form’ (DBWE 1:245).

210

The Limit of Responsibility

Maintaining a Chalcedonian Framework Perhaps because of the tensions entailed in a Chalcedonian ethic, the discipline of Christian ethics too often divides between those focused on a narrowly intra-ecclesial life of discipleship and those who advocate a general ontology [Geschöpf-Sein] (DBWE 2:15) separable from faith and independent of divine revelation. Curiously, perhaps, Bonhoeffer’s writings are sometimes cited as contributing to this divide. Consider how H. Richard Niebuhr baulked against sectarian ethic readings of Bonhoeffer that seemingly positioned Bonhoeffer against any general ethic of responsibility. As James M. Gustafson wrote in his introduction to Niebuhr’s The Responsible Self, Niebuhr was by no means happy with the theological ground that supported Bonhoeffer’s Ethics (or Barth’s either, for that matter). Niebuhr sought a much broader base for critical reflection about the meaning of responsibility than is present in either of their works.5 For Niebuhr, the meaning of responsibility is integral to the species homo dialogicus; responsibility is a topic that benefits from peculiarly Christian consideration but is also fundamental to human experience regardless of faith commitments. The word ‘responsibility’, he says, is more than a single, distinct, meaningful element of speech; it is a symbol that summons people to become their best selves: ‘What is implicit in the idea of responsibility is the image of man-the-answerer, man engaged in dialogue, man acting in response to action upon him.’6 The very word ‘responsibility’, he says, seems to have a power beyond itself to call all humanity to better living. Contra Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr is read as envisioning an understanding of responsibility as reflecting an interpretation of what it is to be human and not only a disciple of Jesus Christ. Hence the central questions in his ethic: ‘To whom or what am I responsible, and in what community of interpretation am I myself?’7 The subtitle of The Responsible Self – namely, An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy – indicates Niebuhr’s intention to address an audience beyond the church walls. In Schweiker’s words, ‘The task of Christian moral philosophy is nothing less than to interpret human life in all its depth and complexity.’8 Niebuhr’s object of inquiry was human moral life in general and not primarily or exclusively the churchcommunity: ‘In trying to understand and guide human life, we do so in light of experience, activity, or purpose taken to be uniquely revealing of the meaning

5. William Schweiker writes in his Foreword to the 1999 edition that Niebuhr’s The Responsible Self ‘is one of a very select group of books that have decisively shaped Protestant and Roman Catholic ethics in the United States during the twentieth century’ (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), ix. The influence of this book extended beyond the United States and is, perhaps, the book that provides the subliminal definition of responsibility for most Christian ethicists today. 6. Niebuhr, The Responsible Self, 48. 7. Niebuhr, The Responsible Self, 68. 8. Schweiker, Foreword, x.

Responsibility as Political Event

211

of existence.’9 So Schweiker describes Niebuhr’s conviction that the dialogical, interactive, answering understanding of responsibility pertains to all humanity. By contrast, ‘There are theologians who insist that the object of inquiry is not some ostensibly general human experience, but the unique mission and identity of the Christian community.’10 Their focus, he says, is on the identity and particularity of the Christian community, whereas Niebuhr wanted his moral philosophy of responsibility – albeit informed by Christianity – to have all human experience as its object of inquiry. Contra Niebuhr’s perceived reading of Bonhoeffer, some recent scholarship moves in the direction that I am proposing. Especially exciting is the collection of essays edited by Jens Zimmermann and Brian Gregor, entitled Being Human, Becoming Human: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Social Thought.11 The stated purpose of the collection is to demonstrate Bonhoeffer’s significance for reflecting on the social and political dimensions of our contemporary world and is the most sustained recent conversation on this topic among the relevant scholarship. The golden thread running throughout the collection is human dignity, and whether, in the face of biotechnical advances in human engineering, it is possible to guard our human dignity without reference to the transcendent. Zimmerman and Gregor set up the debate over and against the secularist humanism of neoDarwinian scholarship that denounces appeals to the transcendent as nonsensical and harmful, and assemble the essays to advance claims regarding ‘the social intention of all basic Christian concepts’ (DBWE 1:21). The theme of sociality that runs throughout Bonhoeffer’s corpus, they argue, has implications for his anthropology as it extends beyond the church-community. Their particular contribution is to affirm the cruciform character of Bonhoeffer’s Christological theology of human sociality and to emphasize his exploration of true humanity as the kerygma of the Christian gospel: ‘Being human means becoming human in the image of Christ.’12 Thus Zimmerman locates Bonhoeffer in a tradition that stems from the ancient fathers, through Aquinas into Renaissance humanism, but that also has roots in Luther and Calvin, to the effect that all humankind is called to fulfilment both in and because of Christ: ‘Bonhoeffer’s Christological humanism is a repristination of patristic humanism.’13 In keeping with this tradition, says Zimmerman, Bonhoeffer expresses the fundamental ontological unity of all human beings in the divine Logos becoming flesh.14 9. Schweiker, Foreword, x. 10. Schweiker, Foreword, x. 11. Jens Zimmermann and Brian Gregor, eds., Being Human, Becoming Human: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Social Thought (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2012). 12. Zimmermann and Gregor, Being Human, Becoming Human, xv. 13. Jens Zimmermann, ‘Being Human, Becoming Human: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christological Humanism’, in Being Human, Becoming Human, ed. Jens Zimmerman and Brian Gregor (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2012), 30. 14. Zimmermann, ‘Being Human’, 31.

212

The Limit of Responsibility

Hence Bonhoeffer’s insistence in Sanctorum Communio on the church-existingas-community as the new humanity (DBWE 1: 232) and his emphasis in Discipleship on all of humanity regaining the dignity of the image of God in Christ’s incarnation (DBWE 4:285). Ulrik Besser Nissen argues in the same collection that the Chalcedonian Christological foundation of Bonhoeffer’s ethics makes it possible for him to maintain the universal and specific dimension of Christian ethics at the same time.15 ‘In Bonhoeffer’s Ethics there is an underlying Christological mode of thought penetrating the whole work. This is a Christology with Chalecedonian traits.’16 The implications are clearest in the mandates, says Nissen, but are also apparent when Bonhoeffer’s ethics is brought into proximity and dialogue with the ethics of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas et al. The Christological core of Bonhoeffer’s ethics, Nissen argues, implies an affirmation of all human reality. ‘As there is only one Christ-reality, Bonhoeffer can speak affirmatively of human reality without seeing this in conflict with the lordship of Christ.’17 There is no universal principle that defines the ethical situation beforehand and no norm that guides ethical discernment apart from the immediate encounter with the Other. The individual is called upon to judge for themselves what the situation demands and to answer for the consequences without recourse to support from other peoples or principles.18 The universality of responsibility arises in concrete encounter with the neighbour. Responsibility is understood as an answering to the Other and to life itself. With Zimmerman, Gregor and Nissen et al., I suppose that Bonhoeffer regarded the incarnation as the recapitulation of humanity, affirmed in the life of Jesus, judged on the cross and redeemed in the resurrection, and that his writings have a humanistic character in which concepts such as freedom and responsibility reflect his understanding of the participation of all humanity in Christ.19 Bonhoeffer, as we have seen, resists any ontology that establishes the meaning of responsibility in a pre-reflective sense – as per his critique of Heidegger et al.’s attempt to demonstrate the primary of being over against consciousness. Bonhoeffer does not develop a theology of Stellvertretung from a common, moral knowledge that is available to all apart from revelation but from the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. With Zimmerman, Gregor and Nissen et al., I suppose Bonhoeffer’s thoroughly Chalcedonian ethic of responsibility as being for the mission and service of the church in the world. Barth and Bonhoeffer were rightly opposed to any natural theology that posed 15. Ulrik Becker Nissen, ‘Responding to Human Reality: Responsibility and Responsiveness in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics’, in Being Human, Becoming Human, ed. Zimmermann and Gregor, 193. 16. Nissen, ‘Responding to Human Reality’, 193. 17. Nissen, ‘Responding to Human Reality’, 195. 18. Nissen, ‘Responding to Human Reality’, 197. 19. Zimmermann and Gregor, Being Human, xiv–xv.

Responsibility as Political Event

213

a threat to the infinite qualitative difference between God and humankind by in some way reducing it to a quantitative difference. At no point can Christian theologico-ethical consideration be divorced from confession of God the Creator and Redeemer, or from reference to the coming reign of Christ and the meaning of responsibility learned in him. Jesus Christ is the measure of normativity and the reason for the church’s engagement with questions of responsibility.

Church under Judgement As we have seen, Bonhoeffer was deeply frustrated and disappointed with the empirical church of his day and knew that an ecclesial ethic places the church corporate under judgement. Hence the importance of his question in the final section of Sanctorum Communio, ‘Church and Eschatology’, about judgement and eternal life: ‘The question is, how do we conceive of human community as undergoing judgment?’ (DBWE 2:284). Bonhoeffer’s theology of judgement reminds us again that the question of responsibility today is not something that we can address individually to the exclusion of our being judged with others. Divine judgement applies to persons as individuals, he says, but also to collective persons [Kollektivpersonen]. The person is judged not only in isolation, he says, but as a member of their nation, family, marriage and so on. Bonhoeffer acknowledges the difficulties entailed to human perception in this regard: ‘It remains unclear how we are to imagine in detail a collective person being rejected or accepted, while the individual belonging to it may be treated according to a different verdict’ (DBWE 2:284). Bonhoeffer remains convinced, however, that biblical witness supports the belief that divine judgement will be exercised against the collective as well as the person: ‘We learned that the community as a collective person exists from God to God … and that it must be conceived as being established through the will of God, and as such standing at the last judgment’ (DBWE 2:284). He cites Matthew 11:21ff, where Jesus bears witness to judgement against Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum, as biblical evidence, plus the address to the churches in Revelation chapters 2 and 3. Entire towns and cities are subject to judgement. Nor should we overspiritualize Bonhoeffer’s stance in these concluding sections of Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being. Lifestyles locus imperii, purchasing habits and investment choices are under judgement. Herein is the need for painful repentance in God’s sight is continuous, and also the call to consider how the structure of responsibility bears upon Christian teaching with respect to the God-given mandates of work, marriage, government, as well as the church itself (DBWE 6:68–75). We established above (§3.6 ‘The Concrete Church and the Problem of Guilt’) the mission and witness of the church regarding the meaning of responsibility with respect to the mandates which is where Bonhoeffer, in his mature theology, gives expression to the lordship of Christ over all creation. There is no retreat for the disciples of Jesus away from the world, which includes the service to those who

214

The Limit of Responsibility

understand responsibility differently, to land and the wider natural environment.20 Divine transcendence is not encountered via notions of the metaphysical absolute but among fellow human beings for whom Christ died: ‘Our relationship to God is no “religious” relationship to some highest, most powerful, and best being imaginable – that is no genuine transcendence. Instead, our relationship to God is a new life in “being there for others”, through participation in the being of Jesus’ (DBWE 8: 501). The human condition ‘in Adam’ before God is under judgement. Yet the realm of God refers not merely to the fulfilment of the church but also to the ‘new world’ (DBWE 1:283) eschatology of nature and culture, that is, to the creaturely order in its entirety. ‘In speaking about the fulfillment of the church and of the communities, we are dealing with only a part of the whole problem’ (DBWE 1:283). This means that at no point can Christian theologico-ethical consideration devise its own understanding of responsibility. The closing section of Sanctorum Communio is entitled ‘Church and Eschatology’ (DBWE 1:282), and the final section of Act and Being is entitled ‘The Definition of Being in Christ by Means of the Future: The Child’ (DBWE 2:157). Jesus is the name of every person’s unity with everyone else, including future generations. Accepting this truth is the real business of Pentecost, which requires commitment to this name. Mindful that the empirical church disappoints, Bonhoeffer’s challenge is to speak one to another the words of biblical comfort familiar to the church, rather than deciding upon a ‘penultimate’ response of ‘a kind of helpless solidarity’ in the face of terrible realities. Conscience is something defined by the past in Adam (DBWE 2:155). A different future is present in faith and given to the church in baptism (DBWE 2:159). All Christian responsibility has its origin in this gift. ‘To-let-oneself-be-defined by means of the future is the eschatological possibility of the child’ (DBWE 2:159). Here again we encounter a reversal of the structure of responsibility from I-You-I to You-I-You: You hold the meaning of responsibility for me. In Christ, the child at every celebration of baptism holds the meaning of responsibility for all concerned. The child calls each person present to a different from that curved in on itself (incurvatio in se ipsum): the ‘limit’ of responsibility is shifted from agentact-consequence nexus and the problem of insufficient knowledge to ‘the concrete ethical barrier of the other person’ (DBWE 1:49, 54). In the child, responsibility is experienced as a gift that calls the self into being and being-as-care (DBWE 2:69). 20. Bonhoeffer was aware of the divorce in Protestant theology of creation from redemption and of the grave consequences of this for a Christian outlook on the world. Strands of Protestant theology had allowed the natural or penultimate to be diminished in significance for the sake of the ultimate. This one-sidedness was manifest in a ‘two spheres’ kind of thinking that kept the realm of the natural subordinate to that of grace, the spiritual separate from the secular and, in its most extreme form, the world apart from Christ: ‘The monk and the nineteenth-century Protestant secularist typify these two possibilities’ (DBWE 6:57) but the true relationship of ultimate and penultimate is found only in Christ (DBWE 6:153).

Responsibility as Political Event

215

Likewise, and mindful of the guilt inherent in all responsibility exercised locus imperii, the limits of responsibility for every child of future generations are not at the edge of knowledge but are found in the centre of one’s own finite existence, discovered through encounter with neighbour and the earth, and always in excess of what I, alone, can do or be. Bonhoeffer is similarly prepared to face the question of limits directly: ‘Does responsibility place me into an unlimited field of activity, or does it tie me firmly to the limits given within my concrete daily tasks?’ (DBWE 6:288). Having switched, in effect, from an I-You-I to You-I-You understanding of responsibility, Bonhoeffer encounters the question of responsibility unlimited. ‘For what am I genuinely responsible, and for what am I not? Does it make sense to consider myself responsible for everything that happens in the world, or can I watch the great world events as an uninvolved observer, as long as my own minute domain [Bereich] is in order?’ (DBWE 6:288–289). Indeed, he asks even more directly: ‘What are the limits of my responsibility?’ (DBWE 6:289). The answer is Jesus Christ. The limit of responsibility is found in him. Bonhoeffer’s answer is not escapist, however. ‘The Place of Responsibility’, which is the next section in Ethics, treats the topic of vocation [Beruf] as responsiveness to the call of Christ, whatever that might be, and offers a critique of that kind of monasticism which attempts to cut short the scope of God’s call only to what can be seen: ‘This futile attempt to escape from the world takes seriously neither God’s No, which applies to the whole world including the monastery, nor, on the other hand, God’s Yes, in which God reconciles the world with himself (DBWE 6:291). “The attention of responsible people is directed to concrete neighbors in their concrete reality” (DBWE 6:261). Self-denial is demanded “in accord with reality”’; it demands careful attention to the specifics of a given situation and a heart for the other person. Finding the meaning of responsibility in Christ makes a difference to how it is lived. ‘Originating from him alone, human action occurs that is not crushed by conflicts of principle, but springs instead from the already accomplished reconciliation of the world with God’ (DBWE 6:266). Pious attempts to protect one’s own virtue are to be abandoned: ‘responsibility … recognizes the world as loved, judged, and reconciled by God, and acts accordingly within it’ (DBWE 6:267). Truly responsible action cannot arise merely from good intentions (DBWE 6:267); it must seek to understand the entire given reality, origin, essence and goal of all things under the divine Yes and No of judgement. ‘Those who act responsibly place their action into the hands of God and live by God’s grace and judgment’ (DBWE 6:268–269). Herein is the limit of the burden: ‘There can never be an absolute responsibility that does not find its essential limit in the responsibility of the other person’ (DBWE 6:269). Only yielding to the saving grace of God keeps the disciple from being pulverized by a burden of either guilt or fear. By recognizing that responsible action is limited both by surrendering our action to God’s grace and judgment, and by the responsibility of the neighbor, it simultaneously becomes apparent that precisely these limits qualify the action as responsible in the first place. For God and neighbor, as we encounter them in

216

The Limit of Responsibility

Jesus Christ, are not only the limits of responsible action, as we have recognized, but they are also its origin. Irresponsible action is defined by its disregard for these limits of God and neighbor. Responsible action, on the other hand, gains its unity, and ultimately also its certainty, from this very limitation by God and neighbor. It is not its own lord and master, nor is it unbounded or frivolous. Instead, it is creaturely and humble … sheltered in Christ. (DBWE 6:269)

In other words, with Butler et al., Bonhoeffer understands that responsibility is always a mutual relation between persons, and that You constitute the limit of responsibility for me. Only when derived from the responsibility of Jesus Christ for human being, however, so that the origin, essence and goal of all reality is the Real One, who is God in Jesus Christ (DBWE 6:270), can the burden be endured. The great change takes place, as we not come to understand, the moment the unity of human existence no longer consists in its own autonomy, but, by the miracle of faith, is found in Jesus Christ, beyond one’s own ego and its law. (DBWE 6: 278) In freely surrendering the knowledge of our own goodness, the good of God occurs. Only in this ultimate perspective can we speak about good in historical action. (DBWE 6:285)

Responsibility remains a relationship of mutuality but is differently framed such that neither guilt nor fear overwhelm. Because of Pentecost, moreover, responsibility becomes a truly shared experience of realizing what devastating guilt before God means and surrendering of any self-justifying attempt to act responsibly to the love of God in Christ. Only thus does responsibility have true human meaning. Kant’s ethic of duty leads to condemnation (DBWE 6:288). Similarly, an ethic of responsibility based in need, precariousness and the vulnerability of every human body to damage and threat weighs heavy. With Butler et al., Bonhoeffer knows that any attempt to separate one person’s enactment of responsibility from another person would be the end of responsibility (DBWE 6:288). His point is that only Jesus is the obedient one, and herein is hope. Only because of his obedience, are human beings really free to act; they can dare to attempt responsibility: ‘Freedom dares to act’ (DBWE 6:287). Shared need and precarity is not the basis for an ethic of responsibility chosen by Bonhoeffer, however.21 Instead, his You-I-You structuring of lived responsibility is given in Christ; it ‘is creaturely and humble … sheltered in Christ’ (DBWE

21. These issues are addressed by inter alia Kathryn Tanner in ‘Eschatology without a Future’, 222–237. She seeks to extend exclusively temporal debates about eschatology to include a more intentional focus on specialization as an aspect of relationship with God, thereby uncoupling eschatological hope from the future of the world. Steven C. Van den Heuvel argues that Bonhoeffer tried to give voice to a similar idea in his twin notions of

Responsibility as Political Event

217

6:269). Bonhoeffer warns time and again against the human attempt ‘in Adam’ to live according to conscience: ‘As sinners they keep their sins with them, for they see them through their conscience’ (DBWE 1:139). Such conscience, he says, is of the Devil who leaves human beings to themselves in their untruth (DBWE 1:140). ‘Here is their limit: human beings cling to themselves, and thus their knowledge of themselves is imprisoned in untruth’ (DBWE 1:141). Only when Christ breaks through this solitude of sinfulness and self-deception will human beings know themselves placed into truth. ‘When conscience is said to be an immediate relation to God, Christ and the church are excluded, because God’s having bound the divine self to the mediating word is circumvented’ (DBWE 1:141). Apart from Christ acknowledged in faith and revealed to the heart, conscience and selfunderstanding lead to death. There is no understanding of responsibility via selfdeceiving conscience. Such an understanding of responsibility retains the character of sin: ‘The attempt of conscience to limit sin to the act must be understood as a human attempt at self-deliverance’ (DBWE 1:145). Regarding the judgement of persons as individuals, Bonhoeffer expounds upon the isolating effects of standing in the face of God’s wrath: Eternal death means to exist in the solitude of God’s wrath, that is to be along in sin, without any ethical communication with other spirits, and at the same time conscious of one’s sin, and aware of what one is missing. (DBWE 2:285)

The gravity of divine judgement exists essentially in solitude. By grace, however, says Bonhoeffer, the member of Christ’s body the church is given to share in its life: The very moment in which a human being must live in solitude through the unspeakable distress of painful repentance in God’s sight – something that we must also assume for believers – is also the moment in which that person enters completely into the church-community of Christ that carries them. (DBWE 2:286)

Herein is the grace given to the church as Christ’s presence in the world; all who believe upon his name enjoy membership of his body. God’s judgement and grace apply to persons. The responsibility that is Jesus Christ’s vicarious representative action (DBWE 2:146–148) cannot be historicized, psychologized or naturalized because sin clings to human nature apart from his name.

the ultimate and the penultimate: ‘Bonhoeffer emphasized that the ultimate is not only temporary in nature, but also qualitatively different from the penultimate’, in Bonhoeffer’s Christocentric Theology and Fundamental Debates in Environmental Ethics (Princeton Theological Monograph Series, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2017), 63. As already noted, theologians are also beginning to think with Bonhoeffer about environmental ethics and climate change.

218

The Limit of Responsibility

Note Bonhoeffer’s urging of the church to worship and to worldly service together is found in the doctrinal limit of responsibility, namely in Christ and neighbour: ‘The transcendent is not the infinite, unattainable tasks, but the neighbour within reach in any given situation’ (DBWE 8:501). Hence his criticism that pastors who focus on the inner, personal dimensions of human existence fail to minister to the whole person: ‘One must not find fault with people in their worldliness but rather confront them with God where they are strongest’ (DBWE 8:457). ‘Our lives must be “worldly,” so that we can share precisely so in God’s suffering; our lives are allowed to be “worldly,” that is, we are delivered from false religious obligations and inhibitions’ (DBWE 8:480). It is not religious acts that make someone a Christian, says Bonhoeffer, but rather sharing in God’s suffering in the world. ‘Jesus calls not to a new religion but to life’ (DBWE 8:482). God’s heart is for all people in need, Christians and heathens. In a poem of that name, Bonhoeffer says this in verse: God goes to all people in their need, fills body and soul with God’s own bread, goes for Christians and heathens to Calvary’s death and forgives them both.

(DBWE 8:460)

Forgiveness in Christ is available to all. Written while listening to sleepless, incarcerated men toss and turn, with chains clanking and wooden cots creaking, Bonhoeffer’s affirmation is that God is present with them and suffering too. The worst forms of pietism and any attempt to save the church for its own sake as institution must be left behind (DBWE 8:500). Generally in the Confessing Church: Standing up for the ‘cause’ of the church, and so on, but little personal faith in Christ. ‘Jesus’ disappears from view. Sociologically: no impact on the broader masses; a matter for the lower and upper middle classes. Decisive: Church defending itself. No risk taking for others. (DBWE 8:500)

In this text that is surprisingly critical of ecclesial introversion, Bonhoeffer laments the weaknesses and failings of the Confessing Church at the time of writing. Jesus’s being-for-others was not being lived out among the members of a coterie, he implies: ‘our relationship to God is a new life in “being there for others” through participation in the being of Jesus’ (DBWE 8:501). His last, anguished, impassioned words betray sadness, frustration and a yearning for something more; he also calls for the members of the church-community to be there for others in the worldly tasks of life, helping and serving. The neighbour is found not only in the churchcommunity but in any given situation. The church-community must be bold enough to start from the Christian-biblical faith and not be entrenched behind an abstract, dogmatic notion of the ‘faith of the church’ (DBWE 8:502). The church-

Responsibility as Political Event

219

community has a place and vocation in the world that allows it to live in the world by God’s goodness and to struggle against evil and injustice (DBWE 4:245).

The Politics of Pentecost The truth of these affirmations is, says Bonhoeffer, like the cantus firmus in a polyphonic musical composition (DBWE 8:394). The cantus firmus is the preexisting melody that endures throughout the piece – the melody to which other voices resound in counterpoint. Only with continual attention to the truths of Chalcedon can the church elaborate its present-day and corporate calling to worldly service. This calling includes an obligation to comment substantively on the meaning of responsibility with respect to societal issues. So, for instance, he urges condemnation of the false presupposition that life consists only in its social utility (DBWE 6:193). No human life lacks value: ‘Poor Lazarus, the leper who lay crippled before the door of the rich man while dogs licked his wounds – a man without social utility, a victim of those who judge life only by its utility – is valued by God as worthy of eternal life’ (DBWE 6:193). Only in God is the measure of the value of human life to be found: the worth of a genius is not to be weighed against that of an idiot. Economically, asserts Bonhoeffer, the care of such patients will not seriously impair the living standards of a people: ‘A nation’s expenditures for the care of such patients have never come close to expenditures on luxury goods’ (DBWE 6:194). Social utility is not a measure of human worth and there are times when the gospel message impinges directly on socio-economic policy. The church must not regard such witness as the start and end of its mission: ‘we will not recognize its legitimate task unless we first find the correct starting point’ (DBWE 6:356, emphasis in original). Such witness is integral to the public dimensions of ecclesial existence. Comments about responsibility are not limited to the ecclesial or personal. ‘On the Possibility of the Church’s Message to the World’, after warning the churchcommunity against, in effect, becoming an alternative social service, unpacks how God’s love for the world places the church-community into a relationship of responsibility for the world by reminding readers that God’s truth is for all (DBWE 6:357).In other words, Bonhoeffer’s hopes for a reforming church are inherently public and political for doctrinal reasons. The church has a public existence by virtue of its empirical, local instantiation as the body of Christ, and that the church is inherently political by virtue of its public, societal witness to God’s valuing of life. The ministry of the church is public because it has a body that is publicly available and contextualized locally, nationally and transnationally. The ministry of the church is political because the resurrection and events of Pentecost constitute a universality that cuts across every other designation, ethnic, religious, linguistic, cultural and more. Moreover, these events are for all. The universalizability of the Pentecostal message is intrinsic to its force in worldly affairs; personal faith in Jesus Christ constitutes the new universality as people are empowered and enabled

220

The Limit of Responsibility

in faith (DBWE 8:405). Note how, in the ‘Outline for a Book’ that he wrote towards the end of his life, Bonhoeffer starts by taking stock of Christianity before asking ‘What is Christian faith, really?’. The church with ‘little personal faith in Christ’ is unable to grapple meaningfully with phenomena such as changes in the insurance industry, technological advances of all kinds, threats to and from nature, and so on. A church and society, for whom God is merely a working hypothesis or stopgap for our embarrassment, is powerless in the face of these realities (DBWE 8:500). This church ends up defending itself, with little significance for broad swathes of society, burdened by its own ideas and devoid of risk-taking for others: ‘Standing up for the “cause” of the church and so on, but little personal faith in Christ’ (DBWE 8:500). Only confrontation with the question ‘Who is God’?’ and new encounter with Jesus Christ is adequate for a genuinely reforming church and an adequately Christian understanding of responsibility. Encounter with this question will not lead, he hopes, to an abstractly conceptual ascription to God of the attributes of transcendence. Merely a general belief in divine omnipotence, infinity and so on will not sustain the reforming church: ‘not in the conceptual forms of the absolute, the metaphysical … ’ (DBWE 8:501). Only the Crucified One effects the kind of reformation that is truly ‘the human being living out of the transcendent’ (DBWE 8:501). The kind of belief needed is not intellectual assent alone, but faith by which to live: ‘What do we really believe? I mean, believe in such a way that our lives depend on it?’ (DBWE 8:502). Old debates between the Lutheran and Reformed, and to some extent Roman Catholic, churches are no longer real; expending energy on keeping old differences in place is unnecessary and a potential hindrance to the witness of all. More important is lived affirmation of a Christological truth: ‘The church is church only when it is there for others’ (DBWE 8:503). This means inter alia that the church and its members individually must speak in all walks of life ‘of moderation, authenticity, trust, faithfulness, steadfastness, patience, discipline, humility, modesty, contentment’ while recalling the example of Jesus’s humanity and participating in multiple ways in the worldly tasks of life in the community, ‘not dominating but helping and serving’ (DBWE 8:503). In his own day, Bonhoeffer understood this challenge to mean confronting the vices of hubris, the worship of power, envy and illusionism. Implications would follow for the meaning of apologetics, and also the preparation for and practice of ministry (DBWE 8:504). Heartbroken at the failures of the church of his acquaintance, Bonhoeffer thus yearns for the church not only to represent Christ notionally in society but to possess him as Spirit in being for others, living out of the power of resurrection for others (DBWE 8:504). While there is no explicit mention of Pentecostal living in his ‘Outline for a Book’, references to this season of the church’s year season the entirety of Letters and Papers from Prison. Some are recollections of warm and summery days in Finkenwald (DBWE 8:400, 404). These memories, like the event itself, are a source of strength and means by which to live in the face of danger: ‘Inwardly, one learns gradually to put life-threatening things in proportion’ (DBWE 8:404). Some are personal spiritual reflections (DBWE 8:104–105). The letter to his parents, Karl and Paula, 4 June 1943, recalls Paul Gerhardt’s Pentecost

Responsibility as Political Event

221

hymn with its plea for joyfulness and strength, and reminder that God did not give a spirit of timidity but of power, love and self-control (DBWE 8:97). Bonhoeffer speaks of the benefit that he derives from the service for Pentecost that he did for himself – alone, like John on the island of Patmos – while thinking of congregations with whom he had previously kept company. Some are more like manifesto aspirations for ecclesial life redolent of hope beyond the intimately personal experience of knowing the Spirit of God to be the Spirit of power, love and self-control (DBWE 8:97). So, for instance, Bonhoeffer recalls Leibnitz’s grappling with the idea of a universal script consisting not of words but of signs representing every possible idea, remembers the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel and yearns for the day when the universality of divine blessing touches the live of all: That the Babylonian confusion of languages, through which people are no longer able to understand one other because each speaks his own language, is to end and be overcome by the language of God, which each human being understands and through which alone people are also able to understand one another again, and that the church is where this is to take place – all these are indeed very deep and important thoughts. Leibniz wrestled all his life with the idea of a universal script that was to represent all concepts, not by words but with clear and obvious signs – an expression of his desire to heal the fractured world of his day – a philosophical reflection of the Pentecost story. (DBWE 8:105)

The public presence and politics of Pentecost is a reversal of the confusion of Babel because everyone understands the words spoken in their respective languages; the language of God cuts across earthly confusion such that each encounters the message personally. Pentecost is not a homogenizing force but establishes new conditions for the healing of old divides and for the empowerment of disciples through their finding a new voice.

Empowerment Bonhoeffer bring us thus far. By preparing the way for and, indeed, venturing initial explications of the public and political dimensions of Pentecostal living, his writings evoke a response from subsequent readers. What follows inter alia is that an ethic of responsibility in Christian perspective will be characterized by questions and concerns about power and healing, and will be oriented towards the empowerment of those hitherto relatively powerless. Attempting to write from the dis-ease of a locus imperii lifestyle, and mindful of the challenges around truthing, post-colonialism, and more, as discussed in Chapter 4, the challenge of knowing how best to approach the topic of empowerment is considerable. True for all is that Jesus empowers his disciples. The gospels are full of reports of Jesus empowering men and women. He makes the lame walk, gives sight to the blind, restores wholeness to a woman’s life, raises the dead to life, sets those of questionable

222

The Limit of Responsibility

morality on a better course, encourages busy people to find time for prayer and more. His promise of empowerment is given to every disciple: ‘Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you’ (Luke 10:19–20). At issue is how, albeit from different perspectives, Christian people can together allow the biblical narrative of resurrection and Pentecost to shape our own horizons of expectation such that we read these texts with questions in mind about the exercise, distribution and preservation of power. Even asking questions about empowerment from a locus imperii perspective, as someone benefiting from the operations of transnational mining companies, is very different from asking the same questions as a person worried about whether mining will commence in their locality or will cease in their locality such that jobs are lost and training opportunities disappear. While global risks are facts of life for everyone, vulnerability to risk is something very different: ‘disaster risks are skewed toward developing countries’.22 Small islands, developing states and other small countries have far higher levels of relative risk of poverty in a changing climate with respect to the size of their populations and economies than do the United States, UK or other members of the G8.23 Non-white and low-income communities typically breathe air polluted with more hazardous ingredients than affluent white communities.24 The source of many risks associated with climate change and economic volatility affects the world’s poor but can be traced to energy consumption patterns and political choices in the rich world.25 Very poor people in diverse countries around the world are already bearing the brunt of the consequences of climate change, the targeted killing of terrorist suspects, downturns in the global economy and more. The Descent of the Holy Spirit icon sometimes called the Icon for the Feast of Pentecost speaks directly to these challenges. This icon depicts events described in Acts 2:1–4 when the Spirit of God descended in power upon the disciples gathered 22. United Nations Human Development Report 19 2007/2008, Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World (New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2007), 76. http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_20072008_EN_Chapter2.pdf (accessed 8 August 2013). 23. Pan American Health Organization, Disaster: Preparedness and Mitigation in the Americas. Entry on ‘Risk and poverty in a changing climate’, Issue 112, October (2009). http://www.paho.org/disasters/newsletter/index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id=62:risk-and-poverty-in-a-changing-climate&catid=41:issue112-october-2009-perspective&Itemid=90&lang=en (accessed 8 August 2013). 24. Michelle L. Bell and Keita Ebisu, ‘Environmental Inequality in Exposures to Airborne Particulate Matter Components in the United States’. Environmental Health Perspectives 120, no. 12 (2012): 1699–1704. 25. Human Development Report 2007–2008, Climate Shocks: Risk and Vulnerability in an Unequal World. http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_20072008_EN_Chapter2.pdf (accessed 10 September 2013), 74.

Responsibility as Political Event

223

together in Jerusalem. Acts 2:1–4 recounts the event as an historical occurrence whereas the icon strongly suggests the present-day reality of the presence of God’s Spirit in the church. The presence of the apostle Paul in the icon unsettles any historical representation because accounts in Acts of his conversion on the road to Damascus have not yet been recounted. The semicircular seating pattern of the apostles is incomplete and open to observers whom the icon draws into its unity. The presence of God’s Spirit is not confined to tongues of flame resting on the heads of each but represented as the golden glow of light issuing from the top of the icon. Light radiates out not only from the halos adorning each apostle but more powerfully from the descending Spirit itself. This Spirit is not under the control of any human but a force field of power which suggests that the spaces between recognizable entities are capable of being filled by the presence of God and have potential for transformation. There are no humanly predefined rules or guidelines to which the Spirit of God must conform. At the bottom of the icon is a semicircle in which an aged king stands against a dark background. Sometimes known as Kosmos, he represents earthly political authorities and power. Kosmos’s arms are outstretched and hold a red cloth in which rest scrolls containing the apostles’ teachings that bear witness to Christ himself. Kosmos stands in darkness and the shadow of death (Lk 1:79) and yet knows something of true meaning of divine power, mercy and salvation. The inherently public and political character of Pentecost can be compatible with, and mediated through, the earthly exercise of power. While the darkness of sin continuously threatens to engulf this exercise of power, the resurrection has made it possible for earthly authorities to function in ways that glorify God until the empty seat at the centre of the icon, the place of honour that awaits Christ Jesus the Teacher of all truth, is occupied. Kosmos knows enough of divine grace to communicate something of its substance in his daily exercise of authority and power. Given Christ Jesus’s absence, the uncertainties that entail, and the continual threatening darkness, earthly political authorities and power have heavy labours to perform in anticipation of His coming reign. A Christian ethic of responsibility requires not only a Chalcedonian framework but a robust pneumatology too. More specifically, we are trying to reckon with the evangelical imperatives of truthing and empowerment of the powerless that mark Pentecost as an intrinsically political event and to make sense of these imperatives in a globalizing era. In the context of industry-scale mining, moves towards mining in partnership with local communities and capacity building are typically how reputable companies get serious about the kind of empowerment that at least has the potential to resonate harmoniously with the politics of Pentecost. The challenge for Christian ethics is to learn enough about what good mining in partnership might look like, what, if any, kinds of empowerment people close to mine sites and affected by mining need in order to flourish and what is required for meaningful capacity building that is genuinely of assistance to communities close to mine sites. While for some, in many and diverse places in the world, the call of God is to resist mining in their particular locality, others opt for a critical engagement with mining companies because of the help to individuals and families

224

The Limit of Responsibility

regarding jobs, spin-off businesses and other opportunities that mining in an area can bring. Neither is the correct approach a priori. Whether empowerment is to be sought for resistance or partnership depends upon the situation. A key question for Christian ethics locus imperii in situations where empowerment is to be sought for partnership, that is, where governments have granted licenses to mine and mining operations are either under way already or in preparation, is how to hold those governments and large mining companies to account or, more specifically, how to provide the kind of intellectual resources that will help to orient professionals in the relevant fields to do this work in practice. The Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN) Catalyst Mining Company of the Future Development Partner Framework 2014 talks of the potential for mining ‘if properly managed by both companies and governments, to be a significant catalyst for the socioeconomic development of the countries and communities in which mines are developed and operated’.26 The International Institute for Environment and Development in its Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development report makes a similar though less ambitious point: The mining and minerals industry has come under tremendous pressure to improve its social, developmental, and environmental performance. Like other parts of the corporate world, companies are more routinely expected to perform to ever higher standards of behavior, going well beyond achieving the best rate of return for shareholders. They are also increasingly being asked to be more transparent and subject to third-party audit or review.27

The best mining companies will be pursuing such agendas so that, for instance, they will think from the very inception of a mine through to many years after its closure about how the infrastructure planning of the mine might help companies to deliver on sustainability objectives regarding the development of the local area. Infrastructure projects in rail, ports, power, water and information and communications technologies could typically all be planned with more attention to the needs of regions and local communities. The World Bank Group has been pressing for this.28 Resolutions at the United Nations are increasingly using

26. KIN Catalyst, Reinventing Mining: Creating Sustainable Value. Introducing the Development Partner Framework. Mining Company of the Future (Evanston IL: Kellogg School of Management, 2014), 8. 27. International Institute for Environment and Development, Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development. http://www.iied.org/mining-minerals-sustainable-developmentmmsd (accessed 17 November 2017). 28. The Public-Private Partnership in Infrastructure Resources Centre provides reference manuals and sample agreements country by country and maintains a database of private participation in infrastructure projects that currently has over 6,000 entries. http:// ppp.worldbank.org/public-private-partnership/ (accessed 18 November 2017).

Responsibility as Political Event

225

strongly worded language that suggests a preferred route: ‘… new partnerships with civil society, including with non-governmental organisations and the private sector, and innovative arrangements for mobilising additional resources, both private and public …’.29 The economic case for using mining infrastructure to advance generate real economic opportunity for the communities impacted by the project rests on the benefits for the company of reducing the risk profile with respect to violent protests at, or close to, the mine site because the mine is not seen by local people to be advancing community development and empowering local people with jobs and training. The message for investors and shareholders is that developing infrastructure is likely to deliver value through social licence. National and regional government, local trade associations and so on are more likely to accept and even welcome the operation if the benefits to local communities are likely to remain after the mine has closed. So, for instance, socio-economic benefits to be maximized might include: • allowing open or shared access to infrastructure to expand economic benefits, for example by opening up existing water systems to allow access to community for domestic or agriculture use; • designing infrastructure such that it benefits a broader cross-section of stakeholders, for example designing new railway loading/offloading facilities in a way that accommodates other commodities; • finding local partners to empower, while reducing the operational risk, for example enhancing local skills and expertise through third party or joint operations. For minimal additional cost mines could overspecify either power production or power distribution infrastructure. In water stressed areas, additional water infrastructure can (relatively easily) be included in the mine design that can provide clean water to regional communities – the incremental cost (given the current water demand by most large mine developments) is negligible and the social benefits significant. The best mining companies have been committed for some time to running skills training centres during the life of a mine. Often such centres will train both for the skills required by the mine and for skills that will enable local people to set up small businesses in bricklaying, plastering, masonry, plumbing, carpentry and welding, accountancy, weaving, cooking and more. I have seen such centres in operation 29. A World Fit for Children, GA Res. S-27/2, UN Doc. A/RES/S-27/2 (2002), para. 56. https://www.unicef.org/specialsession/docs_new/documents/A-RES-S27-2E.pdf (accessed 18 November 2017). This paragraph draws upon work prepared by the team of participants on the six-month Anglo American Plc Advanced Social Management Programme (ASMP 2015), of which I was a member. We worked together on a project entitled ‘Using Mining Infrastructure to Facilitate Social and Economic Development’. My thanks to (our winning!) team members.

226

The Limit of Responsibility

and spoken to people for whom they are life changing. To date, however, using mining infrastructure to facilitate social and economic development is typically underdeveloped. The need is for more integrated thinking regarding a potential mining project and local/regional social and economic development across the life cycle of a mine and in dialogue with the relevant government authorities and communities. As the future operating environment is expected to require fewer manual jobs as automation at mine sites becomes yet more extensive, a focused approach to infrastructure development could offer significant ways forward for the mining industry to move towards engagement with local communities such that mining is something done with rather than to communities. A commitment to renewable energy sourcing, for instance, with take-off agreements for local communities during the life of mine plus hand-over arrangements after mine closure, could bring benefit to all. My personal observations from involvement with the Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative is that mining companies are increasingly willing to have such debates about front loading infrastructure decisions in order to create the physical environment needed for shared prosperity. The challenge is to convince shareholders of this wisdom and, not least, to press faith groups invested in mining to act prophetically in this regard. Governments where mining occurs or is planned might need to become more organized and transparent about the infrastructure needs of their country. Governmental regulation might need to be strengthened and made clearer. Until this happens, mining companies might hold back from infrastructure partnerships because of too high risk. A range of financing arrangements might need to be developed. Yet more significantly, shareholders need to be convinced of both the financial pluses and moral worth of ensuring that every aspect of the life of a mine brings benefit to local communities, and that they are effective partners in such developments. To this end, churches and other faith groups in the countries, regions and localities, as well as internationally, have a role to play.30

Penultimate Conclusions In what sense, then, am I responsible for the seven open pits at the Kolomela mine, situated 22 kilometres from Postmasburg in the Northern Cape province of South Africa, the mine-dredging of a 2-kilometre-wide by 17-kilometre-long strip of sand dunes at Richards Bay in KwaZulu-Natal Province and so on? I am not accountably responsible in a sense analogous to proceedings at law. The actions of mining companies at these sites cannot be attributed to me directly. Yet most aspects of my lifestyle benefit from the products of industry-scale mining, from the operations of transnational corporations that trade in commodities such 30. At the time of writing, a new Church of England policy on the extractives sector is expected.

Responsibility as Political Event

227

as iron ore, copper, zinc and lead, nickel, ferroalloys, alumina and aluminium, and so on. I am implicated in the harms (and goods) resulting from actions that benefit me. Hence our overarching question about the meaning of responsibility in a globalizing era and the challenge of holding together the locally situated and personal dimensions of responsibility with the global systemic ones. Because the everydayness of human beings in Adam is guilt, the question of responsibility is not a question of when ecclesial purity should come into contact with the messiness of mixed motives and the need for a profit; it is not about the impeccability of the church-community free from the alloy of sin. Instead, the question of responsibility is about how to live freely in Christ amid the everydayness of human beings, which is guilt: ‘The structure of Adam’s humanity should not be conceived in terms of theories of psychological-historical interpretation; no, I myself am Adam – am I and humanity in one’ (DBWE 1:146). The question is how to conceive of the human community in general, and the church-community more specifically, as undergoing judgement (DBWE 2:283–284) and how to relearn the meaning of responsibility as given in Christ. Here is the heart of a Christologically informed You-I-You restructuring of the meaning of responsibility. Bonhoeffer’s Christological relearning of the meaning of responsibility yields a basic social category, that is, ‘the I-You-relation’ (DBWE 1:55) in which personal being is structurally open and that is true for all humanity – whether recognized and acknowledged or not. As we have seen, this structure of the meaning of responsibility for all humanity is underdeveloped in the Bonhoeffer’s dissertation writings and not given practical application until expressed in the mandates, that is, in his formulation of the orders of preservation directed by God. Mandates are the historical forms that God’s command takes: ‘the concrete divine commission which has its foundation in the revelation of Christ and which is evidenced by Scripture’ (DBWE 6:254).31 As early as Sanctorum Communio, Bonhoeffer is close to a form of Christian materialism whereby humanity has been bought once and for all in Christ (DBWE 1:146); its truth is in him. Consequently, the meaning of vicarious representative action is not acquired through human expressions of solidarity, however cohesive, because only Christ 31. The mandates do not arise merely from the claims of the instinct of self-preservation or from the claims of hunger, sex or political force. Rather, says Bonhoeffer, the mandates have the quality of divine decree and confront us in historical, albeit culturally diverse, form. Moses’s specific command to go to Pharaoh ‘to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt’ (Ex. 3.10) affected every aspect of his daily labour, family life and interaction. It also took him into far closer contact with God’s people, the Israelites. Few of us can expect as dramatic an encounter with God’s word as Moses enjoyed, but God’s commandment, says Bonhoeffer, unfolds in the same mandates of labour, marriage, government and the church. Each mandate is dependent upon, and must be exercised in relation to, the one commandment of God as revealed in Jesus Christ: ‘They are introduced into the world from above as orders or “institutions” of the reality of Christ, that is to say, of the reality of the love of God for the world and for men which is revealed in Jesus Christ’ (DBWE 6:255).

228

The Limit of Responsibility

represents the whole history of humanity in his historical life (DBWE 1:147). The resulting challenge for the church is to respond faithfully and constructively to the reality of the world as recognized ontologically in Christ, with the material value revealed in him being true for all. In other words, Bonhoeffer invites a reversal of modern Western philosophical ways of thinking about responsibility in ways that can resource an ethic of responsibility in a globalizing era; the question of responsibility is not framed (at least, not exclusively) from agent to act to consequence but, rather, as an understanding of responsibility that originates in You, that is, learned from Christ and neighbour. Because of Jesus Christ, and only because of Jesus Christ, responsibility is defined in terms of the concrete call of You to me. Hence the challenge to Christian people to unpack with Bonhoeffer the threefold dynamic of living ‘with-each-other’ [miteinander], ‘being-for-each-other’ [füreinander] and called to vicarious representative action [Stellvertretung] as the lived meaning of responsibility. Hence the irresponsibility of me as a consumer incurvatio in se ipsum (curved inward on itself), ensconced within a univocal mindset that subsumes socio-economic, cultural and religious differences within itself, who rarely lifts my eyes to meet the gaze of the Other. Too often the discipline of Christian ethics addresses questions of responsibility only as they bear upon the lives of individuals. Christian ethics today is challenged to explicate the public and political dimensions of Pentecostal living, in ways that discern and engage creatively with some of the moves that his later writings evidence. Because Pentecost is an event that is political, so too is the understanding of responsibility that it engenders manifests itself politically as inter alia entailing good news for all, open to the future, as marking a space for action into which the truth is spoken and empowering those previously too frightened to speak. The challenge for the churches is to engage in the practical realities of truthing and empowerment wherever the Spirit of God blows. This might include shareholder meetings where obstacles to the exercise of responsibility may not be the intransigence of the mining company but, instead, the reticence of shareholders who are, perhaps, managing the pension fund that I hope to draw upon some day.

BIBLICAL REFERENCES Acts 2.1–41 xx 17.7 143 1 Corinthians 13.12 99, 106 2 Corinthians 5.1 14 Exodus 3.1 227 Galatians 3.6 9 4.9 99, 106 6.1 136 Genesis 15.16 9 18.32 124 Isaiah 40.1 124 42.1–3 148 John 5.19 150 19.5 152 Leviticus 18.28 156 Luke 1.79 223 9.1–6 206 10.19–20 222 11.21–22 149 12.25 166 12.49 147 18.24–27 150, 173 19.1–10 173 19.4 156

Mark 1–8 149 3.27 149 9 147–50, 154 9.4 147–50, 152, 154 9.39 155 9.39–40 148 9.39–41 149 10.25 150, 173 12.13–17 144 15.43 173 Matthew 3.10–12 147 10.1–24 206 11.21ff 175, 213 12.29 148–49 12.30a 147, 149–50, 152 15.3 166, 169 16.25 166 16.26 166 18.12 166, 169 19.24 150, 173 20.21 166, 169 22.42 166, 169 25 19 25.14–30 173 25.40–43 147 Philippians 1.7 144 Psalms 24.1 203 Revelation 2 147, 213 3 213 20.11–12 147 Romans 4.3 9 6 118 13.7 143–44

BONHOEFFER WORKS DBWE 1–Sanctorum Communion xvii, xix, 60, 87, 90–4, 96–101, 103, 112–13, 118–19, 122–25, 129–30, 134–6, 140, 166, 174–5, 200–1, 205–9, 211–12, 214, 217, 227–8 DBWE 2–Act and Being 90, 94–108, 110–18, 120, 134, 201, 207–8, 210, 213–14, 217, 227 DBWE 3–Creation and Fall 108–10, 112 DBWE 4–Discipleship 119, 135–6, 152, 155, 200–1, 207, 212, 219 DBWE 5–Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible 174

DBWE 6–Ethics xv, 26, 60, 87–9, 105–6, 108, 111–15, 120, 124, 136, 147, 152, 155, 174, 200–1, 213–16, 219, 227 DBWE 8–Letters and Papers from Prison 89, 115–16, 171, 173, 208–9, 214, 218–21 DBWE 12–Berlin: 1932–1933 112–13, 130, 135–6, 140, 207 DBWE 14–Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935–1937 112, 130

NAMES Adelman, H. 96 Adorno, Theodor W. 22, 96, 194 Agamben, Giorgio 87 Akbas, Eren Karaca 41–2 Al-Noman, Tarek 39 Althaus, Horst 65–6 Alznauer, Mark 56–8 Aquinas, Thomas 55, 119, 211 Archer, Margaret 11, 13 Arendt, Hannah 27–37, 70, 87, 91 Assmann, Hugo 71 Athanasiou, Athena 88 Auga, Ulrike 127 Avineri, Schlomo 65 Badiou, Alain xix, 14, 87, 146, 166 Baggini, Julian 50 Bannon, I. 189 Barnett, Stuart 2, 61, 90 Barth, Karl 111–12, 115–16, 210, 212 Bartonek, Anders 66 Bayer, Oswald 94 Bayertz, Kurt 15 Becker, Sascha O. 19, 83, 212 Beitz, Charles 142 Bernasconi, Robert 20 Bierhoff, H.W. 15 Birnbacher, Dieter 15 Blackledge, Paul 68 Blamey, Kathleen 149 Bloechl, Jeffrey 20 Bloom, Allan 62 Blum, Ulrich 83 Boadle, Anthony 182 Bohmbach, Karla G. 157 Bohn, W.E. 67 Brown, Peter 173 Browne, Paul 67 Buber, Martin xix, 14, 17–19, 24–5, 105, 212 Busch, Kirsten 157

Busk, Larry 33 Butler, Judith xix, 14, 19, 22–6, 45, 60–2, 87–8, 105, 121, 194, 216 Camic, Charles 76 Caputo, John D. 20 Carrington, Damian 177 Castoriadis, Castor 74, 85 Cesarale, Giorgio 66 Chung, Paul S. 127 Clements, Keith 128–9 Cohen, G.A. 68 Collier, P. 189 Corry, Steven 126 Coser, Lewis A. 81 Critchley, Julian xix, 14, 20, 24–5, 68 Davis, John B. 14, 65, 189 Debord, Guy 41 DeGruchy, John de 128 DeJonge, Michael 124 Derrida, Jacques xix, 14, 20, 24, 40, 61, 208 Dodd, James 54 Drichel, Simone 20 Dube, Musa 126 Dudley, Leonard 83 Duff, Anthony 5, 6 Dunning, John H. 193 Dussel, Enrique 71 Eagleton, Terry 117 Ebisu, Keita 222 Evdokimov, Paul 37, 146 Faucci, Riccardo 80 Feinberg, Joel 6, 7 Fierro, Alfredo 71 Finn, Daniel K. 3–5, 73 Fletcher, Joseph 174–5 Floyd Jr, Wayne Whitson 96–7 Forstater, Maya 2

232

Names

Foucault, Michel 11, 22–4, 43, 47 Fraser, Nancy 144, 189–90 Frick, Peter 91, 124 Friedman, Milton 194 Fromm, Eric 69–70 Geuss, Raymond 47 Giddens, Anthony 83 Godsey, John D. 111–12 Gomberg, Paul 142–3 Goodhart, Sandor 19 Gorksi, Philip S. 76 Gray, John 50 Green, Clifford, J. 88, 127, 206 Gregor, Brian 10, 17, 123, 211–12 Gruchy, John de 128 Guerrero, Sylvia H. 40 Guijjaro, Santiago 148 Gustafson, James M. 210 Habermas, Jürgen 62 Hahn, Udo 124 Hamill, Susan Pace 139 Hamilton, Alexander 47 Handelman, Susan 21 Hannan, Shauna K. 157 Harris, H.S. 65 Hauerwas, Stanley 174–5 Hausschild, W.D. 10 Hawley, John C. 21 Hegel, Georg W.F. xix, 56–73, 89, 94–9, 107, 147 Heidegger, Martin xix, 24, 89, 102–4, 113, 212 Henderson, James P. 65 Herzog, Annabel 29–30 Heuvel, Steven C. van den 157, 216 Hodgson, Peter 61, 79 Holm, Jacob 95 Honig, Bonnie 27 Honneth, Axel 60 Hoogstraten, H.D. van 157 Houlgate, Stephen 64 Hoyer, Karl Georg 12 Hubig, Christoph 15 Hurtado, Larry W. 156–7 Husserl, Edmund xix, 89 Irigaray, Luce 24

Jaeschke, Walter 61, 63–4, 66 Jenkins, Willis 128 Jiwanji, M. 189 Kant, Immanuel xix, 10–11, 14, 22, 48–53, 57, 61–2, 89, 91, 93–7, 144–5, 216 Karttunen, Tomi 124 Kaufmann, Franz-Xaver 15, 44, 95 Kautsky, Karl 67 Kearney, Richard 21 Kepe, T. 132 Khonje, Martha 141 Kierkegaard, Søren 116, 119, 130 Kiernan, Paul 182 Kiess, John 31, 33–6 Kiskenniemi, Erkki 149 Knox, T. M. 57, 65, 90, 118, 128, 210 Kojeve, Alexandre 62 Kretschmar, Georg 10 Krumwiedge, Hans-Walter 10 Kwan, Tze-wan 19 Laclau, Ernesto 62 Latham, Robert xiv Lederman, Daniel 190 Leite, C. 189 Lemm, Vanessa 42 Levi, Margaret 2 Levinas, Emanuel xix, 14, 19–24, 87, 105, 212 Levit, Stuart, M. 161–2 Louden, Robert B. 53 Louth, Andrew 175 MacLachlan, Alice 27 Malina, Bruce J. 148 Maloney, William F. 190 Malpass, Alice 2 Marcuse, Herbert 60, 70 Marinson, Mattias xv Marsh, Charles 98, 102 Martin, Kara 17, 75, 102–3, 105, 128, 133, 157, 212 Martin-Schramm, Jim 157 Mason, Edward 191 Mather, Ronald 83 McBride, Jennifer M. 128, 174 McKeon, Richard Peter 47–50, 86 McKinnon, Andrew M. 83–4

Names McMahon, Gary 189–90 McRae, R.F. 49 Mercier, Gilbert 151 Meyers, Ched 148–9 Midgley, Mary 50 Milbank, John 146–7, 154 Milner, Jean-Claude 146 Miranda, José P. 71 Moberly, Jennifer 119 Moorman, Mary C. 9 Moreira, Susana 190 Morgan, Jonathan 156 Muers, Rachel 130–1 Murray, John 9, 47 Myers, Ched 148, 166 Neill, Onoroa 143–4 Newlands, George xvi Niebuhr, H. Richard 14, 210–11 Nielsen, Ulrik 157 Nietzche, Friedrich 22, 27, 41–4, 95, 101, 200 Nissen, Ulrik Besser 212 Ntsebeza, L. 132 Nziem, Isidore Ndaywel È. 39 Ossowski, R. 189 Oyefusi, Aderoju 184 Palmisano, Trey 101 Papyrakis, E. 189 Park, John S. 52, 91 Pellauer, David xviii, 7, 149 Peters, Rebecca Todd 37, 126 Picht, Georg 14–17 Pippin, Robert B. 62 Plekon, Michael 37, 146 Pope Francis 80, 176–7, 185 John Paul II xviii, 2, 4, 7–9, 37, 49, 67–72, 81, 90, 127, 142–4, 146, 149, 154, 157, 171, 182, 220, 223 Powell, Walter W. 80 Ramsey, Paul 90 Ranson, Ina 15 Rassmussen, Larry L. 157 Rawls, John 142 Reath, Andrews 10

233

Reed, Esther D. 58, 140, 152 Regan, Tom 143–4 Reiss, Hans Siegbert 91 Richardson, Ruth Drucilla 92 Ricoeur, Paul xviii, 7–10, 14, 25, 81, 87, 131, 149, 154–5 Ridley, Aaron 43 Rittel, Horst 12 Robbins, Jill 19 Roberts, Richard H. 96, 128 Robins, Nick 86 Robinson, William I. xv, 103, 127, 142 Rose, Gillian 61 Rosser, Andrew 190 Roth, Günther 75 Rothstein, Stanley William 72 Roudinesco, Elisabeth 40 Runehov, Anne xv Sachs, Jeffrey D. 189 Sagafi-Nejad, Tagi 193 Saito, Kohei 66 Sala-i-Martin, Xavier 189 Santos, Carlos 127–8 Schaap, Andrew 27 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, D.E. xix, 50–7, 66–7, 69, 89–93 Schliesser, Christine 118–19 Schweiker, William xv, 210–11 Scott, Peter Manley 157 Segre, Sandro 79 Simirnov, G. 73 Singer, Peter 50, 142 Sizoo, Edith 15, 37–9 Skempton, Simon 61 Skomvoulis, Michalis 66 Smith, Angela M. 6, 17, 65–6 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 117, 127 Starr, Bradley E. 75, 77–8 Tallroth, N. 189 Tangyin, Kajornpat 19–21 Tanner, Kathryn 214 Taylor, Charles 61 Teng, Thomas 127 Theal, George MacCall 132 Theissen, Gert 148–9 Thiem, Annika 24 Tiagi, R. 189–90

234 Tice, Terrence N. 54, 91 Tietz, Christiane 91, 123–4, 157 Toews, John F. 72 Torsen, I. 27 Trubek, David M. 76 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond 177, 204 Ukpong, Justin S. 126 Umbel, Daniel 118 Vanhoozer, Kevin J. xv Verheyden, Jack C. 51 Voegelin, Eric 77 Voeglin, Eric 77 Wallace, Robert M. 126 Warne, Rees 184

Names Warner, Andrew 189 Webber, Melvin 12 Weber, Max xix, 11, 14, 74–85 Weidmann, J. 189 Wilcken, John 129–30 Wilding, Adrian 84 Willmott, Chris 50 Woessmann, Ludger 83 Wolff, Ernst 21, 48–9 Wright, N.T. 148 Wu, Kuo-An 115 Zadek, Simon 2 Zimmermann, Jens 123, 211–12

SUBJECTS advocacy 198, 202, 204 alienation 60–1, 65, 67, 70, 72–3 Augustine 16, 34–6, 90–1, 173 autonomy xvi, 48–9, 88, 95, 121, 216

decision-making 3, 5, 9, 75–6, 78, 81, 86, 101, 121, 125, 143, 145, 172, 177, 187–8 discipleship 119, 175, 210

baptism 116, 118, 122, 209, 214 blame xvi, 3, 6, 8, 10, 13, 15, 23–4, 28, 42, 45, 47, 56, 84, 86, 118, 158, 183–4 blessing 130, 197, 209, 221

economics 3, 66, 72, 197 ecumenism xv, 128–30, 134 employment 145, 152, 159, 167, 192, 197 empowerment/empowering 35, 221–4, 225, 228 energy xviii, 68, 133, 152, 166, 188, 195, 220, 222, 226 environment 1, 4–5, 14–15, 37–8, 42, 134, 153, 156, 160, 165, 176–7, 179–80, 182, 186, 188, 193, 196, 199, 204, 214, 226 eschatology 14, 17, 61, 108, 149, 214, 216 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) 153, 162 externalities 2, 57

cattle 2, 160, 164 Centesimus Annus 4, 72 chaplaincy/ chaplaincies/ chaplains 131, 133–4, 200 commodities 67, 86, 165, 181, 190, 225, 226 communication 4, 41, 62, 130–1, 187–8, 196, 209, 217 conflict 2, 55, 57, 69–71, 73–4, 77, 85, 96, 101, 146, 150, 169, 184–5, 195, 212 conscience 16, 22, 27, 30, 33, 42, 44, 49, 77–8, 86, 102–3, 113, 117, 120, 199, 209, 217 consumer xviii, 1–5, 7, 13, 137, 145, 201, 228 consumption xiv, xviii, 2, 7, 162, 179, 184, 194, 222 contamination 124, 160–3, 203 corporate social responsibility (CSR) 40–2, 150, 190, 197 corruption xix, 4, 123, 137, 150, 160, 191, 193, 197, 203, 208 creatureliness 92, 109–11, 113 culture 39, 40, 66, 124, 136, 139, 151, 196, 198, 203, 214 curse 177, 188–91, 194 dams 13, 182–3 Dasein 24, 102–4, 112–14, 116 death 10, 31, 51, 57–8, 84, 96, 102–4, 110, 115, 117–18, 120, 153, 160, 164, 184, 212, 217–18, 223

farmers 160, 164, 167, 183, 195, 203 finitude 102, 104, 108, 120 forgiveness 24, 37, 104, 113, 115, 117 G20 137–9 globalization/globalizing xiv–xvi, xvii, xviii, 3, 7–8, 10–12, 25, 37, 64, 67, 74, 89, 118, 122, 124, 126, 135, 139, 140, 145, 146, 150, 201, 205–6, 223, 227–8 governance 4, 12, 38, 184, 193 grace 9, 87, 109–13, 117, 214–15, 217, 223 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 141, 147, 181, 189 guilt 16, 23, 28, 43–4, 47, 56, 85, 100, 102–4, 113–14, 117–21, 124, 134, 155–6, 194, 201, 215–16, 227 always-being-already-guilty xix, 89, 104 Schuld 103 healing 33, 35, 114, 147–8, 156, 178, 221 hegemony 102

236

Subjects

hunger 143–4, 227 hypocrisy 34, 137, 146, 175, 186 idealism 53, 60, 62, 67, 90, 92, 96, 98, 101, 106, 107–8 ideology 68 I-It 17–18 imputation 8–11, 47–9 incarnation 64, 104, 110, 112, 151, 207, 212 incurvatio xvii, 15–16, 87, 97, 214, 228 individualism xvii, 3, 11, 35, 51, 78–81, 87, 94, 124 inequality 42, 45, 126, 128, 130, 135–6, 140 infrastructure xvi, 4, 73, 139, 141, 151, 153, 167, 178, 186, 188, 192, 224–6 innocence 28, 43, 56–7, 119 International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) 74, 164, 187–8, 192 investors 7, 41, 137, 145, 161, 171–2, 180, 198–9, 225 iron xiv, 27, 132, 160, 171, 182, 227 Israel 23, 123, 149, 156 justice 2, 21, 70, 126, 139–45, 163, 168, 172, 200, 202 Laborems Exercens 69–70 love 26, 29, 34, 52, 90–1, 99, 101, 109, 118, 120, 157, 166, 216, 219, 221, 227 Luther, Martin 9, 10, 64, 75, 82, 112, 123–4, 128, 201, 211 mandates 114–15, 212–13, 227 markets 2, 3, 13, 126, 167, 169, 185, 193 metals xvi, 2, 7, 27, 131, 160–1, 163–5, 176, 187–8, 196, 204 neighbour xv, xvii, xviii, 29–30, 34, 54, 87, 88–9, 97, 100, 107, 112, 114, 121, 123, 140, 152, 165, 205, 212, 215, 218, 228 Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) 154, 163, 165, 177–8, 180–1, 186, 199, 202 one-third-world xvi–xviii, 124, 134, 169, 175, 184, 208

parable 95–6, 109, 173 paradox 58, 88, 146–7, 191 partnership 29, 181, 188, 193, 223–4 peace 26, 51, 128–9, 200 pension xiv, xviii, 7, 134, 143, 171, 186, 191, 193, 228 Pentecost xvii, 206, 214, 216, 219, 220–3, 228 Pharisees 147–8, 156 poverty 41–2, 51, 68, 91, 126, 128, 137, 143–5, 152, 174, 177, 188, 190, 192, 197–8, 222 profits 13, 137–8, 155, 159, 194 Protestantism 82–4 punishment 39, 43–4, 48, 57, 86 reconciliation 127, 215 reputation 155, 169, 186, 198 Rerum Novarum 70 responsibility answerability 5, 15, 40, 72 attribution xviii, xix, 8–9, 11–13 being-for-each-other 122, 228 being-with 95, 102–3 culpability 8, 9, 118–19, 124, 205 miteinander 122, 124, 128, 134, 136, 175, 194, 205, 228 responsiveness 24–5, 158, 215 responsivity 14–5, 109 responsum 14–15 resposio 14–15 Stellvertretung xvii, xix, 10, 37, 87, 119, 121–2, 125, 127, 130, 134, 155–6, 175, 205, 207, 212, 228 Verantwortung 14–15, 50, 54, 56, 111 with-each-other 122, 128, 228 You-I-You xv–xviii, xx–xxi, 14, 18, 87, 121–2, 126, 158, 165, 175, 205–6, 214–16, 227 You-We-You xx, 18, 87 resurrection xvi, 99, 104, 110, 115, 118, 131, 156, 207, 212, 219, 220, 222–3 revelation 63, 90, 99–100, 102, 104, 106–8, 110–17, 201, 206–7, 210, 212, 227 Satan 109, 148–50 shareholders 142–3, 187, 192, 199, 224–6, 228

Subjects sin 4, 5, 37, 39, 47, 73–4, 83, 96–7, 103, 105, 107–8, 113–14, 117–19, 122–6, 130, 156, 162, 175, 205, 217, 223, 227 peccatorum 123, 125, 208 sociality 51–2, 90, 92–3, 99, 116, 206, 211 solidarity xix–xx, 64, 68, 71, 118–19, 123, 125–6, 168, 186, 206, 214, 227 Spinoza 52–3 stakeholders 187, 196, 199, 203, 225 suffering 2, 23, 26, 29, 120, 143, 155, 174, 208, 218 sustainability 1, 164, 168, 172, 181, 193, 199, 200, 224 tailings 13, 165, 171, 182–3, 198 tax 42, 126, 136–45, 159, 167–9, 190, 192 thoughtlessness 27, 33, 37, 45 titanium 132 traceability xv, 2, 4, 11, 110, 205 trade xiv, 2, 3, 44, 63, 71, 74, 138–40, 189, 225, 226 transcendence 84, 93, 97, 109, 111–13, 115, 214, 220

237

transparency 1, 4, 138, 162, 188, 203 truthing 165, 167, 221, 223, 228 unions 70–1, 74 United Nations (UN) 151–4, 176, 182, 186, 193, 222, 224 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 153 universality 17, 59, 64–5, 123, 205, 212, 219, 221 utility 49, 79, 86, 143, 219 vocation 123, 133, 169, 174, 200, 215, 219 vulnerability/ vulnerable xx, 18, 22–3, 25, 26, 43, 128, 144, 150, 176, 184, 216, 222 wages 2, 69, 72–3, 189, 192, 203 well-being 34, 42, 96, 177, 185, 188, 204 wool 2, 126, 167 workers 1, 41, 65, 67, 69–71, 73–4, 153, 160, 183, 186, 193, 195, 203 World Bank 141, 176, 189, 190, 224 World Economic Forum 176 worship 55, 63, 136, 171, 204, 207, 218, 220