Approaching the End. Stanley Hauerwas

33. In her recent book, Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), Porter references Oliver O’Donovan’s claim that the creation of the world and the redemption in Jesus Christ are poles in relation to which Christians narrate the moral history of the world. Accordingly, Porter affirms O’Donovan’s presumption that the God who creates and the God who elects are one and the same God, but she insists that we experience the one God in diverse ways. So it is appropriate to develop an account of God from creation, that is, from “the natural forces which both sustain us and bear down and ultimately destroy us” (p. 57). The last phrase Porter explicitly borrows from Jim Gustafson. How she can at once express agreement with O’Donovan and Gustafson is not clear to me. Moreover, the appeal to “experience” to sustain a sense of creation begs for further elaboration and defense.

34. I find it odd that Porter does not engage David Burrell’s comparison of creation in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Burrell helps us see that creation is understood in each of those traditions as the free origination of all from the one God and that this means creation so understood is not unique to Christianity. Burrell notes, however, that this common conviction does not mean that there are no differences among these traditions about creation. See David Burrell, C.S.C., Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), pp. 7-26. Burrell, moreover, argues that Barth makes explicit what Aquinas presumes, that is, that “the scriptures supply a personal language with which to speak of God the creator, and this reinforces the point that the covenant is the inherent goal of the creative activity of God. What the biblical accounts presume (and the Qur’an makes explicit) is that the goal of bringing the universe into being is to relate that world, via its human microcosm, to the One who creates it. So those narratives are not concerned to detail a natural level of divine activity and human response accessible to philosophy, but rather to offer an account of the origin of all which makes covenantal relationships possible” (pp. 21-22).

35. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, p. 166.

36. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, pp. 171-72.

37. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, p. 177.

38. Porter, Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 137.

39. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, p. 287.

40. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, pp. 289-90. In Ministers of the Law Porter argues against Niebuhr’s defense of the nation-­state as a manifestation of human sinfulness. She argues that the state, while often corrupted by sin, is nonetheless part of God’s good creation and ordained to enable human cooperative life. Interestingly enough, I think she is right to so criticize Niebuhr.

41. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, pp. 291-92.

42. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, p. 293.

43. In her most recent book, Ministers of the Law, there are few references to creation as necessary for understanding how natural law is necessary to establish the authority of the law. I find myself, however, in agreement with her defense of how authority can and should be grounded in the political process. In particular, I am in sympathy with her contention that social life is not the result of sin but rather constitutive of what it means to be human.

44. Porter, Ministers of the Law, pp. 337-38. She argues, however, that such a judgment reflects the result of Christian ideals and practices that have shaped Western liberal ideals of equality and rights.

45. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4, p. 55.

46. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4, p. 55.

47. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4, p. 53. For my account of the Decalogue see Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), pp. 37-60, and The Truth about God: The Ten Commandments in the Christian Life, with William Willimon (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999).

48. Porter discusses the Decalogue in Nature as Reason (pp. 268-78), but there she is primarily concerned to show how the analysis of the precepts of the Decalogue by Aquinas clarifies the fundamental ideal of justice, which is to render each his due. She also briefly refers to the Decalogue in Ministers of the Law, noting that the scholastics did not think the precepts of the Decalogue to be, as much of the law in the Old Testament was regarded, provisional; but neither did they think the Decalogue to be a fully articulated moral code (p. 67).

49. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 80.

50. Glen H. Stassen, D. M. Yeager, and John Howard Yoder, Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), p. 61.

51. Yoder, in Authentic Transformation, p. 62.

52. In what may seem counterintuitive to some, David Kelsey draws on Wisdom literature to illumine the relation between an eschatological understanding of creation and a trinitarian understanding of God. He notes that how Wisdom’s creation theology bears on a trinitarian understanding of the Creator’s relation to creation can be displayed in the following fashion: “The Father creates. This phrase gets its force entirely from its Trinitarian context and is not open to any direct nuancing by Wisdom’s creation theology. Classically, the Trinitarian formula tells of the triune God’s creating in a certain pattern: It is not the ‘Father’ who creates as YHWH, or instead of or on behalf of the triune God. Rather, it is the triune God who creates. However, God creates by actively relating in a certain way that is told most aptly in a particular quasi-­narrative pattern: the Father creates through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit” (Eccentric Existence, vol. 1, p. 167).

53. John Milbank famously argues that “Christianity recognizes no original violence. It construes the infinite not as chaos, but as a harmonic peace which is yet beyond the circumscribing power of any totalizing reason. Peace no longer depends upon the reduction to the self-­identical, but the sociality of harmonious difference. Violence, by contrast, is always a secondary willed intrusion upon this possible infinite order (which is actual for God).” Accordingly, Milbank argues that Christianity exposes the postmodern understanding of difference as violence as a false “encoding” of reality. In contrast, Christianity is the “coding of transcendental difference as peace.” Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 5-6.

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