In a hyper-political age, Ephraim Radner’s Mortal Goods arrives as a calmly reasoned prompt for perspective, for a reframing of Christian political imagination by way of a reminder that we can do little to move history in the direction we desire.
Radner sketches what he envisions as a more modest politics grounded in mortal goods, the goods that constitute and mark the limits of our created lives – our births, families, brief living, raising of children, our relations, our decline and deaths. In Radner’s vision, these mortal goods find their focus in the household, in the goods conducive to the generative love of parents and children. It is a modest politics of immediate relations, of home and village.
Yet Radner’s vision of politics does not entail betterment. That is, Christian politics is not properly about ameliorating the human predicament or making the world a better place, in either progressive or conservative forms.
Why? Because betterment does not work. Intentionally echoing Ecclesiastes, Radner argues political campaigns of betterment do not achieve their purposes, and ameliorative benefits occur only by chance. Moreover, such programmes are crippled by the impenetrable complexity of human life and its unintended consequences – for example, Radner argues, the health transformation that has nearly doubled human life expectancy since the early 1900s has been more destructive of the life of service to God than the advent of the capitalist market. Finally, such efforts at betterment hint at ingratitude – a failure to appreciate the lives we have been given in favour of better lives we engineer.
Radner’s alternative centres on recognising the giftedness of created lives – acknowledging with gratitude the intrinsic goodness of the lives we have been given in any and every circumstance – and offering them in the service of God, by which Radner means seeking to order those lives so that they nurture the generative love of parents and children.
This, however, is not simply a vision of betterment scaled back to hearth and home. For catastrophe, not incremental improvement, is the stage on which created life is lived. While he notes that catastrophe can clear the ground for positive change (a vision quite popular in cynical leadership and political circles of late), he highlights the negative dimension of catastrophe, but reminds us the hard life, including evil days, is a gift from God, that suffering belongs to the good life, and so forth. In the end, Radner’s Christian politics is a politics of endurance, of grateful survival.
Radner’s reminder that we are not in charge of improving things and that we rarely if ever succeed as expected is humbling, perhaps frustrating, but true and helpful in the midst of political cultures that increasingly tend towards apocalyptic Prometheanism. Radner reminds us that our efforts are more Sisyphean in nature; God is in charge.
Radner’s efforts to reign in the scope of Christian politics are decidedly mixed in their success. He believes that focusing on the mortal goods that nurture generative life will narrow Christian political concern. But this is not clearly the case. After all, it is not difficult to connect most contemporary political issues to his generative concerns. Indeed, scattered throughout the pages of Mortal Goods, one can find a fairly comprehensive list of political concerns that belie claims for modesty or narrowing.
On the other hand, some may see Radner narrowing Christian political concern by restricting it to home and village. This would be a mistake insofar as Radner’s treatment of the neighbour at least implicitly broadens political concern beyond the seemingly narrow confines of home and village.
In the end, Radner actually expands Christian politics by recognising the political significance of the mundane, of everyday life – that perhaps the most significant forums for ordering the gifts of mortal goods are not the institutions and offices that those in power want us to think are most important but rather those constituted by mundane relations. This is one of the strengths of the book.
The most provocative dimension of Mortal Goods is the renunciation of betterment. As a critique of human pretensions of control, this is helpful. Where it becomes problematic is with regard to what God is doing. Radner is adamant that Christian politics is not about human attainment but is limited to ordering God-given mortal goods.
The question is, what does God give here and now? Radner admits that he all but ignores the eschatological transformation effected by Jesus and enacted in the church’s liturgy. In so doing, has he inadvertently diminished the mortal goods God gives by ignoring what the Spirit is doing in, with, under those mortal goods? We can embrace Radner’s critique of merely human agency and progress and still ask, what of the Spirit and sanctification?
Likewise, we might embrace Radner’s call to gratitude for mortal goods under any circumstance. We can praise God even on the rack. But what of the dominical promise of abundant life? What of hope and patient waiting that is more than mere survival and endurance?
We can agree that catastrophe, and not incremental improvement, is the setting of fallen mortal life (the book is absent any discussion of the difference sin makes in accounting of mortal goods), we can recognise the incompleteness (or ‘not yet’) of the good, but what of the difference that the positive catastrophe of the advent of Jesus, and concomitant overlapping of fallen and new creation, make for our politics?
Is there no God-given betterment in this time between the times? No balm in Gilead? And is not sharing that balm, in admittedly fragile and incomplete ways, not part of our Spirit-empowered witness?
I tell my students that Christian ethics comes down to one question: What is God doing here and now to overcome sin? Mortal Goods is a wonderfully provocative and helpful reflection on the limits and possibilities of Christian politics that flow from how one answers that question.
