The Spirit and the Common Good

Shared Flourishing in the Image of God

Daniela C. Augustine

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781467456340
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

A fresh vision of the common good through pnumatological lenses

Daniela C. Augustine, a brilliant emerging scholar, offers a theological ethic for the common good. Augustine develops a public theology from a theological vision of creation as the household of the Triune God, bearing the image of God in a mutual sharing of divine love and justice, and as a sacrament of the divine presence.

The Spirit and the Common Good expounds upon the application of this vision not only within the life of the church but also to the realm of politics, economics, and care for creation. The church serves a priestly and prophetic function for society, indeed for all of creation. This renewed vision becomes the foundation for constructing a theological ethic of planetary flourishing in and through commitment to a sustainable communal praxis of a shared future with the other and the different.

While emphatically theological in its approach, The Spirit and the Common Good engages readers with insights from political philosophy, sociology of religion, economics, and ecology, as well as forgiveness/reconciliation and peacebuilding studies.

Chapter 1

From the Common Image to the Common Good

In his 1989 book Creating a Just Future, Jürgen Moltmann locates the reasons for the current global ecological, political and socioeconomic crisis, within distorted perceptions of God’s image and their reflective mirroring by human society within the cosmos to the detriment of all creation. In light of this beckoning assertion, he proposes that the profound socio-transformative change needed to cure the dehumanizing and ecologically devastating effects of modernity’s ethical visions must begin with a renewed gaze at the image of the triune God—with rediscovery and inspired imaging of the divine community of love.¹ Moltmann’s brief book (first published in the year that marked the collapse of the Eastern Bloc) reads as a manifesto against the madness of civilizational self-extermination, culminating in the Cold War’s nuclear proliferation race (and its present threat amidst global political tensions and economic uncertainties).

In an era dominated by fear of the ideological (including religious) other and a rampant competition for an ever-shrinking world with limited natural resources, the text provokes distressing questions about humanity’s prospects for survival. Has modern society aborted its own future by refusing to take responsibility for the present and for the well-being of the next generations through uncompromised commitment to sustainable economic development, unceasing peacebuilding and faithful stewardship of creation? Have narrow national and regional interests, ruled by the “trinity” of power, prosperity, and security at the expense of others, distorted so irreversibly our vision and understanding of the self and the world that we have lost sight of the deep, organic continuity between our flourishing and that of others? Have we been blinded (by fear of the other and anxiety over scarcity) to the truth that there is no security and well-being for us without security and well-being for the other (for the ethnic, racial, cultural, religious, ideological, and nonanthropic other),² that authentic flourishing depends on mutuality since (in the words of Sallie McFague) “relationality” is “the hallmark of creation”?³ Has the worship of unrestrained, self-indulging consumerism (coined with fervent religious justification of savage, devouring “dominion” over nature) left any place for genuine human community and the pursuit of a planetary common good? Moltmann’s concise answer is painfully sobering—if there is any future left for society that “future is repentance.”⁴ Yet amidst this call to metanoia, his work vibrates with visionary anticipation of a cosmic shalom—of comprehensive flourishing for all of God’s creatures, illuminated by a new (trinitarian) epistemology of love and undergirded by an “ethic of the common life” in a global community of justice and inclusion of all (both anthropic and nonanthropic) others.⁵

For Moltmann, the return to the image of the triune God, essential for the mending of our own humanity as well as of our common home, planet earth, is an outcome of the Spirit’s renewing, socio-transformative work within the redeemed community—the church—the fellowship of the ones whose eyes have been open to see and ears to hear. The Christian is to see the world anew and know it otherwise, through the glorious, illuminating vision of the divine face. Therefore, the community of faith is humanity resensitized by the Spirit to the divine presence within the cosmos, to God’s nearness that fills creation and sustains the breath of all that lives (Job 32:18; 34:14–15). The church is the community of the ones who have seen the face of God (Jesus Christ) and have been empowered by the Spirit to image it in the world through self-giving, unconditional love for God and neighbor. Moltmann’s vision of world-mending centers on this new, in-Spirit-ed, relational epistemology of love in knowing the self, the other and the world—the active, creative love of the communal God poured out by the Holy Spirit into redeemed humanity and embodied by the ontologically renewed, reconciled covenantal community. As the author states, “We always know something else only in so far as we love it, and in this love can allow it to be wholly itself.”⁶

In light of this assertion, the remainder of the present chapter offers a reflection on the Spirit’s Christoforming work in humanity’s ontological renewal as essential for the healing of the world. It begins by turning to the pneumatic hallowing of human life as the embodied bridge between faith and the practice of the common good, articulated and enacted in the Christified lives of the saints. The text proceeds with a brief “exegesis” of the Eastern Orthodox icon of creation and its undergirding “theology of the face,” highlighting the event of the Incarnation, through which the world beheld God’s face in the face of Jesus of Nazareth. The chapter continues with exploring some of the ways in which redeemed humanity images the Trinity within the cosmos, and concludes with reflecting on the significance of Pentecost in establishing the church as the visible icon of the Trinity on earth.

From Belief to the Practice of the Common Good

The divine triune communal love that speaks the world into existence and sustains it with its very breath is manifested in redeemed humanity: in its Christoformed, kenotic longing for all others to live and have life to the fullest (John 10:10), for (as stated by Arthur McGill) love “is the communication of life”—the creative activity through which “life is passed from one person to another, from one community to another.”⁷ Therefore, love, as the new way of knowing, according to Jürgen Moltmann, is not for “dominion” but for “participation”⁸ in the cosmic community of the Spirit. The Spirit of God, “poured out on the whole creation,” brings forth and sustains “the unity and community of all creatures with one another and with God.”⁹ The “cosmic Spirit” is the “common bond,” the living presence that holds all things together as “the ground and source of all that does not live of itself but from, with and in others.”¹⁰ Therefore, life together in pursuit of the common planetary good that circumscribes the flourishing of all God’s creatures is possible only in, with and through the Spirit and her work of renewing the image of God within the cosmos (which coincides with understanding and discerning of the world as a living sanctuary of the divine presence).

In this vein of thought, Moltmann highlights the need of “a new, Christian ‘natural theology’, not so much for the sake of God as in earlier times as for the sake of nature and its worth”¹¹ and insists that if we “find the ‘traces of God’ in the nature of our environment, then we can discover the ‘image of God’ in ourselves.”¹² Orthodox theology describes this journey as nothing less than becoming like God through the Spirit’s sanctifying, Christoforming work within the human community. Therefore, the journey to the common good is the journey toward becoming fully human (becoming Christlike); it is the creature’s ascent to theosis.

Often theologies which justify unrestrained exploitation and destruction of creation perceive the first human beings, placed by God in the garden of Eden, as a perfect, complete project (the very crown of creation) for which all exists and over which they are given unquestionable dominion. Differing from such views, Eastern Christianity understands the first Adam as a “good” (Gen 1) unfolding creation, an ongoing project, whose telos is the final/last Adam—Jesus Christ. This is the project of growing in the freedom of divine love toward all that exists, the totality of creation; it is the free-willed journey toward the likeness of God, in which humanity is transfigured by the Spirit in a perpetual, glorious ascent of partaking in and making visible (within the materiality of the world) the divine communal life of the invisible God. This transfiguring work of the Spirit takes place though bringing about the embodiment/incarnation within the human community of the Word that has spoken the world into existence—a pneumatic movement that weaves and sustains the essential continuity and community between humanity and the rest of creation (itself being materialized words spoken forth by the eternal Word).

In light of this pneumatological anthropology, it is not accidental that many of the Eastern church fathers differentiate in their works between the terms “image” and “likeness” in relation to humanity’s ontology and vocation within the cosmos.¹³ Their theological vision depicts these terms as reflective precisely of the transfiguring movement from prototype to telos, from potentiality to actualization, while magnifying the redemptive tension between divine grace and human responsibility as an intended pedagogy on becoming like God. Therefore, the image is often portrayed as the full God-given potentiality for attaining the likeness, while likeness, understood as theosis culminating in union with God, is seen as the vocation and destiny of human existence.¹⁴ In the ontological brokenness of the fallen world, the spiritual ascent toward theosis is experienced as “a journey into God”¹⁵ through the sanctifying/Christoforming work of the Holy Spirit who transfigures humanity from glory to glory (2 Cor 3:18), making it a partaker of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4). Indeed, theosis is Christlikeness (the likeness of God in human flesh), and since Christ is the visible image of the invisible God (Col 1:15) in the material cosmos, to be truly human is to be Christlike.¹⁶ Yet theosis is experienced as ontological renewal and healing that engulfs not only humanity but all of creation in life-giving union with the Creator. This all-permeating cosmic healing involves free-willed, Christoformed, Spirit-empowered human agency. Therefore, humanity’s vocation is engraved from the beginning in its ontology. The first Adam represents the communion of heaven and earth, as the union of matter and spirit—of the visible and invisible, the created and uncreated.¹⁷ Adam stands within the world as a microcosm which is to unite the creation to the Creator until the entire world is transfigured into a cosmic, ecclesial macroanthropos—a destiny actualized in the cosmic Christ as the last Adam.¹⁸ Since from the beginning, the last Adam is the ontological telos of the first Adam and of all creation, and his communal body, the church, is to circumscribe all existence (both terrestrial and celestial) into union with the Creator, then not the first Adam but the church as cosmic, Christoformed community is the crown of creation—the destiny of all existence. To paraphrase the Shepherd of Hermas, she is the goal for which the world exists.¹⁹

The path toward attaining the likeness of God demands cooperation and alignment of the free human will with the divine will. It unfolds as an empowering pedagogy on becoming like God by choosing to love and will like him. It is a call to one’s continual Christic transfiguring through sanctification of personal will and desires, in fasting from oneself on behalf of the other as expression of incarnated love toward God and neighbor. Because Christoformed love is a free and voluntary response to God’s call to humanity, the freedom of human will in the image of God is a prerequisite for attaining the divine likeness. As Vladimir Lossky states,

To be what one must in loving God, one must admit that one can be the opposite; one must admit that one can revolt. The resistance of freedom alone gives sense to the union. . . . This freedom comes from God: it is the seal of our divine participation, the masterpiece of the Creator.²⁰

Therefore, it takes one will to create humanity, but two to sanctify it. Or in the words of Lossky, “A single will to rise up the image, but two to make the image into a likeness.”²¹

As Christoforos Stavropoulos points out, the Holy Spirit is “the main and essential beginning” of humanity’s sanctification,²² the One who applies what is objectively accomplished in Christ to the life of the individual believer and the community of faith, forming Christ’s body on earth as the communal icon of God. Echoing Saint Athanasius, Lossky asserts that God became flesh so that humanity may receive the Holy Spirit²³—become pneumatized. Therefore, Pentecost is not merely a continuation of the Incarnation or its sequel. It is its result and purpose as the inaugural event of the Spirit’s sanctifying work in humanity.²⁴ As such, Pentecost is the beginning of the “last things” for it is the event of unveiling the church—the end of creation—amidst the present.

In light of this understanding of theosis, Christians (as the ones on whom the Spirit has poured himself) are those who through the Spirit’s illuminating and transfiguring work have responded to the divine call (mandate) to humanity to become Christ-(God in flesh)-like by following and imaging within the world Christ’s kenosis (emptying themselves for the sake of others, Phi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Miroslav Volf
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: The Story Behind the Text
• 1. From the Common Image to the Common Good
• 2. From the Iconoclasm of Violence to Love as the Life of the New Creation
• 3. Recovering of Eucharistic Being in a Market-Shaped World
• 4. From Forgiveness to the Common Good in the Spirit’s World-Mending
• Epilogue: Toward a Hagiography of a Community Committed to the Common Good
• Bibliography
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture Citations