Liberating the Will of Australia. Geoffrey Burn

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СКАЧАТЬ of this salvific orientation of God’s movement towards us that we are aware of the depths and nature of sin. “We know sin only in the context of God’s resistance to our resistance to God.”46

      A change in life comes when a person responds to God’s overwhelming life and turns to God in faith, to receive change in her deepest being, gradually being released from the bondage of the will that blocks communion with God. Faith is the work of the Spirit of God in a person. In the words of McFadyen, faith

      excites willing into a new orientation upon God . . . In faith, one internalises the dynamics of a God who is radically and genuinely for us. The spirit of faith is the excited and redirected energy (desire) through which a person answers by orienting herself in an excess of joy, which repeats and redoubles as it internalises God’s excessive movement towards her. In faith, one commits personal energy in consensual response to the dynamic in which God is for us, and finds oneself simultaneously filled with joy in God and oneself and others. Through the commitment of such personal energy, that dynamic is internalised and redoubled. In the dynamic joy of faith, letting “God be God” enables one to stretch towards being genuinely and fully oneself.47

      Human beings are made for worship; all human beings give their lives in worship. To worship is to orient and order one’s life around a reality as primary to and constitutive of what one considers to be of worth and to be true; it is what one gives personal energy to as the ground and criterion of active life-intentionality. Worship of God is the active and attentive response to the dynamic order of God, directing and stretching our energies towards God; worship intensifies being as communion. Bound willing, therefore, directs our worship towards things which are not God and which take our life away. Turning towards the overflowing love of God sets us free from the things which have bound our wills and the love of God enhances and energizes that choice.

      Critically, the gift of God is not restoring what was lost, but bringing something new out the present reality. This is seen fundamentally in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection narratives show that the resurrection was awkward and confusing precisely because it did not deny or disregard what had happened. Moreover, something entirely new was present in the resurrected Jesus, whose bodily life was now different and who could no longer die. The implication is that nothing which has been done need be the final word, that God can bring good out of that which was damaging, but not by returning to some, possibly imagined, pristine past, but by working with what is there to bring something that cannot be imagined.48

      It can be seen now how both child sexual abuse and the Nazi holocaust are truly pathologies: both block the dynamic flourishing that arises from being turned towards God by directing energy towards something that closes down the possibilities of life. In child sexual abuse, the abuser blocks the dynamic ecology of being in communion, focusing all energy on relating to the abuser; the child is inhibited from being able to relate to others, particularly God, who is the only one whose relationship is entirely free from damaging consequences. More than that, such abuse is sedimented in the structures of a person’s identity and so limits his capacity for orientation towards the abundance of life that comes from being able to respond to God in worship. Abuse has blocked the possibility of transcendence. In the Nazi holocaust, the peculiarities of the Germanic peoples were absolutized by Nazi ideology. Whilst there is a right place for joy at the particularities of one’s people, it is dangerous when these become absolutized, especially when the way of achieving this perceived purity is the extermination of the other. Raising particular characteristics to being the goal towards which a nation works—that is, directs its energy; that is, what it worships—is to set up something that is static and other than God as the object of worship, which results in the restriction of the life of any who are different in some way. The deliberate destruction of the Jewish people is bad enough in itself, but it has a deeper significance, for Israel’s vocation was to worship God and so to draw all other peoples into the abundance of life that comes from this worship. Walter Wink writes that “Israel’s vocation is to be a light to the nations: to teach them to worship Yahweh as the absolute, and not to worship the absolutized faculties of their own nations.”49 This is not to say that the practice of Jewishness at any point in history completely fulfilled this purpose, but it does say that the worship of national identity can only be pursued through the dismantling and destruction of everything that God intended the nation of Israel to be.

      This section began with the desire to have a way of describing pathological situations which is powerful enough to give a deep description of the pathology, one which both explains the dynamics of the situation and is also hopeful because it shows us a way of working with it that gets beyond punishment following the determination of guilt. The theological concept of bound willing was introduced as a way of giving a thick description of situations and McFadyen demonstrated the usefulness of this concept with his case studies. This is a work of hope because we can understand the deeper dynamic of bound willing as being ways in which we are blocked from responding to the generative love of God. If “binding” is the word to describe what happens to the will in being born into and being shaped by sin, then “loosing” describes the process of being freed from this captivity by the overflowing love of God. Both of these are processes, or movements, hence the titles of the major sections of the book. The Second Movement will consider how to take hold of this liberating movement of God. Before we get to that, the next section will show how the concept of bound willing can help us to read the biblical book Ezekiel in a different and illuminating way, giving us more insight into how bound willing works in whole nations over a period of many generations. Then the final section will begin to look at how bound willing describes what has been happening in Australia. The Intermezzo is an extended study which shows how the dynamics of bound willing inherently limited the possible outcomes of the fight over land within the Australian legal system.

      II

      Bound Willing in Ezekiel

      The previous section introduced the theological concept of bound willing and the gift of God in releasing people from that binding. This will be an underlying theme throughout the whole book. In this section we will look at the book of Ezekiel from the Bible, which was written about a period in Israel’s history in the sixth century BCE. Ezekiel sees Israel at the time as a nation that was continuing to sin in ways that are shaped by the past. It will be argued here that either they could not see this or they refused to acknowledge it. Through the prophet Ezekiel, God calls the nation to repent, which it does not do. Even so, the generosity of God overflows in the promise to restore the nation to the land of Israel in the future. Part of the reason for including this study is to help us shift from thinking about individuals and individual responsibility to being able to think in terms of the nation as an entity, which is more than just a collection of individuals, and also to begin to think about problems that have stretched over multiple generations.

      Throughout the twentieth century, the dominant reading of Ezekiel was to see it as a crucial point along the trajectory from a “primitive” notion of corporate responsibility to a “modern” one of individual responsibility.50 The key text for this interpretive move is Ezekiel 18, where Ezekiel uses an image from the laws for individuals as an analogy in order to be able to speak of the national situation in Israel at the time. This text will be discussed in more detail below, but first it is necessary to consider the ideological stance which underlies the misleading interpretation of Ezekiel.

      Ezekiel 18 is not part of a trajectory towards individual responsibility. The prophet is speaking to a community in crisis. He is responding to a community complaining that their fathers (i.e., the previous generations) had sinned, and it is they (i.e., the present generation) who are being punished. That is, the purpose of Ezekiel 18 “is to demonstrate the collective responsibility of the contemporary house of Israel for the national disaster which she is suffering.”51 Paul Joyce argues convincingly that, “although a single man is considered in each of the three test-cases [Ezekiel 18:5–18], it is the cause of the nation’s predicament which is being explored; the proverb blames the sins of previous generations for the sufferings of the present, СКАЧАТЬ