Wednesday after Lent 2

Joseph is practicing the rough art of statecraft, testing the suppliants who have come to him for food.  But he is also toying with his brothers, secretly working revenge on them by keeping them in suspense and letting them experience the danger of being before him. 

By contrast, Paul continues his rigorous instructions to the Corinthian Christian community.  He makes a sharp contrast between those inside the church community who are held to a higher moral expectation and those outside the church.  He urges this because of a more radical ethic, the church will do well to maintain its own discipline. 

The juxtaposition of these texts poses the difficult question of the relationship between a public ethic that governs both the state and the corporate world, and a more intense ethic that guides the church.  On the other hand, Reinhold Niebuhr has famously allowed that much more latitude is to be recognized in the pubic domain, as public affairs require greater "realism" about issues of justice, unlike the church, with its more insistent requirements of mercy and compassion.  on the other hand Stanley Hauerwas[*] more recently, in a sustained appeal to the "peace church" tradition, refuses such a sharp distinction and expects more in the public sphere. 

This is an issue in which Christians must be engaged, especially since our public economy has largely been taken over by an oligarchy of wealth that skews all social relationships and that readily leaves behind those it judges to be disposable.  Paul seems to want an exclusive focus on the church.  In our time we might do well to require more of the state and the world of corporations. 

*  Great, another theologian I don't know but have to read and don't have the time to.  I'll be listening to his many lectures on Youtube, in the mean time.  I think theology is the source of the most useful radical traditions without intending to be radical, they have to be considering the Gospel is radical and the Prophetic tradition is, the Law is radical in its economics and its vision of society.   I just started listening to one very interesting and troubling one calling the inherence of rights into question.  I'll certainly try to get around to addressing what he said in it.  I think he is right about "rights language" which force us to understand that even the most obvious of inherent rights are limited in relation to our exercise of them when those impinge on the rights of others. I think his points are especially important in terms of the law and Constitutional law.