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My Beloved is Mine and I am His: non‐commensurable‐giving as a metaphor for the divine‐human relationship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Extract
At the heart of Christian belief is a gift: the ‘free gift of God. . . in Jesus Christ our Lord’. The language of gift is peppered through the New Testament and constitutes one of its most distinctive features. It portrays an abundant and generous God who acts out of love, without expecting return, and whose generosity in no wise depends on our activity. Traditionally, this utter gratuitousness of God’s gifts has been cited and defended in connection with the doctrine of divine sovereignty: God’s gifts must be offered without expectation of any return, because to claim otherwise would be to imply that God desires something, and so lacks it in the first place.
However, this affirmation is in some tension with another: that at the heart of Christian life is a response, in the worship and works of God’s people. While the image of a needy God is alien to Christian understanding, it is equally alien to the Christian understanding to postulate a God who does not want or intend a responsive movement from God’s people. Herein lies a dilemma for Christian theology: how to hold together such an exalted view of the necessary freedom and unconditionality of God’s gift with the maintenance of human responsibility and so capacity to respond?
So Christians must at one and the same time preach that God gives freely; and that to love God is necessarily to serve God. This tension is a familiar and perennial one, beginning with the faith-versus-works controversy of the New Testament itself, and re-emerging regularly throughout Christian history.
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- Copyright © 2002 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 A version of this paper was first read at the Annual Conference of the Society for the the Study of Theology, 11 April 2002
2 Rom 623 (NRSV).
3 Webb, Stephen H., The Gifting God. a Trinitarian Ethics of Excess (Oxford: University Press 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am indebted to Webb's work for the basic approach to the question adopted here.
4 See e.g. Given Time I: Counterfeit Money trans. Kamuf, Peggy (Chicago: University Press 1992)Google Scholar
5 See Titmus, Richard, The Gift Relationship (London: George Allen and Unwin 1970), 73Google Scholar: “The social relations set up by gift‐exchange are among the most powerful forces which bind a social group together” (quoted in Webb, 42)
6 See especially Webb, The Gifting God, 1–3.
7 Webb, 4–6
8 Webb, 84
9 Ibid 90
10 Ibid 11
11 Kilby, K., ‘Perichoresis and projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity’, New Blackfriars Vol 81, no. 956 (2000) 432–445CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Ibid, 442
13 “Christianity affirms both excess and mutuality by taking them to the extreme point —located through hope on an eschatological horizon — where they meet, one leading to the other” (SHW 9)
14 Milbank, John, ‘Can a Gift be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic Modem Theology 11.1 (1995) 119–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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16 This is the substance of Part 1: ‘Reciprocity Refused’.
17 In Part 2: ‘Reciprocity Granted’
18 Ibid, 486
19 “Within such knowledge [i.e. by faith], we will then affirm a virtuous and not futile reciprocal spiralling between the visible and the invisible: a benign circulation for which, instead of mutual cancellation, the finite visible is known as upheld in its finitude only by the infinite invisible, and inversely, the infinite invisible is known as intrinsically the giver of the shapes of the finite” Ibid, 489.
20 Ibid, 490. This then leads to his conclusion that, in giving, “The reciprocating circles of twin souls must not be superseded by one impersonal circle, but must be themselves given, in their twin, never‐interlocking circularity, by an elevated otherness. If, all the same, the gift they are offered is not merely an empty gift of one‐way circularity, but rather, the gift of reciprocity, then what is disclosed is transcendent Otherness that is itself personal exchange: eternal spiralling, not an eternal and impersonal unity.” Ibid, 505.
21 Milbank, ‘Can a Gift be Given?’ 132
22 125–7
23 127
24 The work of Dr. Ennio Mantovani S.V.D in the Point series (Goroka: Melanesian Institute. P.O. Box 576, Goroka, PNG) has parallels from the closely‐related Chimbu people.
25 Marcel Mauss reports a similar status for gift‐giving as the basis for social interaction, as described by Radcliffe‐Brown in The Andaman Islanders. However, neither he nor Radcliffe‐Brown bring out the importance of the gifts’incommensurability, and instead minimise it by reducing gifts to items of comparable value. It is beyond the scope of this paper to enquire as to whether or not their analysis adequately represents the substance of what they observed. It is however tempting to view their interpretation as the mapping of western values on a different sort of economy. See Mauss, Marcel, The Gift trans Cunnison, Ian [1954] (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1969) 17fGoogle Scholar.
26 See Gilkey, Langdon, ‘Creation, Being and Nonbeing’ in Burrell, David B and McGinn, Bernard (Eds) God and Creation, an Ecumenical Symposium (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 1990) 226–241Google Scholar
27 Also the Johannine ‘whoever knows me knows the Father’
28 Lk 191‐10 am indebted to a participant in the aforementioned SST Conference (whose name I failed to remember) for this insight.