Between Kin and Cosmopolis

Оглавление

Nigel Biggar. Between Kin and Cosmopolis

Отрывок из книги

Between Kin and Cosmopolis

An Ethic of the Nation

.....

A properly Christian view, then, insists that every nation is equally accountable to God for its service of the human good. No nation may pretend to be God’s chosen people in the strong sense of being the sole and permanent representative and agent of God’s will on earth; no nation may claim such an identity with God. This relativization still permits each nation to consider itself chosen or called by God to contribute in its own peculiar way to the world’s salvation; to play a special role—at once unique, essential, and limited—in promoting the universal human good. It allows members of a given nation to celebrate the achievements of the good that grace their own history and to take pride in the peculiar institutions and customs in which they have realized it. At the same time, it forces them to acknowledge that their nation’s achievement is but one among many; and so to recognize, appreciate, and even learn from the distinctive contributions of others.

But more than this, each nation must realize, not only that other nations too have made valuable contributions to the realization of the common good of all things, but also that the achievement of the good in one nation is actually bound up with its achievement elsewhere. National loyalty, therefore, is properly extrovert. As Karl Barth put it:

.....