Sunday, 16 October 2016

We the People: Israel and the Catholicity of Jesus,
Tommy Givens, Fortress, 2014, page 272

After discussing Schmitt's "state of exception", Givens now explains what that means to who puts in the effort and why.

The existence of the people, and therefore its identity, cannot be a matter of its own decision or agency. No faithfulness of its own, no ideas of its own, no perceived virtue of its own, can function truthfully as the basis for deciding who is in and who is out, for regulatings its life, or for engaging threats to its existence.

Well, that's a long sentence, but what does it mean?

It means that the existence, and therefore the identity of the people is given by G-d, such that the people is empowered to meet the deepest challenges to its life both with powerful measures of resistance and without violence. The people is freed from the presumption that its life depends on its own striving or policing, and so it can be a community of both discipline and unconditional love.

Now there's something the whole Body of Messiah needs to understand!