Liberating the Will of Australia. Geoffrey Burn
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, and accordingly the individuals of the test-cases represent a generation . . . the possibility of Yahweh judging individuals in isolation from their contemporaries is not considered. This is because the question at issue is a different one, namely, ‘Why is this inevitably communal national crisis happening?’”52
Joel Kaminsky rightly criticizes the way of thinking that sees Ezekiel on the trajectory from communal to individual conceptions of identity and responsibility, noting that this way of thinking reflects a modern bias towards privileging the individual over the communal, which has been adopted in biblical interpretation in the political project of wanting to construct a trajectory from what is construed as the messiness of the communal, law-based religion of Israel to the purity of the individual, grace-filled Christianity. Besides the problematic ideological position of such an argument, Kaminsky notes that the idea of communal responsibility is present in the books of the Old Testament that many scholars believe were written late, such as Daniel 6:25 and Esther 9:7–10, and so no such trajectory exists in the Old Testament.53
The centrality of the corporate as well as the individual continues to be present in the New Testament and so it was not something that was superseded with the coming of Jesus. For example, God addresses the “angel” of each of the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3. Here God is speaking to the spirit of each church as a corporate body, not to individuals. As a second example, Paul also writes to churches, as well as speaking to particular individuals. His image of being incorporated into Christ, being “in Christ,” is central to his way of thinking and he even talks of all having died in the death of Christ (2 Corinthians 5:14–15), something Westerners find it hard to understand. A third example is that whole households were baptized (e.g., Acts 10:33, 48; 16:15; 16:33). As a final example, Matthew sees the work of Jesus as being about the renewal of the community of Israel. Stephen Barton writes that the central preoccupation of Matthew is “the revelation of the divine presence (kingdom of heaven) in the coming of Jesus as messiah, in fulfillment of scripture, to call Israel to repentance and through a renewed Israel to bring God’s blessings on the nations of the world.”54
Thinking corporately is innate to many other cultures. For example: the identity of people as being part of a village is central to notions of justice in Bougainville;55 Vincent Donovan gives the example of a whole tribe of Masai converting to Christianity, because it was impossible for the tribe to be split;56 and there is an African saying, “I am because we are, and because we are therefore I am.”57 All of these point to the fact that it is possible to conceive of the world very differently. That is not to say that these worldviews are perfect, but they provide encouragement for reconsidering the nature of corporate entities.58 In fact, biblically, corporate entities are part of the created order.59
Not only does the corporate remain important in the Bible, but so does corporate responsibility. For example: Jesus castigates the lawyers of his time as a group and holds them responsible for the sins of their forebears (Luke 11:45–54); Jesus laments over Jerusalem as a corporate entity (Matthew 23:37 || Luke 11:34); and Jesus says that Jerusalem will be destroyed