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God and Globalization: Globalization and Grace (Theology For The 21St Century) (v. 4)

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Do we really need another book on globalization? The first two words of the title of this four volume work immediately draws our attention to the distinctive perspective that this series seeks to develop. What does God have to do with globalization? Some would cynically sneer at the joining of these two seemingly disparate terms. Yet, in his fourth volume, Stackhouse not only critiques this misinformed position, but more fully develops the notion and need for "public theology", which he argues is the most important theological development in its potential to address issues posed by globalization. Unlike the previous three volumes which were comprised of twenty-two different contributors from theology, science, philosophy, law and sociology, this volume is solely authored by Stackhouse. Using three Biblical categories of grace--Creation, Providence and Salvation--Stackhouse outlines a distinctively Christian public theology that engages and addresses this massive phenomenon of globalization. More specifically, his approach provides the creation of an ethos, and a moral infrastructure for a world-wide civil society that could lead to a highly diverse, cosmopolitan civilization.

Stackhouse is to be commended for this seminal work in defending and demonstrating the quintessential importance of religion in the analysis of globalization. God and Globalization rightly emphasizes the need for a multi-faceted analysis of globalization beyond the conventional economic, social, cultural, and political perspectives.

In this final volume, Stackhouse presents a concrete model of what a Christian public theology would look like drawing upon the resources of confessional theology. His public theology is not a diluted religious syncretism, but a distinctively Christian vision which he effectively argues as the best possible model allowing for the proliferation of this world's diversity.

One of the difference between this volume and the preceding ones is vol 4 is wholly written by the editor of the series (Stackhouse) and so delivers a greater depth and consistency of development arising from the premise of this series. The other volumes were thematically connected bridging important aspects of globalization with religion; however, there was not the kind of consistent development that I appreciated in this work.

While, there are terms in this work that could be potentially confusing for those not familiar with Christian theology or the Bible, vol 4 presents an insightful and pioneering vision that will greatly benefit those who are seeking for a comprehensive vision of the impact that globalization can make in our world.

Volume 4 in this globalization series, Stackhouse's "Globalization and Grace" is a masterful summary of conclusions by the thelogians who wrote for the first three volumes. Unlike many treatments of our emerging global civilization, Setackhouse does not focus only on the economics and politics of this complex subject but also on the changing cultural links between peoples of earth. He crowns the analysis with the rare addition of comprehensive theological evaluation, chiefly but not exclusively from the standpoint of Christian faith. Chapters 3-5 are a fresh look at our global interconnectedness under the "graces" of Creation, Providence, and Salvation. The final chapter is a readable, accurate summary of the wisdom of all four volumes in this series.

The book will appeal to serious students of theology and contemporary social change. Stackhouse is a master synthesizer. Somewhat lacking in detailed historical illustration, the book is nonetheless indispensable for anyone who wants to think theologically, not only economically and politically, about the astonishing contacts that all six billion of us now have with each other around the earth.

--Donald W. Shriver, Union Theological Seminary, New York

In the first century St. Paul believed that God's divinity was everywhere manifest and nowhere fully heeded. Max Stackhouse, editor of three previous books in this series, and author of this volume Globalization and Grace (God and Globalization), believes that God's extraordinary actions often are still overlooked. He argues that globalization is misunderstood because of flawed, but widely held, views about the interaction of theology, economics, and social change. Many find it impossible to imagine God being involved in anything larger than the human soul or that social structures are theologically meaningful. Stackhouse is not among them. Globalization, he claims, is an ambiguous dynamic that nonetheless is creating a new transnational kind of affiliation, a global civil society, that simultaneously will routinize and modify core Christian ideas. How globalization is shaped will affect everyone.

I find Stackhouse's interpretations cogent; some readers may not. Whatever readers conclude, however, a public debate about globalization is demanded. Stackhouse here sketches the primary terms that should focus such a debate. In chapters one and two, he argues that Christians are uniquely positioned to understand and, on a lower level, creatively shape the forces driving globalization. Globalization entails a radically postmodern, cosmopolitan ethic that has the potential to further the growth and development of countless people. In chapters three through five, he discusses creation, providence, and salvation as "graces" that provide lens through which to view implications of globalization. Stackhouse's application of the Christian mythos to globalization offers something like a short course in theology and social systems.

I am persuaded that Stackhouse's cosmopolitan view offers significant promise, but the anti-globalists are many. In the future, theologians will look back on decisions made in this period as portentous. Will our decisions be deemed worthy? Let us hope that the future judges us with as much straightforward candor, humane awareness of limitations, and conviction of God's love for us, as Stackhouse does in this concluding volume of God and Globalization Globalization and Grace (God and Globalization).

In Volume 4 of this ground-breaking series about the impact of "religion," descriptive and normative, on the pervasive forces of globalization, its principal editor (and inspirer), Max Stackhouse, lays out the theological first principles which he believes have helped to shape globalization, can enhance its future possibilities and avoid its worst effects. How can we not attend to ways of orienting aright this "potential civilizational shift that involves the growth of a worldwide infrastructure that bears the possibility of a new civil society"? (2), one brought to be in recent times by the emergence of the Internet, the multinational corporation, global financial markets, travel, and other webs of communication and inter-relationship? Granting the potential positive influences of other world religions (and also secular worldviews and actors), and noting the "worries" he has about current Christian misreadings of globalization (conservative and liberal), Max Stackhouse turns to the meta-narrative of Christian faith for illuminating its issues, arguing for its positive historic role in shaping this phenomenon, its promise as the "metaphysical-moral vision" best suited to guide it, and even the presence of faith's Deity amidst the ambiguities and dangers of globalization.
Focusing on the theological proposal to the fore in this volume (a long Introduction does a reprise of the geneology of globalization found in the earlier volumes and engages some of its current commentators from Hans Kung to Samuel Huntington), Professor Stackhouse turns to the biblical drama interpreted as the unfolding of a first, second and third grace. Creation, as captured in the biblical myth of beginnings, is the first and "common" grace that establishes the world's essential goodness and the unique place of the creature with the human face gifted with the divine image that confers it with special dignity and the capacity to respond to a call to stewardship of the earth, amity with its kin, and obedience to its God, all structured by "orders" of its common life with their associated "rights." Yet such grace can be resisted, and so "the fall" with its hubris that corrupts the journey toward "human flourishing," the sin that everywhere persists in the noblest of ventures. Thus comes a second and "sustaining" grace manifest in a Providence with its "covenant"-- biblically grounded, but universally discernible and necessary to warrant and order by moral law and divine purpose our human freedom toward the end of global flourishing. So too the providential grace of "calling"--the vocation identified biblically as prophet, priest and king , but roles (including a fourth, "sage") discernable always and everywhere as necessary to carry out the covenant that can humanize a globalized civilization. The third and special grace, "salvation," is the entry of God into the world in Jesus Christ where "sin and death are in principle defeated" (199) and the Body of Christ born, "a paradigmatic new organization"( 200) with a missionary mandate for both personal and social conversion that point toward an End in which the reconciled reign of God comes to be, an "eschatology" that is the bookend of the story's beginnings in creation's "protology." Such a vision bestirs Christians both to discover and set up signposts of the inbreaking Kingdom. In the present context, this means arguable guidelines to make the world's way toward modest approximations of "the right" and "the good" through the ambiguities of globalization.
All the foregoing is viewed as an exercise in "public theology," a long-time Stackhouse passion not unrelated to his extensive world travels and wide cultural encounters. Theology so conceived has to do with bringing to bear motifs/doctrines of a given religious tradition--Christian faith in this case--on the "ethos" of a culture, not only by action therein, but also by publicly testable argument, warranted by a common and sustaining grace supporting a broken but not destroyed imago with its rational, moral and affective capacities. In theological ethics, this means universal access to norms of behavior, themselves grounded in testable transcendent claims about the Source of human and natural good. This puts Stackhouse on collision course, on the one hand, with "postmodernisms" of one sort or another, whether they be secular deniers of macro-narratives in the Lyotard , Foucault, Rorty stream, or theological advocates of ecclesial conventicles and/or denial of the possibility of universal moral norms --Hauerwas, MacIntyre, Milbank et al., and on the other, with premodern theologies that run from traditional pietisms to theocratic fundamentalisms (some of these diverse alternatives, having value, however, as wake-up calls). Also set against the Stackhouse theses are those who see globalization as the unambiguously destructive imperialism of Western capitalism.
Stackhouse's theological allies-- while they might use other rationales, come from other traditions and accent different Christian motifs--are many of the essayists in the first three volumes, ones that run from colleagues Donald Shriver. Don Browning, Richard Osmer, Peter Paris, Diane B. Obenchain and William Schweiker, through specialists in the field of medicine, law, family and biomedical matters-- Allan Verhey , John Witte, Jr., Mary Van Leuwen and Ronald Cole-Turner, to those conversant with world religions--John Mbiti, Sze-kar Wan , M. Thomas Thangaraj, Kosuke Koyama Lamin Sanneh and Scott Thomas, to systematic theologians--Jurgen Moltmann, David Tracy, and well-known commentators on globalization itself-- Roland Robertson and Yersu Kim. The Stackhouse lineage of analysis, theological and/or social. goes back to such as Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch , Abraham Kuyper and Walter Rauschenbusch, and comes forward to Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, James Luther Adams and Peter Berger. His theses have, as well, paradigmatic figures, especially so Martin King and Desmond Tutu.
Drawn in part from Scripture and the sequence of graces lined out above, but also from Stackhouse's ingenious use of typologies, are the schemas that provided the framework for the first three volumes and recur here. They include the concept of New Testament "powers" (energy systems that inhabit institutions as investigated by Walter Wink) seen in the sub-sets of "principalities" ( Mammon, Eros, Mars, the Muses and Religion); "authorities" with their relative independence- law, medicine, education., science, technology and the charismatic leader; "thrones" ( identified as "regencies" as in newer universalizing instrumentalities that run from the fast-developing world regulative agencies to NGOs; and "dominions" as in the particular world religions that provide interpretive frameworks for civilizations.
Can any serious commentary on globalization that takes into account this series now ignore the role of religion, descriptively and normatively considered? Can the specifics of Christian insight that Stackhouse has argued as critical to understanding the origins and guidance of globalization be overlooked? Reductionist diagnoses and prescriptions current, especially economistic ones, may well do so. But it will be much harder as the evidence amassed here is weighty and the arguments for religious influence compelling. Also more difficult to do will be the denial of the validity of universal moral norms--both their actuality and their necessity.
Of course there are questions that can be raised, even by those convinced by this enterprise. For example: could not Professor Stackhouse have made use in this volume of his long-time trinitarian interests? If a guideline for globalization is the ultimate reconciled Reign of God, then its very grounding is germane, the coinherence of the Persons of the ontological Trinity: God wills what God is, Life Together. This would also suggest more attention to the christological nature of Stackhouse's important accent on common and preserving graces, for they are the fruit of the Spirit of the Son of the Father (Moltmann).
For all that, one cannot help seeing in this series, and especially in its final volume, an analogy to the intentions and importance of an earlier theological ethicist, one clearly influential also in the Stackhouse project, Reinhold Niebuhr. In this volume and project is to be found a theology of history that demands the attention of those who would understand and shape the polis-to-be, not unlike that of a notable discerner of the signs of his own times.