Tyndale House

13^th July 2001

Meldrum Lecturer in Systematic Theology

Faculty of Divinity

New College

Mound Place

University of Edinburgh

EH1 2LX

Thanks

I would like to thank you for this invitation. It’s also always pleasant to return to the place of the birth of my two sons.

I am also grateful for the chance to move my research into a very different area, an important and an ever more discussed area that has taught me a lot in preparing this paper. I do confess that my expertise is not as either an economist or a cultural commentator, but that my observations will not sound too amateurish nonetheless.

Clarification

It is worth clarifying in advance how I will be using the term ‘globalisation’, in order to prevent the kinds of confusion I created when presenting a denser version of this paper to the theological graduate students at St. Andrews in May.

The word itself is complex and has various dimensions. But I will not be using it merely to describe things or movements that are ‘global’ in scope. For that, for example of the universal thrust of Christianity or Islam, I will use Roland Robertson’s term ‘globality’.

Following commentators such as Immanuel Wallerstein I will use the term ‘globalisation’ to describe a broadly economic phenomenon within capitalist market strategies. However, this is not a feature confined to economic structures, but rather those structures have highly significant knock-on effects on culture, and perhaps even themselves are shaped by certain cultural projects and understandings. After all, Max Weber understood capitalism to be the fruit of particular cultural appropriations of certain varieties of Christian theologies. In this sense, then, the economics of globalisation cannot be culturally referred to without ‘globalism’, or cultural ‘one-worldism’ what Albrow names the ‘global society’.

What I am concerned to describe and critique, then, is not ‘globality’ as such, but the various problems arising out of economic globalisation, and its close relation, ‘globalism’. To speak with Michael Northcott:

On saying that, however, I have not yet determined how far I concur with Marx’s critique of capitalism as such.

George Steiner, in his reflections on themes of absolute tragedy in tragic dramas, suggests that such cannot be endured. Nietzsche, in his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy, argued that the abyss of existence could only be endured through constructing ‘illusions’ or visions by which to live. However, he implies that not all ‘illusions’ are properly and appropriately life-affirming. In the narrative of one of his later works, The Gay Science, a madman discovers that a crowd he encounters has continued living as if God had not died, even though they claimed to know that he was dead. Unsurprisingly, then, Nietzsche sets his task as that of "vanquishing God’s shadow", in other words, of deconstructing secularism’s theological basis.

‘Globalisation’, as broadly speaking a re-energising of capitalism’s global project, falls foul of such Nietzschean strictures on appropriate illusions. In other words, and to be more specific, underlying the various ideologies that inform it are secular versions of eschatological themes narratable most appropriately from within the Christian story. Forms of the globalisation process, then, could be seen as ways of creating artificial lighting in order to stave off the darknesses – for in the night the demons strike.

In 1989 Francis Fukuyama controversially announced the ‘end of history’, strangely misunderstood by several critics as the ending of the temporal process itself. One does not have to look far to see an explicit admission of his philosophical Hegelianism, with its immanentist type of eschatology, particularly evident in perceiving "history … as a single, coherent, evolutionary process". Modernity’s historical trajectory has somewhat come to its ideological, if not yet its practical, telos in "the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

This sense of the present culture as ending history is accentuated through David Harvey’s image of the compression of space and time. Living in this world entails that we have a certain circumscribed geography and temporal co-ordination, the manner of which has been reconfigured in globalisation. Mass television ownership, telecommunications systems, and internet usage, he argues, collapse "the world’s spaces" into a rush of simultaneous images. A certain instantaneous multilocality, or omnipresence, is herein performed, adverting to a new way of being as disembodied and, as Margaret Wertheim, suggests providing a certain analogue to the Christian conception of heaven. Yet, even the bodies we inhabit can experience the resurrection life now, since bodies apparently can be made perfect here. Alongside very recently troubled technological corporations, the new growth industries have been in leisure and health, thriving in and themselves re-informing, in Graham Ward’s terms, "a culture of seduction, a culture of euphoric grasping of the present in order to forget the present".

Even closed economic and cultural borders are being somewhat increasingly transgressed by the rapidity of recent deregulation and increasing uncontrollability of both the politically insensitive information superhighway, and the global financial flow. Anthony Giddens speaks of their "butterfly effect", and Marshall McLuhan of a ‘global village’

"[T]ime horizons shorten", or are telescoped, into the non-extensive moment, or rather a series of maximal momentary/instantaneous episodic impacts, so that, as Harvey argues, "the present is all there is". The future does not exist, or at least does not regulate one’s behaviour. Time is frozen with this loss of the future. Not merely in Hollywood is the plastic, but merely cosmetic, cult of freezing or prolongating youth cultivated.

Everything, it seems, has to be instant – ‘fast-food’, electronic mail, TV remotes and multi-channel facilities, cyberspace, for example – and disposable, but for a few recyclable items. Even problem solving is quick-fix – wonder diets without the rigorous graft of intense physical exertion; divorce rather than the painful exertion of discovering new ways of relating, and so on. With this move, Harvey argues, comes

Cultivated is a whole series of simulacra as milieux of escape, fantasy, and distraction, whether that be the "mindless hedonism of capitalist consumerism", narcotically induced fantasy, or the voracious craving of instantaneous experiences, what Ward names "The drug of [the] ever new" as the deflation of boredom and prevention of stagnation. This is why Bauman speaks of consumers as primarily accumulators of "the excitement of … new and unprecedented" sensations rather than of tangible possessions.

This is the late capitalist globalised self or subject-as-consumer, experiencing "only ‘a series of pure and unrelated presents in time’." The temporality of being as a being-for-others is displaced and replaced by the increasingly atomised being as being-to-consume each present for oneself and then dispose of it in the next present moment, experienced liberatively by some and enslaving by others as their time of loss.

And yet there is something paradoxical about this display of eschatological instantaneity. Consumerism, the usually unquestioned ideological ‘ism’ lying behind the consumer societies/cultures/ways of life of late- or post-modernity, what Frank Stilwell argues, is "the dominant ‘religion’ of the era", defers realisation endlessly. Satisfaction is never achieved. Fashions, rapidly becoming global and socially homogenising in their appeal through advertising and association with desired affluence, have a decreasing ‘shelf-life’, and necessarily so since the closure of desire for ‘more’ would be the suffocation of the consumerist market. Even, ethics slides into ‘pop’ aesthetics, with issues such as fur wearing, vegetarianism, sexual preferences, environmental issues, etc. being presented forcefully only momentarily, and becoming victim to subsequent taste reversal. Images, the surfaces exposed to instant perception, become more important than the commodity themselves, expressing a supposed distinctiveness of identity and a sensibility encouraging of the recent explosion of image consultancies and importance of brand logos.

The icons of the globalised worlds are those able to play this game in celebration with skill, who can flaunt their rags to richness with lavish liturgical self-indulgence, and who can endlessly narcisstically reconstruct the surfaces of their temporary and malleable plastic self-identities before their obsolescence with the passing of their fashion.

Therefore, it appears somewhat disingenuous for Fukuyama to echo what he describes from Hegel and Marx of a form of human society "that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings." For as Bauman more accurately suggests, consumers’ travelling is one "which makes arriving into a curse" for the sake of their continuing consuming. This Bauman calls providing a taking "the waiting out of wanting", a side effect of which is the further compression of temporal horizons, the "taking the wanting out of waiting", a forgetting of the recently consumed by the artificially created pedagogy of the impetuous and pathological desires for the novel. Salvation is given in and through the movement of consuming, and yet it is, in an important sense, yet-to-be-realised. Furthermore, and darker still,

Suggestive in Bauman’s comments is a certain irony over discourse about free markets, since they need to resort to providing not even so much what people want, never mind need, as what people will want and think they need. Consumerism, Stilwell maintains, "is fostered through the marketing activities of corporations worldwide, competing for market shares, and reinforcing the consumerist ethos – ‘I consume there I am’." Harvey goes even further with talk of marketing’s "manipulating desires and tastes", as does Bauman with his talk of seduction that cleverly leads us to imagine that in acting we are "in command".

Fukuyama’s thesis is that while stable liberal democracies have not yet become universally politically available, philosophically

Of course, any good Marxist will not lack justification in asking of the ease and convenience of Fukuyama’s historicist move from noting the collapse of Communism as governmental system to his assurance that Marx’s economic and political theories have been ‘disproven’. Certain postmodernists could be sceptical of the naïve sounding claim that human beings would be satisfied by liberal egalitarianism in politics, economics and culture (what Fukuyma calls the desire for "universal and reciprocal recognition").

Moreover, questions have to be asked about the unacknowledged perspectivism attending his appreciation of Alexandre Kojeve’s grand Hegelian value-judgment on history’s teleology towards liberal democracy (and one that fragilely depends upon the pragmatics of majority consensus). Thus, while Jean-François Lyotard has made famous the post-grand narrative claims of modernity for the fragmented consciousnesses of The Postmodern Condition, neo-liberal narratives sound very grand indeed, masternarratives, as Cavanagh explains.

Yet globalisation’s ‘spin-doctors’ advance that localities and cultures are self-protecting and self-sustaining, adding their own local flavours to the global marketplace, what Roland Robertson calls "glocalization". Advertised is the fact that the success story of American fast food global companies, McDonalds, has had to give in to local tastes by adding local variations to its menus in the Indian subcontinent.

Fukuyama, on the other hand, does admit to a certain homogenisation of social tastes and values, what could be called a pre-Babelic society of a universal commodity language and global techno-talk. Nevertheless, this is carefully packaged within his celebration that "good news has come", "the gates of the Promised Land of liberal democracy" can be viewed and entered, and that on the heels of late twentieth century historical pessimism. The free markets have

Moreover, it is often heard that globalisation can peacefully negotiate, manage and incorporate differences into its spreading catholicity while beneficently eradicating division. For example, the president of Nabisco Corporation has asserted that

Would this be peacefulness or the banality of those apathetic to anything other than simulacra? The seduction of ‘Bread and circuses’ is, after all, an ancient and well-tried formula for social control.

But is such quietism, the product of the illusion of needs satisfied, precisely what globalisation’s supporters promise? Bauman, for instance, identifies and laments the contemporary privatisation of dissent, expressed in public indifference or politically diluted single-issue campaigns, or "private escapes from public squalor. But is consumerism not a pathetic reduction of the enlightenment ideal of freedom to "A few trivial aesthetic choices, made from a range predetermined by these [multinational] corporations"?

While this perspective appears facile and shallow as a solution to serious deep-seated problems of national and racial prejudices, poverties, etc., there is certainly a case to be made for economism as peace-making. John Cobb, for example, observes the economic rather than military nature of European conflicts and competition. However, Cobb and others claim that far from achieving peacefulness, it actually increases forms of social alienations and violence. Its competitive marketing strategies have brought localities into conflict with each other in the search for industry creation, and individuals who have been becoming more atomised.

There is something poignant, then, in Bauman’s closing his 1998 study with a chapter on justice and on penal systems in global states. Ward draws out the sense of this in reflecting upon the LA riots of 1992 wherein, according to Jencks, 68% of damage was done to retail stores.

Consequently, an industry has developed in self-securing from the threatening other who is also no less a product of globalised society, selling the illusion of ‘the safe environment’, fortifications against all uninviteds. Once again, the lights are left on to exclude the night-time city threat of vampirism. This is the product of a form of society that facilitates growing social fragmentation, a defining of self by competitive difference, and the growing social atomisation facilitated by consumerist cravings for the self.

Increasing neo-fundamentalisms, neo-nationalisms and localisms respond by occasionally taking the attractive form of providing depths of meaningfulness, secure spaces within the ever shifting images of a fragmented world, powerful senses of belonging in an era of occupational insecurity and flexible short-terminism, and stable identities that counter the superficiality of the endless reconstructions of momentary consumerist egos that are fashionably ‘all dressed up with nowhere to go’

However, these, as Peter Beyer argues concerning conservative religious groups, cannot halt, even if they do momentarily stem, the tide of globalisation. The markets and technology have spread their influence too far for any localities to fatally impede them. Moreover, as Cobb reflects, what constitutes "modest consumption" is defined by the market. Also, frequently, this option "concentrates on religious function and tends towards privatization", ahistoricality, interiorisation, frequently otherworldliness, and submission to the political and cultural status quos.

Therefore, as Ward notes, this option fails to

There is a certain irony, too, in the fact that religious, national/historical traditions are often preserved by being romanticised, commodified and marketed, a Hollywoodisation of our memories in fact, a Bravehearting of nationalisms. This is a revisionist and nostalgic repackaging of the to-be-remembered-past for the consumer age, a sort of sanitised selective amnesia, within the virtual narratives our lives may be situated.

According to several critics, then, globalisation is a religion only of the ‘winners’. And, indeed, has its own discourse of damnation concerning the losers, those, according to Bill Gates, not participating in world free trade.. Mahathir Mohammad, the Malaysian Prime Minister at the South Summit of the G77 (12 April, 2000), asserted that globalisation has shown signs of becoming a religion that tolerates no heresy, which is unfortunate as globalisation, if properly interpreted and regulated, can benefit both rich and poor. Others, however, have been even more damning in their assessments, especially since this religion is showing signs of silencing, primarily through avoidance, any voices expressing discontent. Jan Pronk, for e.g. (Netherlands minister of environment and former minister for development co-operation and member of UNCTAD), argues that

Several commentators on the conditions of third world nations in a globalised world would seriously question Gates’ rhetoric, claiming vital voices that suggest, parallelling Manuel Castells, that the free market is contributing to, rather than alleviating, poverty are unheard.

After all, the globalised markets, which are in any case extremely volatile in their dynamic, despite the rhetoric, is a profit maximising arrangement, and as such has a narrow and short-term view which incapacitates it from taking into account those who are not seen as profit material. A globalising marketplace, and that construct with a hegemonic Western urban trajectory, needs to have no space or time for the poor, a poor who are further exploited into losing their own values in dreaming of the accumulation of Western urban lifestyles, and who are frequently required to oil the wheels of the various forms of the capitalist machine.

Moreover, fears over the dangers of unsustainable over-consumption have not been abated, although have perhaps are passing from being the public’s latest fashionable moral crusade. The idea of ‘sustainable development’, initially articulated in the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development [Our Common Future (WCED, 1987)], is a substantive principle with dramatic normative implications for behavioural adjustment. And yet, globalisation, if untempered in the depth of its consumerism, is not a strategic instrument. It does not invest in the future. It, as a result of its suffused consumerism and its character as ‘surplus society’, stresses temporary engagements which should not outlast the time required to glutinously consume the desired objects (or for the desirability of those objects to wane). As George Bush, when U.S. President, famously announced prior to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 (UNCED), the American standard of living was "not negotiable".

Identifying strategies for globalising pressure and advocacy of policies for sustainability themselves have to find their global forms and scales, in opposition to what Marx called the "robbing [of] the earth". Especially is this seen to be so when consideration is paid to the fact that inequality of economic distribution encourages, for example, the Brazilian underclasses to clear and farm the rain forests "as one of their only hopes for economic advancement."

And yet, despite these tensions and unresolved problems, Fukuyama’s claims share the growing noise about the inevitability of globalisation, couched as observation but operating more at the level of ideological rhetoric, the almost eschatological steamroller sense of the unpreventability of the universalisation of the principles of the free market economies.

Hope requires a future, but the consumerist instantaneity of the moment leaves none. If there can be any, hope becomes little more than hope for the next thrill, the forthcoming moment of satisfied feeling. Hope’s direction, in other words, is itself commodified, hope for immortality characterised as an infinitely extended egotism. But what hope is available for those at the wrong end of the process?

Something very suggestive, then, is adverted to in the subtitle of Bauman’s Globalization, The Human Consequences. As has been suggested above, or at least raised as a possibility against the optimistic rhetoric of neo-liberalism, "The costs" of market freedom, he argues, are, indeed, enormous."

Lamenting the privatisation of religion, the vacating of the public spaces and retreating into an uncritical and conservative sentimentality for fantasy ages past, Richard Roberts discovers certain resources for counter-cultural response to globalisation in a global form. Keen not to miss points of incommensurability, Roberts discovers that there is enough commonality to stress that what it can particularly do is offer a means of confronting some of the more extreme fragmentations of postmodernity. It "celebrates diversity" without succumbing to the universalisation of what Roberts calls, "contemporary orgies of collective tribal power", or to the manipulation of consciousness for its interests.

Nevertheless, while sensitive to religion’s points of incommensurability talk of ‘globalised religion’ creates a significant tension. On the one hand, I would not want at this stage to question Roberts’ assessment of the ethically and politically significant commonalities, and need for cooperative engagement. On the other, however, it is worthwhile, if the discussion is not to remain too general and therefore unusable, to press for an examination of specificities. It may be possible, for example, that convergence on a certain theme and/or practice may be justified in immeasurably different ways, and that those ways themselves may lead to serious divergence over another significant theme and/or practice. Consensus is not necessarily either ‘natural’ or to be expected, but only ad hoc and to be hoped for. Terms like ‘globalised religion’, then, may distractingly serve to be unproductive and detract from this contextuality of religious discourse. Each particular religious locality may provide resources that ask certain questions of the values and practices of globalisation – and it is to Christianity, and certain traditions within it, that I now turn since they are the traditions with which I am most familiar and indebted.

When governor of Bithynia, Pliny the Younger famously wrote to his emperor c.A.D. 112 for advice about what to do about the suspect group, the Christians. Adverting to some sort of food consumption, he declares that they gathered "to take food, but ordinary and harmless food". The reference to "ordinary" is interesting, and can be theologically pressed into highly significant areas of the nature of kenosis and sacramentality, God’s self-glorification in and through the ordinary materials of the created order, elected and embodied incarnationally. However, Johann-Baptist Metz speaks of Christianity as being constituted in and through a dangerous memory, and it is the dangerousness of the eucharistic memory that Pliny, as unschooled observer, that talk of "harmless food" misses.

William Cavanagh discovers in Christian eucharistic traditions’ resources for enabling a response to globalisation’s pressures, struggles and trajectories. However, and here it is not clear that Cavanagh fully succeeds, David Ford warns, "theology needs to be wary of its habits of generalising about the Eucharist." Concrete eucharistic practising, with their frequently attendant gender, racial and denominational divisions, and near idolisations of the species, may suggest little hope for facilitating and resourcing cultural and political responsibilities. Around the table/altar is demonstrated painfully that or the church there are Greeks and Jews, males and females, slaves and free. Nevertheless, when carefully reread the eucharist in the shadow of the Last Supper narratives, particularly those of the liturgically influential Pauline 1Cor., may indeed indicate something of the shape and dynamic of Christian hope.

Paul opens his recitation with a temporal co-ordinate, referring to a particular evening. It was ‘night’, and that night was the night he was betrayed.

The betrayal reference is important, not merely because of its gospel reference to the actions of Judas, but also to those of Peter. Not only did the disciples disappoint Jesus’ hopes for them in Gethsemane, but Peter’s denial of Jesus is itself betrayal and apostasy.

Paul, of course, incorporates this notion of ecclesial apostasy in a way that condemns the Corinthian lifestyle, a way of living that, at the church’s love (agape) feast entails that, in the strongest terms, they are eating and drinking damnation unto themselves through their exclusionary, hierarchical, and therefore uncharitable, feasting. Fasting from this type of eating, this impoverishment of the eucharist, is what is called for.

That which makes the church church, in Henri de Lubac’s famous phrase "the eucharist makes the church", then, encourages a constant suspicion of premature claims to divine presence, representation, and possession.

Rahner’s blunt reminder is "that she is a Church of sinners", an admission that "is itself a piece of the Church’s consciousness of her faith." In fact, if anything, as the note of betrayal informs, the church has to be the place where sin’s threats are recognised, attended to, and prayed against.

However, the Pauline passage does not permit the Christian time-telling to sense the night in any straightforwardly dark, or one might say, absolutely tragic, way. The closing reference "until he comes" (11:26) is also temporal, and suggests a refiguring of time in its being bordered by events of cross and resurrected’s consummating return. Everything happens, then, in-between or in the midst, so to speak, of this temporal determination, situating the drama of Christian existence as an eschatological temporality.

This is the time for hope. But what kind of hope? And hope for what? This second temporal co-ordinate, it could be surmised, casts its gaze back to the gospel traditions of Jesus’ promise of the inexhaustible celebration and sociality of feasting in heavenly banquets. Yet the Pauline narrative is not so straightforward. Why and how, after all, should we hope for this?

Eucharistic debates have frequently concentrated on the status of the Supper’s elements in relation to Christ’s presence, in abstraction from questions of either the complex ‘ecology’ of how it actually worked (Ford) and their proper ecclesial location in the eucharistic act (Pickstock). Further, all this question has its own locale in the fact that, instead, the eucharist first asks us Who it is Who gifts us this sacrament? In other words, without necessarily denying that the question of presence is important, something that is often missed in debates over the eucharist is the role of Jesus as perpetual divine Giver and primordial celebrant, the eventfulness of God (the dynamic of giving) and the hope-full responsibility of human being (the human giftedness and giving back in thankful response).

Missing this can leave confusion over where salvation may be found. Jüngel, following Barth’s fear over Roman Catholic sacramentology, worries that this is the case with talk of the church as the universal sacrament of salvation. Sacramentum in the New Testament, instead, speaks of the prevenient action of God’s Self-presentation, enacted and performed graciously for us through creaturely means – i.e., the humanity of Christ. Human activity can only, he says favouring Barth’s interpretation, witness to this prevenience of God’s personal presence, and liturgically receive these divine benefits, but cannot represent, repeat or render effective his action.

However, the wider notion of saramentality can be retained, through the ancient notion of the corpus triforme, as the complex multiplicity of Christ’s mediation. Hans Urs von Balthasar:

Hence, the church’s nature as sacramental is as it participates in, analogues, and is spoken through by Christ. This would mean that the church is only being church when it refuses to claim secure possession of grace which is bestowed through it, and premature identification with the so-called heavenly ‘church victorious’, and lives as one acknowledging that the Kingdom of God irreducibly overflows the church. It does so in concrete acts of caritas (love) that participate in, and are judged and determined by Christ as the primal sacrament of God. In other words, according to Bauerschmidt "It is the quality of life of those who are in Christ that manifests – or fails to manifest – the truth of Christ."

The eucharist is the third form of the tri-form body of Christ. It is not merely illustrative of the being of the church but is itself constitutive and regulative of it, the conditioning and determining liturgical core. The church’s existence is eucharistic, the Greek word eucharistia meaning thanksgiving – hence to be church is to be continually responsively thankful for the irreducible and unpossessable grace given; for its incorporation into the grace that was God’s in Christ, the body broken for us while we were yet sinners. In this, the eschatological dimension is irreducible, and teases out meanings of eucharistic presence and graciousness that always speaks of a certain type of deferral, or absence – that the One presented to the church is always so as the inexhaustible unknowable One who is always coming, and therefore an infinitely rich Giver perpetually excessively giving [and never accessedly given to those who are less than gifted in handling that gift]. This is illustrated in the repeatability and diversity of eucharistic enactments. Fulfilment awaits the eschatological consummation.

The liturgical structure of the Pauline citations emphasises this prevenience. The first stage of the action is the action of Christ, in anticipation of the ‘laying down’ of his life. Whether the Supper was celebrated during the time of the Passover is doubtful, but nevertheless, the characteristics of Jesus’ anticipating it are noteworthy – and, of course, he accounts for his coming sufferings in terms of eschatologically vicarious Paschal sacrificiality. The act was itself an act of hope. Indeed, eschatologically it is the primary and archetypal act of hope – Jesus’ acting out of hope for the world as its High Priest, entails that there is vicariousness in his hope – his hope in God’s plans for the world through him (the "yet not my will but yours" of Gethsemane), his hope that God will be vindicated (his hope for being resurrected), his hope that the world will come to participate in his sacramentality (his image bearing of the divine). Jesus celebrates at the Supper because of his forthcoming Passion – that which enables him to have hope for us, "for us and our salvation" (Nicene Creed).

Because of these hopes, and the hopeful acts of this primordial Hoper, time has been opened for an extension of his hoping through participation in its activity. He hopes for us (on behalf of us, and in our place) so that we may hope for him (or, have hope in him for him). In other words, he becomes our hope [the One we hope for, as the One in whom the divine imaging of the world has been thought], and he is our hope precisely as the One who has hoped for us (recreated what it is for a human to hope). We are set in the way of becoming what we are in him as we are hopeful with and because of him – concelebrants given something to celebrate and to engage in celebrating with him. Only in this Christ-ian God-centredness (theocentricity) of hope can the world’s time be hoped to be transformed from the uniformity of sin, corruption and violence endemic to it into inexhaustible novelty in sharing the bounteous divine eventfulness.

So, the eucharist, the time of memorially re-enacting the past as a continuous contemporaneousness and hoped for future, judges, reconfigures and re-performs human hope beyond any consumerist commodification of hope. What it means to hope, why we hope, what/who we hope for, are given new meanings incarnationally and eucharistically because declared is that in Christ we are no longer able to live as the people we thought we were. Time is not the time we think we see and experience, but rather that created, reconciled and redeemed in Christ.

Redesigned is what it means to be ‘human’, to be self-full, full of Christ beyond any self-ishness or self-lessness as self-loss, one whose being placed in accountability is for the sake of human flourishing; and reordered are our notions of place, the places which both nurture and infect or disorder the development of our selves. Now we have a cruciform existence that is open to Christ’s world as vocationally engaged in witnessing to his work of re-sacramentalising places that had been vacated for the secular, its capitalistic self-assertion, and its inhabitants characterisable as ‘separated selves’. Challenged are all our simulacra, virtual realities, with the vere res (true substance/reality) that the world in Christ is engraced as that hoped for, and therein.

Performing the eucharist is a hopeful act that speaks of humanity’s having been reperformed as human only in christ. But this eucharistic self is only truly itself in its active hoping for the world, since it was for the world that humanity in Christ died. Rahner concludes his comments by claiming that "Through our priestly existence, we are sent out to others." Thus there is an important socialising of hope for the world in its embodied existence, concretely embodied sacramentally, that asks serious questions of the increasing social atomisation that marks the contemporary West, of the strategies of domination in contemporary relationalities (patriarchal, politically, cultural and religious imperialisms), and of the eucharistic pietisms that imagines the eucharistic action as primarily ours. Moreover, undone is any possible aesthetisation of the sacrament, that which was fuelled by medieval adorations consequent upon the clerical wrenching of lay contact with the species from the active participation in the communion. According to von Balthasar, aesthetics is inseparable from dramatics, the theo-dramatics that calls forth its echo in mission.

Hence, it makes demands [i.e., that our deferential eucharistias are to be made on behalf of/for the sake of eucharistic differences,] witnessing in order to bring others into the performance of eucharistia (thanksgiving), and to aid in the feeding of those living within the multiple poverties that are not merely reducible to simple economics, feedings that themselves, then, possess multiple manifestations in their expressing the sensuality of grace for the true healing of embodied creaturehood. It is this socialising of hope, "the vision of a new and qualitatively different earth", the "necessary improvisations, … articulations and practices" in testimony to the extravagance of "God’s creative abundance" as lavish Self-giving in "the particularising activity of the Holy Spirit", that can be radical in a world plagued by multiple hungers and ir-respons-ible satieties.

It is surely ironic that the writer of the FG describes certain peoples’ reaction to the dark as one of ‘love’ rather than fear (3:19). Content to remain in the darkness, with the radiating light they may, one can imagine, scramble for the shadowed corners; others, as the Gospel later portrays, frantically set themselves the task of extinguishing the light – like those living in fear of night-time air-attack from a war-time enemy.

And yet there is theologically more to it than that. It is not mere love of the darkness that is involved, since those portrayed in these dark shades could not have imagined themselves as confused, ignorant, or unenlightened (the frequent signifieds in the semiotic discourse of ‘darkness’). Rather, their day, the light that they believed that they possessed, was shown up for what it really was – darkness, the night of sin, evil, death and damnation. Their eyes had adjusted accordingly, and had mistaken the images that they had seen for the real thing, that they had clear and illuminated vision.

The artificial lights of globalisation, I have argued by identifying certain analogies with eschatological themes, create images of the self in consumerist terms, and less, despite the rhetoric, of ending poverties and providing spaces for maximal living. As such globalisation does not have the capacity for creating hope beyond the commodified hopes for perpetual instances of instantaneities of self-gratification. Even the poor are, when not de-voiced through public apathy, commodifiedly objectivified as those whose poverties can be eradicated by numbers, by general economic growths elsewhere.

Cavanagh speaks of the eucharist as providing ‘resistance’ to these economic productions, and one should add, a refusal to reduce the complex multiple manifestations of poverty to simple economic terms. The problem, however, is that concrete eucharistic performances, in all their failures to be peace-making, bare the impress of the night of betrayal, [the night that also scapegoated Judas/Israel]. Churches are themselves inadvertently caught up in pressures of wider cultures, and in the unseen motors of those darknesses. As Barth came to discover by the end of the 1910s, ‘resistance’ cannot cover the full range of options of church-culture relations when the two overlap considerably, for good and for ill.

A certain account of the eucharist can argue that what it, as ritualised and performed word, can do is speak of, and therein re-perform when it is heard, time’s having been opened eschatologically. Therein it can both fashion and demand the fashioning of a form of subjectivity/selfhood that is pre-eminently hopeful in the incessant dynamic of learning-to-be-in many ways of relating to others that is economically, politically, and culturally responsible. Our time cannot be kept from others as if it is time for us to eat-for-ourselves, because God has enacted God’s time for creation in a form of consuming that is a feeding of others, so that creation’s time may be incessantly eucharistia, thankfulness, to him.

Therein it is given that God in Christ still has time for creation because he still has hope for it. There is here a refusal to let any part of the darknesses of that creation remain unhoped for, or be feared, even the ‘witching hour’. The watchful waiting that is commanded of the church is the strange kind of waiting that hopes by its own fragile and tentative, but nonetheless risked, acts of hope. These acts, if they are truly full of Christian hope, participate in the healing enlightening of the world by the One who darkly bears the scars until the end of that world.

The direction that that agency make take may not yet be blue-printable. However, interrogating, in Nicholas Lash’s terms, "all unrelationship, unbrotherhood, all domination and division", may be a good place to start, eucharistically. In other words, a politics of the eucharist, as Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s comments on "the politics of biblical interpretation",

In doing these things one may find that discover that globalisation’s consumerist underpinnings may fare badly in the examination.