Reclaiming the Common Good: How Christians can help Rebuild our Broken World, edited by Virginia Moffatt. Darton, Longman & Todd (London 2017), 208 pages. £14.99.
This useful set of essays, edited by an associate of the think tank Ekklesia, sets out to liberate the concept of ‘the common good’ from its Roman captivity in what is called Catholic Social Teaching and make it an inspiration and guide for all Christians concerned with the state of society. The concept has a long history in Christianity, appearing in the idealised picture of the primitive Jerusalem community in the Acts of the Apostles: ‘There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need’ (Acts 4: 34-35). It was sharpened in the fourth century CE by John Chrysostom, who maintained: ‘Not to share our wealth with the poor is theft from the poor… we do not possess our own wealth but theirs’ (p. 56).
The idea has a history that can be traced back to Aristotle, as shown in the first chapter of the collection by Patrick Riordan SJ, who takes it forward through Augustine and Aquinas to John Rawls. If, as Rawls believes, we cannot agree on the content of the common good, it still remains a ‘heuristic concept’, a guiding idea, defined by the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council in 1965 as ‘the sum total of all those conditions of social life which enable individuals, organisations and families to achieve complete and effective fulfilment’.
If Fr Riordan guides us through intellectual history, his fellow Jesuit John Moffatt plants us squarely in politics when he describes the Labour governments of 1945-1951 as ‘an exemplary case of government working for the common good’ through its establishment of the National Health Service and the nationalisation of the coal, iron and steel industries. This followed the wartime coalition government’s 1944 Education Act, which provided for universal free secondary education to age 16, which shows that there was a degree of cross-party consensus about the common good in the immediate post-war period. Fr Moffatt asks, ‘What has happened to the Common Good?’, and his essay introduces the strongest part of the book, six chapters addressing that question and discussing how the pro-welfare consensus was eroded and replaced by attitudes such as ‘benefit stigma’. There is no clear answer to the question, though the rise of globalisation is clearly a factor, and changes in the British economy that have given such importance to the financial services industry, ‘what in older times was known as usury’, as Simon Duffy remarks (p. 72). It seems likely that the very term ‘welfare state’ comes from Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, who welcomed it as an alternative to ‘the blood money of charity’. The contributors see a continued role for the churches in defending the role of the state in welfare provision. Duffy comments, surely rightly: ‘Today the welfare state is under threat and there is a danger that the Church will step into its old role as giver of last resort. But this would be unfortunate and regressive, the Church would be conspiring with injustice’ (p. 81).
Part Three of the book, ‘People and Planet’, deals with migration, ecology and war, with an interesting discussion of drones by Henrietta Cullinan (pp 172-73). The conclusion, by Baptist minister Simon Woodman, returns to the role of the Church, built around reflections on the book of Revelation. Woodman argues that the vision of the new Jerusalem that is central to Revelation is ‘a model for Christian engagement in building a vision for the common good’ (p. 198). After all, in this city, light and water are free and abundant (Rev 21-22)! Woodman’s basic point is that the church does not exist for its own sake, but for the world: ‘Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile,’ as Jeremiah told the Jewish exiles in Babylon, ‘for in its welfare you will find your welfare’ (Jer 29.7).
Francis McDonagh translates for the international theological journal Concilium. He previously worked on development and human rights in South America for Oxfam and CAFOD.