TO SAY, as we do, “Nobody is perfect” implies some notion of perfection. What are Christians to make of “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5.48)? Is human perfection about being flawless, or growing into maturity, or godly living, or becoming closer to God?
Robin Gill, Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology at the University of Kent, and General Editor of the prestigious series of New Studies in Christian Ethics, seeks to expand and unpack an aspect of his earlier work, Moral Passion and Christian Ethics (Books, 16 June 2017), to provide a fuller discussion of various concepts of perfection, and to relate these to the work of Christian ethics. For Part 1 of the book, his working definition is that “A perfect action or artefact is one where it is difficult to see how, in its context, it could have been done better.”
Gill notes how the word “perfect” requires different definitions in different contexts, and illustrates this from prayers, hymns, and numerous theological and other writers across the centuries — St Thomas Aquinas featuring most regularly in his discussions.
The first part of this copiously referenced, and wide-ranging inter-disciplinary study, finds possible “glimpses” of perfection in words on memorials in churches, and in some works of art — a musical performance, George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket, a bronze sculpture, possibly some allusions in Iris Murdoch’s The Bell. We can, perhaps, speak of perfection in such examples by asking whether it could have been done better.
It is much more complex when we ask about moral perfection in human lives. Gill admires the lives of, for example, Henry Holland the missionary doctor, Paul Farmer, a compassionate social activist, and Desmond Tutu, as people in whom aspects of moral perfection might be glimpsed. The observer’s perception plays a large part in distinguishing between what psychologists call “adaptive” and “maladaptive” perfectionism — the former a striving to do the right; the latter more an obsession to avoid doing things wrong.
The second part of Gill’s study becomes more theological, dominated by an extended exploration of the multiple meanings of teleios in the Septuagint and the New Testament, sometimes translated “perfect”, but also referring to completeness, maturity, fulfilment, achieving an end, and the ways in which Jesus is depicted as “perfect”. The Epistle to the Hebrews and, in contrast, that to James; Eric Mascall and Karl Rahner; Rowan Williams, and the American New Testament scholar Richard Hays are all discussed, as are many others in an — at times — rather overwhelming glitterball of references. And then the question: what implications does the inimitable and unique perfection of the human Jesus, in his desire to seek and serve God, have for Christian moral behaviour?
AlamyTransfiguration icon (16th century, city museum, Veliky Novgorod, Russia)
The main fresh contribution that Gill offers as Part 3 of the book is to open up the significance for Christian ethics of the reports of the transfiguration of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. He offers an extended exploration of Patristic perceptions of the transfiguration, quotations from Aquinas and recent Eastern Orthodox social ethics — the work of John Zizioulas, for example. We are shown that it was not only Jesus who was transfigured, but also the disciples who entered the cloud, and the processes of transfiguring the followers of Jesus has implication for both personal and social ethics.
The inclusion of Moses and Elijah in the Gospel narratives enables Gill to explore how the transfiguration might be interpreted today in relation to the needed cooperation and trust between Abrahamic faiths, and pushed even more globally to include what the Spanish theologian Raimon Panikkar called “Cosmic Christ”. This creates a way for Gill to address “the global ethical issue of today” — human-induced climate change, and its correlates in reduced biodiversity and encroaching deserts, flood, and famines.
Just as Pope Francis has called for a new ecological spirituality, so Gill suggests that the transfiguration of Jesus points to an imperative for followers of Jesus to live in, and care for, a world that God made good.
Dr David Atkinson is an honorary assistant bishop in the diocese of Southwark.
Human Perfection, Transfiguration and Christian Ethics
Robin Gill
CUP £85
(978-1-009-47674-4)
Church Times Bookshop £76.50