Reflections on Mortal Goods by Ephraim Radner, Part Four

One of the first “5-minute finds” that we do in our senior-level class involves the ancient concept of eudaemonia, the term the ancient Greeks used for a good or flourishing life.  Every culture has an example of what constitutes a “good life,” and any given culture might have a picture of it with some variation.  It’s interesting watching Ephraim Radner make sense of the idea from a particularly Christian perspective while weaving in a major thread from the Old Testament.  It’s a move that he almost has to make, since once of his goals is to focus on the here-and-now and let the supernatural seep through.  And so the journey of the people of Israel is vital to what he wants to communicate in Mortal Goods.

Early in the book, Radner picks up own the language of sojourning, of being “on the way” in some sense or another.  The earliest positive example of this would be rooted in the Exodus narrative.  The book of Numbers is important for Radner here, as

. . . the Hebrew name midbar (wilderness), taken from Number 1:1, is more telling.  A midbar is an open tract of land, not always a desert in a modern sense, but land without roads or settlements. And the book of Numbers is properly read as a vision of sojourning, of life in the trackless world, where Adam— that is, all the people— in his joys and frustrated needs receives life and death from God . . .  In this sense, the service that Moses lays out for Israel is itself a service of survival.

Here Radner adds service to the idea of sojourning.  And that service, at least as it is articulated in the book of Numbers, appears as a kind of offering.  Numbers tells of the peoples way through the wilderness as a way of preparation to enter the Promised Land, including both narrative and laws.

Like that of a sojourner, the “way” through the wilderness, which is less a clear path than a wandering, is bound to the “way” of God’s commandments— a “walking” that both takes us through trackless desert and brings us closer to God.  Once they are no longer slaves to the world, Israel’s embededness in this world becomes the stuff of praise and faithfulness.  One cannot be a slave to what one offers up.

The last two sentences there are quite striking: a reminder of the reality of Israel’s calling as well as something deeply, devotionally true.

It is in the context of this sojourning as service, and ultimately as offering (“what one offers up”) that Radner lands on the image of the holy peasant.  It’s not a phrase that rings well in 21st century American ears, but there’s also something in it that resonates better on reflection.  Radner argues that much of human history is the story of the peasant.  The peasant-life will be key to understanding a Christian “politics” moving forward. Invoking the “Christian peasant” of days-gone-by, Radners defines mortal goods:

With each of the Christian peasants day’s came a prayer, and the prayers were wrapped around the content of the days— children, animals, gardens, feast days, marriages, bedsides, burials. All this was good, however hard and however brief. All this was good, not on its own, but because this is what God gives.

As Radner understands it, this is the heart of eudaemonia: what is good because it is what God gives.