Sermon by the Revd Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, June 21, 2026

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Amen.

Quaint as it may seem to some now, our most ancient universities have traditionally indeed the modern era to begin with the fall of Rome.

The view has a defensible logic, save for the difficulty in deciding when exactly the fall of Rome conclusively occurred, since it is one of those demarcations that tends to become hazy when one looks for the exact evidence.

Traditionally, the fall of the Western Roman Empire was deemed to have been marked by the sack of Rome, as it was always called, by the Goths, led by Alaric in 410 AD.

And that collapse was considered to have been completed with the deposition of the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, in 476 A.D.

by the Germanic king Odovacca.

But one would also could that the fall of Rome is better understood as consequent upon a series of gradual changes, within which there occur the intermittent catastrophic events that brought violent change.

With all of this taking place over a rather longer period, perhaps between 350 and 600 AD.

That's quite a long period.

And over the course of that time one might discern at least two stage two-stage processes, starting with the Battle of Hadronople in 378, when the Emperor Valens and two-thirds of his army, upwards of 10,000 men, fell in a single afternoon at the hands of an army of Gothic migrants, long before the deposition of Romulus Argostinus.

This process of collapse could be further analyzed as consequent upon first a large-scale immigration into the then Roman Empire, which was followed later by a second phase, during which, by force of arms, a rapidly expanded area came under the direct control of one or another of these incursionary communities under assorted warlords, as we would call them now.

Taken together, this entailed the economic collapse of central Roman administration and a consequent fragmentation of power, within which multiple smaller fiefdoms arose, where previously there had been but one sovereign power, namely the Roman Empire.

And with the collapse of central control and government, there came by 476 the end of the Pax Romana, since the central state could no longer muster funds, and therefore no longer muster the forces needed to secure and maintain it.

War and conflict then became endemic across the Roman West.

And it was amidst all this structural breakdown that there next followed a cultural collapse, with a dramatic decline in education and literacy, along with an end to the relatively advanced international trade and economic interaction the empire encouraged, and then a collapse in culture, ranging all the way from sophisticated architecture through to the end of an empire-wide rule of written law.

But however we analyze all this, the Visigothic attack of Rome in August 410 was widely seen at the time as epochal and cataclysmic.

Three thinkers we might turn to as illustrative as Christian figures who recorded their assessment of the disaster, albeit from afar, because none of them was actually present in Rome itself, but each produced a theological interpretation that had an enduring legacy.

I think, for example, of Jerome of Bethlehem, who lived from 347 to 420.

When news of the four-term sac reached him in Bethlehem, he reportedly fell into stunned silence for three whole days.

Whereafter, in a letter to a friend, he wrote, as we now have it recorded, Rome was besieged.

The city which the whole world fell to has fallen.

If Rome can perish, what can be safe?

For him, clearly, Rome's fall was entangled with eschatological terror.

Indeed, the collapse of the last of the great empires, as he saw it, meant in his reading of the book of Daniel, specifically, that the Antichrist, not just foreign barbarians, stood at the door.

And his church in Bethlehem was indeed quite rapidly affected as waves of Roman refugees poured into the Holy Land.

Then I might think too of Augustine of Hippo, who lived from 354 to 430.

When he heard of the sack of Rome, he was indeed in Hippo Regius in North Africa.

Well, there was an immediate negative reaction on the part of the pagans around them to the Christians in their midst, whom they blamed.

For whom they blamed this disaster on Rome's abandonment of the traditional gods in favor of Christianity.

Augustine's response was nothing less than his famous as it was to be De Civitate De, the City of God.

He wrote that roughly over the next thirteen years, ending up with twenty-two books setting out his perspective on just about everything in history, political philosophy, and theology, on a grand scale of immense later importance.

And trained as he had been in Roman rhetoric, he advanced a powerful counter-narrative to that of the pagans.

He argued that Christianity was not responsible for Rome's fall, but rather for its success.

Moreover, to him the earthly city, the Kibitas terrena, was always and already provisional.

It was always a fallen reality distinct from that which was eternal, which was the eternal and is the eternal city of God.

Along the way, he also pointed out that it was a nominally Christian army, after all.

Alaric's Visigoths had received an avarant, or more specifically Arian, the form of Christianity.

And it was they who, as this type of Christians, had succeeded, where generations of completely pagan enemies had failed in bringing about Rome's collapse.

A point of irony, of later resonance, if we think of the way in which the West ultimately failed to come to the rescue of the Christian East in Byzantium, which led ultimately to its home as well as the second Rome.

Then again, we might think of Salvion of Norset, a priest and monk who lived from 400 to 490, a little bit later than the others.

He was among an and was arguably the most directly engaged eyewitness of what followed from the sack of Rome.

Known in his own time as the Jeremiah of his age, he wrote in his On the Government of God, composed in the early 440s, an account that gives us a vivid commentary on the collapsing Western Empire.

But his thesis was different again, but uncompromising.

To him, Roman moral corruption and the church's own failures had brought divine judgment upon the war.

And he even argued that the invading barbarians were in many respects morally superior to the Romans they replaced.

All of which illustrates the diversity of Christian reflection on this slow but profound change as the original Roman Empire and the West came to an end.

Even though we need to remember that all the while the Eastern Empire at that point remained and became, as the legacy of Constantine, the New Rome.

These sources together, comprising, as they do, elements of apocalypticism on the one hand, political theology on the other, and the last one a certain moral prophetic capacity, set out the striking breadth of Christian interpretive accounts and responses to the crisis, to the Rome, to the fall of Rome.

That of course does not detain us today.

But this may usefully console us, as we arguably face an almost comparable era of radical change today.

But let us first go back to the lessons of today that we've just heard.

Because before we think further about all of that, we should dwell upon the two lessons before us, not least because their message is the same today as it was for those early Christians confronted with the collapse of civilization, as they then knew it.

In Romans chapter 5, St.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

Paul presents the global narrative of Christianity, a narrative that transcends every individual epoch and every empire that has come and gone.

As he contrasts Adam's sin after the opening grandeur of creation, a moment itself in which the human error was brought, and brought us into condemnation, by virtue of bringing sin into the world as the cost of our freedom.

But then comes the ultimate remedy with Jesus Christ's act of obedience, which offers justification and eternal life to all who believe by restoring their relationship to God, the relationship broken by the legacy of Adam.

This passage therefore emphasizes the abundance of God's grace through Jesus, highlighting that while sin enters the world through one man, salvation and righteousness are available to all of us through another, the man who was also God, and thus through his sacrifice for us in Jesus Christ.

In this passage, Paul thus highlights in a very characteristic way the themes of sin, condemnation, grace, and justification.

Paul emphasizes that the grace of God through Jesus Christ is far greater than the offense caused by Adam's sin.

While Adam's sin led to death, Christ brings life.

And in respect of justification, a passage asserts that the gift of salvation is not morally a response, or rather merely a response to sin, but a powerful act that justifies all who accept it, highlighting the transformative nature of God's grace, something that transcends all epochs of time, history, and place.

All of which underscores the belief that through faith in Christ it is open to us to receive justification and thus to experience the fullness of life offered by God's grace.

What this offers also is a profound message of home, as this passage serves as a cornerstone for understanding the Christian doctrine of salvation and the hope it provides to all who believe.

And that is immensely important.

When we turn to Matthew chapter 10, we find Jesus commissioning his twelve disciples as apostles, giving them authority to heal, cast out demons, and instructing them on their mission to the lost sheep of Israel and far beyond.

Matthew 10 · chapter mention

And, as the whole narrative emphasizes, this was a point of preparation and profound challenge, warning the apostles what they would face.

And in the portion of the chapter we've just heard, there is plainly set out the high cost of discipleship and the importance of relying on God for provision and support.

In other words, to turn back to the message later articulated, of course, in the passage of Romans.

All of this comes together in ways vital for us to consider when we think about the context we face in our time, which, as I suggest, has some parallels intellectually with that of the fall of Rome.

The eminent German philosopher Jürgen Helbermas Habermas, who died earlier this year, 1996, spent his long lifetime trying to name the elements of the collapse in our own time and rise and the rising forces of darkness that threaten us, and how best to resist what he called the colonization of the life world.

That's to say the invasion of the space of ordinary human communication by systematic forces.

Money, power, and nowadays the algorithmic logic of artificial intelligence and platforms designed not to foster understanding, but to prolong engagement, not to educate, but rather to excite.

Two years before his death, in a conversation with the historian Philip Felsch, Habermaus said that his world was being dismantled step by step.

A world in which citizens, small people, shortly, have become, in a sense, commodities.

Technology increases the power of perhaps a few who are hidden.

Popular culture serves up mechanized banalities in which truth and falsehoods commingle, fully justifying the pessimism of the whole Frankfurt school, to which he was himself an heir, that ironically felt a fully enlightened earth glows under the sign of triumphant disaster.

Of fitting epitaph for our modern condition.

In his last book, written at 93, Habermas described our public discourse as a desolate cacophony in fragmented, self-enclosed echo chambers.

And we may perhaps here recall the psalmists writing 3,000 years before, who put things even more economically.

They utter lies to each other with flattering lips and a double heart, they speak.

Some things do not change.

The specific mechanisms differ, but the underlying disorder does not.

But what is particularly of interest here, amidst all this, depressive as it is, is how Habermas responded, even though he was not in the end a man of Christian faith.

He was, by his own description, an atheist.

But he was, in an important sense, a man of hope, albeit earthly.

He refused the council of despair, that is to say, of his own Frankfurtian teachers, Hawkheimer and Adorno, who had cultivated something they brilliantly expressed, in the dialectic of enlightenment.

He refused, that is to say, to take up residence in what the Marxist critic George Lucas, with bitter wit, called the Grand Hotel Abyss, that comfortable establishment perched on the edge of nothingness, from whose windows the intellectuals observe the ruin of civilization with the detached satisfaction of those who have predicted it.

Instead, Habermas made a wager, albeit one very different, from Pascal.

He invited us to wager that reason was not in fact exhausted, that despite the catastrophes of the 20th century, let us think of just Auschwitz, the voulants of communism, even of course Hiroshima.

Despite the Frankfurt School's devastating critique of enlightenment, rationality is containing within itself the seeds of domination, despite Nietzsche and Heidegger and the post-structuralist dismantling of every claim to objective truth, despite all of that, he argued that the practice of human communication itself contains a residual, indestructible orientation towards truth and mutual understanding, and the recognition of each other's dignity.

All required in an echo of Kant as a presupposition or ground of the very possibility of communication.

That argument is somewhat subtle.

He did not say that we are in fact rational.

He said that the very act of speaking, communicating to another person, genuinely speaking, that is to say, not manipulating, not broadcasting, not performing, commits us certain presuppositions.

What you are saying is, to the best of your knowledge, true, that it conforms to norms you believe your interlocutor could in principle share, that you are sincere.

These are not ideals imposed from the outside, they are simply part of the internal logic of what it means to address one word to another person.

They are, he said, unavoidable.

Even the liar must understand what truth is in order to deviate from it, and even the manipulator must understand what genuine address looks of in order to simulate it.

All which I suggest is a position of considerable theological interest in the end.

For here Habermas was reaching from within secular philosophy towards something that theology names with greater precision and greater confidence, namely that language is not merely a human invention, a tool we happen to have fashioned for our convenience, but that rather it participates in a rational order that precedes us, constitutes us even, and in some sense addresses us.

Arguably he glimpsed thus what he could not quite name.

Compare that with St.

John's Gospel and its prologue, in the beginning was the word.

The evangelist's choice of that word logos was not accidental and not merely poetic.

Logos, in the Greek philosophical tradition, all the way from Heraclitus through the Stoics to Philo of Alexandria, named the rational principle imminent in the cosmos, the ordering intelligence that made the world intelligible, that made human reason a participation in something larger than itself.

When John writes that MRK in the very beginning, before creation, before language, before human community, there was the logos.

He's making a claim, therefore, of staggering philosophical consequence.

He is saying that reality is at its foundation, rational and communicative.

The word is not chaos that human minds have imposed order upon.

It is rather an order that human minds are privileged to participate in and to discern.

But when then St.

John makes the claim, he goes on to make, it is one that surpasses the merely philosophical.

Because he goes on to say, as we all dare, the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Thus did the logos not remain abstract.

It did not remain a structural principle, a mere regulative ideal, or a formal presupposition of discourse, such as Habermas reached toward.

Rather, the eternal word of Christianity entered the very particularity of human life.

A specific bot with a specific voice, capable of all the weariness and grief of being human, and even the cry of dereliction, we will remember from the passion.

The word that holds all things in being thus came in Christ, spoke as a Galilean in the language of his local people, touched lepers, wept at a tomb, was silenced by the collusion of imperial powers and religious adversaries.

And that human who was also divine, nonetheless, was sacrificed, died for us, and rose again from the dead.

This is the theological answer to the questions that Habamas's project raises but cannot itself sustain.

Habermas had asked what is the ground of human dignity?

His answer, that every act of genuine address presupposes the other's rational agency, was not wrong, but it was not sufficient.

It is vulnerable to exactly the condition of contemporary post-modernity, when discourse is replaced by noise, when algorithms simulate us without instantiating it, when the forum, as it were, is colonized by forces indifferent to truth.

The merely procedural ground of dignity in the model cannot bear the weight, in other words, we need to rest upon it and give way.

But if dignity is grounded not in the condition of discourse, but in the prior fact of creation, in the claim that every human face is an icon of the logos made flesh, by virtue of being made in the image of God, then it cannot be dissolved by any amount of digital and verbal confusion, any colonization of the life world, any triumph of what Habermas calls strategic action over communicative action.

The image of God in the human person is not a conclusion, in other words, of mere democratic process.

It is a given that precedes, transcends, and judges every process.

The far earlier Anglican divine, Richard Hooker, in the preface to the Ecclesiastical Polity, wrote of the large and copious gift of reason as the means by which we participate in the divine law.

That is the substance of his book.

Habermass was attempting in secular terms to articulate something of what Hooker meant.

That reason is not merely a tool of the individual ego, but a participation in an order that exceeds and judges us.

The difference is that Hooker knew the name of that order, and Habermas, for all his brilliance, did not or would not.

It was Kant who asked the question I had in mind at the very opening, one that Habermas carried as a question throughout his life.

What can I hope for?

It is the question of this moment in a culture which echoes the collapse of Rome.

The answer of the gospel is not an argument, simply, though it is entirely compatible with forms that can be presented as arguments.

It is ultimately a person and the person of the God man Jesus Christ.

It is the claim that the Logos, who was in the beginning, through whom all things were made, in whom was life, and whose life was the light of all death, that this Logos has spoken definitively and irrevocably in human life, through human death transcended, and through the resurrection.

His speech did not simply model good communicative action.

The life and witness of Christ constituted the possibility of truth-telling, of genuine address, of the recognition of the dignity of what it is to be human, because it names the ground from which all of these arise.

The light shines in the darkness, says the evangelist, and the darkness comprehended it not.

The sermon of the church in this darkening time is not to explain the darkness, there are philosophers enough for that, but to hold up the light, knowing that it may be costly, and knowing that the darkness is real, and is not to be minimized.

But knowing too, with a confidence that is not mere optimism but faith, that the darkness does not have the last word.

What can I hope for?

The answer is nothing less than this.

Exactly and only this.