The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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We bear (implicit) witness to God's love by optimizing the limits of freedom-—for all others as well as ourselves. 

We optimize the limits of freedom—others' as well as our own—by acting to meet all relevant creaturely needs. 

But creaturely needs are not all on the same level. Deeper than all creaturely needs arising within an established order is the need of every creature for an established order that itself permits the optimal exercise of the creature's freedom to create both itself and others. 

Correspondingly, the deeper way in which we bear witness to God's love by optimizing the limits of creaturely freedom is to establish the local­, social and cultural—orders that God gives and commands us to establish within the cosmic order that God alone establishes, thereby acting to meet the deeper need of every creature for an established order permissive of the optimal exercise of its own freedom to be an active subject of history instead of being merely a passive object. 

Thus, while we can bear witness to God's love only by also acting justly to meet creaturely needs arising within the established social and cultural order, our first and most fundamental responsibility is for a just ordering of society and culture themselves—for so creating, maintaining, or transforming their most basic structures that they allow for the fullest possible meeting of all relevant needs, thereby giving to one and all her, his, or its own (suum cuique). 

August 1997 

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