LAUSR

In recent times, Christian theologians have engaged in some creative dispute about the significance for ecclesiology and political theology of a key term and concept of the New Testament, namely diakonía (διακονία). This has been particularly notable on the European continent, in the United Kingdom and in Australasia. At the same time, amidst ongoing transitions in the welfare state and church-state relations, these years have witnessed tensions regarding the proper form of ecclesial social action vis-à-vis the church’s missional identity. This intra-ecclesial debate has had a counterpart in political society as the kinds of incentivization which lead people towards public service have developed subtly selfaggrandizing and instrumentalist forms. While the church has experienced pressures towards explaining itself and its activity in worldly terms in order to gain a hearing, acts of and even vocations towards public service have been subject to a process of transactional commodification which seems a corrosive on the public good. As a core concept of the New Testament, diakonía constitutes not only a proper object of study in itself and highly instructive for conceiving of the church’s mission, but also a kind of heuristic for understanding various aspects of present-day society’s representation of “service.” Indeed, it has often been understood simply as “service,” the response to the needs of the poor and the suffering. In the nineteenth century, such an understanding increasingly assumed various kinds of institutional form. Diakonía, as a social-political movement, came to be synonymous with forms of ecclesial provision for public welfare, especially in Britain, Europe and the United States. This was hardly wholly new of course. Ever since the Reformation, different notions of diakonía have fostered differing institutions of welfare provision, and indeed arguably still undergird the legitimacy of at least some versions of the modern Western welfare state. However, recent New Testament research on diakonía by John N. Collins and Anni Hentschel has drawn a robust distinction between diakonía and service thus understood. The sense in which diakonía is principally to be understood as a commissioned task has become increasingly accepted, whether or not that task constitutes anything akin to service, still less humble service. In the New Testament, those somehow characterized by diakonía include Christ (e.g., Mark 10:42–45), the apostles (Acts 6:1–7) and political authorities (Romans 13:4). Whether and how diakonía is to be equated with the humble service rendered by laymen and -women, some part of priestly ministry or the activity of political institutions are not trivial concerns. For how we conceive of such individual roles and institutions will shed light on the proper character of human agency