The Deeper Inquiry

The philosophy of invitation and commitment has been most deeply developed in the traditions that understand commitment as the constitutive act of certain forms of relationship. Hannah Arendt's analysis of promising in The Human Condition (1958) establishes that the act of promising is not merely a declaration of intention but a constitutive act that creates the relational conditions within which a certain kind of trustworthiness becomes possible. The invitation of this chapter asks for something analogous: not merely the declaration of alignment with the values of Providence, but the constitutive commitment that makes genuine participation possible.

The ethics of commitment under uncertainty has been examined from multiple angles. Charles Taylor's analysis of authenticity and commitment in The Ethics of Authenticity (1991), Bernard Williams' analysis of integrity and commitment in Moral Luck (1981), and the more recent work on the ethics of risk and responsibility in contexts of deep uncertainty all contribute to understanding what the invitation of this chapter asks in ethical terms. The invitation asks for commitment to a project whose outcome is genuinely uncertain, based on an intellectual argument that may be wrong in specific ways, in a relationship with an institution that is committing to specific things but cannot guarantee that it will meet those commitments without failure. This is not a comfortable form of commitment. It is the only honest one.