The Way of Enemy Love: Dismissing Jesus, A Critical Assessment, Pt. 7

Leave a comment

In the past installments of this series of reviews, I have made an effort to tread the thin and delicate line of constructive criticism: on the one hand, I genuinely valued many of the things the book was trying to do, and wanted to affirm and advance them; on the other hand, I was genuinely concerned about points of confusion, unclarity, or just plain error, and wanted to draw attention to them when they were significant enough to have negative consequences.  In considering the ways of Weakness and Renunciation (chs. 2 and 3) I coordinated these two objectives by couching my reviews as calls for further clarification, and pointing out how the unclarity could in fact conspire to deprive Jones’s readers of exactly what they most needed—principles for practical action.  In considering the ways of Deliverance and of Sharing, on the other hand, my approach consisted more of attempting to ground a similar practical agenda (at least, so far as Jones’s practical agenda was discernible) in different, firmer theological soil, pointing out how failure to do so could render very good practices—works of mercy and of sharing—spiritually destructive.

In this chapter, I am afraid I shall have to take a blunter approach, although I hope that none will be offended.  In this chapter, the lack of clarity and equivocation is combined with so sweeping an attack on traditional Christian teaching that it is difficult to salvage anything constructive.  Taken alone, either of these might be frustrating, but might still leave us with a good deal to learn or at least converse with.  The real problem arises, as I sought to outline in Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 of this review, when these two tendencies are combined.  If you want to raise the stakes and condemn the mainstream of Christian practice and teaching for abandoning the way of Christ, this might be unfair or inappropriate, but if your terms are clear and your arguments incisive, you can at least prompt a fruitful debate and discussion.  On the other hand, if you write an ordinary work about theology or Christian living, and don’t define your terms all that well and lapse into occasional contradictions, readers might not gain that much from the book, but at least others may be encouraged to try and refine your arguments to more fruitful ends.  But if you raise the stakes—God vs. Mammon, the way of salvation vs. the way of destruction—and at the same time, indulge in constant equivocation, then the result can hardly be edifying.

PrintTo be sure, as a destructive takedown of contemporary American bloodlust and militarism, some of Jones’s polemics obliquely hit home; though for a somewhat clearer and more useful rendition of this, readers might simply skip to chapter 17, “American Mars.”  But aside from the general sense that many of us American Christians might be compromised by too permissive an embrace of the ways of war and violence, and that we might do well to take more seriously Christ’s blessing of “the peacemakers, it is,” readers are given very little which they can use, and quite a bit that they could readily abuse.

Don’t get me wrong.  None of this is to “dismiss Jesus” or the idea that we need to take a good, long, hard look at our attitudes toward violence.  Few Christians, perhaps, have given serious thought to what it means to love enemies (whether on the battlefield or in their personal lives), or wrestled earnestly with the ethics of war.  While I have, after much wrestling and questioning, settled fairly securely into just war camp, I have great respect for sincere and thoughtful pacifists, and have read with profit and appreciation the writings of Yoder and Hauerwas on this subject, as well as the just-war theories of Paul Ramsey and Oliver O’Donovan. Read More

The Party of Death

Leave a comment

With Roe v. Wade day coming up, it is a time for bloggers everywhere to be weighing in with some thoughts about abortion.  Unfortunately, I already did that, purely by coincidence, two days ago, reflecting on some of the occasional unsavory excesses of the pro-life movement (for a chilling reminder, though, of the moral gravity of abortion in America, it’s worth reading Al Mohler’s post today, “Abortion is as American as Apple Pie”).

The greatest problem with evangelical politics today, however, is not that it is too pro-life but that it is not pro-life enough.  This is hardly a novel observation, having become a slogan of sorts for more leftward-leaning evangelicals, who would like to see a Christlike commitment to peace become part of Christian politics in America.  But the extent of the Christian Right’s myopia has become glaringly obvious in this election cycle, which has been summed up for me (no doubt unfairly) in two memorable moments: (1) The cheers of a debate crowd when a moderator asked Rick Perry about the 234 death-row inmates he had executed as governor of Texas (which I blogged about last October), and (2) The crescendoing boos of a debate crowd (made up of my fellow Bible Belt South Carolinians) when Ron Paul said earlier this week, “Maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy: we shouldn’t do to other countries what we don’t want to have them do to us.”  

Now, in all fairness, the masses were probably not straightforwardly cheering for death and booing for justice in either case; rather more was going on.  As a commenter on this blog pointed out regarding the Rick Perry incident, the audience was cheering for a concept of justice—a deviant one, perhaps, but one with a reasonable pedigree—even if they chose to do so in extremely poor taste.  Likewise, one might say that the crowd was not so much dissing the Golden Rule, as (perhaps) booing at where they knew Ron Paul was headed, because they disagreed with the facts of the case—they did not accept that we bombed other countries without good cause.  If so, I would say that they have had their heads in the sand, and again, acted in very poor taste and with a poor sense of timing, but it is perhaps more understandable.  Yet I’ve seen enough to suggest that this mitigating explanation is unfortunately rather too charitable.  Many on the Right—yea, on the Christian Right—seem outraged at the notion of applying Golden Rule logic to foreign policy, since that would mean giving others (such as Muslims) the same kind of benefit of the doubt we would give ourselves, would mean attempting to see the world through their eyes.  I recall in the last election cycle, it was considered virtual treason for Ron Paul to suggest that we might’ve done anything to provoke the 9/11 attacks—no, of course not!  That would imply that our enemies were rational human beings, rather than crazy demons!  The Right really has no interest in any rule that would seek to measure our actions in a scale of justice vis-a-vis our enemies’ actions; for ours are virtually in no need of justification, whereas theirs are virtually incapable of justification.

What makes this repudiation of the Golden Rule by a voting bloc that largely identifies as Christian (indeed, evangelical Christian) so troubling, is that this is not even a rejection of charity in favor of justice as a rule for political action.  Plenty of Christians will say, “Yes, we should exercise love of enemies in a private and personal context, but it would be disastrous to apply those specifically Christian principles to politics.”  I think there’s some dangerous dichotomies being drawn in that kind of thinking, but I can understand it.  The Golden Rule, however, is not even a statement of distinctively Christian charity—rather, it is usually considered a basic principle of justice confessed by religions, philosophies, and cultures the world over (though I think there is a bit more going on in Jesus’ articulation of it).  It is a cornerstone of the natural law.  And if we can’t base a Christian politics on evangelical law or natural law, then we are in very bad shape indeed.

 

For whatever reason, the issue of abortion seems to have acted not as a telescopic lens, provoking Christians in America to open up their moral imagination, looking far and wide to discern the evils of their culture of death, and sensitizing them to the need for a resolute witness in favor of life; instead, it has acted as a microscopic lens, leading many Christians in America to focus solely on this one issue, using their moral passion against abortion as a self-justifying salve for their eagerness to see malefactors executed and foreigners bombed.  The result of this hypocrisy is a frightful witness to the watching world, which is always looking for Christians to make a misstep that will justify its repudiation of Christ.  Although the comments on Youtube videos are consistently inane and rancorous, it was troubling to see how many took the opportunity of Ron Paul’s booing to say, “This is why I’m not a Christian!  All these Bible Belters don’t even give a hoot about their Bible!”  This election cycle, showcasing candidates feverishly attempting to outdo one another in the belligerence of their foreign policy, suggests that the Republican Party, from which most American Christians still seem unwilling to unhitch their wagon, is becoming (if it was ever anything else) a party of death, not life.  

Some Much-Needed Clarity on American Empire

3 Comments

In a recent piece for First Things On the Square, Peter Leithart has at last given us a sneak peek at some of the refreshing and illuminating thoughts on “empire” (which is to say, in our current setting, American empire) that have been gestating inside his fertile brain for the past couple years.  His uncanny ability to bring balance and clarity to highly polarized discussions thick with the fog of war is a great asset for this controversial topic.  Many right-wing Christians still need to be brought to a sober reassessment of their nation’s evildoings, but without losing all sense of perspective and hurtling headlong into whichever left-wing or anarchist ideology promises the most fervent denunciation of American empire.  

In his mini-essay, “Towards a Sensible Discussion of Empire,” Leithart offers ten modest theses, many of which are “truisms . . . so obvious that it is telling that they have become controversial.”  Indeed, it is remarkable how many of these truisms will immediately cause many readers (including myself) to bristle, become suspicious, or even to start casting accusations like those of one commenter who compared Leithart’s argument to something that might be “made by a German academic in defense of the Nazis during the period of their rise to power.”  Such suspicion is perhaps not a bad thing—we should always be suspicious of any claim that appears to serve the interests of those in power—but it should not keep us from being sensible, and recognizing the difference between a truth and the abuse of a truth.  I won’t of course repost the whole essay here, but will simply call attention to a couple of the most fruitful contributions it makes.

First, Leithart seeks to demystify the concept of “power” somewhat, by inviting us neither to demonize it, idolize it, or too narrowly define it.  On the one hand, he tells us right out of the starting gate that power is evil not by nature but by abuse, and although often abused, “in itself, power is preferable to powerlessness.”  “It is better to have the power of sight than to be blind,” he points out.  And yet he ends by reminding us of the transience of worldly forms of power: “Empires end, yet the world keeps going. . . . Much as the current world system depends on the U.S., the future of the world does not ultimately depend on our ability to remain the world’s superpower, nor does our survival as a polity. We do not represent the end of history.”  Between these two claims, he invites us to reflect on the variety of the forms that power takes, in a very provocative paragraph:

“Abuses of power can be arrested only by an exertion of power. To rescue a victim, or to save a people from genocide, you have to exert power. Possession of power imposes an obligation to protect the weak. The power exerted in response to an abuse may not take the same form as the abuse itself. A persuasive orator can pacify a mob. Martyrs exercise a mystical power beyond the imaginations of their persecutors.”

Although the initial summary statement might appear more or less equivalent with the claim “force must be repelled by force” (as one careless reader seemed to take him as saying), it becomes clear that something more nuanced and interesting is being said.  Of course, force may need to be repelled by force, physical power overcome by greater physical power—Leithart’s stance here is forthrightly a just-war one—but the repelling power may be of a different kind altogether, and indeed, a non-physical power, like that of the orator or the martyr, may be far more powerful, as he suggests.  This, I think, is a clever and key move.  Too often, we tend to think of “power” in a very negative light, and treat all these other means as “powerful” only in a metaphorical sense.  But Leithart invites us to here to refuse to fall prey to the temptation to identify coercive force as the essence of power; power in itself is something much more pluriform and mysterious, and violence is but one, and in the end, one of the least powerful, of the forms of exercising power.  He also forces us to reckon with the fact that the martyr’s is an exercise of power, not merely a renunciation of it, echoing themes from his Defending Constantine and highlighting the problems with a lot of fashionable rhetoric.  To be sure, it is a renunciation, but the renunciation is simply a means to exercise a greater power.  The martyr’s sacrifice is not a despairing suicide, or a mere passive acceptance, but a triumphant conquest of his foe, just as was the cross of Christ.  We fear that using the language of “power” and “conquest” in this connection will give us a militaristic Christ, but perhaps such co-optation of the language of power is actually the best antidote to militarism.

 

Second, Leithart manages to be simultaneously forthright about the wickedness of empires, including our own, while also keeping this within proper perspective—a balance that seems to elude most Christian discussions of the topic.  On the one hand, we are reminded that many empires, and certainly our own, in fact do a great deal of good, intended and unintended, alongside their evils (as many contemporary intellectuals such as Niall Ferguson have been eager to point out), but this is quickly counterpointed with the insistence “The benefits from empires do not excuse the behavior of empires. We cannot give ourselves a pass on international folly and injustice by congratulating ourselves on the good things we do”—a principle that Ferguson does not appear to have grasped.  He enumerates just a few of our own unexcusable evils in a paragraph that is quite restrained overall (“Native Americans have many legitimate complaints against the U.S., as do Latin American countries” might be a little understated), but which still will discomfit many right-wing Christians at points (“While we Americans congratulated ourselves for our Christian charity in civilizing the Philippines, other Americans were killing Filipinos or herding them into concentration camps. For decades, we have deliberately dropped bombs on civilians and slaughtered hundreds of thousands.”)  

I will confess that I am not entirely satisfied with the balance that Leithart seeks to strike here; I think he goes too far, in his paragraph headed (sensibly enough) “American hegemony is not an undiluted evil”, in concluding “Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and the neoconservatives are right.”  Of course, he is trying to be provocative, but I am still not sure that I would agree with the proposition (to which I take it he is alluding) that “on balance and considering the alternatives, America is a force for good in the world today.”  To “consider the alternatives” is a very difficult matter, both historically and morally, but I would like to see it asserted, a little more clearly than it was in this brief sketch, that many of America’s evildoings in the past few decades are not merely occasional incidents of bad behavior, but have been systemic and pathological.  On the other hand, Leithart is writing in First Things, so I expect there’s a limit to how far he can deviate from the Neuhaus party line.

In any case, I eagerly await the promised harvest of further reflection on this subject, to which Leithart intimates these theses are preparatory.

C.S. Lewis, Just War, and the Locus of Authority

2 Comments

In a 1939 letter to the journal Theology, C.S. Lewis raises a very important, and too little discussed, question of just war theory: who is responsible to decide whether a war is just?  Too often, just war debates focus on the six traditional just war criteria, whether they are sufficient, and whether they have been fulfilled in a particular case.  But Lewis objects, “It is plain that equally sincere people can differ to any extent and argue for ever as to whether a proposed war fulfils these conditions or not.  The practical question, therefore, which faces us is one of authority.  Who has the duty of deciding when the conditions are fulfilled and the right of enforcing his decision?”  To this, Lewis offers a very interesting and uncomfortable answer.  To be sure, he grants from the start, no subject must obey a decision that he knows to be wrong and unjust; indeed, he must not obey.  But just how responsible is he to determine whether it is wrong or unjust?  Lewis is inclined to think that the ordinary citizen has, in fact, relatively little responsibility on this front.

He uses the analogy of a hangman.  Assuming that a Christian may legitimately be a hangman, we will of course say that

“he must not hang a man whom he knows to be innocent.  But will anyone interpret this to mean that the hangman has the same duty of investigating the prisoner’s guilt which the judge has?  If so, no executive can work and no Christian state is possible; which is absurd.  I conclude that the hangman has done his duty if he has done his share of the general duty, resting upon all citizens alike, to ensure, so far as in him lies, that we have an honest judicial system; if, in spite of this, and unknowingly, he hangs an innocent man, then a sin has been committed, but not by him.  This analogy suggests to me that it must be absurd to give to the private citizen the same right and duty of deciding the justice of a given war which rests on governments; and I submit that the rules for determine what wars are just were originally rules for the guidance of pinces, not subjects.  This does not mean that private persons must obey governments commanding them to do what they know is sin but perhaps it does mean (I write it with some reluctance) that the ultimate decision as to what the situation at a given moment is in the highly complex field of international affiars is one which must be delegated.” 

One can certainly feel the force of Lewis’s argument here.  To generalize it, surely we must acknowledge that the subject’s duty of determining the justice of laws to obey is not as thorough and comprehensive as the lawmaker’s duty of determining the justice of laws to enact.  Otherwise, every citizen would be his own lawmaker and there would be no authority.  And of course, this objection is not simply to protect authority, but to protect the subject from the awful, paralyzing weight of responsibility that he should have if he must thoroughly sift every judgment made by his leaders before going along with it.  If I should be guilty of sin every time I obey a law that should not, on the whole, have been made, then this would be a heavy burden indeed on every conscience, and an intolerable demand on each citizen’s time, since he must be forever researching the pros and cons of every decision.  

What Lewis draws our attention to here is perhaps the crucial, but often-neglected, dimension of authority–epistemological authority.  Although, within a suitably circumscribed sphere, authorities can make right what might otherwise be wrong, or make wrong what might otherwise be right, more importantly their job is to help decide for us what is right, in a situation where this determination is complex and very difficult to come by.  Submission to authority means, therefore, a willingness to suspend judgment, to defer to another’s conclusion, even if one cannot see all the reasons for it, even if, indeed, it may seem thoroughly unpersuasive at first glance.  Otherwise, again, we put unbearable burdens on each conscience, and reneder impossible any kind of collective action.  

 This much I think we must grant, despite our hesitation; to be sure, we must leave room for conscientious objection, for open debate questioning the law and the authorities, and yet these must be the exception, rather than the rule–most citizens, most of the time, will be justified in obeying political authorities without investigating all the ins and the outs.  But I expect we are likely to be far more hesitant about this principle when it comes to war, especially in a generation scarred by the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.  

 

But can we offer a rational defence of this hesitance, without demanding that every hangman be a judge?  Well, yes, I think.  There are a couple routes.  First of all, while adopting as a general principle that ordinary citizens do not have the same responsibility to determine the justice of political decisions as authorities do, we might well want to say that their responsibility is raised as the stakes are raised.  In ordinary mundane decisions, we can generally assume that the authorities are making reasonable calls and that we needn’t second-guess these decisions.  In life-or-death decisions, such as capital punishment, then, although we needn’t put ourselves in the position of the judge and the jury, we may want to prick up our ears and be especially attentive to make sure that justice is being done, and be ready to speak out if there are anomalies that suggest it is not.  In decisions involving the life and death of tens of thousands of people, and of whole nations, then we should be far more attentive, far more questioning.  As a people, we do incur a certain degree of guilt if so much blood is shed wrongly, and so we ought to be diligent in demanding a clear explanation of a just rationale for war.  We don’t demand to know every detail, but we can and should ask for a coherent account, and if one is lacking, we should suspect that something rotten is afoot.  

But there is perhaps a more basic problem with the hangman example.  For the closest analogue of the hangman in a time of war is not the ordinary citizen, but the soldier.  Like the hangman, the soldier has signed up for the job of doing the dirty work.  He has in a very special way submitted his own judgment to that of his commanders; the justice system cannot work if the executioner is forever demanding to see all the evidence, and the military system cannot work if the soldiers are forever cross-examining every deployment order.  I would suggest that, although they have a serious responsibility to determine the justice of the system they choose to serve before they sign on the job, once they have so signed on, the hangman and the soldier have in fact less responsibility to determine the justice of orders than ordinary citizens.  In a controversial court case involving the death penalty, I would suggest, ordinary citizens have more duty to be protesting what they see as an unjust decision than does the hangman.  So, when a war is undertaken, soldiers may have to stay silent when those on the home front raise foreceful objections.  I would suggest that we have to give a more complex account of vocation, then, than Lewis’s simple citizen/leader dichotomy.  Lewis asks, for instance, 

“What is the alternative?  That individuals ignorant of history and strategy should decide for themselves whether condition 6 (‘a considerable probability of winning’) is, or is not, fulfilled? — or that every citizen, neglecting his own vocation and not weighing his capacity, is to become an expert on all the relevant, and often technical, problems?”  

Well no, that’s not the only alternative.  We are to weigh our vocations.  And some private citizens have a particular vocation to ask questions of those in power, to investigate the truth of their claims, to weigh the consistency of their rhetoric and to sift expert opinions?  Journalists, for instance, ought to have a crucial vocation within a modern society to inform the citizenry and to ask questions of those in power.  So when it comes to the possibility of war, the stakes are high enough that we should ask questions, and some will have the vocation to do a lot of cross-examination.  Perhaps Lewis is right and our default, if we live in a generally just society, should be to trust our leaders, but if this cross-examination uncovers evidence that contradicts what our leaders have told us, then we should not.

 

If we cannot be discerning and critical at this point, before the shots have been fired, before loved ones have been killed and we’ve been hardened by the ubiquity of death, before the fog of war has engulfed us, then when will be critical.  Lewis, like Paul Ramsey, operates under the assumption that ius in bello should be much easier to discern, and much easier for Christians to witness consistently to, than ius ad bellum: 

“a clear Christian witness might be attained in a different way. If all Christians consented to bear arms at the command of the magistrate, and if all, after that, refused to obey anti-Christian orders, should we not get a clear issue?  A man is much more certain that he ought not to murder prisoners or bomb civilians than he ever can be about the justice of a war.  It is perhaps here that ‘conscientious objection’ ought to begin.”

 

The problem is that history, above all the six years of history that followed Lewis’s writing of this letter, simply does not bear out this rosy optimism.  On the contrary, it seems generally to have been much easier for governments to convince their people that a war is being fought justly than that a war is being entered into justly.  Civilian deaths can always be covered up, or else dismissed as accidents.  Or perhaps a people, sufficiently hardened by war, can be brought to the point where they just don’t seem to care, as was the case by 1945, when the US and UK engaged in airborne atrocities on a scale that almost defies imagination.  If we are to be vigilant witnesses against the injustice of war, we must start by doing so when a war is first proposed, not after it is well underway.  Otherwise, if we start by simply trusting that the authorities know what they’re doing, then it’s almost certain that once we’re in the heat of conflict, when the alternative can be portrayed as treason, we will continue so trusting them, no matter what they command us to do.  

A Constantinian Showdown

Leave a comment

 Yes, believe it or not, I am still alive.  But I am on vacation, and my brain has completely shut down and refused to produce blog-worthy ideas.  

However, I can point you to where some real blogging action is–or was–I’m a week or two behind. 

Ben Witherington recently produced a lengthy series of posts reviewing Peter Leithart’s groundbreaking recent book, Defending Constantine–while broadly appreciative and complementary, he was sharply critical on several points, as one might expect, given that he is a pacifist.  Leithart’s responses to his objections are particularly fascinating, and very relevant to the recent discussion about retributive justice here.  Leithart’s final post, “Loving Enemies” offers a frank confession of the difficulties of a Christian just war position, which he nonetheless feels compelled to cling to.  My own thoughts on this subject are very similar to what Leithart voices in this fantastic post.

Here are the links:

Witherington Intro
Witherington 1
Witherington 2
Witherington 3
Witherington 4
Witherington 5
Witherington 6
Witherington 7
Witherington 8 

Leithart 1: “Guarding the Garden”
Leithart 2: “Crushing Heads”
Leithart 3: “Protoeuangelium”
Leithart 4: “Warrior Messiah”
Leithart 5: “Marcion”
Leithart 6: “Loving Enemies” 

If you’re eager for more action, this just in–the AAR conference this fall in San Francisco will host a dialogue/debate between Leithart and Stanley Hauerwas over Defending Constantine.  If I weren’t already going, I might buy a plane ticket just to see that!