Month: October 2004

Just for the record, and current polls notwithstanding, I predict that President Bush will be re-elected on Tuesday (or whenever all the recounts and legal wrangling are finished – from which may God save us!). I think the Democrats in general and the far Left in particular have overplayed their hand with respect to the Bush-bashing. The fact that the likes of Michael Moore are now seen as mainstream Democrat spokesmen will, I think, turn off a lot of people who, even if they disagree with the President’s policies, don’t revile him. I also think that Kerry hasn’t made a case that will convince the necessary number of people that he’s the man to stand up to terrorism. Rightly or wrongly, I think the majority will go with the guy who’s perceived as “tougher.” Plus, Kerry just comes across as so darn unlikable! Even people who are planning on voting for him don’t like him!

I don’t say all this to make a partisan point. Though I voted for Bush in 2000, I won’t be voting for him this time around (nor will I be voting for Sen. Kerry). I just wanted to get this prediction on the record. Fortunately, there are no consequences to my being wrong!

Martin Peretz has some questions for John Kerry:

How would John Kerry have dealt with Saddam? He has told us Saddam needed to be “confronted.” But the word itself–which implies that the United States could have overthrown Saddam without using military force–tells us what we need to know. Had the United States and our allies not embarked on this war, the Iraqi mass murderer would still be in power. And, were international sanctions gone, as they soon would have been thanks to Russia and France, he would have been on his way back to having and deploying weapons of mass destruction. And the senator from Massachusetts would not have raised his voice.

Now, of course, the WMD rationale for war has dissolved like a mirage in the Mesopotamian desert. For Kerry and for Democrats, this has simply dissolved the case for the war. Finis. Which leaves us with the dilemma of how we deal with regimes that commit genocide. Saddam’s genocides seem not to have provoked Kerry at all, nor, for that matter, did the genocide in Rwanda. (When U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright finally tried to focus the Clinton administration on the government-sponsored massacres there, Kerry was not exactly an ally.) It is true that, during the first presidential debate, Kerry limply suggested that perhaps, as a last resort, some American troops should be sent to Darfur, Sudan. But I haven’t heard him mention it much since, which says something about his seriousness.

Kerry’s main problem is that the United Nations, the designated proctor for his “global test,” is an impediment to prompt and effective action against savage governments. The United Nations was set up largely to protect the territorial integrity of its member states. But, with a few exceptions, states no longer make war on their neighbors–they make war on segments of their own populations. (Of course, even in that rare case where one state did invade another, and the United Nations endorsed military action–Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait–Kerry did not. In that vote, and in others, he carries on a tradition of Massachusetts isolationism. Democratic politicians in the Commonwealth did not want to send aid to Great Britain before World War II, and Joseph Kennedy, JFK’s father and FDR’s ambassador to the Court of Saint James, was a rank appeaser.)

The savagery of governments against their own people, usually against a defined ethnic or religious minority, has been a consistent feature of the postwar world. Not charged in its charter with dealing with such cases, the United Nations has simply looked the other way, or worse. In the 1960s, it sided with the Nigerian government against the Ibos of Biafra; with Kofi Annan in charge of the U.N. presence in Rwanda, genocide unfolded there; and, with Annan again in charge of the blue helmets in Yugoslavia, many massacres took place in Bosnia. Likewise, over decades, it did not see–because it did not want to see–what was going on in Iraq.

More here.

Deciding not to vote is not the same as not bothering to. It’s a conscious choice, made for a reason. And the reason is this: A vote is an endorsement. When you punch the circle next to a candidate’s name, you’re backing that candidate’s program. It’s like signing a petition, or writing a letter of recommendation. You’ve just vouched for someone. You’re now implicated in the decisions he’s made, and in the ones he will make.

But what if you don’t agree with those decisions? Then don’t do it. Refuse to sign the petition. Decline to send the recommendation. Don’t vote. Just because one of the candidates is going to win, doesn’t mean you have to help.

You have to wonder if Carlson, a conservative who has since turned against the Iraq war, is speaking of his own intentions.

Full article here.

Further, all men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you. For, suppose that you had a great deal of some commodity, and felt bound to give it away to somebody who had none, and that it could not be given to more than one person; if two persons presented themselves, neither of whom had either from need or relationship a greater claim upon you than the other, you could do nothing fairer than choose by lot to which you would give what could not be given to both. Just so among men: since you cannot consult for the good of them all, you must take the matter as decided for you by a sort of lot, according as each man happens for the time being to be more closely connected with you.

–St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine

From Jim Henley.

This is a deeply silly piece of writing. Slate asked its contributors to disclose the candidate for whom they’re voting and offer some reasons. Here’s the response from Steven Landsburg, the economic writer:

If George Bush had chosen the racist David Duke as a running mate, I’d have voted against him, almost without regard to any other issue. Instead, John Kerry chose the xenophobe John Edwards as a running mate. I will therefore vote against John Kerry.

Duke thinks it’s imperative to protect white jobs from black competition. Edwards thinks it’s imperative to protect American jobs from foreign competition. There’s not a dime’s worth of moral difference there. While Duke would discriminate on the arbitrary basis of skin color, Edwards would discriminate on the arbitrary basis of birthplace. Either way, bigotry is bigotry, and appeals to base instincts should always be repudiated.

Bush’s reckless spending and disregard for the truth had me almost ready to vote for Kerry—until Kerry picked his running mate. When the real David Duke ran against a corrupt felon for governor of Lousiana, the bumper stickers read, “Vote for the crook. It’s important.” Well, I’m voting for the reckless spendthrift. It’s important again.

I can’t figure out if this is serious or some kind of parody of a libertarian homo economicus. Does Landsburg also think it’s morally wrong to feed one’s own children in preference to the children of strangers? Is taking my own wife out to dinner rather than my neighbor’s discriminating on the arbitrary basis of marital-relation-to-me?

Eastern Orthodox theologian David B. Hart has a review of The Virtue of War: Reclaiming the Classic Christian Traditions East and West by Alexander F. C. Webster and Darrell Cole in the November issue of Touchstone.

The book, according to Hart, is an attempt to show two things. First, that the Eastern and Western churches speak with one voice in commending just war thinking as opposed to either pacifism or the brand of “realism” associated with Reinhold Niebuhr. In this they succeed admirably:

The greatest virtue of this book is that it does not advance its case only over against Christian pacifism of the sort one associates with, say, John Howard Yoder, but also over against the “Christian realism” of Reinhold Niebuhr and his disciples. It has long been one of the more irksome oddities of American Christian ethics that—in matters pertaining to war—the pacifist and realist positions have been treated as the only available options for Christian moralists.

And yet pacifism and realism are mere inversions of one another, inasmuch as they share more or less the same view of what warfare is. Both accept the premise that war is by its nature evil, while only peace is an unqualified good. The pacifist may believe that peace (understood simply as the absence of strife) is best achieved by refusing to participate in war, and the realist that peace (understood as a secure and just social order) is best achieved by answering violence with violence, but both then accept that the Christian never has any choice in times of war but to collaborate with evil: He must either allow the violence of an aggressor to prevail or employ inherently wicked methods to assure that it does not.

Webster and Cole will have none of this. The bracingly unsentimental argument that they want to make is that war in fact is not intrinsically evil, however tragic it may be, but is a neutral instrument that may be used towards ends either moral or immoral; and, when it is waged on behalf of justice and by just means, it is a positive good, a work of virtue, and an act of charity. Simply said, for Christians, to go to war should never be a tragic choice of the lesser of two evils, for we are forbidden as Christians to do evil at all.

The second claim advanced by Webster and Cole is that the churches can and should support America’s “war on terror” as substantially in accord with just war principles. This, Hart says, is considerably more problematic:

[T]he greatest problem with this book is that it never succeeds in providing truly compelling arguments regarding how just war principles can be applied by Christians in the age of the secular state. Christians ought not to support or participate in any unjust war, says Cole; but then, also, Christians must not make war except under the authority of a state’s duly constituted military. But, surely, if there is no established Church, there is no way of knowing whether any given government will make even a show of limiting its belligerences to causes or practices condoned by Christian moral law….

…It seems to me to be a difficulty that is inescapable whenever one attempts to use a moral grammar suited to an age of Christian princes and Christian cultures as a guide to our relations with the post-Christian political order. Webster is almost strident in his assertion that we can credit ourselves with virtuous warmaking in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and pray God he is right. But I cannot imagine anyone not disposed to approve of the invasion of Iraq (in particular) being convinced by any argument this book advances.

What exactly, he might ask, are we fighting for? Democracy? Freedom of religion? But these are not demonstrably biblical values. Did Iraq constitute a threat to us? Perhaps, but not a threat that can ever definitively be shown to have been more than suppositious. And even if this were not so, is this a war waged to defend the people of God? Is ours really a Christian culture—our culture of abortion, pornography, and polymorphous perversity—worthy of defending?

The issue here, for Hart, is the Christian’s relation to the essentially non-Christian modern secular state (a preoccupation of this blog as you may have noticed). If the state doesn’t see itself as under the authority of Christian morality, can Christians support the wars it carries out?

Hart offers a qualified answer:

I am not urging any particular view of the matter, as it happens; I am only calling attention to how complicated the issue becomes when the Christian just war theorist can no longer claim that we are fighting to defend or restore a Christian order. It may well be that the only Christian argument for the war in Iraq that will not inevitably become at best equivocal when subjected to a sufficiently unyielding moral skepticism is that the suffering of the Iraqis under Saddam’s regime was sufficiently monstrous that no Christian conscience could possibly be content to leave that regime in place.

But if this is so, we may have to draw a firm demarcation between the aims of Christians in this conflict and the aims of the secular state. Perhaps we should cease to imagine that we can simply translate the principles of just war from the age of Christendom to the age of “the rights of man.” If we make war justly as Christians, we do so “alongside” the state perhaps, but surely not under its moral or (God forbid) spiritual authority.

Christianity Today asks.

When we ask how Christians should relate to the social order around them, the underlying presupposition is that the social order is not “Christian,” otherwise the question wouldn’t arise. Whether or not we regard it as a good thing, there is a growing consensus that we in the West are living in societies that are increasingly “post-Christian.” Which is simply to say that Christianity is not regarded as a publicly authoritative source of meaning and moral guidance for society as a whole.

Lately I’ve been reading some of the writings of John Howard Yoder, the Mennonite theologian best known for his book The Politics of Jesus, and I think some of what he has to say casts a helpful light on issues of faith and politics in a pluralistic society. As someone who regarded attempts to “Christianize” the social order through government power as intrinsically misguided, Yoder gave a lot of thought to these issues.

For Yoder, the life of Christian discipleship is marked primarily by becoming a part of a new community, or polis, that embodies a way of life standing in stark contrast to the surrounding world. To be a Christian is to live in light of and as a witness to the eventual eschatological triumph of God’s rule. This community (the Church) is marked by a new approach to economic life (sharing) and communal decision-making (consensus), and, above all, to the renunciation of violence, even when employed for the sake of a just cause (pacifism).

This is what Yoder means by “The Original Revolution.” In contrast to political revolutions that seek merely to exchange one set of power holders for another, followers of Jesus reject the very idea of holding power and take up the way of the Cross instead. It is a more radical revolution in that it rejects the underlying presuppositions of most politics. As Jesus tells the disciples:

You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave–just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Matthew 20: 25-28)

Yoder elaborates:

What is wrong with the Zealot [i.e. violent revolutionary] path for Jesus is not that it produces its new order by use of illegitimate instruments, but that the order it produces cannot be new. An order created by the sword is at the heart still not the new peoplehood Jesus announces. It still, by its subordination of persons (who may be killed if they are on the wrong side) to causes (which must triumph because they are right), preserves unbroken the self-righteousness of the mighty and denies the servanthood which God has chosen as His tool to remake the world….

This is the original revolution; the creation of a distinct community with its own deviant set of values and its coherent way of incarnating them. Today it might be called an underground movement, or a political party, or an infiltration team, or a cell movement….

When He called His society together Jesus gave its members a new way of life to live. He gave them a new way to deal with offenders–by forgiving them. He gave them a new way to deal with violence–by suffering. He gave them a new way to deal with money–by sharing it. He gave them a new way to deal with the problems of leadership–by drawing upon the gift of every member, even the must humble. He gave them a new way to deal with a corrupt society–by building a new order, not smashing the old.

Thus the primary way in which Christians influence the social order is through a kind of leavening effect. The Church, by embodying an alternative set of social practices, demonstrates that an alternative way of life is possible. While this way of life is intended primarily as a sign of God’s kingdom–which will be brought about by God at the end of time, not by our efforts–it can also influence the attitudes and practices of non-Christians.

This is not a matter of keeping religious beliefs and practices “private” and separate from the “public” realm. For Yoder, the Church is a “public” in its own right. It is the firstfruits of the new creation and shows what the whole world is destined to become.

The primary mission of the Church, then, is to be the Church. But does this allow Christians to seek to influence the State towards adopting Christian positions?

Yoder distinguishes two levels of ethics, one for the Church and one for the State. The body of Christian believers is called to a life of radical discipleship, which requires forsaking violence even if the price is martyrdom. The State, however, is ordained by God to maintain the relative peace and order that allows the Church to go about its business of evangelism. So, in a limited sense, there is a justification for the State’s authority to restrain evildoers and punish the wicked.

However, Yoder carefully qualifies this. The State is still under the authority of Christ and can never be a law unto itself. There are not two moralities, one for Christians and another for everyone else. Christians can and should still seek to influence the State in the carrying out of its police functions, even if they can’t expect that it will adhere to the strict standards expected of disciples of Jesus, which requires faith and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

In an early paper “The Theological Basis of the Christian Witness to the State,” Yoder clarifies:

We do not ask of the government nonresistance; we do, however, ask the most just and the least violent action possible, and taking that advice would mean for the government also an act of faith in the right. We cannot reproach our governments for having a police force; we can hold against them every use of police methods when they are not necessary.

But if the State is not, indeed cannot be, explicitly Christian, on what basis can Christians appeal to the State to limit its violent actions? Yoder here introduces the notion of what he calls “middle-axioms.” These are principles drawn from non-theological insights that overlap with Christian judgments about what is right. For instance, in a democratic society, the Christian might appeal to such values as freedom, equality, or checks and balances when arguing for a particular position. This picture is complicated by the fact that a society like ours contains a Christian residue where many Christian values are at least given lip service in the wider society.

This is not, it should be noted, an appeal to natural law or some kind of universal morality allegedly held by all people of good will. Yoder’s position seems to be more one of making ad hoc appeals to whatever principles have currency in the society in which Christians exist (it might be instructive to imagine what such appeals might look like coming from Christians in, say, an overwhelmingly Islamic society). The idea seems to be that Christians should appeal to the better angels of the wider society, challenging it to live up to its own stated principles.

Moreover, the Christian has no blueprint for the ideal society or “just State” to offer. Rather than offering utopian schemes, Christian social witness should focus on concrete injustices. As Yoder puts it:

…[T]he prophetic witness…always works most effectively when it combats one visible sin at a time, not when it demands the establishment of an ideal order. When, through a confusion with non-biblical lines of thought, the prophetic witness demands an ideal order, it discovers afterward that it has played into the hands of secularizing and demonizing tendencies. When it exposes one injustice at a time, pointing each time to a better way, there can be real improvement in tolerability, and thus in a certain sense progress.

So, the social witness of the Church combines 1) the life of the Church as embodying alternative social practices rooted in the Peace of Christ, 2) non-violent protest when the State exceeds its limited role as the preserver of order and 3) seeking to remedy concrete injustices one at a time without offering an overall blueprint by which to run society.

I think this picture provides a helpful understanding of how Christians can seek to influence the society around them. However, one might offer a few caveats.

First, does the Church’s having an influence on society depend on a prior recognition by the State of the Church’s exalted status as the bearer of God’s new way of life? That is, what voice can the Church have in a society that is officially and publicly “neutral” between competing visions of the good life? Yoder says that “We must begin by repeating firmly that the state, or more generally the organization of society, exists for the sake of the work of the church, and not vice versa.” Is this a truth that the State must recognize?

Secondly, does Yoder ask too much from the Church? He seems to see it as almost an all-encompassing reality for Christians, indeed as a new polis or kingdom. As attractive as this is, how many Churches are actually like this? And would we want them to be? A Lutheran, for instance, would say that the Church’s mission is primarily to be the bearer of the Gospel–announcing God’s forgiveness of sins. I realize that Yoder would take issue with a Lutheran account of just what the Gospel is or entails, but is the Church meant to replace the earthly city?

And finally, is Yoder’s opposition to “Constantinism” based on a partial reading of Scripture? Is it wrong for Christians to participate in the governing structures of society and seek to influence society directly? As Peter Leithart says:

But the question of whether to vote, and how, is really only one small part of a larger set of questions: Should we participate in American politics and society at all, and if so, how? Here, I believe we have clear biblical instruction. Quite commonly in Scripture, righteous men participate fully and wisely in less-than-ideal political situations. Joseph rules next to Pharaoh, Daniel is a high official in both Babylon and Persia, Mordecai has enough access to Ahasuerus to warn him about a plot, Nehemiah is cup-bearer to the king of Persia, and Paul talks about Christians who are members of Caesar’s household. In some cases, the rulers that Jews serve are converted, but that is not always the case. Obadiah, as his name suggests, was a servant of Yahweh; but he was also steward of the house of idolatrous Ahab. Scripture demands that we be uncompromising in the midst of corrupt political regimes; but it does not require that we drop out.

I realize this question is related to the question of Yoder’s pacifism, and this post is already far too long to deal with that issue. Suffice it to say I’m not 100% convinced that pacifism is mandated by the Gospel.

Nevertheless, Yoder offers a lot of food for thought. And his thinking on these matters has influenced a lot of people, not the least of which being Protestant ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, who is as close to being a rock star as a theologian is likely to come.

David Koyzis offers a clarification of first and second-level political disagreements among Christians.