Month: March 2005

Sang this one at church yesterday. (Although, for the record, I’m not crazy about this newfangled practice of conflating Palm Sunday and “Passion Sunday.” People can go to church on Good Friday, dammit! UPDATE: I realize that in one sense it makes perfect sense to observe Passion Sunday as inagurating Holy Week. Though until, I believe, Vatican II “Passion Sunday” marked the beginning of Passiontide – i.e. two weeks leading up to Easter. In any event, what annoys me is cramming the Passion reading into the Palm Sunday service so people don’t need to come to Good Friday services. End of gripe.)

Alas! and did my Savior bleed,
and did my Sovereign die!
Would he devote that sacred head
for sinners such as I?

Was it for crimes that I have done,
he groaned upon the tree?
Amazing pity! Grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

Well might the sun in darkness hide,
and shut its glories in,
when God, the mighty maker,
died for his own creature’s sin.

Thus might I hide my blushing face
while his dear cross appears;
dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
and melt mine eyes to tears.

But drops of tears can ne’er repay
the debt of love I owe.
Here, Lord, I give myself away;
’tis all that I can do.

—Isaac Watts

Here’s an article in the Guardian (via Get Religion) by two British Anglicans urging the Left to realize that it has religious allies and not to cede religious faith to the Right:

Even comparatively recently things were looking up for the religious left. Tony Blair is a member of the Christian socialist movement and in Rowan Williams the Church of England has a self-confessed “bearded lefty” at the top. Yet instead of a renaissance there has been a decline. The Archbishop of Canterbury is now a virtual prisoner of the religious right. And Labour Christians seem silent and impotent. How did we get to here?

In the first place, the religious left has found itself constantly challenged by the secular left. Whilst the religious right and neo-conservatives have worked together, progressives have split and split again. Blair is too embarrassed to talk the language of faith because he knows it would alienate his allies. Some object to religion on principle. Others insist that a Christian response is inevitably intolerant, exclusive, even racist. So left secularists welcomed Jubilee 2000 but ignored the fact that the Jubilee is a biblical concept.

But progressive Christians also seem incapable of confronting the religious right on its own terms. Jesus offered a political manifesto that emphasised non-violence, social justice and the redistribution of wealth – yet all this is drowned out by those who use the text to justify a narrow, authoritarian and morally judgmental form of social respectability. The irony is that the religious right and the secular left have effectively joined forces to promote the idea that the Bible is reactionary. For the secular left, the more the Bible can be described in this way, the easier it is to rubbish. Thus the religious right is free to claim a monopoly on Christianity. And the Christian left, hounded from both sides, finds itself shouted into silence.

One thing that goes unmentioned in the piece is that there might be substantive differences between the “religious Left” and the “secular Left.” Abp. Williams, for instance, is probably rightly considered a man of the Left, but he also opposes abortion and euthanasia. And Williams and Tony Blair are diametrically opposed on the issue of Iraq. What is the Left-Christian position on war and intervention?

If Christians are going to enter into political coalitions (and it’s probably inevitable that they will), should they cede the determination of policy to their secular allies, with Christians just supplying a religious patina for whatever policies are adopted on secular grounds? Or should they contribute to informing those policies with a distinctively Christian vision?

Charles Krauthammer detects a double standard:

After all, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability.

A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile Gen. Augusto Pinochet eight years after he’s left office, and becomes a human rights hero — a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone. Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing — Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Hussein and his sons — nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America’s courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.

Now, I can’t speak for what “the left” thinks about anything, but I opposed the Iraq war not because I opposed bringing Saddam to justice, but because the way in which it was proposed to do it has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. But Krauthammer makes it sound as though “removing” Saddam was basically the same as arresting Pinochet.

Suppose the police are pursuing a dangerous criminal and he runs into an apartment building full of people. Would we praise the police for heroism if, to get the criminal, they dropped a bomb on the apartment building, killing all the inhabitants inside?

Today Camassia linked to this post from Rilina comparing Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics and J. H. Yoder’s Politics of Jesus. Rilina is dismayed by what s/he perceives as Wallis’ tendency to subordinate the core of Christianity to a progressive political agenda:

What’s missing is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Really. I spluttered when I finally realized what was bothering me about the book. Wallis refers often to Jesus’s teachings; the Beatitudes in particular get a good deal of play. But he never talks about how Jesus lived, why Jesus died, and what the resurrection might mean in that context. In fact, I could only find two places where Wallis even touches upon the narrative of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. The first was, ironically enough, a place where Wallis calls President Bush on misusing biblical language by using the following snippet from a hymn, “power, power, wonder-working power,” in a speech. Bush used the quote to describe the power of the American people. But that actual hymn refers to the “power, power, wonder-working power in the blood of the Lamb.” But Wallis doesn’t go on, unfortunately, to further dissect the significance of salvation or the crucifixion–even though Christ’s death on the cross was a hugely political act that Christians are explicitly called to imitate. Wallis just goes, “Shame on you, Bush, for coopting the language of salvation!” Later, the resurrection comes up when Wallis asserts his belief in a literal resurrection (pg 349). But the assertion isn’t followed by any discussion of the implications of that belief for his political /activist beliefs.

In contrast to the absence of the life of the Jesus, we get huge swaths of the book devoted to the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. This makes sense from some perspectives; King was an activist religious figure who led a hugely important social change movement. But what is the best thing Christianity can offer society? Martin Luther King Jr. or Jesus Christ? Progressive social change or salvation and all that salvation entails?

I still haven’t gotten around to reading my copy of GP, but when I saw Wallis speak a couple months ago I did detect what I thought was a certain ambiguity in his position:

Something that remains unclear to me (and maybe this will become clearer as I read Wallis’ book) is to what extent he is proposing a distinctively Christian political stance rather than re-casting traditional liberal/progressive politics in Christian language.

Rilina contrasts Yoder’s emphasis on faithfulness with Wallis’ emphasis on results. Whether this is fair to Wallis I will abstain from judging til after I’ve read the book. Though I definitely want to avoid any straightforward identification of Christianity with “progressivism” (or “conservatism,” or any worldly ideology).

(On an interesting side note, when I talked to Wallis briefly at the book signing he mentioned that Yoder was one of his greatest mentors.)

Salon‘s Charles Taylor (no, not the evil dictator or the communitarian philosopher) heaps some well-deserved praise on my beloved O.C. in the New York Observer.

Things aren’t looking good for the President’s Social Security plan if this story is to be believed. Now, I don’t do much in the way of thinking about nitty gritty policy stuff here, because a) I don’t know that much about it and b) it doesn’t really interest me. But what I can do passably well is “interrogate” (as the po-mos say) the underlying premises of arguments.

One of the underlying premises of the push for Social Security reform is that the system is in “crisis” and will soon begin to spend more money than it takes in. Now, folks on the left have questioned the math, but the more fundamental point, it seems to me, is that everyone is taking as a given that SS must be funded by way of FICA (payroll) taxes.

But why should this be so? Why not fund SS out of general tax revenue? The deceit at the heart of Social Security has always been that by paying FICA taxes you are “investing” for your retirement. But this is nonsense. Decades of government propaganda notwithstanding, SS is a wealth transfer program like welfare. It takes money from one group of people (young workers) and gives it to other groups of people (retirees, the disabled, their dependents, etc.). There may have been compelling reasons for pitching it as an investment plan, but basic honesty compels us to admit it ain’t so.

Now, it seems to me that two things fall out of admitting that SS is a welfare program of sorts. First, there’s no reason, in principle, it couldn’t be funded from general tax revenue (sales, income, personal, corporate, or whatever). Second, it could be given only to those who need it. Once you’ve given up the fiction that people are investing in their own retirement, you no longer need to maintain that they’re entitled to a return on their “investment.” Eligibility for SS could be determined based on need (and “need” could be defined more or less generously), which makes sense, since the whole purpose of the program was to keep the elderly out of poverty. Retired millionaires don’t need that extra couple hundred bucks a month.

Funding SS out of general tax revenue would also address another problem: the FICA tax is one of the most regressive taxes we have (especially when you take into account the cap on income that is susceptible to FICA taxation). A progressive income tax (or even a flat tax) would be fairer and simpler.

I assume (contra libertarians and many conservatives) that it is meet, right, and just that society should provide assistance to those who need it. There’s no shame in admitting that Social Security is a program by which we extend aid to those in need. On the contrary, the fact that it has for so long been portrayed as a kind of investment scheme actually gives rhetorical ammunition to critics who want to privatize it (If it’s “your” retirement, why shouldn’t you be able to decide how it’s invested?). Being honest about its purpose would seem to allow for greater flexibility in determining how it might be reformed.

Along with the thinkers like Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver (1910-1963) was one of the leading intellectual lights of the conservative movement that emerged after the Second World War. Weaver might best be classified as a “Christian humanist” or maybe “Christian Platonist”; he believed that there was an intelligible order to reality, and that human flourishing required cognizance of that order.

For Weaver, one of the hallmarks of civilization is the making of distinctions. There are many different qualities that we value, possessed by different people in varying degrees. Rather than reducing everything to a single measure of value (e.g. utility, economic productivity, etc.), a healthy culture allows that there are many different measures of value (aesthetic, ethical, religious). Eliding such distinctions is the social analogue to denying that things have distinct, intelligible natures and adopting some kind of monist ontology (e.g. materialism) that reduces all things to a common substratum.

It’s in this context that we can understand Weaver’s critique of total war. His essay “A Dialectic on Total War” appears in his book Visions of Order. In it he argues that the advent of total war marks the collapsing of distinctions that were painstakingly built up over centuries of development in the West. With respect to war, the most important distinction is that between combatant and non-combatant. When this distinction is recognized as having a foundation in reality we get limitations on the conduct of war as expressed in codes of chivalry, just war theory, and laws of war. When such distinctions are denied, we get total war:

These obliteration bombings carried on by both sides in the Second World War put an end to all discrimination. Neither status nor location offered any immunity from destruction, and that often of a horrible kind. Mass killing did in fact rob the cradle and the grave. Our nation was treated to the spectacle of young boys fresh out of Kansas and Texas turning nonmilitary Dresden into a holocaust which is said to have taken tens of thousands of lives, pulverizing ancient shrines like Monte Cassino and Nuremberg, and bringing atomic annihilation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are items of the evidence that the war of unlimited objectives has swallowed up all discrimination, comparison, humanity, and, we would have to add, enlightened self-interest. Such things are so inimical to the foundations on which civilization is built that they cast into doubt the very possibility of recovery. It is more than disturbing to think that the restraints which had been formed through religion and humanitarian liberalism proved too weak to stay the tide anywhere. We are compelled to recall Winston Churchill, a descendant of the Duke of Marlborough and in many ways a fit spokesman for Britain’s nobility, saying that no extreme of violence would be considered too great for victory. Then there is the equally dismaying spectacle of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the reputedly great liberal and humanitarian, smiling blandly and waving the cigarette holder while his agents showered unimaginable destruction upon European and Japanese civilians. (Weaver, Visions of Order, pp. 98-99)

Weaver’s line that “[s]uch things are so inimical to the foundations on which civilization is built” hints at his response to those who would argue that once you’ve engaged in war it’s foolish to obsever limits and that you should just get it over with as quickly as possible. For Weaver, on the contrary, means and ends aren’t so easily separated:

The expediential argument for total war is ususally expressed very simply: “It saves lives.” I have seen Sherman’s campaign in Georgia and the Carolinas defended on the ground that it brought the war to an end sooner consequently saving lives; the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been excused in the same way. This argument, however, has a fatal internal contradiction. Under the rationale of war, the main object of a nation going to war cannot be the saving of lives. If the saving of lives were the primary consideration, there need never be any war in the first place. A nation threatened by war could surrender to the enemy at once, preventing the loss of even a single life. The enemy would in all probability allow the people of that nation to go on living, even if it demanded “unconditional surrender” and proposed to make the people of that nation slaves. The truth is that any nation going to war tells itself that there are things dearer than life and that it proposes to defend these even at the expense of lives. The people are reminded of this in numberless ways, and every young man is instilled with the thought that he must be willing, if called upon, to make the supreme sacrifice. In war the saving of lives is a consideration secondary to the aims of war.

This is not to say that there is no economy of means in war. It does, however, say that in war the economizing of lives is not the first aim, since in embarking upon war that nation declares that the war aims are the supreme goal for which lives will be spent if necessary. The self-contradiction of total war is that it destroys the very things for which one is supposed to be sacrificing. The “total” belligerent finds at the end that he has the formal triumph, but that he has lost not only the lives necessary to win it but also the objectives for which it was waged. In other words he has lost the thing that the lives were being expended to preserve. (p. 103)

The “thing,” the end in question, is the preservation those forms of civilization that make distinctions by reflecting the true order of being. To sacrifice those distinctions for the sake of victoy leaves the “victor” “on an immensely lower plane than that on which it began.” (p. 104).

Anti-war conservative Robert Novak has some good things (well, I think they’re good things) to say about John Bolton in his most recent column:

If being a neoconservative means embracing a Wilsonian vision of bringing democracy to the world, Bolton is surely not one. He may be the last important foe of nation-building inside the administration and would like to get out of Iraq quickly.

An interesting interview with New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano. Napolitano is a staunch advocate of procedural checks on government, especially in areas of law enforcement.

Some excerpts:

Reason: What’s your case against the USA PATRIOT Act?

Napolitano: Let’s put aside all of the procedural problems with enacting it. Forget about the fact that there was no debate. Forget about the fact that most members of Congress didn’t even have an opportunity to read it. It is a direct assault on at least three amendments to the Constitution: the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, and the Fifth Amendment. The PATRIOT Act legitimates the notion that if we give up certain freedoms, the government will keep us safer. I reject that notion from a moral and legal point of view. I also reject it from a practical point of view. It doesn’t work. The government doesn’t need our freedoms to keep us safer. No one—no lawyer, judge, or historian—can point to a single incident in American history where national security was impaired because someone insisted on their right to free speech or their right to privacy or their right to due process.

[…]

Reason: Let’s talk about the evolution of your views. During your college years in the late ’60s, you wore a “Bomb Hanoi” T-shirt and supported Richard Nixon’s law and order campaign. You write that eight years on the bench as a superior court judge in New Jersey turned you into a “born-again individualist,” and Fox News Channel viewers can see you regularly argue in favor of restrictions on cops and law enforcement more generally. How did serving on the bench change you?

Napolitano: I had a realization that many [law enforcement agents] were lying. Some of them would acknowledge, not to the extent that I would have them charged with perjury, but in the wink and the nod in a conversation with them afterwards, “Well, we almost don’t care if you found out that we kicked in the taillight.” “We knew,” they’d suggest, “from the profile—Mercedes Benz, New York plates, African-American driver, coming off the George Washington Bridge—it was more likely than not that drugs were in there, and we don’t even care.” They took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and they’re violating that oath when they violate the rights of the driver of that car.

I’ve always considered myself a Barry Goldwater Republican. I want the Democrats out of my pocketbook, and I want the Republicans out of my bedroom. I believe that the Constitution and the natural law mandate that the individual is greater than the state and that individual rights are the whole reason for our success in the Western world. Our cultural successes, our enjoyment of freedom, our financial successes, are all due to unleashing individual initiative and guarding and protecting individual liberty.

[…]

Reason: How do you feel about Alberto Gonzales as attorney general?

Napolitano: He will be the first attorney general in American history, publicly, to be in favor of torture. The others may have been in favor of it privately, but Al Gonzales is in favor of it publicly. This is an untenable position to take.

[…]

Reason: What’s the connection between your Catholicism and your politics? The church contributed hugely to the development of natural law theory. But historically, the church has also often been an extremely repressive, anti-democratic, anti-individualistic organization.

Napolitano: The Catholic Church teaches that every human life is of potentially infinite value, that it can be saved up to the moment of death, and that each soul could present everlasting and eternal glory to God, no matter how evil the person appears. That’s about as strong a statement of the primacy of the individual over the state as you could imagine.

Here’s a write-up from this Sunday’s Inquirer on Ron Sider’s new book the Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. Sider calls for Christians to recommit to living as a “countercultural community” that resists the values of the surrounding society:

The drift from biblical norms toward mass-culture values of individualism and entertainment is widespread, Sider says in the book, citing various surveys. For instance, 26 percent of traditional evangelicals and 46 percent of nontraditional ones do not think premarital sex is wrong. Twenty-five percent of born-again Christians have had live-in partners before marriage, not that far below the U.S. rate of 33 percent. The divorce rate for born-again Christians is 26 percent, topping the non-Christian rate of 22 percent.

Despite recent church efforts to repent of racism, white conservative Protestants have been found to be more than twice as likely as other whites to blame lack of equality between the races on a lack of black motivation rather than discrimination.

Though incomes have risen, giving to churches has not. Only 6 percent of born-again adults tithed in 2002, a drop from 12 percent in 2000. Giving has fallen from 3.1 percent of personal income – a third of a tithe – to 2.66 percent.

Sider teaches at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary just outside of Philly, and there was a conference there to discuss the ideas in the book:

Randall Balmer, professor of American religious history at Columbia University, rued the current “blind allegiance to hard-right politics” as being a reversal of evangelicalism’s historic advocacy of progressive causes such as abolitionism, temperance, and women’s education and voting rights.

As the movement joined forces with political conservatives about 25 years ago, Balmer said, its suspicions of “worldliness” also fell away: “In its quest for political influence, economic affluence and cultural respectability, evangelicalism ceased being a counterculture.”

I’m hesistant to critique someone’s position based on just two quotes taken out of context, but doesn’t this at first blush seem inconsistent? Surely the progressive evangelicalism of the past sought “influcence … and cultural respectability.” Indeed, such evangelicals were an integral part of the turn-of-the-century Progressive movement, elements of which tended to view the American state as God’s chosen instrument to stamp out sin in all its forms. These selfsame progressives were instrumental foisting the disastrous and hated 18th Amendment on the country and stampeding the country into World War I (with the honorable exception of populist evangelical William Jennings Bryan who resigned as Wilson’s Secretary of State once he realized the administration was bent on entering the war, despite its official stance of neutrality).

My point being that it’s one thing to criticize conservative evangelicals for being too “worldly” by entering into politics, and it’s quite another to criticize them for not being progressive enough.

Other participants at the conference suggested that evangelicals drop out of the culture to a certain extent:

A grab bag of cures to unbiblical living were proposed by speakers on the dais and from the floor: “Selective disengagement” from the culture (“Turn off the television, turn up the Bach,” quipped Wheaton College historian Mark Noll). Small “accountability groups,” in which believers confront sins. A return of church discipline in which members, particularly leaders, could be sanctioned. More use of sacramental confession and penance. More youth mentoring. Racial and urban-suburban dialogues. And the recovery of “biblical literacy.”

Bible classes should explore which social conventions Jesus subverted and which injustices Moses redressed, Christianity Today editor David Neff said. “Not until we see the Bible’s radical challenges to ourselves and to the social evils we have been taught to tolerate are we biblically literate… . The gospel is about salvation, but we also know that the gospel never stops at salvation.”

Sider suggests “We simply cannot follow Jesus in this crazy society unless we recover a deep sense of the church as a countercultural community,” and “We almost certainly would strengthen the church today if we made it harder to join.”

Though I must say my Lutheran hackles are raised when I read things like this:

“When Christians today reduce the gospel to forgiveness of sins, they are offering a one-sided, heretical message that is flatly unfaithful to the Jesus they worship as Lord and God.”

For another view, check out this essay by Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde: “Is Forgiveness Enough? Reflections on an Odd Question.” Forde says:

The first step we need to take in sorting out our problem is to pay some heed to the distinction between the ultimate and the penultimate in these matters. When the question is put, “Is forgiveness enough?” the first thing to ask is, “Enough for what?” The immediate answer, surely, is that it is enough for salvation. We are constantly reminded of that in our liturgy by the song of Zechariah when it is said that God’s people shall be given “knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins” (Luke 1:77). Such forgiveness is, as already indicated, the ultimate judgment, the last word spoken over and to us in this penultimate world. Indeed, it is the end (finis and telos) of our penultimate world and the beginning of the ultimate, the end of this old age and the beginning of the new. It brings the turn of the ages to faith. And so it is enough. Faith simply cannot ask, “Is that all?” It is all! To be faithful is to believe in the forgiveness of sins, and that it is enough.

Of course we will want to say some other things when we turn to consider the penultimate and its concerns. Forgiveness of sins does not straightaway do for us in this age what we might desire. It does not heal the paralytic; it does not put food on the table; it does not bind up all our hurts and pains. If that is the sum and substance of what is hoped for, forgiveness will never be “enough.” But then, one might add, nothing will ever be enough. I expect that is the major impetus behind our question. In our culture of complaint and victimization we tend to lose sight of the ultimate and to focus rather on immediate injustices, wrongs, and abuses. So we cry, “Forgiveness is not enough!” We demand rather our rights; we demand justice, the righting of wrongs, the end of all abuses; we want fulfillment, self- esteem, happiness. No doubt these are matters of considerable importance. But they are, nevertheless, penultimate.