I have no idea if a free concert designed to raise “awareness” rather than, you know, money is a particularly effective way to fight poverty. But I’ll tell you what I don’t like – the fact that they’re effectively shutting down half the city for the likes of Bon Jovi and Linkin Park.
Me, I’m leaving town to avoid the craziness altogether.
There’s an interesting conversation going on over at Eric’s about Radical Orthodoxy and whether someone like Jim Wallis represents a “Constantinism of the Left.”
I have trouble coming to grips with the argument because I think the “sectarian vs. Constantinian” debate rests on a false dilemma. In fact, I’d go further and say that they are in some ways two sides of the same coin. Both seem to think that the Kingdom can be realized in a present social configuration; for one it’s the church and for the other it’s society at large (“Christendom”).
By contrast, I would argue that something like Luther’s “Two Kingdoms” is an inevitable part of a viable Christian social ethic. “Two kingdoms” can sound like a static notion that rigidly separates the church from the world; a better way of thinking about it might be to think of it as the two ways in which God governs the world. There is no “secular” space from which God is absent – rather God is everywhere dynamically present in the care and redemption of his creation.
In the church God reigns through the proclamation of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments, freely bestowing his grace upon sinners. In the world God reigns through his law and the so-called orders of creation – the spheres of life that provide a certain degree of order and justice, making human flourishing possible despite sin. This is the political, or civil, use of the law.
In this perspective, one of the duties of Christians is calling the secular authorities to account when they fail in their appointed task of securing justice in this age. The role of the authorities is not to usher in God’s Kingdom, which comes in God’s good time and not through any effort of ours. In that respect, the “Constantinians,” whether of the Right or Left, are mistaken in their desire to create a “Christian” social order (I’ll leave aside the question of whether it’s accurate to describe someone like Wallis as “Constantinian”).
However, the sectarians (for lack of a better term) are, I think, mistaken in setting up such a stark church-world dualism. They seem to want to make the church into what Gerhard Forde calls an “eschatological vestibule” – a polis unto itself that embodies the Kingdom. The church is not necessarily more virtuous than the world, but lives entirely by grace. And like the surrounding social order, the church belongs to “this age” and is destined to pass away.
The church does better, I would say, to equip its members for their various vocations in the world rather than trying to replace the structures of the world. The key here is that because Christians know they are justified by faith, they are then turned back out into the world, free to serve their neighbors.
Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that widens the scope of eminent domain could be bad news for churches:
Jared Leland, legal adviser for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said churches could be especially vulnerable.
“Because all houses of worship are tax-exempt, they will continue to be attractive targets for seizure by revenue-hungry local governments,” Leland said. “We’ve already seen attempts to take them in favor of a Costco in California and a condo development in New Jersey.”
It’s one thing to seize property for a genuine public need, quite another to do it in order to benefit a private entity. Or so it seems to me. Especially in these cases where towns want to create upscale shopping districts by displacing primarily lower-income homeowners and small business owners. What happened to “A man’s home is his castle”?
P.S. Note this quote from Justice O’Connor‘s dissent (no fire-breathing right-winger, she):
Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner. … Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall or any farm with a factory.
and
Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.
Rumors are making the rounds that Justice O’Connor, rather than Rehnquist may be the next Supreme Court justice to step down and that President Bush likes the idea of a “Gonzales Court.”
I’d say Ross Douthat gets it about right:
Alberto Gonzales is, I have no doubt, an intelligent man. His resume certainly makes him more qualified for the Supreme Court than, say, Sandra Day O’Connor or Clarence Thomas prior to their confirmation hearings. But he’s also a Bush family retainer, whose record while working for the Governor-turned-President – whether in his Texas “clemency memos”, or the so-called “torture memo” – suggests a man whose primary career ambition has been to help Bush sleep a little better at night. (And I say this as someone who’s of several minds about both the death penalty and harsh interrogation techniques.)
More importantly – and our more socially liberal readership will have to pardon me while I breathe fire for a minute – there seems to be no chance – zero, zilch, nada – that a Justice Gonzales would be a reliable conservative vote on the bench . . . and no chance, more specifically, that he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Which means that if he’s nominated to replace someone like O’Connor, social conservatives should dig up their Thomas Frank and think long and hard about the terms of their support for the institutional Republican Party.
Here’s a sober and thorough attempt to look at the “war on terror” through the prism of just war theory (via Ut Unum Sint). The author also discusses Jody Bottum’s “New Fusionism” which I wrote about here.
The Discovery Institute has an online book on “C.S. Lewis and Public Life” that I came across the other day. In particular this chapter where Gilbert Meilaender discusses Lewis’ views on the role of government.
Lewis, Meilaender points out, saw “omnicompetent government” as inherently antithetical to Christianity:
Christianity, with its claims in one way personal and in another way ecumenical and both ways antithetical to omnicompetent government, must always in fact . . .be treated as an enemy. Like learning, like the family, like any ancient and liberal profession, like the common law, it gives the individual a standing ground against the state. (from “On the Transmission of Christianity” in God in the Dock)
Meilaender argues that Lewis had an “Augustinian” view of politics in that he distinguished sharply between virtue and justice. The task of the state is to maintain justice, but it’s too blunt an instrument to inculcate virtue.
To ask of sinful human history more than it can give is often the quickest way to achieve less good than is possible. We can make comparative judgments of better or worse, just as Augustine admired the ancient Romans more than those of his own day, but we cannot transform our communities into the City of God. An obvious conclusion follows, and Lewis states it clearly: “The practical problem of Christian politics is not that of drawing up schemes for a Christian society, but that of living as innocently as we can with unbelieving fellow-subjects under unbelieving rulers who will never be perfectly wise and good and who will sometimes be very wicked and very foolish.” Lewis does not, therefore, expect much from the political realm.
More important still, he thinks it would be a mistake for us to use its power in our efforts to achieve moral goods that go beyond that justice which government exists to provide. Whether we lack or possess political power, it will be equally true that “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” Good ethics and good politics are therefore not the same. The political realm seeks not virtue, only justice. If Lewis is hesitant to recommend the use of political power in service of morally desirable goals, that does not mean that no social transformation or improvement of our communities is possible. It means only that our efforts to promote good ethics should not make use of political power. Thus, the sharp distinction between ethics and politics becomes a distinction between the social and the political. [footnotes omitted – ed.]
This led to some positions that some of Lewis latter-day admirers might find alarming:
Lewis not only makes this distinction, he clearly seems to think that the social is in one important sense more fundamental than the political.”The law must rise to our standards when we improve and sink to them when we decay.” That position governs Lewis’ judgment, for example, about both sexual conduct and sexually explicit literature; although he believes that “masturbation, perversion [i.e. , homosexuality], fornication and adultery” are wrong, he realizes that many of his contemporaries no longer regard such conduct as morally evil. Because, in his view, laws will necessarily reflect the mores of a people, the law cannot be expected to continue to support his own moral judgments on these matters and attempts to make it do so are likely to lead only to confusion and hypocrisy. He suggests that the law might rightly still concern itself with adultery because it is an instance of injustice, when promises on which others have depended in significant ways are broken, but not because adultery is an instance of sexual immorality.The law must concern itself with injustice, not with forms of sexual wrong-doing that, however wrong, are not unjust.
It makes you wonder where, if anywhere, Lewis would feel at home on our political spectrum.
Marcus has posted a comment-box discussion between me and him on the merits of free trade vs. protectionism. As I said over there, I’m still agnostic on the matter.
One thing that confuses the issue, as I’ve mentioned before, is that “free” trade agreements are often elborate schemes of government-managed trade. For an example of the “purist” free trader argument against such agreements see here.
Marcus also directs our attention to this article by theologian John Cobb, Jr., which looks interesting.
Kim-Loi Mergenthaler (congrats on that new baby!) posts on the tension between trying to consume less and live more simply and trying to make socially conscious choices with one’s money:
If everyone were upper middle class like many of the environmentalists I’ve met, we could all drive hybrid cars, install solar panels in our homes, and buy organic, but what if we can’t afford to make those choices? I’d gladly support farmers by purchasing fair trade coffee if it weren’t so darn expensive. I wish I could justify spending $3.00/dozen for farm fresh, locally grown, organic eggs but can no longer do so when regular eggs were on sale for $.77/dozen at the supermarket last week.
She also makes some good observations about how cheap goods have broader social costs. More here.
Some comments in the post below got off on a tangent about Stanley Hauerwas and the use of Scripture in the church and it got me thinking about the meaning of the Protestant principle of “sola scriptura.” After a bit of poking around I found an article by David W. Lotz of Union Theological Seminary called “The Proclamation of the Word in Luther’s Thought.”
Here’s a relevant bit:
The Holy Scriptures are justly called Word of God, the written Word, because they have God the Holy Spirit as their ultimate author: the prophets and apostles all spoke and wrote under the inspiration of the Spirit. Yet the Scriptures are the Word of God in a seconday or derivative sense because they always point beyond themselves to Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word, who is their matchless content; to the prophetic and apostolic gospel of Christ, which is their glorious theme; and to the church’s continuous proclamation of this biblical gospel, which is their true reason for being. The Scriptures possess sole normative authority for the church’s faith and life inasmuch as they are the source and standard of its teaching and preaching. Preachers must “extract” their message from the Scriptures to insure that they are now preaching the same gospel taht the prophets and apostles once proclaimed as the foundation of the church. Their message must be tested by the Scriptures to insure that it is truly gospel and so Word of God. Thus the Bible’s authority is ultimately rooted in the authority of the gospel of Christ, namely, that original spoken Word which brought forth the Scriptures and which is now available only in the Scriptures.
For Luther, according to Lotz, the oral proclamation of the gospel is primary because it is this proclamation which effects faith and salvation. This is God’s word in a more fundamental sense than the written word because it is the very act by which God calls sinners to salvation. It was necessary, however, to have a written testimony to make sure the church was preaching the same gospel that the apostles preached. That is why the Scriptures remain the source and norm for the church’s teaching and preaching.
A Thinking Reed 