A Thinking Reed

Month: February 2007

  • Cluster bombs and discrimination

    Jeremy at Eating Words blogs on this Christian Science Monitor story detailing the dangers posed by unexploded cluster bombs used by the Israelis in the recent conflict in Lebanon. One of the more hideous aspects of this problem is that it’s children who are disproportionately the victims. Kids have a tendency to pick up the unexploded “bomblets” from cluster bombs not realizing what they are (see also this).

    The Just War criterion of discrimination should have something to say about the use of such weapons. It’s not sufficient that we simply try to use what weapons we have in as disciriminatory a way possilbe, avoiding civilian casualties when we can. The very existence of such weapons is called into question.

    This is in some way a smaller scale version of the question that a lot of Just War theorists faced duing the Cold War about the use of nuclear weapons. Most mainstream JW thinkers concluded that the use of nuclear weapons against enemy populations could never be licensed. Notably, respected Catholic moral theologians John Finnis, Joseph Boyle, and Germain Grisez argued that the use of nuclear weapons even if only as a deterrent, was immoral by Just War standards. The reason is that some weapons, such as nuclear ones, are inherently incapable of being used in a way that respects the principle of discrimination.

    The same could be said about cluster bombs. If the majority of their victims are non-combatants (indeed, many of them after hostilities have ceased), then I think that’s a strong prima facie case that their use is impermissible. To be committed to justice in warfare requires, among other things, that we not treat the methods used as simply given and beyond the scope of moral evaluation.

  • Smartest thing I’ve read all day

    From Brandon at Siris:

    I think blogging constantly about politics is mentally unhealthy, inevitably warps one’s priorities, and distracts from the fact that politics is merely one necessary condition of the good life, and not even the most important.

  • Augustine’s Enchiridion 13 & 14

    Augustine concludes his Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love with a discussion of Christ’s saving work, the forgiveness and new life we receive in baptism, and a brief meditation on the final judgment.

    Recall that for Augustine we are condemned on account of original sin – the guilt imputed to us because of our first parents’ sin – and actual sins we have committed (though infants are guilty only of the former). Christ, then, is the sacrifice that washes away all sins, original and actual. “Although he himself committed no sin, yet because of ‘the likeness of sinful flesh’ in which he came, he was himself called sin and was made a sacrifice for the washing away of sins.”

    Augustine goes on to describe how Christ takes away our sins in a way that to my ears sounds very Lutheran:

    The God to whom we are to be reconciled hath thus made him the sacrifice for sin by which we may be reconciled. He himself is therefore sin as we ourselves are righteousness–not our own but God’s, no in ourselves but in him. Just as he was sin–not his own but ours, rooted not in himself but in us–so he showed forth through the likeness of sinful flesh, in which he was crucified, that since sin was not in him he could then, so to say, die to sin by dying in the flesh, which was “the likeness of sin.” And since he had never lived in the old manner of sinning, he might, in his resurrection, signify the new life which is ours, which is springing to life anew from the old death in which we had been dead to sin.

    This passage hits a couple of favorite Lutheran themes such as the “happy exchange” and the notion of “alien righteousness.” Christ takes our sin and we receive his righterousness. We have no righteousness or standing before God of our own, but we have Christ. It’s very easy to see how passages like this influenced Luther.

    And we receive Christ and his righteousness by being united to his saving death in baptism:

    This is the meaning of the great sacrament of baptism, which is celebrated among us. All who attain to this grace die thereby to sin–as he himself is said to have died to sin because he died in the flesh, that is, “in the likeness of sin”–and they are thereby alive by being reborn in the baptismal font, just as he rose again from the sepulcher. This is the case no matter what the age of the body.

    In baptism we die to all our sins – original and actual – to all the sins which we have already committed by thought, word, and deed. This is true as much for the lifelong sinner as for the newborn infant. Since Christ died to sin once and for all, defeating the power of sin, we, in being joined to his death by the waters of baptism die to sin as well.

    The death of Christ crucified is nothing other than the likeness of the forgiveness of sins–so that in the very same sense in which the death is real, so also is the forgiveness of our sins real, and in the same sense in which his resurrection is real, so also in us is there authentic justification.

    Such a high view of justification by grace, though, always seems to raise the dread specter of antinomianism. If we’re forgiven and justified because of Christ’s righteousness and saving death, then why not go on sinning? Laissez les bons temps rouler!

    Of course we all know that Augustine, following Paul, when asked if we should sin more that grace may abound is going to respond: by no means! Christ, in his death, “died to sin” in the sense that he defeated its power. How much more, then, should we who are baptized into his death also “die to sin”? As the Apostle says “If we have died to sin, how, then, shall we go on living in it?”

    Part of the idea here seems to be that because we are so closely united to Jesus in his life-giving passion and resurrection, it would be a kind of performative contradiction to go on sinning. It makes no sense for me to say that with Christ I have died to sin but can nevertheless go on sinning. If I say that it shows that I either don’t really believe it or don’t understand it.

    Augustine points out that the entire sweep of Christ’s life serves as a model for the Christian life:

    Whatever was done, therefore, in the crucifixion of Christ, his burial, his resurrection on the third day, his ascension into heaven, his being seated at the Father’s right hand–all these things were done thus, that they might not only signify their mystical meanings but also serve as a model for the Christian life which we lead here on the earth.

    It’s interesting here that Augustine doesn’t advert to the teachings of Jesus as providing the template for the Christian life, but the whole shape of his life, especially his passion and resurrection. We are crucified with Christ, buried with Christ, and raised to new life with Christ. Quoting Paul again: “But if you have risen again with Christ, seek the things which are above, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For your are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”

    There is, then, a kind of “because…therefore” structure to Christian ethical imperatives. Because we have died and been buried with Christ, we therefore are dead to sin. Because we have been raised with him, we therefore have new life. This is in contrast to a “if…then” form such as “If you want to be accepted by God, then you must do x, y, or z.” The Christian life grows out of the experience of being grasped by God’s grace (preeminently in the sacrament of baptism).

    Augustine concludes with a brief discussion of the Last Judgment. He acknowledges that Christians believe that Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead, but he points out that “the living and the dead” can be understood in two different senses. It could mean, literally, that Christ will judge those who are alive here on earth and those who have already died at the end of the age. But it could also refer to the “living” as those who are righteous, or destined for God’s kingdom, and the “dead” as the unrighteous. The judgment of God would then reveal one’s status as belonging to one of these two groups (elsewhere Augustine talks in more depth how here below we can’t determine empirically who belongs to the elect and who to the reprobate). Of course, these two notions aren’t mutually exclusive; God may judge the living and the dead precisely by means of establishing who the righteous and the unrighteous are.

  • Better copyediting needed

    Oxford University Press is publishing a pocket version of Phyllis Tickle’s popular Divine Hours series (an adaptation of the Daily Office/Liturgy of the Hours), which sounds like a worthwhile project.

    I couldn’t help, though, but snicker at this line on the book’s website page: “Tickle draws her texts primarily from the Book of Common Prayer and the writings of the Church Fathers, and includes memorable devotional and meditative poems by Cleland McAfee, Charles Wesley, Phos Hilaron, and others.”

    Ah yes, Phos Hilaron, one of the great hymnodists of the church…

    (Cheap shot, I know)

  • As the Anglican Communion turns (and turns, and turns…)

    I’m sure others better informed than I am will have plenty to say about this NT Wright interview, but I have a couple of questions for Anglican/Episcopalian readers: Has the Episcopal Church violated its own canon laws in proceeding with the election of Gene Robinson? And in what sense does the structure of the Anglican Communion forbid a national church from proceeding with something like this? My impression was that the various provinces were more or less autonomous. But +Wright’s comments make this all sound like a foregone conclusion.

    Also, I can’t help but bristle a bit at +Wright’s tone here: it brings out my patriotism. We’re not gonna let some snooty Brits tell us what to do! Spirit of ’76, baby! Just sayin’. Actually, I’m sort of in an ambiguous position here: I’m a non-Episcopalian attending an Episcopal parish that has gone out of its way not to align itself formally with either “side” in the current unpleasantness. So, if the “schismatics” are to be “pruned” I really have no idea which branch I’d be sitting on.

  • Augustine’s Enchiridion 12: The Incarnation and the Holy Spirit

    In chapter 12 Augustine considers the role of the Holy Spirit in the Incarnation. Though we say that Christ was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, we don’t call him the son of the Spirit. Should we say that his divine nature is the Son of the Father but that his human nature was the Son of the Spirit? No, because that would divide his person.

    He goes on to discuss the various senses in which we might say something is born of something else and the different respects in which someone might be called a son (by birth, by adoption). His point is that not everything which is born of something else is called that thing’s son, nor are all sons sons by birth. One wonders whether part of Augustine’s intent here is to counteract attempts to portray Christianity as another pagan myth where the god impregnates a human woman with his offspring.

    So, we don’t want to call Jesus the Son of the Spirit, and yet the Spirit plays a special role in his conception and birth. Augustine’s explanation is to connect this to grace:

    Wherefore, since a thing may be “born” of something else, yet not in the fashion of a “son,” and conversely, since not everyone who is called son is born of him whose son he is called–this is the very mode in which Christ was “born” of the Holy Spirit (yet not as a son), and of the Virgin Mary as a son–this suggests to us the grace of God by which a certain human person, no merit whatever preceding, at the very outset of his existence, was joined to the Word of God in such a unity of person that the selfsame one who is Son of Man should be Son of God, and the one who is Son of God should be Son of Man. Thus, in his assumption of human nature, grace came to be natural to that nature, allowing no power to sin. This is why grace is signified by the Holy Spirit, because he himself is so perfectly God that he is also called God’s Gift. Still, to speak adequately of this–even if one could–would call for a very long discussion.

    Being born of the Holy Spirit indicates, then, that the unity effected between the human and divine natures is from first to last an act of God’s grace. This forecloses both adoptionism and safeguards the full humanity and full divinity of Jesus. Speaking of him as the Son of the Holy Spirit and Mary might indicate some kind of human-divine hybrid. Instead, the orthodox teaching is the human nature was fully united to the divine life, by grace alone, without ceasing to be human.

  • Christian peace bloggers

    I’ve joined a “Christian Peace Bloggers” webring started by Michael Westmoreland-White of the Levellers blog. I think I properly fit into the catergory of “someone who believes war is a very last resort” and “that Christians are commanded to be working for peace so that such a resort doesn’t come.” In other words, I’m not a pacifist, but I definitely hold to a strict version of just war theory and think that war should emphatically not be regarded as a routine policy tool.

    The idea behind the blog ring is for members to post something on war & peace about once a week, so hopefully some useful reflections will come out of that commitment.

  • Faith seeking understanding

    Deconstructionist theologian Don Cupitt urges the church to trade in its traditional reliance on western metaphysics, the view that “behind the flux of experience there had to be something Real, one, intelligible to us, and perfect” with a radical rethinking of Christian faith based on a kind of post-Derridean anti-realism:

    We used to assume that we were presented with a ready-made world, with a built-in order that we were predesigned to be able to grasp. But since Kant, and especially through the philosophies of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, the old western metaphysics has now been radically destabilised, deconstructed. The old west has gone.

    It’s not at all clear what this post-metaphysical Christianity would look like but Cupitt alludes to a faith that “cannot now be more than a practical orientation of our attention, our affections, our life towards One who is hoped for and believed in, but is not actually known.”

    I have three questions for Cupitt here. First, is he essentially attacking a straw man? The classical western theological tradition has never simply held to “a belief in one ready-made truth of things out there, waiting to be copied into our language.” There has always been a kind of dialectic between “negative” and “positive” theology and an awareness of the limits of our thinking to grasp the divine, balanced with the firm conviction that knowledge of God is possible.

    Second, he assumes the cogency of Derridean deconstruction with a kind of “everybody knows this” tone without anything by way of argument or evidence. What reason do we have to accept this? Not only is such a move far from universally accepted among theologians and philosophers (to put it mildly), it’s not clear what a cogent argument for anti-realism would even look like since, according to anti-realism, there’s no one way the world is, including, presumably, the way of being such that there’s no one way it is! (Or, more modestly, we know that the world is such that it’s impossible to know what the world is like.)

    Finally, what would be the point of a Christianity stripped of any reference to an extra-mental reality? And how would we go about practically orienting our lives toward a god about whom we know nothing? For all we know, selfishness and cruelty might be just as fitting a response as benevolence to a reality that is utterly denuded of knowable qualities.

    This isn’t to say that Cupitt hasn’t pointed out a real problem, namely the question of religious authority in a pluralistic “post-modern” world. But the proposed cure here seems worse than the disease.

    Of course, if Cupitt is simply exhorting us to a kind of epistemic humility (“One who is hoped for and believed in, but is not actually known”) then I don’t find that particularly objectionable. But, again, I think those resources are already there in the tradition. Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding” implies that we don’t know but believe, and that belief can lead to greater understanding (though only in the next life will faith become sight). But neither does this preclude having true beliefs about God or making a fitting response to the divine reality. There is a wide middle ground between Cartesian certainty and postmodern nihilism.

    (Link via Thinking Anglicans.)

  • War, intervention, and risk

    Okay, here’s something that I’ve been mulling over for a while now. I’m not sure if this is right, but I thought I’d throw it out there. The question is: when are we justified in imposing the risk of death on others without their consent?

    One occassionally runs into arguments about whether “the Iraqis” are “better off” now than before the war. Usually this is in the context of an attempt to justify the war retrospectively. This strikes me as an essentially unanswerable question, though. It seems clear that some Iraqis are better off and others are worse off. Obviously the dead who would otherwise have lived are worse off, but so also, arguably are those who’ve been injured, lost family members, now live in fear of sectarian enemies, etc. It’s not clear that it would be possible, even in principle, to tally up all Iraqis’ sense of whether by their own lights they’re better or worse off now than under Saddam Hussein’s regime in order to arrive at a sense of whether the Iraqis as a whole are better or worse off. How would you even go about weighing the goods and evils that all the Iraqi people have individually experienced. (How many dead relatives is a sense of political freedom worth? Does the question even make sense? The problem of interpersonal comparisons of utility also seems relevant here.)

    But this seems to me to have prospective as well as retrospective importance. Suppose that you’re living under a brutal dictatorial regime. Would you regard the deaths of your family as an acceptable trade-off for the removal of that regime? Opinions would perhaps differ, but that’s the point: how would you weign one person’s choice against another’s in order to arrive at the correct answer? It’s at the very least not surprising that someone who’s lost his entire family might be less than grateful about his “liberation.”

    This seems to imply that there’s something questionable about an outsider making these kinds of choices for you. By what right would a prospective intervener decide for you whether the loss of your family was an acceptable risk to run for, say, the prospect of political freedom? How can they make the kinds of evaluations that would be necessary to determine what risks, all things considered, were allowable? The imposition of unchosen risks seems, other things being equal, to be wrong. It just doesn’t seem to be my place to put your family at mortal risk without their (or your) consent even if it’s “for their own good.”

    The question then becomes how one nation justifies intervening militarily in another, allegedly on behalf of the subject population, without their explicit consent to the risks involved. Given the realities of modern war it’s a virtual certainty that innocents will be killed in the course of the intervention, and yet no one asked them if they were willing to undertake those risks for the sake of improving their situation relative to the status quo.

    Note that the issue here isn’t whether we actually have reason to believe that most people will in fact be better off after a proposed war. (Though given the limitations of our knowledge and recent history such considerations certainly ought to weigh heavily.) The issue is whether we have the right to impose mortal risks on those who haven’t given their informed consent. It seems at least prima facie that we don’t have that right. What might give us the right is if someone was already in mortal danger and the only way to save them was to undertake a mortally risky course of action and securing their consent was, for all practical purposes, impossible. But in the case of war, at least some of those upon whom we impose the risk of death wouldn’t have died otherwise, so it’s far from clear that the burden is met.

    Obviously this only applies in cases of so-called humanitarian intervention. In a legitimate case of self-defense it might well be justifiable to impose the risk of death on innocents if that is the only way to forestall one’s own death. One would be in a sort of lifeboat or state of nature situation (at least in terms of what we might call “natural” justice; I’m leaving aside whether a “higher” morality might call for self-sacrifice here). Of course, in modern war, “self-defense” often takes on an inflated meaning that includes maintaining our “perimeter of defense” or “our way of life,” cases where imposing the risk of death on innocents seems much harder to justify.

    Really all this is a long-winded way of making the point that in war one is proposing to kill (and injure and maim) other human beings. Any morality worth its salt would have a strong presumption against that. To impose the risk of death on someone, whether for their own good or for one’s own, requires that the good in question be sufficiently weighty that it would seem to rule out most wars. The exceptions would seem to be wars in which either oneself or the proposed beneficiaries were as likely (or more likely) to meet death if there was no intervention.

  • War and peace: some notes and links

    I haven’t blogged directly on politics much over here, but this article by Andrew Bacevich in The American Conservative caught my eye. Bacevich takes on both the neoconservative proponents of the “surge” as well as the establishmentarian “wise men” of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group:

    Almost without fail, media references to the Baker-Hamilton commission emphasize its bipartisan composition as if that alone were enough to win a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Yet to imagine that bipartisanship signifies wisdom or reflects a concern for the common good is to misunderstand the reality of present-day politics. The true purpose of bipartisanship is to protect the interests of the Washington Party, the conglomeration of politicians, hustlers, and bureaucrats who benefit from the concentration of wealth and power in the federal city. A “bipartisan” solution to any problem is one that produces marginal change while preserving or restoring the underlying status quo.

    The status quo, shared by both groups, who pretty much dominate foreign policy discussions in the US is the assumption that America must continue to manage events in the Middle East:

    When it comes to U.S. policy in the Middle East, neither the cavalier urgings of Frederick Kagan nor the confident reassurances of James Baker will provide the basis for defining a “way forward.” Despite superficial differences, their prescriptions point in the same direction: they will simply exacerbate our predicament. Further militarizing U.S. policy, always the first choice of neoconservatives, will only compound our dilemma; yet so too will deference to self-appointed Wise Men, who created that dilemma in the first place.

    Neoconservatives like Kagan believe that the United States is called upon to remake the Middle East, bringing the light of freedom to a dark quarter of the world. Pseudo-realists like Baker believe that the United States can manipulate events in the Middle East, persuading others to do our bidding. Both views, rooted in the conviction that Providence has endowed America with a unique capacity to manage history, are pernicious.

    And, as paleocon uber-blogger Daniel Larison points out, even Chuck Hagel, who’s been heralded by pundits left and right as a potential GOP “peace candidate” doesn’t repudiate interventionism as such. He’s more of an old-fashioned realist/internationalist (which, admittedly, would be preferable to what we’ve currently got). Plus, while I don’t share the paleocon antipathy to immigration, I agree that Hagel’s position there could hurt him with grass roots GOP voters, even ones disaffected with the Bush administration. He also isn’t much of a red-meat culture warrior, despite his fairly orthodox conservatism, and that would no doubt hurt him with the Religious Right types.

    It remains to be seen what kinds of positions the (seemingly inumerable) Democratic candidates will take on the war issue. Michael Westmoreland-White of the Anabaptist blog Levellers notes a spectrum of proposals ranging from “capping” the number of troops in Iraq to withdrawal at various rates. But no one except the real fringe candidates (Kucinich on the left, Paul on the right) is talking about any kind of large-scale paradigm shift in US foreign policy. Most of the Democratic criticisms at this point simply hark back to the good ol’ days of multilateral hegemony and UN-approved bombings.

    UPDATE: Ross Douthat at The American Scene makes a similar point, quoting David Brooks to the effect that the DC policy elite remains firmly entrenched in an interventionist outlook (he also cites this crazed Max Boot column to the same effect). However, Douthat also suggests that younger pundits and policy wonk-types (the elite of tomorrow) may be less sympathetic to bipartisan interventionism:

    The Iraq War has, I think, made questioning the neoconservative/neoliberal consensus far more common among young, wet-behind-the-ears wannabe pundits than anyone would have expected four years ago. Maybe this is a temporary thing, maybe it’s just the narrow circles I move in. But when I look around the world of D.C. journalism, and the wider blogosphere, at the under-30 writers I respect, there seems to be a lot more sympathy for either libertarianism or paleoconservatism (or both together) among young conservatives, and McGovernish sentiments among young liberals, than there is for foreign-policy centrism of the kind that everyone from Boot to Ignatius subscribes to.

    You’d like to think so. But then maybe our up-and-coming elites will “mautre” in office and “grow in stature” ultimately adopting the worldview of the elders. I mean, that’s what the New Left essentially did when it finally acheived instutional power isn’t it? The 60s radicals of yesteryear became, well … the Clintons.