Author: Lee M.

The New Republic has a profile (free registration req’d) of Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis) that makes him look ever-more appealing (to me, anyway, though surely not to the editors of TNR).

Not only did Feingold vote against the authorization of force for the Iraq war (question to the Dems who are now complaining that they were duped: what did Feingold know that you didn’t?), and not only was he the sole senator to vote against the USA PATRIOT Act, but he has been a pretty consistent anti-interventionist, even during the Clinton presidency when many Democrats discovered their inner hawk:

Conditions in Iraq are certainly nasty. But Feingold has long harbored wariness about U.S. military action. When Republicans forced a 1995 Senate vote to cut off funding for U.S. military forces in Bosnia, for instance, he was the sole Democrat to join 21 conservatives in support of the resolution. As other Democrats waxed idealistic about human rights, Feingold fretted about Vietnam parallels and worried that “our attempting to police the world threatens our own national security.” By 1997, he was fighting to cut off funding for military operations in Bosnia and to begin an early withdrawal of U.S. forces. “What they haven’t done is define a concrete exit strategy for our American troops,” he said at the time. “This administration needs to sit down and work with Congress to map out a specific schedule for bringing our troops home, or they will be there for a very, very long time.” Likewise, Feingold cast just one of three Democratic ‘no’ votes against the 1999 Kosovo bombing campaign. “It’s a compelling notion that the American government has an obligation to stop brutality and genocide. I can’t dispute that,” he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in March of 1999. “But how can we be acting in Bosnia and Kosovo and not Rwanda, or Sudan, or East Timor, or even Tibet?” Feingold even told me that, during the 2000 presidential campaign, “I liked some of the things George W. Bush said about nation-building.”

The problem with Feingold is that he may not enough of a dogmatic liberal to win the primary (he was the sole Democrat to vote to see the Clinton impeachment trial through; he voted to confirm John Ashcroft as AG and John Roberts as chief justice; he has been a moderate on gun control) and probably not enough of a hawk to win the general election.

But if the Democrats were picking their candidate solely on the grounds of who would most appeal to me, an anti-war civil libertarian would be a pretty good place to start (they could also make him or her pro-life, but let’s not be utopian).

Speaking of William Placher, in this article from 1992 he discusses how Christians should participate in public life, both in academia and politics. He points out that Christians are in an ambiguous position in American society – on the one hand most Americans would consider themselves at least nominally Christian, but on the other hand our personal and national lives are often sharply at variance with the values of the gospel. But, in recognizing this, if we do try to promote “Christian values,” non-believers often (and not without reason) feel threatened.

Placher considers two prominent approaches to this problem. The “genericist” option emphasizes the common “religious values” supposedly shared by people of good will regardless of their confessional affiliation as providing a foundation for a kind of “civic republicanism” that can direct people to virtue and the common good. He associates this view with the proposals of Robert Bellah and his colleagues in Habits of the Heart. In Placher’s view, this position fails to reckon with the imporant differences between religious traditions and ultimately places a utilitarian value on religion – it’s valued for its usefulness in promoting social cohesion and virtue rather than for its own sake.

The “tribalist” option, associated with thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas, says that the primary job of the church is to “be the church” – i.e. to exist as a countercultural community that displays the virtues of the gospel whose effect on the surrounding society will primarily be an indirect one. Its communal life will serve as a witness to a different ordering of values than those embodied in the structures of the world.

While Placher is clearly more sympathetic to the “tribalists” he worries that they don’t give Christians guidance on how they should behave outside of their roles in the church. How should the Christian bank manager, or newspaper editor or politician behave? Should they bring their Christian convictions to bear on their “secular” callings? And how do they do that without forcing Christian values on their nonbelieving neighbors? Don’t non-Christian citizens have a right to protest the Christian senator who votes for pacifist policies or radical social policies on explicitly theological grounds?

Placher ultimately concludes that if Christians are to participate in shaping public life, they have to do so in what we might call a “self-emptying” way that follows the example of Jesus:

If we are to communicate Christian faith with passion in a way that does not become the morally inappropriate assertion of cultural dominance, then, in a culture like ours, we have to keep rejecting the advantages that Christianity’s residual cultural status could provide. We have to keep making ourselves into outsiders who could speak with a prophetic voice. I suspect this is one reason that theologians of liberation have been the most powerful recent public witnesses of Christian faith. They do, for social reasons, speak from the outside. It is from the margins, from the underside, that one can speak a prophetic Christian word that does not threaten one’s non-Christian fellow citizens.

[…]

For some, such an approach will mean participation in the political process, but always with a bit of irony, always as uncomfortable allies who ask awkward questions just at the moment of victory. For others, it will mean standing radically outside the ordinary political system, as fundamental critics of the way the United States does its public business, whether our critique is explicit or takes the implicit form of constituting communities founded on different values and different presuppositions. But none of us will make either ourselves or our neighbors very comfortable. That seems part of the job, somehow.

This reminds of something French sociologist and Protestant lay theologian Jacques Ellul says in his book Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective. He says that if Christians are going to join a movement on behalf of the oppressed, then as soon as they acheive victory they have to switch sides, since the oppressed almost invariably become oppressors as soon as they acheive power. (Think, for instance, how India, after successfully gaining independence under the leadership of Gandhi, used the power of the state to suppress internal minority independence movements.)

We’ve seen how the religious right has often been co-opted by the Republican Party into supporting policies that seem to be tangentially related, if not outright opposed, to Christian values (preemptive war, torture, Social Security privatization, etc.). And it’s not hard to see how the same thing could happen to the renascent “religious left.” Some of the rhetoric coming out of Sojourners, for instance, sounds like an appeal to a kind of generic religiously-tinged humanism (“people of faith,” “the religious community,” etc.) which could end up simply slapping a religious patina on the platform of the Democratic Party. But without a strong sense of distinctiveness will they be able to resist the blandishments of power any better than their counterparts on the right? If a liberal religious bloc materializes in 2008 and helps elect Hillary Clinton, what will they do when she orders her first bombing raid on another country?

As Placher notes, this isn’t an argument for withdrawal from the political process, but it does suggest a certain amount of detachment and skepticism, a refusal to identify too closely with any movement, and humility in trying to translate our convictions into public policy. It also means a retention of independence rooted in a community that recognizes that all earthly regimes and powers belong to this age that is passing away. Christian values are radical enough that they are unlikely to be embodied in any political party or movement. And there will always be a gap between what can be acheived politically and that community of mutual love that will arrive only when the Lord comes in glory.

Does Paul teach that homosexual intercourse is always sinful? For the reasons I have been indicating, I think that’s a question on which honest Christians can disagree. Is homosexuality one of the sins Christians should worry most about? That’s by contrast an easy question, and the answer is “no.” Scripture discusses same-sex intercourse only briefly, and in complicated contexts. However we interpret those passages, there’s something very wrong in current attitudes in many churches, where condemning homosexuality appears to be the most important of all ethical topics. Moreover (and this is how, I believe, this topic fits into a general discussion of Jesus’ ministry), Jesus clearly did not deliver his most forceful condemnations about the sins that generated the most social antagonism in his culture, as homosexuality often does in ours, but rather reserved them for the flaws in those his society viewed as most respectable. — William C. Placher

Martin Luther was born in 1483 in Eisleben in what is now eastern Germany under the reign of Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor.
Coincidentally (or not??) your humble scribe was born on the same day in 1974 in a small post-industrial town in western Pennsylvania under the reign of Gerald Ford.

This article from The American Spectator argues that, in contrast to Justice Scalia with whom he’s frequently compared, Judge Alito has a libertarian streak which could lead him to rule in ways that libertarians, and to a lesser degree liberals, would find congenial, especially on issues like minority religious rights, federalism, free speech, and immigration.

Reassuring as that may be, for my money the most serious constitutional issue we currently face is runaway executive power, and I haven’t seen much indication that Alito would seek to rein that in.

I wasn’t kidding about it being Johnny Cash month!

First, via Thunderstruck, Even in death, Man in Black looms large at USA Today.

Kim wonders how the new movie will treat Cash’s faith.

Certainly an important issue. It’s reached the highest segments of society!

In his introduction to the collection By Faith Alone: Essays on Justification in Honor of Gerhard Forde, Luther Seminary professor Marc Kolden offers his account of the Lutheran reformers’ notion of “justification by faith”:

First, for Martin Luther as well as the other reformers the whole gospel could be summed up in the phrase, “the forgiveness of sins,” because for Luther “where there is forgiveness of sins there is also life and salvation,” as he puts it in the Small Catechism (5:2). Sin (or sins) refers to everything that is wrong between people and God. Jesus bears the sins of the world and on his account God forgives our sins; they are no longer counted against us. Then all is right between God and sinners, both now and in eternity. Note that the phrase, “the forgiveness of sins,” is very inclusive, as Luther uses it, for it encompasses everything from the saving work of Christ to there being a “new creation” to the anticipation of (and participation through faith and hope in) eschatological salvation now and eventually for eternity. Also, since the wages of sin is death, forgiveness amounts to the sinful person being raised from death to life.

In order to explain all of this properly, the Apology [of the Augsburg Confession] uses the image of being pardoned. Again and again “pardon” is used to explain divine forgiveness. When a sinner is pardoned, everything changes. One who is guilty and deserves to be punished is given a pardon and is no longer considered to be guilty but instead has all the privileges and responsibilities of one who never sinned. The sinner’s role in this is passive; that is, it happens to us, God acts on us. God is the actor, the pardoner, who changes everything. Divine forgiveness, therefore, is not one step in a cooperative process of becoming righteous (or right with God); rather, forgiveness is God’s undeserved gift that makes things right.

Second, to make the case doctrinally or dogmatically within the traditional doctrinal language of justification, the concept of “imputed righteousness” is used to present the centrality of the idea of forgiveness as pardon. In order to justify us (i.e., make things right between God and us), the reformers said, God imputes to us the righteousness of Christ; that is, we are counted as being or are “reckoned” as righteous, altogether apart from our own worthiness (or lack of it). Our sins are not ascribed to us or counted against us, but instead Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us; it is counted as ours. We are declared righteous before God on account of Christ and, as this good news is proclaimed to us (and about us), we can be sure that it is trustworthy because it is God’s word of promise. God’s own trust-worthiness in Christ engenders trust in the hearer. Therefore, the reformers said, righteousness before God is through or by faith (trust) in God’s word; hence, “justification by faith.”

This is a radical departure from the medieval tradition that spoke of some sort of intrinsic or “real” righteousness that comes about in the sinful human being as a result of grace. The Reformation notion of a “forensic” (law court declaration) righteousness moved the focus away from any sort of “empirical” or “actual” righteousness in the Christian to the justifying act of God in declaring us righteous on account of Christ. Critics sometimes chided the Lutheran reformers for holding to a “fictitious” righteousness that was not “real” in the sense of bringing about an evident change within the person but was merely verbal and theoretical. The reformers replied that God’s declaration is more real than human historical “reality” because the declaration that one’s sins are forgiven is a divine promise – it is the last judgment ahead of time. God’s verdict that we are righteous because our sins are forgiven is said to be more “real” than the present “actuality” of our sins. We can trust God’s promise or verdict, in contrast to having to depend on our own successful “actualization” of righteousness with the help of divine power: our “actualization” will always leave us in doubt, no matter how many good works we perform. Hence, “justification by faith apart from works.”

It should be noted that “apart from works” is intended to modify “justification” and not “faith.” This frequently has been misunderstood by Lutherans as well as others to infer that the doctrine of justification leaves no role for works in the life of the believer. The point is that when it comes to justification before God, only the gift of faith is pertinent. But when it comes to life on God’s earth in relation to God’s creatures, good works are commanded for all people—not for righteousness before God but for the good of one’s neighbors here and now.

It seems to be mostly dissident conservatives, says Nat Hentoff (link via Conservative Green):

My respect continues to increase for the conservative defenders of our most fundamental liberties. A founder of the conservative movement, Paul Weyrich — chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation — exemplifies this force when he writes: “Because of the War on Terrorism, America may be on the verge of becoming a national security state.” Mr. Weyrich continues: “That means citizens will allow the state to do almost anything it wants so long as it justifies its actions in terms of ‘national security.’ In effect, the Constitution and the rule of law itself go out the window, along with our liberties.”

There is also Bob Barr, with whom I once joined at a conference of the American Conservative Union to criticize sections of the Patriot Act. With customary clarity, he now states: “We believe in traditional conservative values, like accountability… To date, for example, the Justice Department has failed to disclose how many U.S. citizens’ homes, businesses or records have been secretly searched under the Patriot Act provisions, such as Section 213 (‘the sneak and peek’ provision), or even how many National Security Letter searches (without any judicial supervision) have been executed.”

[…]

These James Otises of our time are in sharp contrast to such critics of the administration as bumptious show-boaters Al Franken, Michael Moore and the exclamatory, one-dimensional TV commercials of MoveOn.org. Meanwhile, the most visible leaders of the opposition Democratic Party — Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean — do not seriously and persistently address the erosion of our civil liberties with the penetrating insistence of conservative libertarians.

Also see this piece by Ivan Eland.

It’s interesting that Thanksgiving is the only secular holiday in the American calendar that has explicitly religious overtones (we might say that holidays like 4th of July and Memorial Day have implicit religious overtones, but that’s another matter). That is, Thanksgiving implies Someone to whom we give thanks, but it’s not an explicitly Christian holiday like Christmas or Easter (i.e. it isn’t part of the liturgical calendar, is not tied to any event in sacred history, is not shared by the universal church, etc.).

While the original Puritan thanksgiving feast was a religious event rooted in a very specific Christian tradition, Thanksgiving didn’t become a national holiday until 1863 (although many individual states had their own Thanksgiving holidays prior to that). In the early years of the Republic, days of thanksgiving were proclaimed in response to particular events, including military victories (by Presidents Washington and Madison).

President Lincoln’s proclamation of a national Thanksgiving holiday in 1863 was prompted by gratitude for the blessings the country enjoyed even in the midst of a brutal and bloody civil war. It’s noteworthy that Lincoln spoke of it in terms that are difficult to imagine coming from any contemporary U.S. politician:

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

Nowadays politicians trip over each other to proclaim the innate goodness and downright wonderfulness of the American people. Can you imagine any politician today encouraging us to adopt a spirit of “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience”?

Christians have good reasons to be suspicious of civil religion, but the version articulated by Lincoln is remarkably robust compared to anemic pleas for posting the Ten Commandments in a court house or ritual invocations of “God Bless America.” The God invoked by Lincoln is not the laissez-faire God of the deists, but a mysterious providence whose will can’t be straightforwardly identified with any human cause.

It would be a pretty radical thing to do for some public figure to suggest that we not only give thanks for all our blessings, but actually engage in self-examination to see where we have been “perverse and disobedient,” individually and as a nation. Not that I particularly want politicians to assume the mantle of the preacher, but it would be a refreshing change from the feel-goodism of so much civil religion that seeks to merely put a stamp of divine approval on the American Way of Life.