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Camassia continues to blog her way through John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus.

One of the great virtues of Yoder’s work, in my view, is to situate the debate between pacifism and just-war as an attempt to answer to the question: How do we most faithfully follow Jesus?

Yoder’s project can be viewed as simply an attempt to draw out the full implications of orthodox Christology. If Jesus is both true God and true man, then doesn’t it follow that Jesus’ humanity is normative for us, at least in certain important respects?

Jesus’ command to love our neighbors, and the kind of love he himself exhibits become the standards for those of us who would follow him. However, the debate is over how to put this love into concrete action.

For just-war proponents, a just war is a way of defending the innocent from aggression, and thus loving our neighbor. It’s an act of charity. This distinguishes just-war theory from “realism” and other assorted “lesser-evilisms.” A Christian cannot do evil that good may come, but for just-war proponents, going to war under the right circumstances is not a case of choosing the “lesser evil” but a positively virtuous action.

Just-war proponents like Paul Ramsey argue that neighbor-love can require the use of force to protect the innocent and punish aggression. They don’t see this as qualifying or watering down the ethic of Jesus, but of translating it to the sphere of politics, which intrinsically involves the use of force.

On the other hand, the pacifist will argue that Jesus didn’t use violence to defend himself and specifically ordered his disciples not to use violence to defend him either. For the Christian pacifist nonviolence is about faithfulness first and effectiveness only secondly.

The pacifist is wary of any attempt to qualify the ethic of Jesus in order to be more “realistic,” where “realism” is defined as meeting the standards of the world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer discusses this at great length in The Cost of Discipleship. Specifically with respect to non-violence, Bonhoeffer critiques the Reformation notion that a Christian can participate in the use of force as long as he’s doing so in the course of carrying out the duties of his office or station in life.

In other words, according to the Reformers, as a private individual, the Christian must turn the other cheek, resist not evil, etc. But if he also happens to be a government official, a hangman, a soldier, etc. he can deploy violence as part of his official duties:

[The Reformers] distinguished between personal sufferings and those incurred by Christians in the performance of duty as bearers of an office ordained by God, maintaining that the precept of non-violence applies to the first but not to the second. In the second case we are not only freed from the obligation to eschew violence, but if we want to act in a genuine spirit of love we must do the very opposite, and meet force with force in order to check the assault of evil. It was along these lines that the Reformers justified war and other legal sanctions against evil.

The Reformers took this even further by arguing that one might be required to resist attacks on one’s person because of one’s duties as, e.g. a spouse or parent, not just as a government official. If I am responsible for providing for my family, I am obliged to resist aggression against my person, even if, considering only my personal safety I would ideally not resist.

The problem with this, according to Bonhoeffer, is that we are never acting merely as a private individual. We all have multiple roles as family members, citizens, workers, etc., so there would always be a plausible reason to use violence if the situation seemed to call for it. The Reformers’ teaching ends up seriously qualifying the radical ethic of Jesus. Bonhoeffer points out that the disciples didn’t divide their lives into their “official” capacities and their capacities as followers of Jesus:

But this distinction between person and office is wholly alien to the teaching of Jesus. He says nothing about that. He addresses his disciples as men who have left all to follow him, and the precept of non-violence applies equally to private life and official duty. He is the Lord of all life, and demands undivided allegiance.

It’s difficult to judge who has the better argument. The just-war theorist will always accuse the pacifist of leaving the innocent and defenseless to the mercy of aggressors and allowing evil to triumph. Is this a proper way to display neighbor-love? The pacifist’s reply will be that faithfulness to Jesus requires following his precept and example and trusting in God to ensure the ultimate victory of his justice. The pacifist might also point out that few, if any, wars have actually been fought within the bounds of just-war theory, and that in practice it has served as rhetorical cover for governments at war more often than it has provided a check on their behavior.

This debate is directly implicated in the realist vs. sectarian debate I’ve been going on about ad nauseum. Pacifists are more likely to reject the nation-state as an object of Christian loyalty (even penultimate loyalty) and are less likely to see it as an instrument for justice. Some, like Jacques Ellul, reject the state altogether. They think the efforts of Christians are better directed to communities of discipleship that exist on the margins of society rather than in the corridors of power.

It’s often asked of the sectarians: Must we take the first century position of the church as normative for all other generations? Just because the church existed at the margins of society in the first century, does that mean it shouldn’t seek to infiltrate the institutions of society such as the government? Might there not be a providential aspect to what sectarians deride as “Constantiniansm”? The answers to all these questions, I think, will depend greatly on how we answer the question of violence vs. non-violence.

Here’s Rodney Clapp on the Pledge of Allegiance:

The Supreme Court’s June ruling on whether “under God” should be part of the Pledge of Allegiance passed with relatively little notice, since the case was rejected on procedural grounds. For those who paid attention to the arguments, however, it conclusively exposed the incompatibility of American civil religion with any kind of robust Christianity. If one considers Elk Grove Unified School v. Newdow theologically, with the conviction that God ultimately refers to the Creator-Redeemer met in Israel and Jesus Christ, then the “God” Americans are to pledge their nation to be “under” is at worst an idol and at best the true God’s name taken in vain.

Clapp goes on to discuss the Justices’ various arguments for why “under God” should be retained, ranging from Chief Justice Rhenquist’s assertion that invoking the name of God is not a “religious exercise” but a “commendable patriotic exercise,” or a simple recognition of our nation’s history, to Justice O’Connor’s adversion to a “ceremonial deism” that is in no way intended to provoke religious sentiments such as awe or penitence.

In other words, the “god” of the Pledge is – according to its defenders – utterly devoid of theological content.

Clapp concludes:

Short of hanging on to the muddy, vacillating devices of ceremonial deism, Christians appear to face one of two choices. One is the open, deliberate restoration of Christian theocracy. Then the referent of “God” in the pledge would be clear and honest. Some evangelicals and conservative Catholics lean in this direction, but gingerly and equivocatingly, if not disingenuously, because of the sheer infeasibility of theocracy in a pluralistic America. With most contemporary Christians, I would argue that theocracy is not only politically dangerous but theologically disastrous.

We are on much more solid theological ground if we turn to the other choice. That choice is to recognize what the Bible and such exemplars of the Christian tradition as Augustine have taught us: to see and trust that the church and not any nation-state is preeminently the social agent through which God works God’s will in history. The church catholic stretches throughout the world and is its own “public,” crossing the comparatively sectarian boundaries of nation-states. Knowing themselves first of all as “citizens with the saints,” Christians may then, like the Babylon-dwelling Israelites counseled by Jeremiah, work and pray for the welfare of the cities (and nations) in which they now dwell, but never confuse those cities with the kingdom for which the church stands.

Apologies for the dearth of posts – I’ve been away on business since last Friday and am now spending Thanksgiving with my family in western Pennsylvania.

Soon: more on sectarians and maybe something on Paul Griffiths’ article “Orwell for Christians,” which I think makes some important points.

Happy Turkey Day to all!

Okay, this will probably be the last of these mammoth posts for a while.

This month’s First Things arrived in the mail yesterday and one of the highlights is an essay (not online yet) by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, the editor-in-chief of FT in which he offers a spirited defense of his particular brand of political theology. The essay is Fr. Neuhaus’ response to an essay by Daniel M. Bell Jr. called “State and Civil Society.” Bell, a professor at Lutheran Theology Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, offers a typology of Christian political theology. The two main camps Bell identifies are the “dominant” and “emergent” schools. Based on Neuhaus’ account (I haven’t read Bell’s essay) this typology matches pretty closely the realist/sectarian dichotomy I’ve been discussing.

According to Bell (according to Neuhaus) the dominant school of political theology accepts the structures of modern society as basically given. The role of the church, on this view, is to be the bearer or guardian of “values” that can be brought to bear on the state and other institutions of society. This view accepts the primacy of “statecraft” – i.e. that the state is or should be the primary instrument by which social change is brought about. This school has a “left” and “right” wing; the former includes liberation theologians like Gutierrez, and progressives like Jurgen Moltmann, while the latter Bell identifies with Neuhaus and company.

This school, Bell says, has capitulated to the “political captivity” of the Church. Neuhaus quotes Bell:

…Whether it is Neuhaus’ eschatological prohibition of sanctifying any political order, Gutierrez’s condemnation of “politico-religious messianism,” or Metz’s and Moltmann’s abhorrence of “political religion,” the “general” or “indirect” role accorded the Church as a guardian of values reduces Christian political engagement to the options offered by the world, more specifically, by the regnant liberal order. This is to say, the dominant tradition conceives of Christian political engagement on the world’s terms…whether in its conservative or progressive modes.

The “emergent” tradition, by contrast, includes people like Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank (British theologian and architect of the “radical orthodoxy” school), and Oliver O’Donovan. These thinkers, according to Bell, identify the Church as itself an alternative political order, a counter-polis or “contrast community.”

Here’s Neuhas:

The aim of the emergent tradition, says Bell, “is not simply the replacement of a sovereign state with a hegemonic Church, but a political rendering of the claim that Christ is Lord.” To say that the Church is the exemplary form of human community “is first and foremost a claim that the meaning of all politics and every community flows from participation in Christ.” Rejecting the statecraft of the dominant tradition, the emergents favor “a distinctly theological politics founded on the conviction that God is active in history now bringing about a new age, the contours of which are discernible not in Western liberalism, democratic socialism, or the Pax Americana but in Christ, in the work of Christ’s Spirit as it gathers in Christ’s body, the Church.” All the issues of ecclesiology, eschatology, and soteriology, writes Bell, can be summed up in one question: “What is the proper political correlate of the Christian mythos? Leviathan or the Body of Christ?”

For the emergent school, the Church is the true community, while the state is a kind of freakish parody of genuine community because, to the extent that it brings about peace and unity, it does so through coercion and violence. For Christians at least, it seems that the Church supplants the earthly political order, laying claim to their allegiance and ordering their economic, cultural and religious life.

Neuhaus then turns to the three thinkers identified by Bell as champions of the emergent view. He chides Hauerwas for emphasizing the importance of the Church as a radical, countercultural community while remaining a member of the decidedly non-radical United Methodist Church (no offense, Jennifer!):

[Hauerwas’] insistence upon the primacy of the community of the Church apparently does not require, for him or for others, actual membership in an ecclesial community that is in political tension or conflict with the culture of liberalism. Indeed, his countercultural posture is warmly celebrated by the culture he would presumably counter.

To his credit, Hauerwas has sometimes acknowledged a certain “ambiguity” in his ecclesial placement. He speaks admiringly of the Mennonite tradition of his mentor John Howard Yoder, and also of certain communities of radical discipleship in Catholicism, but he remains personally associated with the liberal United Methodist Church while pursuing his eccentric and highly effective vocation as a theological freelancer within his primary community of engagement, the liberal academy. […] he insists upon a Christianly-mandated position of absolute pacifism while, at the same time, claiming a role as moral instructor in the exercise of what Bell calls “statecraft” when it comes to how the state should employ force.

The last bit seems a bit unfair. I see no reason, in principle, why a pacifist couldn’t recognize that the state will continue to use violence but seek, nevertheless, to limit that violence. I don’t see that political quietism is mandated for pacifists (more on this later).

The point about the Church, however, seems to me to have a bit more heft. When representatives of the “emergent” tradition talk about the Church, I often wonder if they intend the description they offer as an empirical or a normative one. If the former, then I have to ask: where are these churches? There may be countercultural communities of radical discipleship, but Neuhas is surely right to point out that they are not usually to be found among the UMC (or the ELCA, to be fair!). At the very least we don’t have churches that encompass every aspect of their members’ lives.

If the description is a normative one, then I think the question is whether the sectarians (emergents) are asking the Church to be something it isn’t intended to be. Is the Church really supposed to be a couter-polity, a new political order unto itself? Or is expecting the Church to replace the earthly political order a kind of category mistake? This is ultimately a theological question to which Neuhaus returns later.

Neuhaus has far less patience with John Milbank whom he basically dismisses as peddling knee-jerk leftism gussied up with a lot of postmodern theoretical gymnastics and neologisms. What I’ve tried to read of Milbank I’ve found nearly impenetrable, but that could be because I’m not well schooled in the postmodern idiom he and his followers tend to work in. A lot of people think he’s the cat’s pajamas. Who knows?

Neuhaus is much more sympathetic to Oliver O’Donovan’s project and here we get a clearer view of Neuhaus’ own position. O’Donovan advocates a kind of “chastened liberalism,” that is, the state that recognizes the Church as the bearer of salvation and ultimate meaning will correspondingly be more humble in its claims. As Neuhaus puts it:

While this is not the place to summarize O’Donovan’s project, the mandate of this journal and my own work are in strong sympathy with O’Donovan’s invitation to rethink Augustine’s two cities, based on two loves, for our time. The promise to Israel and the coming of the Kingdom in Jesus Christ are emphatically public claims, and the efforts of political modernity to relegate that claim to the sphere of the private and “religious” must be sharply challenged. Christian fidelity relentlessly contends against what has been called the naked public square. To this end, says O’Donovan, the state must be kept “humble” and “minimally coercive,” as befits the “desacralization of politics.” These and other arguments pressed by O’Donovan are consonant with the tradition of political liberalism that carefully distinguishes between state and society, with both under the lordship of Christ.

I haven’t read O’Donovan’s Desire of the Nations, but for a fuller synopsis of his project, see this review essay by Gilbert Meilaender.

On this understanding, which we could call “Augustinian Liberalism,” the state has a role to play, but it is a role significantly diminished because of the coming of Christ. No longer can or should people find their ultimate meaning or identity in politics. The state serves rather to create a space within which the Church can go about proclaiming the Good News. The Church doesn’t replace the existing political order, but it reorients it to the more humble goals of maintaining an earthly peace.

Here’s Neuhaus again:

The final question, writes Bell, is: “What is the proper political correlate of the Christian mythos? Leviathan or the Body of Christ?” That is, I suggest, an unfortunate muddling of the matter. As St. Augusine understood, the Church is not a political correlate of the gospel but a distinct society that is integral to the gospel. The political correlate is the politics by which the Church is confronted in the course of her sojourn through history.

On this understanding, the Church and the state do not have competing tasks (when properly understood), but complementary ones. Here’s Meilaender discussing O’Donovan’s position:

The core of the idea of Christendom is that each of the two authorities—which we can here call simply the Church and the state—is to render service to the other “predicated on the difference and the balance of their roles.” The state serves the Church by making possible its mission; the Church serves the state by instructing it in what it means to be a “humble state.” The esse of political authority still characterizes the humble state; it exercises power and sustains the identity of a community. But now that the new age has dawned in Christ, we can be clearer about the bene esse—the proper action—of political authority. Now the exercise of power and the preservation of communal identity give way somewhat to the execution of right and justice. Power is now exercised under law, never as if it were the ultimate source of justice and right. “The responsible state is therefore minimally coercive and minimally representative. . . . This is not a restraint imposed by the nature of political authority as such, which can thrive on excesses of traditional legitimation and on splendid displays of force; it is imposed by the limits conceded to secular authority by Christ’s Kingdom.”

The Church’s primary task is to spread the Word of God, “announce the rule of God in Christ” and call the nations to repentance and obedience. But this task in itself displaces any ultimate authority the state may lay claim to. Under “Christendom” the state recognizes this and confines itself to the maintenance of social order.

Meilaender again:

If the Church serves the state by helping it to be the humble state, it in turn serves the Church by creating space in which the latter’s mission may be carried out. In part it accomplishes this simply by being the responsible state that understands the limits to which the dawning of God’s kingdom now makes it subject.

Of course, someone like Hauerwas would argue that such a “chastened” liberalism is impossible. Liberalism will always subvert communities committed to an “illiberal” notion of the good, leaving atomized individuals in its wake. Neuhaus, on the other hand, would say that our current society is a diseased form of liberalism, and not the inevitable outcome of a liberal order.

Again, I have to ask if the differences between these positions are as stark as they appear. As far as I can tell, there are significant similarities between the “Augustinian” position sketched by Neuhaus and the “sectarianism” of (say) John Howard Yoder. (In fact, see here for a discussion of Yoder’s Augustinianism.)

Here are a few of the more important similarities as I see it:

1) The Church is a new society that trains its members in the virtues appropriate to the Kingdom of God. Being a Christian means learning how to rightly order our loves, as Augustine saw. The Church becomes the new bearer of our identity and lays claim to our primary allegiance.

2) The state continues to be necessary. For Yoder the state still fills the role of maintaining order until the Lord returns. He explicitly disavows the idea of anarchism or that the Church could replace the functions of the state. Indeed, Yoder even goes so far as to say that the state exists for the sake of the Church – i.e. to makes its mission possible. Thus I think it’s fair to say that, for Yoder, the Church constitutes a new community but it doesn’t constitute a self-sufficient political order. (Perhaps Yoder parts company here with Hauerwas and/or Milbank?)

3) The state is under the lordship of Christ. The powers have been defeated, and, correspondingly, have been chastened by Jesus’ victory. No longer should people locate their identity or transcendent purpose in the politics of the earthly city. And the state can no longer claim the unqualified loyalty of its subjects. This doesn’t mean that the state won’t continue to overstep the bounds of its legitimate functions, but that is when the Church must call it to change.

4) As a corollary to 3, Christians have the task of challenging the social order to improve. The fact that the powers have been subordinated to Christ means that Christians should challenge the state when it claims authority that doesn’t belong to it. And they will also seek incremental improvements in the social order, even while recognizing that there is no permanent or definitive political order to be built.

I would add that, contra Neuhaus, this means that it’s perfectly consistent for someone committed to pacifism to critique the state’s use of force. An Augustinian pacifist could recognize the state cannot renounce coercion but still challenge it to do better. This could take the form of insisting that the state live up to certain stated principles such as just war theory.

No doubt I’m missing a lot here, but it seems to me that an Augustinian position that recognizes the fragmentary, limited and fragile nature of any earthly peace or justice is quite compatible with a “sectarian” view that the role of the Church is to witness to God’s reign through Christ. The pilgrim Church has the dual task of making disciples and witnessing to the larger society.

Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada has been elected to the post of minority leader in the Senate, replacing Tom Daschle. Sen. Reid is characterized by CNN as opposing abortion rights (it also says he’s pro gun rights). NARAL gives him a 29% approval rating, while National Right to Life gives him a 55%. Could this be a bid to cross the red/blue divide?

Let me try and give a concrete example of why I’m not clear on the practical upshot of the realist/sectarian distinction.

Last night I was re-reading Stanley Hauerwas’s essay “Abortion Theologically Understood”. His main contention is that the church should not get bogged down in the debate over rights, whether that be the “right to life” or the “right to choose.” Rather, the church should be a community of radical hospitality ready to welcome new life whenever and wherever it appears.

This means, in very concrete terms, that churches should support – financially, emotionally, and spiritually – the women in their midst who are facing unexpected or difficult pregnancies and be willing to continue to support those women and their children.

What it means to be the church is to be a group of people called out of the world, and back into the world, to embody the hope of the Kingdom of God. Children are not necessary for the growth of the Kingdom, because the church can call the stranger into her midst. That makes both singleness and marriage possible vocations. If everybody has to marry, then marriage is a terrible burden. But the church does not believe that everybody has to marry. Even so, those who do not marry are also parents within the church, because the church is now the true family. The church is a family into which children are brought and received. It is only within that context that it makes sense for the church to say, “We are always ready to receive children. We are always ready to receive children.” The people of God know no enemy when it comes to children.

I think this is right on the money and that the church should strive to be the kind of community where no woman ever feels like she has to have an abortion.

However, Hauerwas gives an interesting answer to a question:

QUESTION #1: What about abortion in American society at large? That is, in your opinion, what would be the best abortion law for our society?

HAUERWAS: The church is not nearly at the point where she can concern herself with what kind of abortion law we should have in the United States or even in the state of North Carolina. Instead, we should start thinking about what it means for Christians to be the kind of community that can make a witness to the wider society about these matters. […]

In this kind of a setting, Christians witness to wider society first of all not by lobbying for a law against abortion, but by welcoming the children that the wider society does not want. Part of that witness might be to say to our pro-choice friends, “You are absolutely right. I don’t think that any poor woman ought to be forced to have a child that she cannot afford. So let’s work hard for an adequate child allowance in this country.” That may not be entirely satisfactory, but that is one approach.

Now this is the part I find puzzling. Why can’t I agree that a primary task of the church is to show the rest of society what it means to be a community that welcomes new life and support (say) a partial-birth abortion ban? Can’t we do both?

In fairness to Hauerwas, I don’t know where he stands on such a ban, but if we can lobby for a child allowance (or a living wage or whatever) why not also legal restrictions on the killing of the unborn? The “sectarian” position seems at times to accept the liberal boilerplate that you can’t “impose your religious views” on the rest of society. But it’s not as though only Christians can have reasons for opposing abortion (or supporting economic justice, caring for the environment, etc.). If such a consensus is possible, why not take advantage of it?

One of the central issues Christians have to grapple with in considering their political involvement in the world is the theological or moral status of the social institutions they might seek to influence. Preeminently this means the government, but it may also include corporations and other business, non-profit agencies and other institutional actors in society.

There seem to be two competing visions currently holding sway among Christian thinkers. The first position I would associate with mainline Protestants and most Catholics. Its comes in both Catholic and Calvinist varieties, but the essential claim is that the institutions of society are part of God’s good (though fallen) creation, and like everything else they are groaning to be redeemed. What is required is for Christians to “baptize” these institutions and reform them so that they can serve the ends God intends for creation.

On this understanding, the state in particular is ordained to guard and nurture the common good. The use of political force is thought to be morally neutral in itself, and the task of Christians should be to see that it, as much as possible, is used for good. This was the position of Methodist ethicist Paul Ramsey who argued that the judicious use of force could be the expression of Christian love of neighbor in the political realm.

On this view it makes sense for Christians to cooperate with those who don’t share their particular faith commitments. Often political advocacy will take the form of an appeal to natural law, the idea being that Christian morality is more or less continuous with what everyone already knows through unaided reason.

This view, which might be called “realism”, comes in conservative and progressive varieties, but its adherents are united in seeing the basic institutions of society as God-ordained and amenable to progressive improvement.

The alternative vision is associated with a more “sectarian” position that stresses the distinctiveness of Christian morality and the way of life that followers of Jesus are called to. John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas are probably the best-known advocates of this position (though I think it’s fair to say there are differences between them).

The sectarian sees the state and other social structures and institutions as the “powers” referred to by St. Paul. They are under Christ’s dominion, but remain rebellious and will not be fully subdued until the Last Day. The rebelliousness of the powers is displayed in their proneness to violence and reliance upon coercive means. But Christians are empowered to live outside of the domination of the powers.

Adherents of this view are thus more reluctant to become too entangled with state and other institutions. They believe Christians should renounce violence and coercion and are often pacifists. The primary task of Christians is to cultivate a distinctive way of life that will embody an alternative set of social practices such as forgiveness, truth-telling, nonviolence and the sharing of goods. The influence that Christians have on the wider society consists largely of providing an attractive alternative to the world’s ways.

Sectarians do allow for the church to address the powers directly and believe that she should act as the conscience of society, calling the secular state to heed its better instincts and higher principles. But this happens on a pragmatic and ad hoc basis; the sectarian has no blueprint to offer for the just society that could be put into effect by political authorities. (I discussed Yoder’s approach to witnessing to the state in more detail here.)

The “realists” criticize the sectarians for irresponsibly withdrawing from public life in order to cultivate their own garden of virtue. The sectarians respond that they are simply trying to be faithful to the teachings of Jesus; they think the realists have sold out and forfeited their distinctive Christian voice. Moreover, the sectarians would say that the church has the greatest impact on society when it acts as a faithful witness to God’s kingdom.

As Yoder says:

The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience. The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification of the use of violence and the other kinds of power in every human conflict; the triumph of the right, although it is assured, is sure because of the power of the resurrection and not because of any calculation of causes and effects, nor because of the inherently greater strength of the good guys. The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection.

Both of these positions could be seen as a response to the gradual “de-Christianization” of the West. The realists want to re-assert a natural law morality that they believe provided the moral underpinning of our civilization, while the sectarians argue that Christianity had been co-opted by the “Constantinian” establishment of Christianity as the official or semi-official religion of the West. They see the ending of this establishment as an opportunity for the church to be more authentically Christian.

One might be forgiven for thinking that choosing between these two paradigms is often a function in part of temperament. People of a more “radical” persuasion seem to be attracted to the sectarian option. This includes people on the far “left” wing of Christian thought as well as ultra-traditionalists who emphasize the discontinuity between the church and modern society. Realists tend to be people who are more or less comfortable with modernity and its institutions even if they often strongly object to certain aspects of our contemporary society.

The challenge, it seems to me, is to have one’s political stance informed by cogent theological and biblical reasoning rather than a pre-ordained commitment to a particular political allegiance. I’m attracted to the sectarian vision with its demands for radical discipleship, but I’m also wary of leaving the public sphere to the worst excesses of modernity and the culture of death. And it’s not clear that simply splitting the difference is a possibility either.

What is also not clear to me is where the sectarians and the realists will part ways on specific matters of public policy. When it comes to taking a position on a particular war or piece of legislation, sectarians and realists often seem able to make common cause. Does this indicate that there is less daylight between their positions than they might want to think? After all, both agree that Christians can legitimately seek to influence the conduct of the wider society. I think part of the problem is that I don’t yet clearly understand the full implications of each position.

Bill Keezer comments on this post:

We have to be a bit careful here. Paul in his second letter to the Thessalonians states that those who will not work should not eat. Protecting the poor from predation and protecting them from the consequences of bad decisions are two different things that often are conflated. This is at the root of many welfare state disasters. I do not think it straightforward, if possible, to justify continual handouts from scripture. I think it necessary to investigate more closely the Old Testament concept of justice. It does not necessarity imply rights as it does today.

I think Bill is right here in that some welfare policies are actually counterproductive and fail to help those they’re aimed at. But this, it seems to me, only increases the responsibility of those of us to whom much has been given. Someone who makes bad decisions is in just as much need of help as a hard-working member of the “deserving” poor. It will be a different kind of help, and perhaps not a kind of help best delivered by government bureaucracy. It might involve, for instance, trying to change the environment of children who grow up thinking that dropping out of high school to have a baby or dealing drugs are good ideas.

When I talk about “rights” what I mean is that the poor have a claim on the rest of us for help. How we should respond to that claim will differ with circumstances.

On a related note, see here for a discussion of the effectiveness of recent welfare reform measures.

From the ever-sensible Steven Waldman:

The idea that this was a victory for people who care about morality over those who don’t is galling to liberals because, for many of them, the number one issue in this election was Iraq — and their opposition to the incumbent administration was almost entirely grounded in moral concerns. It’s not like liberals objected because their own family members were dying. Rather, they believe that launching any war unless absolutely justified is profoundly immoral, a position also articulated by the Pope. One can disagree, but I would love the opportunity to watch Anne Coulter tell the Pope his opposition to the war isn’t based on morality. Liberals also believe that a morally indefensible policy was sold dishonestly – a gross moral breach compounded by another. […]

Liberals tend to think that right to life activists are motivated by a desire to control women’s bodies or sex lives, and to impose a religious doctrine. Whether you agree with it or not, the heart of the pro-life position is the belief that life begins at conception, and therefore abortion is murder. Liberals who don’t share that the foundational assumption have a hard time understanding the passion of pro-life voters. Yet they easily admire the radical abolitionists of the 1860s — who were as “rabid” and doctrinaire in their opposition to slavery as pro-lifers are today. Liberals should ask themselves, if they honestly believed that life began at conception, wouldn’t they do exactly what the pro-life forces do?

Much more here.

(via Political Animal)

Steven Riddle at Flos Carmeli has a thoughtful discussion of just war vs. pacifism.

One thing that I think needs to be kept in mind in discussions about just war is that, strictly speaking, we should talk about just (or justifiable) acts of war rather than “just wars” simpliciter. As Paul Ramsey argued, war is nothing more than an extension of political force, and is therefore as subject to moral evaluation as any other political act.

For instance, World War II is often held up as the paradigm case of a just war. But the Allies committed acts in the course of the war that clearly violated jus in bello criteria such as the bombing of civilian centers in Germany and Japan. And some have argued that the insistence on unconditional surrender is itself a violation of just war standards because that demands that the opponent give up its sovereignty, effectively ending its existence as a nation. This is destroying the enemy rather than stopping the wrong he is committing.

This doesn’t show that the Allies’ going to war wasn’t, on the whole, justified, but it does remind us that discrete acts in the course of even a justifiable military campaign have to be evaluated one by one. A just cause doesn’t give us a blank check.