From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Politics: Legibility

James Scott (Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St)) suggests that “legibility” is a central problem of politics.  ”The premodern state,” he writes, “was, in many crucial respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity.  It lacked anything like a detailed ‘map’ of its terrain and its people.  It lacked, for the most part, a measure, a metric, that would allow it to ‘translate’ what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view.”  This mean that “its interventions were often crude and self-defeating.”

Modern states make society legible through many mechanisms: “processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation” are all “comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification.”  In short, “much of early modern European statecraft” was about “rationalizing and standardizing what was a social hieroglyph into a legible and administratively more convenient format.”

Politics: Fichtean Politics

Milbank again, summarizing Hegel’s critique of Fichte’s political views: “In a political world where anything can be made of anything, the only common standard is protection of the finite ego, which, according to Fichte, must extend not only to the prohibition of deliberate crimes against person and property, but also to the numerous ways in which individuals may accidentally interfere with, and inhibit, the freedom of others.  To prevent this happening, to ensure the smooth operation of the free market, and the maximum spread of available information and predictability of outcome, there must be a vast extension of the State ‘police’ in the sense of ’surveillance.’  Hence Fichte’s real positing is of a world of identity cards, internal passports, overseers of overseers, and proliferating bureaucracy.  But this circumspection will never be satisfied, and in the course of its progress, protection of freedom will pass over into its gradual inhibition.”

Milbank notes that Hegel is anticipating Foucault’s emphasis on surveillance, but adds that Hegel sees more clearly that “absolutism is merely the reverse face of liberalism.”

Politics: State and society

At the beginning of  Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Challenges in Contemporary Theology), William Cavanaugh challenges the distinction between state and civil society that is inherent in much Christian thinking about politics.  The two are inseparable, but, Cavanaugh says, it’s in the interests of the modern state to claim otherwise.

The ruse goes this way: The state strips away the traditional moorings of society, atomizing society into individuals; this individualized society is then described as a locus of conflict, a war of rights against rights; and the state then steps in to claim that only its coercive monopoly will be capable of keeping the peace.  But the conflicts that it claims to resolve are conflicts of its own making: “it can be said that the state defends us from threats which it itself creates.”

Cavanaugh has written that the secularity of the modern state is a particular instance of the same process: The wars of religion were not such, but rather were the occasion for the creation of the category of “religion”; the state, having created “religion” and characterized it as a threatening irrationality in the body politic, had to intervene to adjudicate between conflicting religious claims.  Again, the state defends us from threats of its own making.

Politics: End of the “Free World”?

Is the US leadership of the “free world” in jeopardy?  Gideon Rachman (Financial Times) suggests that the deeper question is whether there is still a free world to be leader of.  That is, he points to evidence from Copenhagen and elsewhere that suggests that world democracies don’t necessarily hang together, and thus do not necessarily hang with the US.

“Brazil, South Africa, Turkey and India are all countries whose identities as democracies are now being balanced – or even trumped – by their identities as developing nations that are not part of the white, rich, western world. All four countries have ruling parties that see themselves as champions of social justice at home and a more equitable global order overseas. Brazil’s Workers’ party, India’s Congress party, Turkey’s AKP and South Africa’s African National Congress have all adapted to globalisation – but they all retain traces of the old suspicions of global capitalism and of the US.”  As a result, they end up siding with China and Iran and not the US on a range of international issues.

Politics: Moses the Murderer?

Not according to Ambrose.  Louis Swift writes that, for Ambrose, “even in the private sphere the Christian is not only vindicated in defending another, but actually has a serious obligation in this matter: qui enimn on repellita socio injuriams, i potest, tam est in vitio quam quifacit (De Off. Min. 1.36.178 [PL 16.8I]). Thus, Moses’ slaying of the Egyptian is not simply to be condoned, but to be regarded as an act of virtue. Precisely here, of course, we have a new problem in that violent action is not merely permitted, but in certain circumstancesa ctually demandedo n moral grounds.”

On the other hand: “If the use of physical force was thought compatible with Christian love in the matter of preventing injury to another, such was not the case with self-defense. In this area Ambrose was a pacifist . . . [he] denies to an individual in his own case a right which he must exercise in behalf of another. The evil of self-defense-as distinct from defense of another-lies in the fact that it necessarily destroys pietas elsewhere called caritas( In Luc. 5.77)-which establishesa man’s spiritual relationship with God and which is the foundation of all virtue. In short, resisting an attacker amounts to preferring the human to the divine. By destroying the interior disposition of love it vitiates the natural good of preserving one’s own life.”

On Ambrose’s political ethics in general, Swift concludes: “Ambrose’s opposition to violence in the matter of self-defense, his comments on the evangelical principle of turning the other cheek, and his concept of the brotherhood of man despite national or religious differences all militate against any simple baptizing of the Roman tradition of the just war or any wholesale endorsement of Roman nationalistic principles. If the realities of political and social development prevented Christians from maintaining the pacifist emphases of earlier centuries, pacifist arguments retained much of their old vigor, and the dilemma of Christian violence and love remained to a considerable extent unresolved.”

Politics: Military Martyrs

McGivern again, pointing to the ambivalence regarding military service evident in the accounts of military martyrs.  On the one hand: “When Maximilian, the first known conscientious objector in Christian history, declared at his trial in A.D. 295 that ‘It is not right for me to serve in the army because I am a Christian,’ his execution was seen as a glorious martyrdom that elevated him as a model of sainthood. One would have thought that the lesson was clear: the army is no place for Christians.”

On the other hand: “less than ten years later, when Julius the Veteran was martyred for refusing to offer incense to Diocletian, he boasted at his trial that he had served faithfully in the military for twenty-seven years, fought in seven major campaigns, and never had a commanding officer who found any fault with his record or conduct. He too was revered as a model.”

McGivern suggests that these manifest two different ecclesiologies operating within the early church: “In one, the model of the church is that of Origen, a people set apart, aloof, priestly, rendering spiritual service, refusing dirty or bloodied hands. In the other, the model of the Church is that of Augustine, a people called already to work toward the City of God but not yet rid of the ravages of sin. Its destiny as the spotless Bride of Christ will be achieved only in the eschaton.”

(I’m not sure that this is an accurate description of Augustine, but the point about divergent ecclesiologies stands.)

Politics: Lactantius on war

James McGivern points to the example of Lactantius to illustrate the complexities of the early church views on war.

“According to his Divine Institutes there is absolutely no place for Christians in the army. He says in so many words, ‘It is not right for a just man to serve in the army . . . Nor is it right for a just man to charge someone with a capital crime. It does not matter whether you kill a man with the sword or with a word since it is killing itself that is prohibited. So there must be no exception to this command of God. Killing a human being whom God willed to be inviolable is always wrong.’ Nowhere in early Christian literature is there any stronger, more absolute prohibition of killing, whether it be in war, by capital punishment, or otherwise. The pacifism of the early Lactantius is as total as possible. He is an early Tolstoi but, as [Louis] Swift has pointed out, in his later work, after the tables have been turned and Christians are being given positions of privilege and responsibility rather than being persecuted by the Empire, he seems less sure of himself.

“In his Epitome, for instance, he says: ‘Just as courage is good, if you are fighting for your country but evil if you are rebelling against it, so too with the emotions. If you use them for good ends, they will be virtues; if for evil ends, they will be called vices.’ Other passages suggest that he now believed that it would not do simply to oppose all use of violence.”

One might judge this capitulation; surely pacifists would.  But McGivern suggests that Lactantius is responding faithfully to new circumstances: “The exercise of political responsibilities had now, for better and for worse, fallen squarely on the shoulders of large numbers of Christians for the first time. It was no longer possible to stay on Origen’s pedestal above the fray, so someone had better do some hard rethinking about the perceived incompatibility between Christian faith and military service, and come up with relevant answers for the challenging new circumstances.”

Politics: Augustine and War

Hunter summarizes a 1983 article by RA Markus on Augustine and just war.  By examining Augustine’s statements on war and Christian society in the context of his intellectual biography, Markus comes up with “a highly nuanced account that stresses Augustine’s deepening pessimism regarding the rationality of human actions and, simultaneously, the collapse within Augustine’s own mind of the ‘rational myth of the state.’”

Markus discovers “two major shifts in the context of Augustine’s thinking about the ‘justice’ of warfare. In the earliest discussion in On Free Will 1.5.11-13, written sometime before 388, Augustine sees war as ‘part of well-ordered society’s means of conforming to God’s universal order and …thus rightly sanctioned by law.’ (3). By the time of Against Faustus, however, about ten years later, the first shift has taken place. War is no longer justified by its relation to some aeterna lex; rather, the issue at hand is the Manichean rejection of the Old Testament.”

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Politics: Early Church and War

In a 1992 survey of recent work on the early church’s views on Christian participation in the military (in Religious Studies Review), David G. Hunter sums up with this:

“the ‘new consensus’ would maintain: 1) that the most vocal opponents of military service in the early church (e.g., Tertullian and Origen) based their objections on a variety of factors, which included an abhorence of Roman army religion as well as an aversion to the shedding of blood; 2) that at least from the end of the second century there is evidence of a divergence in Christian opinion and practice and that Christian support for military service (first reflected obversely in the polemics of Tertullian) grew throughout the third century; 3) that the efforts of Christians to justify participation in warfare for a “just” cause (most notably that of Augustine) stand in fundamental continuity with at least one strand of pre-Constantinian tradition.”

Politics: Jus in Bello? continued

In the previous post, Jim Rogers asked what can morally be done about enemies who use innocents are human shields?  That’s a difficult question, but I’ve found Daniel Bell’s discussion helpful (Just War as Christian Discipleship: Recentering the Tradition in the Church rather than the State).

Bell takes issue with Paul Ramsey’s analysis.  Ramsey argues that the blame for the deaths of innocents used as human shields lies with those using them, not with those who kill them while intending to kill enemies.  Bell agrees that terrorists who use human shields are responsible for their deaths, and even concedes that they may be more blameworthy than the soldiers who actually kill.  But this “passing the buck” doesn’t, Bell thinks, give just warriors leave to ignore the principle of discrimination; “two wrongs don’t make a right.”  The fact that the enemy is using innocents for cover doesn’t create “a kind of moral ‘free fire zone’ where the shoeshine boy or the woman with a gun to her head are simply declared combatants because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

What is to be done, then?

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Politics: Jus in Bello?

Jim Rogers of Texas A&M takes some issue with my discussion of the justice of NATO bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  I’ll briefly take up Jim’s questions about human shields in another post.  Here’s Jim’s response:

[1][a] Yes, in general, but your post doesn’t really deal with the problem of the innocent shield (let alone the innocent aggressor). In this context in particular, many of those fighting the U.S. intentionally seek to surround themselves with the innocent, and to blend in with the innocent, precisely to protect themselves from justified attack. That, I believe, is a necessary part of “terrorism,” and serves as part of the conundrum.

The classic example, a bank robber hold an innocent person in front of him to shield him from police attack. He then begins shooting at police from behind the woman. Can the police (justly) shoot “through” the women to return fire in self defense or to protect other third parties? Can the police intentionally kill the woman to remove the shield and return fire upon the robber?

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Politics: Jus in bello?

Hilary Clinton had some stiff opposition last week in Pakistan.  Everywhere she went in her dazzling blue pants suit, Pakistanis raged about US policy in Afghanistan and along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.  One woman pointedly asked, Do the US drone bombings that kill Pakistani civilians count as terrorism?  Clinton of course said No.

On most definitions of terrorism, Clinton’s was the right answer.  Terrorists deliberately target civilians.  Bombs from NATO, mainly US, drones and jets are aimed at terrorists.  We have killed civilians, no one knows for sure how many.  But we don’t intent to kill civilians.

That’s an important distinction, but this precision is bound to be lost on Afghans and Pakistanis who have lost family members and neighbors to the bombs of the US and allies.  And it’s not the end of the discussion about the bombings.

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Politics: Secular

In responding to Milbank’s analysis of Augustine on the secular, RA Markus (Christianity And the Secular (Blessed Pope John XXIII Lecture Series in Theology and Culture)) borrows MJ Hollerich’s summary of Milbank that there is no “neutral public sphere in which people can act politically without reference to ultimate ends.”

Markus thinks this formulation entangles two issues that need to be disentangled.

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Politics: Consumer-based reform

David Goldhill’s article on health care reform in the current issue of the Atlantic bears the provocative title, “How American Health Care Killed My Father.”  It opens with the story of his father, who died at 83 from an infection he picked up at a hospital, as he says “one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals.”

He has a litany of complaints against hospitals:

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Politics: Liberalism and victimhood

Stephen Long (Speaking of God: Theology, Language and Truth (Eerdmans Ekklesia)) summarizes Alain Badiou’s complaint against the subordination of “truth to a liberal politics ruled by the language of rights and diversity”: “For Badiou the language of ‘rights’ requires that our political bonds are grounded in evil because we must first be victims who need protection before we can be political agents.  ’Diveristy,’ ‘the other,’ and ‘inclusivity’ merely repeat what already is.  This language only tells us what we already know; we live in a world with people different from us.  But in modernity this emphasis must always be viewed as a potential threat, and so it is emphasized.  Then rights can be granted to protect us from it.”

If Badiou is right, the politics of victimhood is not an aberration from liberal order, but something close to its essence.

Politics: Maximilian the martyr

Maximilian of Tebessa is often cited as an example of early Christian pacifism.  When Roman officials pressured him to accept a military seal and swear the sacramentum by reminding him that other Christians served without qualms, he still refued, saying “They know what is expedient for them; but I am a Christian, and I cannot do evil.”

What, exactly, is the evil that he would have to do?  Killing?  Swearing?  Idolatry?  It’s not easy to tell.

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Politics: Truth and Freedom

Milbank, discussing the possibility of educative coercion: “although Christianity . . . certainly requires in the end free consent to the truth, it does not fetishize this freedom merely as a correct mode of approach: truth is what most matters, and moreover a collective commitment to truth, since truth itself is the shareable and the harmonious.  Thus in certain circumstances, the young, the deluded, those relatively lacking in vision require to be coerced as gently as possible.  Anyone professing to be shocked by this is, I submit, naively unreflective about what in reality he already accepts (for example in the secular schooling of the young) and is thinking in over-individualistic and over-voluntaristic terms that are ontologically impossible.”

Politics: Socialists against Collectivism

John W. De Gruchy points out in his Christianity and Democracy that nineteenth-century Anglican socialists were concerned equally for the possessive individualism of capitalism and liberal democracy, and the deletion of the individual in collectivism.

De Gruchy summarizes the views of William Temple: “respect for individual personality is the root of democracy, and the herd-instinct its greatest danger: an important reminder that the rejection of possessive individualism is not incompatible with respect for individual persons.  If respect for the individual goes, organic societies degenerate into totalitarian Fascism.”

Politics: Bailout State

In the same issue of the Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti analyzes the “bailout state.”  The point of government management of the auto, banking, and other industries is not merely to save jobs (and votes) and support organized labor.  More, in the bailout state, the government can “transform once-private companies into tools of economic and social policy.”

Government Sponsored Enterprises lend to people without good credit; banks lend to consumers so they can spend and keep the economy running; taking over GM is the only way “to eliminate gas guzzlers from the domestic fleet” and thus make “both the labor and environmental lobbies happy.”

Politics: Democracy fulfilled

Drake notes the unique “democratic” flavor of the churcfh in the fourth century: “Christianity restored to common people an outlet for popular participation which they were denied in imperial politics.  Eusebius [of Caesarea's] awkward letter to his confregation from Nicaea, Constantine’s frequent letters to the Christians of Nicomedia, Alexandria, or Antioch – no matter how varied their format or contents, what the very existence of these letters testifies to first of all is the need of Christian leaders to justify their actions in a way that had long disappeared from other arenas of public life.”

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