The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

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: Engels on imperialism

Writing as Paris correspondent for the Northern Star in January 1848, Engels expressed the opinion that “Upon the whole it is, in our opinion, very fortunate that the Arabian chief [Abd-el-Kader] has been taken. The struggle of the Bedouins was a hopeless one, and though the manner in which brutal soldiers, like Bugeaud, have carried on the war is highly blamable, the conquest of Algeria is an important and fortunate fact for the progress of civilization. The piracies of the Barbaresque states, never interfered with by the English government as long as they did not disturb their ships, could not be put down but by the conquest of one of these states. And the conquest of Algeria has already forced the Beys of Tunis and Tripoli, and even the Emperor of Morocco, to enter upon the road of civilization. They were obliged to find other employment for their people than piracy, and other means of filling their exchequer than tributes paid to them by the smaller states of Europe. And if we may regret that the liberty of the Bedouins of the desert has been destroyed, we must not forget that these same Bedouins were a nation of robbers, whose principal means of living consisted of making excursions either upon each other or upon the settled villagers, taking what they found, slaughtering all those who resisted, and selling the remaining prisoners as slaves. All these nations of free barbarians look very proud, noble, and glorious at a distance, but only come near them and you will find that they, as well as the more civilized nations, are ruled by the lust of gain, and only employ ruder and more cruel means.”

Fundamentally, the Algerians needed to be forced into the progressive movement of history: Even “the modern bourgeois, with civilization, industry, order, and at least relative enlightenment following him, is preferable to the feudal lord or to the marauding robber, with the barbarian state of society to which they belong.”

Politics: Pulling the Dog’s Ears

In his recent The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy(echoes of Niebuhr), William Pfaff argues that the real targets of Islamic violence are not Western or American but closer to home.  He notes that “For nearly a century Washington has supported the Saudi government and, indirectly, Wahhabi fundamentalism, against such secular reform movements as Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1950s ‘Arab Socialism’ and the originally modernizing and secular Ba’ath movements in Iraq and Syria.”  Why?  ”The secular reform parties were seen (no doubt correctly) as threatening American oil interests in the region and as actually or potentially sympathetic to Washington’s Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, supporter of radical liberation movements inside and beyond the Middle East.”

Enter al Qaeda: “Elsewhere than in Iraq and Afghanistan-Pakistan, al Qaeda’s existence remains largely notional.  Its real objective (and the base for its association with the Taliban) is destruction of the Saudi monarchy, which sponsors the rival Wahhabi interpretation of strict Islamic observance.  The phenomenon is essentially an affair of intra-Muslim doctrinal and political rivalry in which Westerners are secondary players (unwelcome, and ultimately dispensable).”

Similarly, the conflicts centered in Pakistan and Afghanistan are not really about the West either.

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Politics: Rational war

In his 2003 Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, 3rd Edition (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society, Vol. 13), Mark Juergensmeyer distinguishes between religious violence with its “symbolic targets” and “performative violence” from political violence with its strategic targets and rational aims.

One of the “more rational” causes of war is conflict over land.

The mind boggles: It’s as if the “motherland” and its borders were not regarded as “sacred” even by virtually all rational nation-states.

Politics: Rule of Law

Haugen notes several times in his book that “the vast majority of victims of injustice in the developing world are not victimized by complicated, knotted violations of human rights, but rather by simple, brutal acts of violence that are already against the law in their own countries.  Millions of victims of slavery and trafficking suffer in nations with robust antislavery and antitrafficking regulations.  Millions of victims of rape, of illegal land seizure, of police brutality endure violence that explicitly violates their country’s laws.  This violence persists simply because the victims have less power than those who oppress them.  Particularly when they are not effectively protected by the power of the rule of law, the poor are incredibly vulnerable to abuse.”  He cites a U.N. report that “four billion people around the world are robbed of the chance to better their lives and climb out of poverty because they are excluded from the rule of law,” and a World Bank report that concludes, “Police and official justice systems side with the rich, prosecute poor people and make poor people more insecure, fearful and poorer.”

They don’t take steps to seek justice because they are sure that it cannot be found.  In his organization’s work, “we bring power back to the side of the victim, by providing him or her with a strong, consistent ally who does not give up.”

Politics: Corporations, cont’d

Eric Enlow from the Handong University of South Korea writes with some clarifications about corporations and corporate law.  The rest of this post is all from Eric.

I think Daly’s argument misses some important details.  The Berman quote does not demonstrate that medieval law recognized the natural reality of groups to a greater extent than modern law.

First, the Berman quotation deals with canon law, not the general civil law of the middle ages. Thus, it provides no support for the claim that “a corporation in Christendom was not dependent on a grant from the state” unless by “a corporation in Christendom” we mean an ecclesial corporation under the limited jurisdiction of canon law. In any case, with respect to canon law, it would be dependent on a grant from the pope or bishop, not the king.

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Politics: Theocracy

In a provocative 2006 article in the Intercollegiate Studies Review, Remi Brague asks whether non-theocratic polities are possible.  If “theocracy” means “rule by clerics,” the answer is obviously Yes.  But Brague doesn’t think that’s the most helpful way to think about theocracy.  Western political systems were “theocratic” in the wider sense of being grounded on theological claims: “Although we modern Westerners commonly look down on ‘theocracies,’ our systems of legislation are, or were, in some sense theocratic too. They are, or were, founded in the last instance on assumptions that are theological in origin. And certainly, the idea of a divine law is not absent from our own Western tradition. On the contrary, it is emphatically present in both its sources—in Athens no less than Jerusalem, in Sophocles, Plato, Cicero, and many others, no less than in the Old Testament.”

Even democracies have theocratic foundations:

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Politics: Illiberal liberalism

Phillip Blond (Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix it) offers a succinct summary of why liberal political order descends to tyranny.  Liberalism is, on Blond’s definition, a political order erected on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally atomistic individual beings.  Once that is in place, and once we have the added notion that the state exists to protect the individual choices of said individuals, we have created the conditions for unlimited policing: “the single individual is continuously threatened with expulsion from that very society of which individuality is supposedly the very basis: everyone is every day a potential traitor and there is always a justification at hand for the latest extension of surveillance or control.  That exercise of creative choice which the liberal system exists to legitimate, it must simultaneously be able easily to ban – merely because any actualised freedom of choice by one person inevitable threatens the potential freedom of choice of another.”

This dynamic leads to the extension of state power in another way as well.  Liberalism’s individualism cannot work in practice; in practice, the liberal state has to reckon with interconnected individuals.  One person’s choice to promote racist ideas – which, given liberalism’s professed commitment to a-telic politics, has to be tolerated – of course offends the sensitivities of others.  But then the question is, Whose choices are going to be honored?  Without an account of the common good, there is no settled answer to that.  It becomes simply a question of power: Whose freedom is honored depends on who’s in charge.

Politics: Feminist Family

Philip Blond calls the family “a deeply radical and indeed feminist institution” because it “binds men to women and offers a cultural account of how they should behave towards one another.”

On the other hand, progressive demolition of the family has left unmarried women triple losers : “they have to work externally, labour domestically, and look after the children by themselves.”

Politics: Tea Party, Cont’d

Jameson Graber responds to my post yesterday on the individualism of the Tea Party movement:

“This quote in your post caught my attention: ‘Today, populist rhetoric “fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power.’ Mark Lilla apparently intended this as a criticism, but to me it is a sign that this is one of those rare moments in history in which people are actually passionate about equal justice under law. For far too long politicians have been playing on class warfare in order to achieve political ends, making laws in order to benefit some constituents at the expense of others. These Tea Party-ers, by clamoring for individual freedom above all else, demonstrate a passionate commitment to a principle that can be applied to all people equally, as opposed to some economic or social good, which mainly benefits themselves. However hypocritical the Tea Party movement might be in practice, in theory this ‘Libertarian Mob’ might be the most principled mob we’ve seen in a while.”

Politics: Libertarian Mob

Mark Lilla makes little effort to disguise his contempt for the Tea Party movement (New York Review of Books, May 27).  His contempt is contemptible, and his charges that the Tea Partiers have “anarchist” tendencies and are animated by “anger” are off-base.

A few elements of his analysis, though, are worth reflecting on.  He begins by summarizing an article that he wrote for the same magazine in 1998, where he contended that the country is far less divided than we might think.  Conservative leaders attack the Sixties; liberal leaders attack the Reagan revolution’s exaltation of capitalist greed.  But the people of America cheerfully have embraced both revolutions.  ”This made sense,” he argues, “given that they were inspired by the same political principle: radical individualism.  During the Clinton era the country edged left on issues of private autonomy (sex, divorce, casual drug use) while continuing to move right on economic autonomy (individual initiative, free markets, deregulation). . . . Democrats were day-trading, Republicans were divorcing.  We were all individualists now.”

The new Populism, he says, grows out of this setting and therefore has a different tenor from populist movements of the past.  Early populists used “the rhetoric of class solidarity to seize political power so that ‘the people’ can exercise it for their common benefit.”  Today, populist rhetoric “fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power.  It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied, but this voice has only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone.”  The new populism brings together “individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that.  This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.”

Lilla calls it “the politics of the libertarian mob.”

Politics: Power and corruption

Everyone who knows Lord Acton knows his most famous claim, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  The context is less well-known.  That sentence appears in a letter, written on April 5, 1887, to Mandell Creighton.  Acton had written a critical review of Creighton’s history of the Papacy in a journal that Creighton himself edited.  Creighton printed the review, but privately objected to Acton’s complaints about white-washing the papacy.  That’s where the famous passage comes in:

“I cannot accept your canon,” Acton wrote, “that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong.  If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases.  Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility.  Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. . . . There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

Politics: Humanized Christianity

During the 1840s, Russian literary culture was overtaken by enthusiasm for French Romantic Socialism, mediated through novelists like George Sand.  The extent to which this liberal socialism was a humanistic reduction of Christianity is evident from the creed of V. Belinsky, the arbiter of Russian literary tastes during the period:

“And there will come a time – I fervently believe it – when no one will be burned, no one will be decapitated, when the criminal will plead for death . . . and death will be denied him . . . when there will be no senseless forms and rites, no contracts and stipulations on feeling, no duty and obligation, and we shall not yield to will but to love alone; when there will be no husbands and wives, but lovers and mistresses, and when the mistress comes to the lover saying: ‘I love another,’ the lover will answer: ‘I cannot be happy without you, I shall suffer all my life, but go to him whom you love,’ and will not accept her sacrifice . . . but like God will say to her: I want blessings, not sacrifices. . . . There will be neither rich nor poor, neither kinds nor subjects, there will be brethren, there will be men, and, at the word of the Apostle Paul, Christ will pass his power to the Father, and Father-Reason will hold sway once more, but this time in a new heaven and above a new world.”

Politics: Hebrew Republic

I didn’t find Eric Nelson’s The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought as revolutionary as some of the blurbs indicate, but it is a very intriguing study.  Contrary to the standard story of early modern political thought, Nelson argues that political science was shaped by writers who regarded “the Hebrew Bible as a political constitution, designed by God himself for the children of Israel,” so that “many of the central ideas we associate with the emergence of modern political thought” developed during what historians describe as “the Biblical Century.”

After a brief summary of the revival of Hebraic learning in the late medieval and Reformation periods, and the increasing availability of Jewish sources, Nelson focuses on three areas where the Hebrew Republic ideal had an impact on the development of modern political thought.  In contrast to earlier political thinkers, who recognized the validity of various constitutional arrangements (monarchy, oligarchy, republican), writers who were gripped by the model of the Hebrew Republic argued that the republican system was the only legitimate system and that all forms of monarchy are usurpations of God’s authority as king.  At the center of the debates were varying interpretations of Deuteronomy 17 and 1 Samuel 8, and particularly rabbinic debates on these passages.

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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.”

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