The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

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: Two Imperialisms

An excerpt from my forthcoming book on empires is posted at http://www.firstthings.com/ today.

Politics: Tolerance, Afghan style

Farr again, commenting on the case of Abdul Rahman who was convicted of apostasy in Afghanistan, sentenced to death, and released after U.S. pressure.  This all came after the Afghanistan had, with U.S. support, adopted a constitution: “The Afghan constitution was heralded as a major step [toward democracy]. . . . It created a presidential system, a parliament elected by universal adult suffrage, and an independent judiciary.  It guaranteed free expression and equality under the law.” It explicitly declared Afghanistan’s commitment to protect “human rights, and dignity” and to ensure “the fundamental rights and freedoms of the people.”  The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan stated that while the constitution made Islam the state religion, “the document provides broad religious freedom – allowing adherents of other faiths to practice their religions and observe religious rites.”

Farr argues that the reality was otherwise.

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American Religion Politics: Unrealist realism

In his World of Faith and Freedom: Why International Religious Liberty Is Vital to American National Security, Thomas Farr describes the failures of the Bush administration to press for religious freedom in Saudi Arabia: “As the second Bush term neared its end, it seemed clear to administration supporters and critics alike that the United States could not afford to rile the Saudis at a time when their support would almost surely be needed to calm the confessional hatreds in Iraq and its neighboring states.  In one of the worst-case scenarios, Saudi support would be critical if the Middle East were to erupt in a regional Shiite-Sunni religious war.”  Oh, and there’s oil in Saudi Arabia too.

Farr thinks this not only unjust to religious minorities in Saudia Arabia (he estimates there are 500,000-1 million Catholics, mostly Filipino servants and other South Asians; almost no priests).  He thinks it shows that the Bush administration didn’t learn the lesson of 9/11: “The birthplace of Islam, of Wahhabism, and its stepchild Bin Ladenism was left to evolve on its own. Although there were a few hopeful signs of political and theological movement in the desert kingdom, there was among American officials no sense of urgency about encouraging that movement.  The belief that U.S. support for despots in the Middle East had helped spawn Islamist transnational terrorism, and that the long-term antidote was stable self-government, was swamped by the season of ‘realism’ that once against descended on American foreign policy.”

Politics: Conservative oppressors

In the latest issue of the NYRB, Mark Lilla takes apart Corey Robin’s recent The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.  Lilla quotes this from Robin: “Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes.  It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.”

Robin describes the collection of “conservatives” pursuing this agenda: “Hobbes next to Hayek, Burke across from Palin, Nietzsche between Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia, with Adams, Calhoun, Oakeshott, Ronald Reagan, Tocqueville, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Ernst Junger, Carl Schmitt, Winston Churchill, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Nixon, Irving Kristol, Francis Fukuhama and George W. Bush interspersed throughout.”

Lilla’s comeback is sweet: “Glenn Beck’s blackboard was never half this full.”

Politics: Empire

I offer a few simple thoughts about how to think about empires today at http://www.firstthings.com/

Politics: Chosen Nations

Strayer argues that city-states and empires both had their problems, and that “The European states which emerged after 1100 combined, to some extent, the strengths of both the empires and the city-states.  They were large enough and powerful enough to have excellent changes for survival – some of them are approaching the thousand-year mark, which is a respectable age for any human organization. At the same time they managed to get a large proportion of their people involved in, or at least concerned with the political process, and they succeeded in creating some sense of common identity among local communities.  They got more out of their people, both in the way of political and social activity and in loyalty than the ancient empires had done, even if they fell short of the full participation which had marked a city such as Athens.”

We might add an insight from Adrian Hastings (The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (1996 Wiles Lectures Given at the Queen’s University of Belfa)), who argues that this middling form of political organization (which he thinks begin much earlier than most contemporary historians would believe) drew their inspiration from Scripture: “The Bible presented Israel itself as a developed model of what it means to be a nation – a unity of people, language, territory and government.”  Elsewhere, he adds, “The Old Testament provided the paradigm [of nationhood]. Nation after nation applied it to themselves, reinforcing their identity in the process.”  Because they possessed the ark of the covenant, Ethiopians saw themselves as the “true, Christian, Israel.”  So did everyone else: “Undoubtedly in Frankish eyes, the French were little less. And, in English eyes, the English. In Serb eyes, the Serbs. . . . Each people sees its ‘manifest destiny’ clearly enough.”  Hastings knows that the concept of a “holy people” is “realized in a universal community of faith and by no means in one nation” but he observes that “for ordinary Christians, lay and clerical, that can seem too remote, too unpolitical.”  We are likely to have to combat this heresy for a long time to come.

History Politics Theology - Ecclesiology: Unwitting secularizers

Gregory VII won his battle, but lost the war.  Joseph Strayer (On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton Classic Editions)) notes that “by separating itself so clearly from lay governments, the Church unwittingly sharpened concepts about the nature of secular authority.  Definitions and arguments might vary, but the most ardent Gregorian had to admit that the Church could not perform all political functions, that lay rulers were necessary and had a sphere in which they should operate. They might be subject to the guidance and correction of the Church, but they were not part of the administrative structure of the church. . . . In short, the Gregorian concept of the Church almost demanded the invention of the concept of the State.”   And the State was seen as having a particular role, the “guarantor and distributor of justice.”

Gregory’s reformed ended up solidifying a political nature/grace duality, separated the sphere of love from the sphere of justice.

History Politics: Collateral Damage

In his The Just War Revisited (Current Issues in Theology), Oliver O’Donovan distinguishes between collateral damage and indiscrimination (a violation of just war criteria) by pointing to the intention.  How can intention be determined? He offers this analysis: “One can test the intention to harm non-combatants by putting a simple hypothetical question: if it were to chance that by some unexpected intervention of Providence the predicted harm to non-combatants did not ensue, would the point of the attack have been frustrated?  If on 6 August 1945 all the citizens of Hiroshima, frightened by a rumor of what was to occur, had fled the city, would the attack have lost its point? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then there was an intention to harm them, and their deaths were not collateral. . . . The truly collateral damage in war is that which, if it could have been avoided, would have left the intended attack on a combatant object uncompromised.  That is what is mean by calling it a ‘side effect.’”

On this analysis, a scorched-earth campaign is legitimate since “burning of a crop does nothing to harm productivity, and may even improve it.”  Thus burning a crop interrupts the supplies for an opposing army but does not permanently disable the economic basis of the society.  On the other hand, “Poisoning the land or its water-supplies . . . was categorically prohibited; for that would attack the very possibility of future cultural life in the region.”

Vinoth Ramachandra (Subverting Global Myths: Theology and the Public Issues Shaping Our World) finds the distinction compelling, but chides O’Donovan for limiting his examples to “nongovernmental military (or military-style) organizations.”  He suggests that the same distinction needs to be applied to what the Allies called “strategic airwar” during WW II.

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Politics: Contradictions of World Govt

In The Ways of Judgment: The Bampton Lectures, 2003, Oliver O’Donovan suggests that the notion of world government is conceptually contradictory: “World government is an abstract idea: the government of a people with no internal relations of mutual recognition. A people with no relations has no identity, and the government of those with no identity has no legitimacy. Whatever their claims to universality, in practice all empires need strong boundaries, which define their identity by excluding peoples who live beyond them. The practical difficulty is a direct implication of this. The more imperial rule encourages the confidence and freedom of its subjects, the more it finds its unitary governing structures under strain. To be a single political society is to act together in certain ways, to have a unitary sense of identity in certain common undertakings. When initiatives and endeavors lead in different directions, it becomes more difficult to hold them with a single decision-making structure. The more cultural pursuits flourish in an empire, then, the more oppressive the regulatory authority comes to feel. . . This points to the inevitable reality of all empire: it must recreate an ‘I-Thou’ structure it has attempted to suppress.”

This seems to imply that international relations that “can have no form except a religious and moral one; there can be no international politics.”  But he thinks that this is too hasty a conclusion.  He points to the medieval model of Christian international politics: “one that lay within the ‘spiritual’ realm, vested in the papacy,” government by “the order of nature,” which was “revealed in a new clarity by the Gospel.”  In this conception, the papacy “was conceived as constituting a kind of international tribunal that could pronounce authoritatively on matters of right between sovereigns where no domestic right prevailed.”  This included a (contested) right to depose rulers.  O’Donovan makes the striking comment that modern internationalism is modeled on the papal precedent: “What was needed was not world government, but a seat of judgment that could declare international right with sufficient authority to strengthen the aspirations for peace among independent political communities.”

Politics: Empty continent

In his recent Republic of Grace, Charles Mathewes describes the widely known but still startling demographic crisis of Europe: “By midcentury, including immigration, Europe’s population is projected to be 13 percent smaller, with the working age population declining by 27 percent, and the median age increasing by a third, reaching fifty years. . . . compared to the rest of the world, European shriveling is even more prominent.  By 1950, the population of Europe accounted for about 22 percent of world population; today it is about half that, 12 percent; and by 2050, Europe’s population is expected to be about half again – 7 percent of the world. By 2050, the population of Yemen – Yemen! – is expected to exceed that of Russia.”

The continent in emptying, and aging: “Today about one-sixth of Europe’s population is sixty-five and older, but by 2030 that will be one-fourth, and by 2050 almost one-third.”  What happens to the generous pensions of European social democracies then?

Politics: Islam and Secularism

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (The Politics of Secularism in International Relations) notes the role that Islam plays in Western views of its own secular order: “More than any other single religious or political tradition, Islam represents the ‘nonsecular’ in European and American political discourse.  This is because secularist traditions, and the European and American national identities and practices with which they are affiliated and in which they are embedded, have been constructed through opposition to Islam. . . . Opposition to the concept of Islam is built into secular political authority and embedded within the national identities with which it is associated and through which it is expressed.”

As a result, “attempts to explain relations between Europe, the United States, and the Islamic Middle East and North Africa through recourse to fixed and objectively given state interests, the characteristics of individual leaders, bureaucratic politics, the international system, or other traditional explanatory vehicles are important but insufficient. . . . secularist authority is a productive part of the cultural sensibilities and normative foundation of contemporary international relations.”  Dealing with Islam thus involves contests about the modern West’s identity, and also makes it difficult for the West to deal with what Islamic regimes actually represent.  On secular premises, the Iranian “revolution was unacceptable because it imported religion into public life,” but the revolution also reinforced Islam’s status as the Western other: “the revolution confirmed the existence of ‘natural’ linkages between Islam and theocracy in contrast to alleged natural linkages between Christianity and democracy.”

Politics Theology - Christology: Eusebian political theology

Anatolios (Retrieving Nicaea) admits that “we should not leap to the conclusion that a trinitarian theology based on ontological subordinationism, with Father and Son relating within a hierarchy of will and obedience, will necessarily lead to a monarchical political theology.”  Yet, “in Eusebius this is exactly what happens”:

“Eusebius’s account of the relation between Father and Son extends seamlessly into a comprehensive vision of reality in which the chain of being coincides at every level with a chain of willing, of command and obedience. The metaphysical, cosmic, and worldly spheres can all be encompassed by the conception of good government. Good government begins with the sovereign willing of the Unbegotten, which manifests the goodness of his nature. The primordial act of this wiling occurs when the father brings forth the Son and ‘cast[s] in him the seeds of the constitution and government of the universe.’ As the Son is vice-regent of the Unbegotten Father, so it the emperor the vice-regent of the Word. Reality is pervasively a monarchy, ordered by a chain of benevolent command a freely embraced obedience. The rupture of this order by sin has been repaired by the incarnate Word, and the emperor presides over the continuance of this redeemed order.  Earthly government now once again images the orderly hierarchical stream of divine generation.”  He cites Eusebius’s oration in praise of Constantine, chapter 3, in support.

Politics Theology - Christology Theology - Eschatology: Politics of Advent

My musings on the political import of Advent at the First Things site this morning: http://www.firstthings.com/

American Religion Politics: American political eschatology

Schmemann says that the distinctive mark of the converted Roman Empire, and of the Byzantine order, was the “state’s” acknowledgement that the end of the church was the end of all things, also then the end of the state.  The state no longer existed to promote its own ends, but to serve the end of the kingdom of heaven.

When the eschatology changes, the whole political system changes.  When America was founded on the conviction that it represented the novus ordo saeclorum, it abandoned the political eschatology of Western Christendom and Byzantium both.  Instead of promoting the transcendent and genuinely eschatological end of the kingdom of God, a nation founded as the new order of the ages can only promote itself.

In American political eschatology, we are the already. The rest of the world is the not yet.  And here we come.

News Politics: Pro-Empire Multitude

Smith argues that Hardt and Negri’s proposals for resistance to empire are insufficiently radical (FL is “libertarian freedom”):

“what the multitude desires is absolute freedom, and what the multitude opposes in Empire is its repression and restriction of freedom. But just what concept of freedom is operative in their proposal? It would seem clear, given the negative mode of formulation (freedom as a freedom from restrictions), the concept of freedom that drives both their critique and constructive vision is a most radical version of FL. But if, as I’ve tried to demonstrate above, Empire—as instantiated in the ‘world market’ and served by American foreign policy—is itself rooted in FL, then it would seem that Hardt and Negri’s alternative vision is still nourished by the same libertarian well. And for just that reason, their alternative is insufficiently radical insofar as it does not really oppose the root (radix) of Empire. If the injustices of Empire are in some significant way the fruit of FL, then it’s hard to see how further radicalizing FL will redress this situation of injustice.”

Occupy Wall Street is in secret cahoots with Wall Street.

Politics Theology: God and freedom again

Smith’s article sums up David Burrell’s argument that we cannot have freedom at all without a Creator as a final cause.  Burrell writes:

“if I cannot be pushed to will something, but only drawn to do so, not even God can cause me to do something freely, if we are thinking of an efficient cause.  Yet God, as my sovereign good, could so draw my will as to bring me freely to consent to the end for which my nature craves. So freedom is less a question of self-determination of what otherwise remains undetermined than it is one of attuning oneself to one’s ultimate end.”

In thinking of God as “cause” of all that comes to pass, has Reformed theology been sufficiently clear about what sort of cause He is?

American Religion Politics: God and freedom

In a 2009 essay in Political Theology, Jamie Smith notes the difference between libertarian freedom and the Augustinian notion of freedom to pursue and do the Good.  He puts the matter starkly: Quoting David Burrell, he argues that libertarian freedom “demands ‘that a free agent parallel a creator ex nihilo. What the Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) theological tradition ascribes to the Creator, modern libertarian accounts of freedom ascribe to creatures.”  He adds that “to affirm libertarian non-teleological auto-sovereignty . . . requires rejecting the Creator – or, at least, rejecting the theological claim that there is a determinate Good for human freedom which is specified by the Creator; in other words, it requires rejecting anything more than a deist creator.”   The “Creator” invoked in American public statements must be the deist creator, since the freedom he underwrites is a freedom without any determinate telos.

The usual way to deflect such a theological critique of modern political freedom – from both the left and the right – is to distinguish different senses of freedom.  In liberal order, individuals and “mediating” communities pursue their own substantive ends; no such end determinate end is allowed for the polity as a whole, since that would endanger the freedom of lesser communities to pursue their own ends.

This argument has a certain power, but it ultimately fails in various ways.

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Politics: Grace-infused politics

Robert Dodaro’s take on Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine confirms Bowlin’s criticisms of Markus.  Late in his book, Dodaro summarizes Augustine’s correspondence with Macedonius, vicar of Africa, written in 413/14.  Starting from an appeal for clemency for someone on death row, the letters turn into an early “mirror of magistrates.”  Dodaro summarizes:

Augustine “explains how the virtues of faith and hope transform the way in which civic virtues like fortitude and justice are understood in the earthly city, by harmonizing them with the way they are understood in the heavenly city.  He describes in detail how this transformation occurs through hope. . . .

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Politics: Loving Coercion

In a 1997 articles in the Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, John Bowlin critiques the accounts of the “contradictions” or “tensions” between Augustine’s overall political theology and his advocacy of coercing Donatists into the church.  Bowlin takes on RL Markus (Saeculum) and Milbank, who for different reasons think Augustine inconsistent at this point.

On Bowlin’s reading, Markus admired Augustine mainly for the “secular, pluralist, and autonomous politics that he finds in Augustine’s mature theology of the saeculum.”  Coercing dissenters conflicts with these main themes.  Over time Augustine abandoned the semi-Eusbian enthusiasm for the Christian empire, and also came gradually to abandon the notion of a tempora christiana, a distinct phase of “sacred history” within the new era after Christ.  These earlier convictions would have supported a religiously coercive civil order, but Augustine abandoned these convictions without revising his views on coercion accordingly.

Bowlin doesn’t find this convincing.

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Politics: Liberal virtues

Early on in Politics & the Order of Love, Eric Gregory comments, in response to anti-liberal Augustinians like Milbank and Hauerwas, that “theological orthodoxy and political liberalism are not alternative answers to the same question.”

Analyzing Gregory’s work in the Journal of Religious Ethics, James KA Smith offers this rejoinder, which dovetails with my brief criticisms of Gregory yesterday: “Gregory’s account of liberalism fails to appreciate the extent to which liberalism is not just forming penultimate habits, but ultimate loves; that is, I take some of its practices to be ‘trumping’ practices that constitute rival liturgies, not just penultimate (‘earthly’) procedures for organizing ‘secular’ life. In this respect, I think his account of liberalism has problems similar to those of Jeffrey Stout.”  Liberalism has its own rites that inculcate its own virtues, which are not necessarily compatible with Christian ones.

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