Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

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

« Previous Entries in Category |

Politics: Liberal state

The liberal state is a free state, but it’s clear from Spinoza that freedom in a liberal state is limited to unlimited freedom of thought and speech.  Action is controlled by the state, including religious action:

“God has no special kingdom among men except in so far as He reigns through temporal rulers.  Moreover, the rites of religion and outward observances of piety should be in accordance with the public peace and well-being, and should therefore be determined by the sovereign power alone.  I speak here only of the outward observances of piety and the external rites of religion, not of piety itself, nor of the inward worship of God, nor the means by which the mind is inwardly led to the homage to God in singleness of heart.”

Several things to note in this breath-takingly self-conscious statement:

Continue reading…

Politics: Diverse identity

Challenging a “solitarist” view of identity, Amartya Sen (Identity and Violence) writes, “The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theater lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English).  Each of these collectivities, to all of which this person simultaneously belongs, gives her a particular identity.  None of them can be taken to be the person’s only identity or singular membership category.  Given our inescapably plural identities, we have to decide on the relative importance of our different associations and affiliations in any particular context.”

Politics: The Obama phenomenon

John Judis has an interesting discussion of the roots and significance of Obama’s candidacy in the March 12 issue of TNR.  In part, he sees it rooted in the American obsession with novelty.  By presenting himself as the “candidate of the new,” Obama strikes a deep chord in the American imagination - R. W. B. Lewis’s notion that the hope to be a new Adamic race haunts American history and the recurring hope that we can re-start the American experiment.

That Obama is black is also crucial: Americans growing up through the civil rights movement “yearn for racial reconciliation, and they see voting for Obama as a means to achieve that.”  But it’s not just his race; Obama is a unique sort of black politician.  Given his Kenyan heritage, his birth in Hawaii and his upbringing in Indonesia, he is a black politician who comes from outside the world of black politics: “Obama has little of the typical black politician’s underlying outlook.”  Appealing to the heritage of slavery comes naturally to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, but Obama “wouldn’t simply shun these kind of metaphors; the probably wouldn’t occur to him because they aren’t part of his political heritage.  To put it in Adamic terms, he is outside of America’s racial history and conveys little resentment over his own racial past.”

Politics: Abortion and Crime

In the journal Economica, Leo Kahane, David Paton and Rob Simmons offer an analysis of the supposed link between abortion rates and the reduction of crime rates in the UK (the article is entitled, “The Abortion–Crime Link: Evidence from England and Wales”).  The authors challenge the findings of several articles by J. J. Donohue and S. D. Levitt (D&L), whose argument they Kahane, et. al., summarize as follows:

Continue reading…

Politics: McCain and the Right

Clever move by the McCain campaign: A scandalous piece in the NYT becomes an opportunity to rally the right to McCain’s side.  The piece and the campaign’s well-organized and long-anticipated response puts the anti-McCain right into a bind: If they jump in against McCain, they’re in bed with Media Enemy #1; if they jump in with the campaign to defend McCain, they help the man who’s destroying the Republican party.

Politics: New Atheism and the Jihad

In his recent book on the West’s war on “Jihadism,” Weigel observes that it is ironic that the “new atheism” has emerged just when religion has become unavoidably dominant in world politics.  Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris would, Weigel suggests, deprive the West of necessary categories for engaging Islamic radicalism: “a West that has lost the ability to think in terms of ‘God’ and ‘Satan,’ and that has forgotten the drama contained in the idea of ‘redemption,’ is a West that will be at a loss to recognize what inspires and empowers those enemies of the West who showed their blood hand on September 11, 2001.  A West that does not take religious ideas seriously is a West that will have disarmed itself, conceptually and imaginatively, in the midst of war.”

Politics: Classy exit

Mitt Romney bowed out before he embarrassed himself with further losses.  He had no chance, and his exit is a bow to the inevitable.

But give him his due: While Clinton and Obama spend millions fighting each other over the next few months, Romney has given McCain time to raise money, solidify his base, to rest.

Nothing in Romney’s campaign became him like the leaving of it.

Politics: Musical city

Augustine quotes Cicero saying, “quae harmonia a musicis dicitur in cantu, eam esse in civitate concordiam.”  That is, somewhat loosely, “what musicians call harmony in singing is concord in the city.”

Politics: Clintons again

Peggy Noonan puts it this way in today’s Wall Street Journal online:

“Bill Clinton, with his trembly, red faced rage, makes John McCain look young. His divisive and destructive daily comportment—this is a former president of the United States—is a civic embarrassment. It is also an education, and there is something heartening in this. . . .

Continue reading…

Politics: Clinton

Jim Rogers of Texas A&M writes in response to my earlier post on Bill and Hillary:

Re your question: ‘Why run a candidate who immediately alienates a large proportion of the voting population?’

Answer: Because the median voter determines elections. If you alienate 49.99% of the voting population, you still win if you’re acceptable to the barest of majorities.

“That being said, most of the polls I’ve seen to date cap Hillary Clinton’s vote at around 48 percent.

Continue reading…

Politics: Manipulator-in-Chief

The notion that the Democrats would select Hillary Clinton as their candidate has always seemed suicidal to me.  Why run a candidate who immediately alienates a large proportion of the voting population?  Bill Clinton’s prominence in the race makes Hillary’s candidacy seem all the more suicidal.  His legacy as President is, even for Democrats, a mixed bag, and his conduct in the campaign has been off-putting in the extreme.

Find the web video of Clinton responding to a question about the legal challenge to the Nevada caucuses, and you’ll see a master manipulator at work: When the reporter suggests that the timing of the legal challenge was suspicious and seemed politically motivated, Clinton tried to corner the reporter with comments like: “Your position is that some votes should count more than others, and some people should have easier access to polls than others.  If that’s your position, write it in your newspaper.”  Of course, the reporter had stated no “position” at all, just asked an obvious question to a former President.

His participation in the South Carolina primary campaign has its obvious advantages.   With Bill in charge, Hillary’s campaign can go after Obama with guns blazing and still avoid the charge that Hillary is being unfeminine.  But Bill’s participation has an enormous downside; the man is genetically incapable of fading into the background, of taking the second spot.

Does anyone, even among Democrats, really want another four years of this former Manipulator-in-Chief?

Politics: Plato’s anti-democracy

Reviewing Malcolm Schofield’s Plato: Political Philosophy in the TLS, Jonathan Lear offers this superb precis of Plato’s politics: “For Plato, one cannot understand politics unless one grasps the nature and structure of human desire. Political scientists must be students of the human soul: for one cannot understand the problem of democracy if one sticks to the rhetoric of its self-understanding in terms of equality and freedom. One needs to see these values as underwriting, and giving license to, a form of human desire which Plato called appetite. In fact, he has a difficult time telling us what appetitive desire is. He picks it out via paradigm instances - hunger, thirst, sexual desire - but then goes on to say that this arena is multiform and thus, strictly speaking, lacks a name adequate to it. It comes to be known as the money-loving or profit-loving part of the soul, Plato tells us, because appetites are most easily satisfied by money. But, as Schofield explains, the fact that appetite can transfer desire from its original objects onto that which can purchase them sets us up for psychic conflict and political confusion. Psychically, if one comes to develop an appetite for money, one will tend to be reluctant to spend it on the things that would gratify other appetites. And since one of the hallmarks of human appetite is a tendency towards insatiability, one should expect a money-lover to be pulled powerfully in disparate directions. Politically, as Schofield puts is, ‘given the social freedom to do as one likes, what people in general will do under a democracy is the thing money gives them the capacity to do - satisfy their appetites.’ Because appetite is multifarious, democracy will in fact be a congeries of people pursuing different ways of life according to disparate appetitive conceptions of the good life. Plato likens it to shopping for constitutions in a market.”

All to the good, say modern theorists of democracy; this is what reason is all about - calculating how one can satisfy desires most efficiently. But for Plato this only looks rational when reason has been distorted by democracy. Reason properly functioning would have other desires: “to know what justice itself is; not merely to know what the just society or the just person is like, nor indeed how justice manifests itself in an orderly cosmos, but to grasp the form of justice and understand how this form is a manifestation of goodness wherever it is instantiated.” Without this desire to know the good, “human life, Plato thinks, is a vain and petty farce.”

The whole review is very rich, but a couple of comments on these points: First, the continuity of Plato and Augustine is very clear here; second, the Platonic desire for justice might reflect a kind of protoevangelium, a yearning for the manifestation of Justice; finally, the prescient recognition of the corrosive impact of money on political order.

Politics: God in Public

N. T. Wright has been getting heat for expressing his political opinions of late, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from his SBL address on “God in Public.”  In the event, I found very little to disagree with, much to affirm heartily, and, as always with Wright, much to delight the soul.

He started with a challenge to the post-Enlightenment separation of religion and politics.  He noted, interestingly, that this separation was linked historically and theologically with skepticism about the resurrection of the body.  He returned to this point later in the lecture, arguing that the resurrection is the launching of the new creation in the midst of the old and suggesting that denying or downplaying the resurrection is a strategy of power.  When the resurrection-as-new-creation is denied, then the new creation (novus ordo saeclorum) can be announced in the 18th century or the twentieth.

He also suggested that the enraged atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens, and others arises from indignation at religion’s refusal to fade decently away.  The Enlightenment bequeathed a situation where secularism stands against fundamentalism, but both accept the same duality of faith and politics.

For his SBL audience, he focused the question of Enlightenment dualism of faith and politics on the interpretation of the gospels.  Christians since the Reformation and Enlightenment have not known what to do with the gospels.  Two apparently opposed but ultimately complicit options have been developed: Seeing the gospel as a story of the kingdom and God’s justice, with the unfortunate ending of a death and resurrection or seeing the gospel as atonement stories with lengthy prologues.  He was urging us to read the gospels as a single narrative, as political and atonement narratives, as narratives about the Creator God taking charge of His estranged world precisely through the cross and resurrection of Jesus.  The gospel is about God in Public, about the Kingdom of God.

Wright provocatively suggested that the methods of New Testament scholarship were sometimes designed precisely to further the Enlightenment project - to find biblical support for the separation of God and politics that the Enlightenment institutionalized.  If New Testament scholarship is going to do justice to the gospels, it will have to develop methods that don’t assume modern dualisms under the cover of scholarly neutrality.  He urged a hermeneutics of skepticism toward the methods of NT scholarship, a hermeneutics that uncovers how those methods make NT scholarship complicit with power. The gospels themselves resist such deconstruction, precisely because they climax in a crucifixion that passes judgment on the political and religious powers.

Wright, however, resisted the Anabaptist solution of withdrawal (he mentioned Jim Wallis several times, mostly favorably).  Against Anabaptists and revolutionaries, the New Testament does not reject pagan order, but teaches that the church must submit to the rulers that be because order, even pagan and oppressive order, is preferable to chaos.  The New Testament holds together the truth that the powers are corrupt with the demand that they be obeyed.  This is a sign, Wright said, that the order provided by political authorities is a common good, a good shared by Christians and non-Christians, and a common good that Christians should support and further.

These two things can be held together when we recognize that the cross is the victory over powers that twist their God-given mandate to maintain order into tyranny, but after the cross and resurrection the powers that be are reinstated as agents of order, even agents that Jesus, the heavenly king, uses to advance His purposes.  He may use them and then judge them, but they are enclosed within his rule.  The Church meanwhile is called to remind rulers of their duty to seek wisdom from the Son, and this witness may result in martyrdom, which, Wright said, is central to any Christian political theology.  The church also cultivates forms of common life that anticipate the eschatological kingdom and challenge political authorities to imitation.

In short, because Jesus is Lord, the church can collaborate without compromise and critique without falling into dualism.

Politics: Obama’s faith

In the December issue of The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan describes Barak Obama’s conversion. In an interview with Sullivan, Obama said, “I didn’t have an epiphany. What I really did was to take a set of values or ideals that were first instilled in my from my mother, who was, as I called her in my book, the last of the secular humanists - you know, belief in kindness and empathy and discipline, responsibility - those kinds of values. And I found in the Church a vessel or a repository for those values and a way to connect those values to a larger community and a belief in God and a belief in redemption and mercy and justice. . . . I guess the point is, it continues to be both a spiritual, but also an intellectual, journey for me, this issue of faith.”

Continue reading…

Politics: To the public

Hamann address his first dedication to his Socratic Memorabilia “To the Public, or, Nobody, the Well-Known.” The dedication begins with a concatenation of biblical polemics against idols:

“You bear a name and need no proof of your existence, you find faith and do no miracles to earn it, you get honor and have neither concept nor feeling thereof. We know that there is no idol in the world. Neither are you human, yet you must be a human image which superstition has made a god. You lack nor eyes nor ears, which nonetheless do not see, do not year; and the artificial eye you form, the artificial ear you plant, is like your own, blind and deaf. . . .

Continue reading…

Politics: War’s balance sheet

Citing a still-unknown Greek writer, Kant shrewdly said, “War . . . creates more evil men than it takes away.”

Politics: Hart’s Secular Faith

For those interested in Reformed political thought, Bill Chellis of De Regno Christi has organized an online discussion of Darryl Hart’s recent book, A Secular Faith. You can find the discussion at a new address:

http://deregnochristi.org/2007/03/19/throwing-down-the-gauntlet.

Politics: Violence and the good

In an interview in the March 17 issue of World, Duke’s theologien provocateur Stanley Hauerwas expresses sympathy for the view that killing to protect the innocent is allowable, but refuses to let his sympathy budge him from his pacifist convictions.

It is never right to kill “to prevent another from being killed.” If this puts him in uncomfortable position, it’s one he’s williing to accept: “Christian nonviolence is a harsh and dreadful love requiring at times we may have to watch the innocent suffer for our convictions.” Apparently, sympathy for actual victims doesn’t budge Hauerwas either.

Hauerwas wants to protect the innocent if he can, only he doesn’t want to do it violently. Overcome evil with good, Paul says, and the pacifist leaps to the conclusion that Christians are prohibited from mounting violent resistance in any circumstances.

That assumes, however, an indefensible equation of violence with evil. Violence comes in such varied shapes, sizes, and contexts that it cannot be classed as one thing. One might borrow a page from Hauerwas himself and say that violence is always part of a story, and good or bad depending on its place in the plot.

Politics: Humanism and health care

The folks at First Things were kind enough to include a short article of mine on their blog. You can find it at: http://www.firstthings.com.

Politics: Christ’s Rule

Readers interested in Christian political theory might be interested in the De Regno Christi web site (http://deregnochristi.blogspot.com). The site is managed by Bill Chellis, a pastor in the RPCNA, and contributors include Daryl Hart, Richard C. Gamble, and myself.

« Previous Entries in Category |